Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 205: Why I’m a Bad Correspondent

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

With Jesse away on vacation, Cal decides to tackle 10 questions in a row, all in one take, with no breaks, covering everything from complaints about Cal’s inaccessibility, to teaching deep work in schools, to a long pontification (read: rant) on the podcasting industry.- Finding time to self-study [5:38]- Why Cal is a bad correspondent [11:44]- Can everyone become so good they can’t be ignored? [25:32]- Should temperament affect job choice? [29:06]- Teaching deep work in schools [33:20] - When does Cal listen to podcasts? [37:46]- How do I succeed in podcasting? [38:57]- Why is Cal so contrarian? [56:22]- How do I stay a digital minimalist after having a baby? [59:31]- How do I teach my family and friends about the deep life? [1:02:23]Thanks to our Sponsors:MyBodyTutor.com EightSleep.com/DeepZBiotics.com/CalBlinkist.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 205. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. I'm by myself, no Jesse. Jesse's on vacation down in Florida. Quick public service announcement, just about what to expect for the midsummer episodes of this show. Jesse is gone today, so he's not going to be here on this taping.

Then I'm going on vacation once he returns. So what you should expect if all goes well and I'm knocking on wood here in the HQ is next week's episode will be recorded by me in an undisclosed location up in the mountains of New England. I'm bringing a microphone with me. I'm going to try to record outside. What's the painting expression? Plendierre French expression. I'm going to record outside. Maybe I'll have some meditations on life in the woods or something similarly.

deep or more likely it'll be like a normal episode but with worse sound quality and a lot of annoying animal sounds in the background. Then the week after that, there is an interview I recorded actually back in December. It's a digital minimalism case study. It's a two-part interview I combined. Kind of an interesting experimental idea I had for an episode. Jesse's editing that up and we're going to release that two weeks from now. And going forward from there, it'll just be normal episodes.

recorded back in the HQ with Jesse. So this is one of three episodes will be a little bit different because of vacations. Now what I like to do when Jesse is not here is try things different. It's a time to experiment. And what I thought I would do for today's episode

is let's get back to basics. I don't know how to operate all the fancy stuff Jesse does. So no news reactions, no split screens, no calls. I gathered 10 questions. 10 questions. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19. 10. I just want to rock and roll through 10 questions, one after another, and see if we can do some damage. Get back to our roots is just seeing question, answer questions, see question, answer questions.

So that is my challenge in today's episode is to get through 10 questions. All right, let me talk briefly about a sponsor that's going to make this cavalcade of question answering possible. And that is our good friends at My Body Tutor. My Body Tutor is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is the lack of consistency. They do this by simplifying the process into practical, sustainable behaviors and then giving you daily accountability and support. So you stick with your plan. When you use My Body Tutor, you are assigned a coach.

This coach comes up with a plan for you and your goals. for eating, for exercise, for movement. You then log your food, log your exercise in an app every day. The coach sees it, gets back to you, gives you feedback, gives you encouragement, helps you stay on the right path. It is a great way to get in shape. Now, here's the thing I've known Adam Gilbert, the founder of My Body Tutor for a long time. He used to be the fitness advice guy on my study hacks blog years ago. So because of that, he is going to give deep questions list.

$50 off your first month if you mention the podcast when you join. All right. So mention deep questions when you join and Adam will give you $50 off your first month. And of course, what is the point of trying to get in shape? If you're not sleeping well, this is where our sponsor, 8, Sleep is something that can help. More than 30% of American struggle with sleep and temperature is one of their main concerns. certainly a concern of mine. I have a hard time sleeping when I'm hot on our vacation. We're leaving for in a couple of days. I will be bringing mini fans to help ensure that I am not too

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I am a fan of eight sleep because I am a flan of sleeping cool. So go to 8Sleep.com slash deep to check out the Pod Pro cover, and you will save $150 at checkout. But that's only if you go to 8Sleep.com slash deep 8Sleep currently ships within the U.S., Canada, and the UK. All right, let us get into it with some questions. Question number one comes from Dan. Dan says, I'm currently pursuing a degree in computer science and I'm having trouble finding time to do

a much needed self-study in parentheses. Dan says what I learn in college is nowhere near enough in parentheses. How much self-studying do you recommend and how do you fit it in with all of the schoolwork without getting overwhelmed? Okay, well, I'm not exactly sure

what self-study refers to here. Do you mean you're not learning enough in the classroom to actually succeed in your computer science classes, or do you mean there is topics you want to learn in general, and you're not able to satisfy that through your college curriculum?

Either way. Either way, we have a more general challenge here, which is you have an intellectual pursuit that is separate from your direct course responsibilities that you want to fit into your college life. I am familiar with this. I had my share of independent intellectual pursuits when I was a college student. I wrote my first book, How to Win at College.

How to Win at College. I wrote that during my senior year at Dartmouth. I also edited a magazine when it was a pending columnist for a while while at school. So I'm used to this idea of having non-class, intellectual but non-class related work to do while in college. And so here's a few things to recommend to make that work. one, keep your course load reasonable. I used to do a lot of work on student stress and reducing student stress, and I can tell you one of the biggest cause of student stress,

especially at elite schools, is students had course loads that were too heavy. Double majors, major into minors, trying to fit in an extra course, three or four really hard courses push together. This is a problem. If your schedule is too hard, your entire semester, is going to be difficult. So you want to have the most reasonable possible schedule in terms of both the overall difficulty and the diversity of different course types, not all quantitative, not all humanities focused. Balance types, keep the course load reasonable. If you have a lot of

credits coming into college, I did some of this, cash that in later in your career to maybe have an independent study or just to take a lighter course load one year. Keep your course loads reasonable. it is the most effective thing you can do to reduce stress. I think students get what I used to call hard attack semesters on my study hacks blog back in the day. They would get into these hard scheduling situations either because they weren't paying attention. When they're sitting up their schedule, they're trying to solve problems. Well, I need this requirement and that. Why don't I get this out of my way?

