Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 214: Quiet Quitting

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Link to submit questions: bit.ly/3U3sTvo- Deep Dive: Quiet Quitting [4:00]- How can I motivate my kids to have Cal’s work ethic? [24:28]- What are Cal’s tips for writing better articles? [34:48]- Are someday/maybe lists worth it? [44:33]- How can a researcher embrace slow productivity? [48:24]- Why did Cal switch from Roam to Obsidian note-taking software? [53:47] CASE STUDY: A World Without Email got my team through a crisis [57:01]- How can I concentrate on work with so many bad things happening in the world? [1:09:31]- What if I don’t enjoy the deep life I designed? [1:20:16]Thanks to our Sponsors:hensonshaving.com/cal  (enter Cal at checkout for 100 free blades)eightsleep.com/deepblinkist.com/deepexpressvpn.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 214. If you're new, this is the show where I answer questions from my audience about both the theory and practice of living and working deeply. I'm joined here, as always, in my Deep Work H.Q. by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I don't know if you noticed the restaurant that we are above,

or I should say we're above, is out of business. Republic? Public is shut down. What happened? Look, I don't want to say it's our fault. I'm just looking at the timeline.

Successful restaurant, we move in upstairs, restaurant closes, so I don't know, maybe it's something we're doing. No, I think it was just pandemic. You know, they never really recovered.

It's a big place. We went in there once. It kind of had an awkward layout. Yeah. It's a weird space. But I've been there for a long time, maybe five, six years.

But they never came, I mean, after the pandemic, they were shut down for a while. And then when they came back, they never went all in. You see, remember the weird hours?

Like, they weren't doing lunches. They were closing at nine. They were closed on Monday and Tuesday. So it's hard to get help. It's hard to get help. It's part of a rest of, group here in D.C., the black group.

And I think they only had so much capital, and they're focusing it on other places. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah. But I was brainstorming. So, like, here's the thought experiment. I'll get your thoughts. Imagine we had a show that was slightly bigger than ours.

Let's say a Huberman, Fredman-Men style show. That would generate enough revenue that you could cover without breaking a sweat, the lease payment on that space. All right. So let's say we're in that situation. We're like, this is the space below us. This is this big, nice space. We need to take it over.

What would we do with that space? What would you do, Jesse? What do you think we should do? I'd probably start bartending and feeding you drinks. You would just be bartending during the show. You are a really good bartender. That could be. So your recommendation, so Jesse's recommendation,

and the people at Tacoma Park would appreciate this, would be to turn that space into a private bar that basically just served elaborate, drinks to a single podcaster. Yeah, I don't know what to do with that space. I mean, hopefully another restaurant or bar comes in, I suppose. Yeah. That's sad.

Yeah, sad. I should say, speaking to Jesse, if you have not been checking out the YouTube channel that goes with this show, you should. He's been doing some really interesting things with the videos. So if you look at videos of the full episodes now, there's a nice introductions. There's also a part in the interruption style ticker on the side of the screens. You can see what questions are coming up and where I am in the questions. I'm in the question blocks.

I think that's nice. Some more editing is happening with the video clip. So if you're an audio-only listener, you might want to check out what this show looks like. And you can see that at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. All right. So I'm looking at our show notes here. We got two good blocks of. questions. It looks like later on I'm also going to introduce a case study, trying to do more of

those, actually hear about someone who has applied some of this advice that we talk about and what it looked like. As always, I encourage you to submit your own questions. There's links right in the show notes. You go to a survey, boom, pipe it in, comes right to us. We appreciate any and all questions that you send in. All right. So before we get going with those questions, I want to start today as I often do with a deep dive. Many of you have been sending me notes and messages and articles about the current workplace-related internet trend de jure, which is quiet quitting. I then went relatively deep on this topic over the weekend for a writing project, something I was

writing is for a book chapter for my slow productivity book. I went deep on this topic and did some research. research about where it started from and how it's being covered and what it's really all about. So I figured this was a good excuse today's episode to actually talk about quiet quitting. So if you haven't heard of this, this is the timeline I was able to excavate through my research. This trend starts on TikTok. It starts in July. So there is a TikTok username. At the time, ZK. Chillon, he has since changed his username. but his name was ZK. Chilling.