That sounds interesting. There's not paying attention to the impact of their choices. Or they're laboring under the delusion that the harder their schedule, somehow the more impressive that will make them. A lot of college students labor under this delusion that there is a college admission style committee in their future that's going to look at their schedule and say, how many things did Dan do,

how hard was Dan scheduled to figure out whether or not to let them in? That doesn't happen after college. That's not the way job interviews work. That's not the way you move to the professional world. No one cares that your sophomore fall semester was really difficult. No one will even notice. You suffer that pain. You get very few benefits for it.

So make your course load easier, Dan, if you want to do extra work. If you're doing extra work, treat it like a major extracurricular, meaning don't have many other major extracurricular pursuits. This should be one of them. Don't be trying to edit a magazine and writing for the paper and being a part of the dance team and do major self-study. You actually have to treat it with respect. If it's one of the things you're working on,

don't put too many other extracurriculars onto your schedule. And finally, leverage autopilot schedules, big piece of advice I give to college students, for every work that happens regularly, I always have this reading assignment in this English class. I always have a weekly problem set in this computer science class. For work that happens regularly, figure out when and where each week that work gets done. This day, this time, then this location, that's when I do the first half of my reading. This day, this time, this location, that's when I do the second half. I problem set. I always do one hour right after the class when it's assigned. I go to the library right next to the classroom and I prep it. I go through the problems. I see which ones I know how to solve which ones look hard. Then I have a meeting with my problem set group. We always do that the next night at 7 here in the study room that we have a reservation for. And then I have a two hour block. I always put together the next morning to clean up what we did and write it up. Whatever. These are sample schedules, but it's the same time, same day, same places. It's an autopilot schedule.

because it makes you not have to actually think and make decisions about when and where you're going to work. Should I work now? What should I work on today? It's all made automatic. So autopilot schedule, your schoolwork, add the self-studying to the autopilot schedule. That is how I wrote how to win at college my senior year. 90 minutes, first thing in the morning, everyone was still asleep. I remember the Wheeler Apartments for Dartmouth people.

I was in a Wheeler apartments with a couple buddies of mine. Hat tipped to John. Who else was in that apartment? Lee, maybe hat tip to Lee. I don't quite remember everyone who was there. But I had a room with a radiator that would spit hot water into the air because this was very old heating technology. And there was one of those old-fashioned over-polished varnish, indestructible college desks in the room. I would get up, go to the desk, and I would write 90 minutes, weekday mornings,

Pete the book was written. Right, Dan, so I used your question as an excuse to go broader to some of my more general thoughts about getting through college. All right, we got next question here from Sam. Sam, who doesn't seem too happy with me, says, isn't it a bit too selfish and myopic to make it so difficult for others to reach you and make them work with you on your terms while disregarding others needs. Sam, I don't have time to answer your question right now. What I need you to do is engrave it. If you could, I'm talking about four by two by one inch pine, preferably.

Engrave it in that, and I want you to mail it to me. And if you can mail it to me, and you need to get here on a Wednesday, then maybe I will answer your request. The answer, though, is going to come three to six months later, it will be via parrier kitchen. Did I just mix those up? Carrier pigeon. I said parier kitchen.

And Jesse's not here. I get a little punchy. All right, Sam, I'm being facetious there. Your question has two interpretations. So I don't know if you're talking about it being selfish myopic. It'd be hard to reach as, let's say, public-facing media figure. So thinking about the way people reach

me as an author, podcast, etc. Or are you referring to some of the rules and things I talk about in books like deep work and a world without email about being more careful about communication protocols as just an individual, someone who's more careful about how do they communicate with their colleagues or their friends, et cetera, to prevent their life being constant context shifts and distraction. So these are two different areas you could be referring to. You're hard to reach as a media figure or as an individual.

Both are interesting. So let's cover both. Let's start with media figure. I am hard to reach as a media figure. I'm not on social media. You can't throw messages my way. I don't have general purpose email addresses. There's particular addresses for particular things with rules about what you should expect or not expect.

A lot of requests go straight to publicists or agents, etc. So I'm kind of purposely hard to reach. Now my motivation for why that's reasonable really came from author Neil Stevenson's famous essay Why I Am a Bad Correspondent. Now Sam, if you will indulge me, I want to read some excerpts. I'm going to read some excerpts from this essay

and then give you my personal take on how I put this into action of my own life. So here's what Neil says, and I'm skipping things. So these are just parts of his essay. Writers who do not make themselves totally available to everyone all the time are frequently tagged with the recluse label. While I do not consider myself a recluse, I have found it necessary to place some limits on my direct interactions with individual readers. These limits most often come into play when people send me letters or email,

and also when I am invited to speak publicly. This document is a sort of form letter explaining why I am the way I am. Right, dot, dot, dot. Stevenson goes on later to say writing novels is hard and requires vast unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource

that I can put to good use to slabs of time. Each two hours long might add up to the same four hours but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. Amen, sir Stevenson. If I know that I'm going to be interrupted, I can't concentrate, and if I suspect that I might

be interrupted, I can't do anything at all. likewise several consecutive days with four-hour time slabs in them gives me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter but the same number of hours spread across a few weeks with interruptions in between are nearly useless. The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I'm a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements.

If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive uninterrupted time chunks, I can write novels. but as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it instead of a novel that will be around for a long time and that will with luck be read by many people. There is a bunch of email messages

that I have sent out to individual persons and a few speeches given at various conferences. All right, I mean, I read that early on and my career as a writer is very influential. You can definitely see ideas from that showing up or being echoed in deep work. quote this essay in deep work. These ideas have also come up in my subsequent writing about distraction as well.

Stevenson, I think, is making the right point for public facing figures. The productivity equation is nonlinear. If I can just have time to think and write, write my books, write my articles, and talk to you folks here through the podcast microphone, I can reach lots of people, I can do my best work. If I instead am easier to reach, I can talk to a lot of individual people. That leads me with a history of individual back and forth conversations, as Stevenson goes on to say of mediocre value, reaching many fewer people than being able to actually put work out into the larger public sphere.

So I agree with Neil with that. Now, I remember vividly when I had to make this transition. I was a graduate student at MIT. I had written three books aimed at students. was running the study hacks blog and newsletter, which at the time was very student-focused, I had really enjoyed during my time at MIT having an open email address where students would send me questions about what I was writing about. And I would answer the students' questions. And I really felt like it was almost a philanthropic investment of my time. I could help dozens of real students with real

issues. And it was very satisfying. And there was a selfish component to it as well, because I would learn from these questions, what was really affecting people, what was really going on. It was my intelligence networking to the life of students. And it would evolve what I wrote about. If you go back and look at my first books and very early study hacks post, you'll see they're very tactical. How do you study? How do you manage your time? My whole focus shifted to be much more emphasizing of stress, student stress and overload and burnout. Where did that shift come from? Hundreds of these emails, just hearing, oh, what is really affecting people? What, these elite schools, it's not just that their time management system needs a tune-up. They're overwhelmed, they're stressed. They don't

know why they're there. So it was very important to me. The problem is dozens became hundreds. And they're long messages. I mean, people are pouring out their life story and their issues and their caveats and their parents and what's happening with their boyfriends or girlfriends. I mean, these long life stories. And I ran out of time. And I remember thinking, I can't do this halfway. I can't answer a few people's questions and let the let rest just go by because they were putting so much effort into these questions.

I couldn't get to them. And it made me feel bad. I remember that vividly feeling bad. And at some point realizing my audience is too big for this one-on-one interaction. It's taking up all of my time. A well-crafted article can get to thousands, a well-crafted email. helps one person. And at some point, I don't know the exact year, but somewhere in this graduate student period, I had to change. I had to change my contact page, get rid of the

general use email address, and no longer be accessible for just over the transom questions. And it was traumatic. I thought that was difficult. I remember having a hard, having a hard time with that. I even did a series around that point called College Chronicles where I helped four or five individual students and I wrote about it on the blog. Just a, I was so used to helping individuals and I wanted to still do it. So I figured if I helped people publicly, maybe their lessons would help other people. And it was an interesting time, but it was a difficult time. So the decision to go Neil Stevenson and become a bad correspondent is not easy. Public-facing figures often have a hard time like I did with it. It really is necessary, though, once your audience

and reach grows past a certain place. All right? So if you're in that situation, the only thing I would recommend is just be very clear about your expectations. If readers know, I can't just reach and get a question answered. But here's a address where I can send you something interesting that you'll probably see, but you probably won't respond. If I have a media request, here's the person I talk to. Clarity trumps accessibility, 95% of the time. People get upset when they expect some sort of interaction that they don't end up getting.

All right. Now, what about individual limits on communication? Not being accessible all the time by text. not being good about answering emails right away for your work colleagues. This is another area in which Sam could be referring to when he talks about being myopic and selfish by making people communicate on your turns. When it comes to the individual level scales, be it for your work colleagues or family, honestly, my advice here, and I articulate this more clearly in a world without email, a book world without email, shut up about it. do it think through communication

don't just be accessible all the time don't constantly be on text on email have other protocols have other approaches to how you manage this communication but don't tell everyone about it don't tell everyone about it this is the Tim Ferriss auto responder issue

Tim had this great idea in 2007 don't check email all the time novel at the time but then he added this very engineering type addition which logically made all the sense in the world You should have an auto responder that announces this intention to whoever writes you. You write someone like Tim at the time.

You get an auto responder and it said something like his suggested auto responder to serve you better. I'm only checking email twice a day at 11 and 3. If you need me in between there, call my number. To an engineer's mind, that makes complete sense. So why not explain to people so they know, oh, I won't hear back from Tim tell 3? the audience at South by Southwest 2007, who heard him give that example, thought it made complete sense.

There are a bunch of engineers. Here's the problem. In the real world, when you get that auto responder, you say, that guy is annoying. And you can't even really put your finger on it, but is violating some sort of diatic, tribal, paleolithic, evolved communication standard.

But it just annoyed people. And it turned out it's better. Just check your email twice a day. You don't have to make a thing about it. You tell someone what you're doing. You're giving a local. location for friction to be generated. Well, why are you doing that twice a day?

I don't know about twice a day. What if I need, no, no, that's not good. That's not going to fly. What if I need you at noon? I don't like this at all. Don't announce what you're doing at the individual scale. It just gives sites for friction to generate. Just do it.

Apologize if you need to. Same thing with your family and text messaging. I don't think you should be responding to text messages all day. You have to have set times. You do that. You need to accompany that with office hours. Don't call them office hours. Your family will think you're a

weirdo or a fink. But, you know, say, hey, by the way, I'm always available at five to six when I'm commuting home. So, like, just you can always call me then and I'll see what's going on. Or I always have my phone open on, you know, lunch at 12, whatever. Like, they have set times they know. Or when I'm coming back, I drop the kids off at the bus stop. So that's very consistent. And so from 8 to 820, I'm walking back. Just call me then. So you have these implicit office hours and in, or explicit office hours. And implicit times you check. And then just do that. And like people might complain some, I couldn't hear from you,

but you're like, oh, sorry, I just saw this now. What are they going to say? Unacceptable? You should have saw this earlier? They don't care. They saw,

okay, great, here's my question. So on the individual scale, you do not announce what you're up to. You just do it and apologize if you have to. I know this happened with a contractor I was working with recently. The emails were coming,

you know, I check emails once a day at most in summer. And so we kept getting in situations where maybe she would send an email at 4 p.m. And I'd already check the email for that day, maybe at 3. And then the next day at 11 a.m., she'd send another email like, hey, did you get this? What's going on? And I hadn't checked the email yet that day because I write in the morning.

And you know what? I finally just apologize and sent a letter. Like, you know, my summer schedule as a professor is I'm usually checking things once a day. So don't expect more than, it could be 24 hours, right? Just depending on when I do the check. It doesn't mean I don't see it. That's just how I do it. But if it's more urgent, like a time,

sensitive thing, you can text me. And if there's something that really needs a lot of back and forth, because I'm not on email all day, let's not do back and forth on email. We can set up if we need a couple standing sort of office hour times. You can always call me. If we think there's going to be a lot of work that needs four or five back and forth. Because you can't spread out four or five back and forth over four or five days. Do you like, yeah, great. The problem solved, right? I didn't have to make a big lecture about it up front, but when it became an issue, I gave a little explanation, everyone was happy. All right. So that's all I would say. If you're a public-facing media figure, eventually you can't be very accessible, be very clear about that.