He posted a 17-second video on TikTok that featured soft piano music playing over a montage of videos. There's one of, it's him on the subway, and then you see a downtown New York City street, and then a residential street, and then for some reason a child's automated bubble machine. So it has this montage, and you hear his voice, and I wrote down what he says in that video.

So he says, I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting. Where you're not quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond in your work. Then he goes on a little bit. I won't read the whole thing. To reject hustle culture, to reject the idea that hustle culture demands,

which is that your work is your life. And he says the reality is that it's not, and you're worth as a person. It is not defined by your labor. So that TikTok video becomes popular. Other TikTok users start posting videos about quiet quitting, in particular lots of profession-specific video. So there's a well-known one now that's a teacher talking about the demands of teaching, etc.

Right? So it becomes a TikTok phenomenon. The mainstream media picks it up. As far as I can tell, early August, they picked this up, and it has now been covered extensively in the mainstream media and other types of media since then. So it jumped from TikTok into mainstream discussion. So I'm loading up here on the screen. So for those of you who are watching this episode or segment on YouTube, you can actually see the article, but I'll narrate for those who are just listening. There is this article from The Guardian on August 6th, which I believe, as far as I can tell, is one of the first actual old-school media sources to tackle the topic.

So it was titled Quiet, Quitting, Why Doing the Bare Minimum at Work Has Gone Global, and it was written by James Tapper. I just want to point out a couple things from this article and then what I want to do is give you my thoughts on all this. So this article opens, I just want to point this out by saying Bartleby is back, although no doubt he would prefer not to be. This is a very British way to open an article like that. There is a book, Melville wrote a short story.

I think it's a novella, short story, I think it's a short story, maybe novella called Bartleby the Scrivener. And it's actually one of the first, as far as I can tell books about knowledge work on Wii. So check out that book if you haven't seen it. But anyways, that's very British. The number of American TikTok users who would know that reference, I'm going to assume, is low.

All right, so let me jump ahead here. Here's another key quote. Instead, they are doing just enough in the office to keep up. So this is talking about the quote unquote quiet quitters. Then leaving work on time and muting slack. The writer then adds kind of snark than posting about it on social media. So here's the summary of quiet quitting that this guardian article gave.

They're doing just enough in the office to keep up, then leaving work on time and muting slack. Now there's some good analysis in this piece trying to understand this trend. So here's a quote from an expert. Since the pandemic, people's relationship with work has been studied in many ways. And the literature typically across professions would argue that,

yes, people's way of relating to their work has changed. We talk about that often on the show, the impact of the pandemic on people stepping back and saying, wait a second, what's going on with my life, what's going on with my work, is a good time to regroup. Another quote from this expert, the search for meaning has become far more apparent. There's a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking, what should work mean for me? What can I do in a role? How can I do a role that's more aligned to my values? And finally, we have another quote here from a Harvard business school. professor who introduced this term the Great Rethink as a better way of describing the current moment and knowledge worked in something like the Great Resignation. There's a lot of rethinking happening. All right, so I want to give

let me give some thoughts here. First of all I should go on to say this article, which was one of the first, was one of the better articles on this topic. They defined what quite quitting was and then gave this psychological context, what's going on. in the workplace, why might this trend have emerged? Since then, things have been going downhill. I do not necessarily suggest looking at the online coverage of this topic. As I went into it for the chapter I was writing, in the months since this idea first arose,

I think online discussion and coverage has become a pylon of superficial criticality. the online commentators are seeing this issue mainly as a chance to prove their sophistication in bona fidees by trying to one up whoever talked about it last by pointing out what they missed. You thought this is wrong, but you're the problem because you missed out on this problem and then someone else comes in.

And I find it to be completely non-useful. So you have the original quiet quitters on TikTok and then you get the reaction that's like kids are lazy, you know, this is just called having a job, what are you talking about? And then you have the crew that comes in and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you both are wrong because what neither of you are doing is cataloging every single identity group and trying to argue which identity groups will have an easier time than worse.

You have to have a huge appendix trying to rank order the ease with which different groups can do quiet quitting. And until you acknowledge that, you're the problem, then someone else comes in and says, no, all of you guys are the problem because what you don't realize is that your, your bougie stooges. And the key here is to rebuild capitalism and replace it with something better. This discussion in general is just part of the superstructure that is upholding this. economic exploitation. Everyone trying to want up everyone else, everyone else trying to make everyone else seem dumber than them. It's a mess.