People understand, or if they don't understand, there's others who do to replace them. And it comes to your individual life. Don't make a big deal about it. Just do what's best for you and apologize only if pushed into it. All right. Doing well here. You know what I didn't do? I didn't number my questions.

I know we have 10, but I should have numbered them. So now I don't know where we are. Oh, well, let's just roll on. Larry has the next one. Larry says, Hi, Professor Newport, I loved your book. So good they can't ignore you. But it seems to me that only a small minority of people can possess rare and valuable skills at any given time.

Does this mean only a minority of people can succeed in achieving the ideal laid out in your book? If not, what would a world where most people are so good they can't be ignored look like? Thank you very much for your time. Good question, Larry. it allows me to clarify something. Yes, the big idea in my 2012 book, Be So Good They Can Ignore You, is that you should build what I called rare and valuable skills.

Use those as leverage then to take control over your career, move it towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. More recently, I might talk about that as use that leverage to get closer to your ideal lifestyle. Same idea. So Larry is saying, well, how many people can really, have rare and valuable skills. How many people are going to be a world-class writer or

mathematician or something like this? And this is an important clarification. Your definition, Larry, what you're thinking of when you think of rare and valuable skills is too broad, too strict, I should say. When you're thinking rare and valuable skills, you're thinking at large scales of competition rather that you're the best. That's way too strict and ambitious. When I say rare and valuable skills, I mean, you can do something for your employees. employer that is valuable to your employer, and they don't have a lot of other people who can do that for them right now. So the scope for rare and valuable skills is your employment situation. So everyone can have rare and valuable skills that give them leverage.

I mean, let's get concrete. Let's say you went to college, you have an entry-level job, you're working at a communications nonprofit outside of Boston, you have your fancy degree, but you're starting at an entry-level job. basically, they'll call you an associate, but you're kind of like an assistant to someone who's higher up. You're helping organize projects and trips that they work on, something like this, right? A very standard sort of entry-level job. What would rare and valuable skills mean right there? Well, you are reliable.

You accomplish the things you say you're going to accomplish. You're organized. You learn and understand whatever it is that the people you assist do. so you can make their life easier. Maybe they work with a particular, and I'm thinking about an actual person, actual job here. This is actually a job my wife had out of college. So I'm using this as an example.

But let's see, they work with a particular tour provider. They would take teachers on tours, getting to learn how that tour operator works and the people over there. That's all valuable. That's very valuable to this employer. And they don't have other people who can do this for him. They could try to hire someone else, but they don't know if they're going to be good or not. That gives you leverage.

Now you're able to move up. You have leverage over what you want to do and what you don't want to do, and you can start moving up in that job. You move up to the next level, you do that next level well. You get good at it, you master elements of it that are specific to the job.

Other people don't do it as well as you, and you move up. So what I'm trying to say, Larry, is rare and valuable is relative to the employer, or if you're self-employed, relevant to your specific clients. Everyone can build rare and valuable skills

in their particular context. That career capital is leverage. Use that leverage. just keep moving your job closer, closer to supporting the lifestyle that you desire. All right, what do we got here? Matt. Matt says you've argued about not basing your career decisions on passions. But what about one's temperament, specifically under the Big Five personality model, if one is low in conscientiousness or particularly high in openness,

how should that be considered to avoid getting into an ill-suited role? All right, so I put this back to back with Larry's question because they're both dealing with careers and they're both dealing with ideas for my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Now, I think what's happening here, again, is too strict of an interpretation of what I am talking about. So in So Good They Can't Ignore You, I reject what I call the Passion Hypothesis, which is this idea that the primary factor in generated a feeling of fulfillment or passion in your career is matching the type of work you do to the pre-existing passion.

If you can match your work successfully to what you're meant to do, you will find your work fulfilling. And if you get this match wrong, you won't. That was a dominant hypothesis when I was writing so good they can ignore you. It is a dominant hypothesis today, though I would say not as strong now as it was back then. it's often summarized with the axiom follow your passion.

And I argued that's wrong. Now, Matt, I think you're taking that argument and you're pushing it farther to say, okay, nothing really matters, nothing intrinsic at all matters for whether or not you're going to like your job. And that's actually not true. I'm pushing back against a strong form of the matching hypothesis that a match to a preexisting passion is all that matters. And I'm saying, no, no, it's more complicated than that. The choice of job is not trivial, but it is not the single determinate factor of whether or not you end up passionate about your work.

The real important stuff happens after you choose your job. Do you build rare and valuable skills like we talked about with the last question? Are you applying those rare and valuable skills as leverage to move your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don't towards your ideal lifestyle and away from traps that you want to avoid? Are you crafting your career in a way that is

consistent and complements your vision of a deep life. If you're doing this, that's very hard work. It takes time and strategy over many years. That is where real passion grows. The actual initial choice of the job is just the first small step in that long journey. That's really what I'm arguing. However, making that first small step choosing what job you want to do, that's not throwing a dart at a job listing board and say, it doesn't matter at all what job I have. You still want to think about it. So your temperament, yes. Yes, it matters. Pick a job that's better suited for your temperament. Do you like to be around people? Do you like to be alone? Sure.

So your personality matters. Skills you already have matters. If you're coming out of school with a math degree and you're pretty good at it. Well, that's going to get you some career capital much faster than if you become a yoga instructor. So preexisting skills matter. A general interest in the field, sure that matters. You know, like, I'm interested in academia seems romantic to me. So, you know, that is a mark in favor of going to graduate school. All that stuff matters. So use what you have when making your choice.

But keep in mind that there may be many different jobs that make sense for you to pursue. And once you make the choice, is what happens next is ultimately you can decide whether or not you get fulfilling out of it. So, Matt, you can take your temperament into account, take your skills into account, interest into account. I'm a big believer in looking at what would the opportunities be if and when I get really good at this job. And do I see down the line opportunities that are really going to give me a lot of control over my life or open up the things that are really important to my ideal lifestyle? That's all critical. Don't just throw a dart. But don't think that the choice by itself is all that it takes to love your work. And don't overswet that choice. There's usually many right

answers. The issue is not I'm going to choose the wrong job. The real issue for most people is I'm going to do the wrong things once I have a job. All right. I think we've got to a bunch of men in a row, so I have some women here. It's three in a row. I did this by accident, but actually we had a run of men and I'll have a run of women asking questions. So let's actually get to some reasonable questions then. All right, Sarah says, how can schools implement a deep work approach to learning? All right. So let's think elementary, high school level, so like secondary elementary school level, at that level of education, can we be doing things to prepare students for

cognitive work and a particular deep work type efforts? I think so. I think there's at least three things that we could specifically integrate into curriculums. One is just the mental model, teaching the students the mental model that talks about concentration as a skill that is a trainable. It's like running. The more you train, the faster you can do it. And be incredibly valuable. This is what allows, okay, great. Andrew Wiles is all formats last theorem, sure. But it's also what allows your favorite musician or songwriter to do something really innovative with the music or to learn the instrument that they then play it a way that is so impressive. What allows this athlete to be so great? That allows this writer to write this.

book that you love or that allows this public thinker to really shape the public conversation. You've got to teach them this mental model. Concentration, especially in today's knowledge-style economy, knowledge-style economy of ideas as well as actual economic output. Concentration, deep thinking, careful thinking, it's everything. It's like being good with the sword in ancient Sparta and it's something that has to be trained. Just giving them that model very important. Two, practice this in the classroom.

And we're going to sit here and do this. It's going to be 20 minutes. And then you know what? By October, we're going to do 30-minute sessions. And by November, we're going to do 40-minute sessions, just working on whatever, these hard visualization problems or math problems. We're going to do writing prompts. You just write, right, right, right.

And don't let your concentration wander. But then when it's over, everyone can jump up and, you know, run around and get all their wiggles out. And then we're going to sit down and do it again. you can actually practice concentration, do interval training and concentration in the classroom. A, this will make them better at concentrating. B, it reinforces that aspect of the mental model I referenced that concentration can be trained. Let your students see they get better at it.

Let them see they get better at it. That's more critical than how good you make them, knowing that they can always get better at it. And the three, I would have detailed notes for parents about how homework should go. and about this mental model and how homework is an aspect for them to practice sustained and focused concentration at home and how they should set up homework and it should be these set times they know when it's going to be and it should be disconnected and there should be no phone there.

And you should say your students will 100%, I will put $1,000 on the table wagering that the first thing your student will say to you is I need the computer, I need internet to do research and Google Classroom has my notes in it. Call BS on that. great, let's sit down at the computer together and get everything you need and then you can go do the work with it. Don't let them use that or here's the other one you will see and I'll bet a lot of money on this because I've been doing this for a while. I need my phone because I have to text

my groupmates if I have questions. So you get detailed notes from teachers to say call BS. Homework should be a time for them to practice it. By the way, there is an extra mental health benefit to making work at home, especially for high school age students or junior high age students with pretty intense homework, if you actually work structured without distraction, the amount of time it takes you get that work done well cuts by a factor of two or three. That's not nothing. If three hours that goes kind of late into the night gets replaced with one hour done right before dinner, it is a much smaller footprint.

That homework is a much smaller footprint on the student's schedule. So yes, I think we should be training deep work. There are some ideas off the top of my head. All right, quick question. Christine asks, when do you listen to podcast? For me, chores is a big one. Cleaning dishes, cleaning the house, mowing the yard. Great time to listen to either podcast or books on tape.

I go back and forth. I treat those interchangeably. Driving. So driving will be another time. I'll do that. The walk home for my kid's bus stop. So I take my older two boys to the bus stop in the morning. about 15 minutes away.

So that walk home, I would consistently listen to things. And then sometimes I would add onto that walk. So I'd make it a little bit longer than 15 minutes on the way home. So that's when I'm listening the podcast. Not all the time, but during times when my mind would otherwise be bored. The exception of that, of course, is listening to deep questions that you want to listen to as soon as it comes out as many times as you can fit into your week. All right. let's do a oh here's another podcasting question okay I got a podcasting question here

I'm going to pontificate a little bit so caveat emptier before we do a couple more sponsors okay this question comes from Paula Paula says I really enjoy your episodes on the business of podcasting and its trends when I was looking for information on starting my own podcast it seemed like a lot of the materials out there were focused on podcast as marketing tools ways to do quick, easy production with lots of episodes as a content-rich way to show off your expertise. I'm more interested in podcasting as the audio equivalent of long-form non-fiction narrative writing like a Planet Money or Freakonomics.

Paula notes in parentheses that she is an economist herself. That's why she was using Freakonomics as an example. Paula goes on to say, I see the value in all these formats, but if the low barrier to start promotional style podcasts fill the directories, does that turn off the potential audience to other styles. Do they step into the podcast world, get overwhelmed, see a lot of styles they don't like,

and that feel very amateur, and leave? For amateurs interested in other styles, does their entryway become working with an established production company, like in traditional publishing thoughts? All right, Paula. I love pontificating on podcasting as business. I have a few thoughts here. Number one, no, I don't think the proliferation of the sort of low-quality

checklist productivity style marketing podcast is going to hurt other more serious attempts at podcasting. By checklist productivity, by the way, that's my reference to the genre of productivity that says if you just have the right insider information, the right steps, and just go through and execute these steps, you can accomplish these big, really interesting things. You want to just work, you want to triple your income and work a fraction of your time, just have the right checklist to go through. And at the other end of that, you'll accomplish that goal.

You want a podcast that's going to be a great marketing tool for your company. The key is going through these checklists. That's checklist productivity. For anything that is desirable, for any type of outcome that a lot of people would want, checklists are never enough. They're really appealing because it's tractable. I put in a little bit of effort and I make me away through the list. You feel like you're making progress.

But things that are hard or hard and checklist aren't enough. Anyways, there's a lot of checklist productivity out there for marketing. podcasts. You get a bunch of these podcasts that no one ever listens to because it's people just talking about whatever their industry is in a way that no one would care about. I don't think that hurts other people making a more serious run. Podcasting is developed enough. There's enough podcast out there. People aren't just perusing directories to see what they want to listen to. It's more like radio shows or TV shows on streamers now. People hear about things through trusted sources. A friend recommends it. They hear someone on another show. A show is spotlighted on one of

these top charts or spotlights that, let's say, like an Apple or Spotify does. That's how people find podcasts now. So the fact that a lot of crap is out there, I don't think it's a problem. All right. Number two, you ask, should you work with a production company? That's not really going to be, that's not an entryway. So there's not production companies out there that will say you know, Paula, like you seem like you're smart and interesting,

we'll build this podcast around you and like you'll find a big audience. There are production companies, but who they tend to work with is either established podcast or established figures. So like an established well-known writer and they will say you have a big audience. we will help you build the podcaster on it. But often what they're really offering there

is technical expertise. So there's not an entryway in the podcasting like you would have in publishing where if you have the right idea, the right publisher might get behind it and you can just focus on the writing and it could take off. Podcasting requires a lot more

from the actual podcaster has to build a show that builds an audience. All right, so that's my second. Third, I don't quite know how to develop this theory, but see, I see a direct line, I think blogging and podcasting are connected. Social media, which emerged between blogging and podcasting is a very different beast, and it

warped. It's my pontification, everyone, so be aware. It warped our understanding of democratized digital content production. Here's what I mean about that. When blogging came along and blogging as the rearguard action of the web in general, Web 2.0, the ability for the average person to be able to publish text that's accessible around the world without having to have access to a magazine or to a newspaper or to a book press. This revolution, this democratizing of text in the digital setting that sort of reached its apotheos with the blog.

This was an important revolution, but most blogs did terribly. Because it turns out here's what happens when you use digital tools to democratize different media channels. it allows many more people to get in and take a swing. But what it doesn't do is lower the bar of quality, of originality for success. So it's a good thing for the culture writ large because there's lots of diverse voices or interesting voices or styles or ideas that never really would have got a shot to get above that bar if they had to write for Life magazine and try to get in there. blogging in it was possible that you could take your shot. No one's going to hold you back. So it's good for the culture writ

large because you get a more interesting, more innovation, more interesting set of writers. But for the individual, it can seem frustrating because 99.9% of individuals aren't producing stuff at the bar that it matters. This is a key mistake of the democratization of digital media that people often make.

Democratizing access to the media does not reduce the quality bar required to succeed. So we, get this standard pushback around blogging when that happens. It's like, well, most blogs are bad. So this isn't changing publishing. But it did. Yes, of course most blogs are bad.

But there was a lot of good ones. And it brought a lot of people into the industry that might have otherwise not. And it innovated the form. And, you know, you have the whole, like just even in politics, even the whole wonk approach to understanding politics and wonk blog and you had Ezra Klein and Nate Silver. And all of this came out of blogging, these voices that, you know, would have otherwise. had to have worked a way up through newsrooms and the traditional political reporting. Podcasting is very similar. It's democratizing digital audio.

Now, almost anyone like me can put together a show and have it out there. And it can leap across the uncanny valley between the internet and terrestrial radio that we're used to. And you can be in the same ecosystem. And almost anyone can do this now. And this is all great for the whole culture because you have a lot of innovation happening. But for the individual, it's still hard because the quality bar is still really high. to produce an audio program that a lot of people want to listen to is really hard. It's like why most radio shows failed. It's why the people who were great at it, the Howard Stearns of the world,

the Dave Ramsey of the world make a lot of money. It's really hard to do. Now, why I talked about social media being a divergence is because social media warped our understanding of this democratization of digital media. Because it didn't just democratize access to various media. They played these weird algorithmic games with a, attention. And I talk about this some in deep work, a little bit in digital minimalism as well, but it had more of a, for lack of a better word, collectivist model of attention where it not just

gave everyone access to publish. We had that before, but it gave everyone access to some attention. Now, it used to be in the early days of social media, back when it was really based on the social graph. The way this unfolded was you would post things and your friends would look at what you posted and they would give you comments on it and you would do the same for them. And now you could kind of post stuff and have and you could have attention. Hey, look, here's a picture. I went to the farm or here's what I was up to today or here's a little quip. And people give you attention.

Hey, good work. That looks beautiful or whatever. And if you had tried to post any of that on a blog, like no one would have come. There wasn't a collectivization of attention there. That wasn't going to attract an audience. And God forbid you had a newspaper column where you were just posting these observations. You know, the paper would have fired you on day two. But social media added this new artificial attention redistribution,

which is really what people want is the attention. So it used to just be this implicit contract between friends. I'll post stuff, let's be honest, garbage. You'll post kind of garbage. But we'll all talk about each other's garbage and we'll all feel like we have an audience. Then things got more sophisticated. And by the time you get to something like TikTok,

now you have just direct manipulation of attention redistribution, where they will take something you post occasionally and show it to a lot of people so that from your perspective, you were getting these intermittent, hard to predict, giant burst of reinforcement that make you feel like,

my God, like that really took off. Maybe I'm really close to breaking out. When I was riding at Bevco yesterday, at the coffee shop near where I record this podcast, there was two Jin Ziers on, I might have been a date. I don't know.

It sounded like a date, like a first date. And they were just going back and forth about TikTok and like, well, I had this one video and, you know, it had these views and that's just pure manipulation of attention. So now it used to be an implicit contract between friends on sharing a network and now just the algorithms do it itself. I think that warped people's understanding of success in media and made it feel like more

just your personal expression and observations of the world are always just, you know, one Mr. Beast's breakthrough away from you suddenly having a big audience, that everyone has the potential, potentially having a big audience, and you get just enough reinforcement, this trickle of online reinforcement that you're used to it. And then you go back to the non-manipulated pitiless media world of podcasting, just like blogs were before it, and just like traditional media was before that, and it's crickets. So, Paul, I've wandered away off your original question. I just think this is interesting that we have these two points going on here, if we're going to just pontificate again about media.

democratization of digital media democratized access to publishing your voice it did not lower the bar of quality required to succeed with an audience but social media collectivized or redistributed attention in a manipulative manner to keep people using it and retrain people to expect and think you know if you're just out there and you're interesting you never know so that all goes to say paula back to your plan to start a podcast

It's just hard. You know, it's just a very competitive pitiless landscape. You have to have something just going to have a large audience say, this I have to listen to. It is a hard world out there. This show does pretty well. It's not a super successful show. It does pretty well. And it is really hard work to get there.

We put a lot of effort into this. And look, I have a large audience. I've been writing books for a long time. I'm published all around the world. I've been around. I've been known. I've been thinking and talking professionally about these things for well over a decade. gate and we work really hard, Jesse and I to try to make this show tighter and tighter.

We have a good audience, but it's not massive. I'm just saying it's hard work. It's hard work. You've got to think about it like a large FM radio station or cable news channel hired you to put together a show and how hard you would have to work to try to make that show a success. That's the way to think about it. Don't let the artificial redistribution of attention that's been leveraged by social media

warp your understanding of what actually goes into success here. All right. Well, speaking about succeeding with a podcast, let me talk about a sponsor. See, Paula, that's the type of professional transition you will have to learn to do if you want to get an audience and make some money off of it. So I want to talk about one of our new sponsors, Zbiotics. As I like to say, there are a few sponsors that I was more eager for to go rigorously test their product. This is definitely a product I gave mini rigorous test. So what is Zbiotics? It is a pre-alcohol probiotic. Indeed, it is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. So here's how it work. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in your gut. It is this byproduct, not as people often say dehydration, that is to blame for your rock.

next day. By the way, I believe that claim. I remember back in college, we tested it. I would drink two now genes of water. That's 64 ounces of water. After a, you would say,

boisterous night, you still have a rough day the next day. It's not just dehydration. So, as they found out, the Zibiotics team, there's other byproducts produced by alcohol that can create those rough days.

Zibiotics has an enzyme that breaks down the specific byproduct they have pinpointed as causing issues the day after a celebratory evening. All right? So it does stuff your liver would otherwise do, but it takes care of this breaking down in your gut before it causes more issues. So you drink antibiotics before drinking alcohol. You drink responsibly.

Get a good night's sleep and you will feel your best the next day. Very clever idea. Very clever idea. I just read Jurassic Park. We reread that with our kids. We listened to it on tape, a road trip recently. And I think this is a much better use of genetic engineering. Instead of putting all that know-how about genetic engineering to bring back dinosaurs from extinction,

leading to many gruesome deaths. Instead, and we can thank the heavens for this, we put that attention instead into something much cooler and much safer, which is helping to prevent rough days after alcohol consumption. So give Zbiotics a try for yourself. Go to Zbiotics.com slash cow to get 15% off your first order when you use Cal at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money.

No questions asked. Remember to head to Zbiotics.com slash Cal and use that code Cal at checkout for 15% off. Also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist, as I always say, ideas are power in our current moment and the best source of quality ideas are books. The problem is figuring out which books to read, which books you just need to know the big ideas from. This is where Blinkist enters the picture. It's a subscription service that gives you 15-minute text or audio summaries called Blinks. of thousands of best-selling non-fishing books.

In fact, they have condensed over 5,000 titles in 27 categories. They even now have a new product called Shortcast, which are Blinks for Podcast. So the way I recommend using Blinkist is if there's a topic that you're interested in, find a bunch of relevant books. Listen to the Blinks, learn to main ideas, learn to landscape of that general area

of knowledge. Now you have a foundation to think and talk about intelligently and you figured out which of these books, if any, are worth actually diving into a more detail and you can buy and read just the books that are really going to matter.

It's not just for business. This can be for growth, personal growth, self-help. There's a large number of categories, over 27 categories covered by Blinkist. You can even download these blinks to listen to offline. So, for example,

maybe you read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. You said, is his follow-up homo deos worth reading? What's it about? Boom, 50-minute blink. You know the big deal. You know whether or not you want to read it. So right now, Blinkis has a special offer just for our

audience. Go to blinkus.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist. Spell B-L-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkis.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven day free trial

at Blinkis.com slash deep. All right. 56 minutes in. No, Jesse. No breaks. Pure professionalism. Let's do three more quick questions.

I want to get to 10. We're going to do 10. Even if I lose my voice trying. All right. So this will be question number eight. Do a little mental math here. Question number eight comes from Matt. Matt says,

it seems to me that a lot of your views that are your most famous for are contrarian. This seems to have served you pretty well. Do you often reflexively adopt these contrarian views? If so, does it ever end up backfiring? And if you are selective in adopting certain contrary in views, what factors you weigh when deciding to go against a grain? Well, two points, Matt.

One, not all of my views are contrarian. you know, I would say there's really three large categories, the type of stuff I write about. So I do have some well-known contrarian views, in particular, my pushback against the idea that you should follow your passion, and my push-back against using social media. Those, at least in the moments in which I articulated, those were quite contrarian, not so much anymore. A lot of my other popular ideas, however, I would put in a different category. I would say it is structuring and articulating clearly things people already believe. they just need someone to help them organize their pre-existing feeling. So with contrarian ideas, you're often trying to convince someone to change their mind about

something. You think following your passion is the right thing to do. I want to convince you of something different. Here is a secret. It's hard to have a really successful nonfiction book convincing people to change their mind. What's much more effective is giving structure and voice to something they already believe. So a lot of my popular ideas fall under that category. Deep work is an example.

It's not contrarian. That book didn't do well because people picked it up and said, No way. What do you mean deep work? What more email? What are you talking about? And then they read it and they were convinced. No, that's not how that book was successful.

People were overwhelmed. They knew something was wrong with the way work was unfolding. And this gave voice to it. That's why that book was successful. Slow productivity is like that. people feel this discomfort with burnout. They feel the ambiguity and lack of specification around our notions of what we even mean to be productive.

And when they hear slow productivity, just that term, when they hear the three principles, do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. It sounds right from moment one. Structuring articulating things people already believe. Same with a lot of my work on the deep life. Not convincing people the deep life is worth. while they know that.

Trying to give some structure to that already existing impulse. And then the final category of stuff I write about, it's like a lot of my New Yorker writing. It's more just observing and explaining trends. It's an expository. So I would say most of my stuff actually is not contrarian. I do like contrarian ideas, so Matt,

and I think it comes from my appreciation of the Socratic dialectic. A lot of people think this, you think that. Two opposing views collide. Truth aburges. Big believer on hitting one view against another, taking something you believe in and getting the best articulation to get someone and believe something different. In that collision of opposition,

the roots of deeper understanding are grown. So when I do go towards the contrary and it's probably motivated by the dialectic. And Danielle says, how can I stop my digital minimalism principles from going out the window after having a baby? So she talks about, I'm going to condense this some. She's on her phone a lot more because she's taking pictures to send to her family, and there's also useful things for her baby that she uses on the phone, like controlling the lights or the white noise in the room. And reading. She really emphasizes reading when you're doing those feedings in the middle of the night. You have your phone and she ends up, I'm quoting her, quoting her here, doom scrolling the Guardian online at 5 a.m. The check the latest COVID news,

etc. All right. She says, the bad phone habits have now set back in like rot. my phone seems like the most efficient way to stay occupied during those long feeds. I don't want to give myself too much of a hard time, but I don't want my son pretty much ever to see me on my phone once he's old enough to be able to recognize it. You know, what do I do? Well, Danielle, first, you're right to go easy on yourself when you're in the infant stage. I mean, anything goes survival.

Not a time to be really on yourself about your phone habits, on exercise and food, on, are you properly socializing with people. It's a little bit of an all hands on deck, at least until you sleep train. And I do hope you sleep train, Danielle, because you got to balance the needs of the baby with your own. One concrete thing I'll just offer from our own experience is when we had our first, my wife had the same issue with the phone reading during the late night feeds. So she bought a Kindle Paperwhite. That's when the Kindle Paperwhite first came into our lives. So you could read a book during the feeds. And the Paperwhite has its own built-in backlight that is not disturbing.

It doesn't fill the room with light. It's not going to bother the baby. It doesn't change you into, oh, my God, it's daytime. And so the Kindle Paperwhite is not a bad idea for distraction during late-night feedings that is not going to send you down a doom-scrolling rabbit hole. The other thing she innovated in our household was also like the go basket next to every place you might feed. It had all sorts of various things like snacks, water bottles.

I'd get fresh ice water and good insulated things before the night. Towels, you know, for the mess. You had these go baskets next to all the places you would feed. And so you have your paper white and all the stuff you need. You just got to make that as easy as you can. I like your idea, by the way, of not having your kids see you on the phone all the time. It doesn't matter with an infant. It doesn't matter even with a one-year-old or two-year-old.

I do think it matters. we should talk about this more as a culture when you're talking about a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, a 12-year-old. They see you on your phone all the time. You can have a hard time convincing them they shouldn't do the same. All right. One last question, family and friend related, comes from Evind, who says, how do you explain a shift to the deep life to friends and family? I am a law student from Norway, and your books and ideas have really helped me in answering some big questions regarding my life and career. my friends and family don't really seem to understand my shift in focus.

I live with my three best friends and they still enjoy the reckless responsibility free lifestyle, the early 20s are renowned for. I did too, but now me and my friends' ambitions don't align anymore. They plan a lot of activities during the day, which is when I want to work. I still hang out with them almost every evening, but when I now say no to their daytime activities or want to go read a book in the evening, they bug me about working too much. And I feel bad. Also, my father expects me to just kind of hang around in the living room when I am home for Christmas and gets annoyed when I want to go for a walk on my own or reflect or go to my room and create a small video for a couple of hours.

As you've explained, the deep life is radical and demands that you are comfortable with missing out and other things. However, I'm finding it hard to steer my life in a different direction than my friends and family and to miss out on some of their experiences. Well, I think you're going through a well-known developmental phrase right now, and I believe the Latin, the Latin description of this developmental phase is you're growing the hell up. That's all this happening here with your friends. You're growing up. They're still in that student mode.

You are transitioning to more of an adult mode, where your identity is now largely separated from a group dynamic and is much more individualated. You have autonomy over your time as well as responsibility. Now it's kind of up to me to take care of myself and make money and pay the bills with responsibility, but you also have autonomy. Socializing becomes more something that is compartmentalized. I want to spend time with you.

Let's make a time to do this. We're going to work out together. We're going to go to a movie together. but it becomes a much more scheduled, less of this sort of background ongoing home that you would see in a group dynamic. You're becoming an adult. And this happens at different times for different people.

Just watch any Judd Apatal movie from 15 years ago ago and you will see for some people it comes kind of late. Other people they get there earlier. You basically are the knocked up character after Catherine Hegel has the baby, not before. That's sort of what's happening here. And I think it's good. Everyone goes through this.

You're just starting to go through this. it now. You got to focus on work, get a job with opportunities, be so good they can't ignore you, build rare and valuable skills, build up a little bit more income, have your own place, some more responsibility, gain some more sense of efficacy, the system, standard stuff of growing up in your 20s. Your relationship with your friends are going to change. Some of those friends are going to go away as you find more adult friends. Some of those friends will grow up and remain your friends. That's all natural. Your relationship with your family is going to change. As you become more of an adult. It's not a father-son relationship. It becomes more of a peer relationship.

And then you realize, you know, if I'm home for a few days for Christmas, you know, I'm here to be around him and socialize with my family. I can do my deep work structured reflection on my own time. And maybe I cut my trip a little bit shorter. But what if I'm there? Maybe I want to be there for, what does this guy need? Right now, suddenly it's a different relationship. You're interacting with peers. you're actually thinking what does this person need for me. It's more maturity. Anyways, it's all great. I love being an adult.

I was an adult early. I was impatient. I was about halfway through college where I was ready to be on my own and doing this type of thing. So it's good what you're going through. Live on your own. Start building your own way in the world.

Let the ideas of the deep life structure this pursuit from day one that will keep you on the right track. But as you move farther down this track with structure to your forward momentum, life is going to get deeper and more interesting. So you're just starting even and it's going to get deeper and deeper. And yeah, it's painful at first. Your friends aren't there.

They'll get there. But you're going to hell up. And I think that's a good thing. All right, everyone. 10 questions in one hour and six minutes. I feel good about it. One take, Tony is what Jesse calls me. And that's what we did here.

Just went for it and got it done. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions. If you like what you heard, you will like what you see at YouTube. dot com slash Cal Newport Media, full episode and clips from the show can be found there. You'll also like what you read. Subscribe to my newsletter at calnewport.com for a weekly essay on these type of topics. I'll be next week from the woods. You don't hear from me. I was probably eaten by a bear. Send help. And until then, as always, stay deep.