It's a pile on. Ignore it. So let's push that aside. Let's get rid of the posture and get back to the original issue here of quiet quitting and this context that I think the guardian provided, which I think is quite good. So I think there is something important here. What we're seeing in that TikTok discussion is a new generation. We'll call it this pandemic.

generation, the generation that had the pandemic disruptions hit early in their adulthood. Discovering, for lack of a better word, lifestyle design. The idea that work is one of the factors that you can intentionally deploy as part of a larger plan to construct a life that is meaningful or deep. So it's an intentional approach to life in which you are designing your life to meet whatever criteria you have for meaning and depth. So it is good to see a new generation discovering this.

The frustration is they're starting from scratch. I mean, quiet quitting is a it's a simplistic and crude first step for us trying to understand well, wait a second. What role does work have in my life?

I'm working too much. I don't know why. Probably because someone's being evil. I think I'm going to like work less. It's a very simplistic first step towards a deeper, more necessary conversation. But this is a topic that has been covered every single generation,

going back quite a few generations. Go back to the 19th century. Read Walden by Thoreau. Jump forward to the 20th century. Read the seven-story mountain. Jump forward another 20 years. Read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Jump forward to the 21st century.

You can start with eat, pray, love, then go onwards to the four-hour work week, which, by the way, was covering this exact issue the last time we went through this, which was the post-9-11 recession, and my generation, the early millennials entering the working world and trying to find their way, we had Tim Ferriss's version of lifestyle design. It's also covered by us here on this show.

And in my writing extensively when we talk about the deep life and lifestyle-centric career planning and career capital and the method of intentionally trying to construct a life that is deep and how you have to be systematic and deploy lots of different angles at it. So it's not a topic we're starting from scratch. the TikTok crew kind of is. So I think this is the good news, bad news. The good news is what a topic. And I'm glad, I think it's a serious topic, and I'm glad to seeing attention with this particular group.

The bad news is, look, if you start from scratch, I don't think you're going to catch up to Thoreau anytime soon. Like, people have thought about this, so you should pull from what is already out there. So I think this is an important topic. I'm glad it's being looked at this pandemic generation, probably has had the most impetus to look at this topic that we've seen since, I don't know, maybe the Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sort of 1960s, early 70s. That's probably the last time we had a comparable disruption in culture, evolution of culture that required a pretty serious rethinking.

That eventually, by the way, led to the 1980s. We talked about this recently, early 1990s notion of passion and following your passion and the bastardization of Campbell's, follow your Bliss, which has been a mixed bag. And we're having another one of these evolutions now. And the great rethink of induced by the pandemic is going on. We're trying to rethink these things. So I think quiet quitting is reflecting a good trend. Even if the details of these TikTok videos are easy to dismiss, I would say let's resist

that urge. Yes, if you're going to look at 23-year-olds posting 17-second videos, we can make fun. We can make ourselves feel smarter than everyone else. but I think what we should do is see this as an opportunity to help a group, a large group of dissatisfied and earnestly searching people find their way so they don't have to do this all from scratch. So that's my thoughts on quiet quitting, Jesse.

It seems like that would be a topic in both books that you're going to work on. Yeah. Because this is a slow productivity book, right? But it seems like it would be even bigger product topic in your next book. Yeah, I think the Deep Life book is going to be a big topic, is going to be a good match for this. I mean, it's all in the air right now. You know, and this happens every generation.

You get to a place. Economically, things are going good. There's other concerns. You don't really think much about work. And then once you get going, something happens. And you're like, well, what role is work supposed to have in my life? What's going on here? And people try to figure this out.

So with slow productivity, how does it relate? Well, I mean, I think slow productivity. productivity is maybe a little bit more narrow in its attack on this topic, but slow productivity is saying, what even are you going for when you say you want to be productive? Like, what is your definition of a working life well executed? And the argument there is that we have these, we don't think of through. We have these superficial definitions. I don't know. Business is better than less. Hustling is better than not hustling. I want to feel like I'm earning my key, but it's all very haphazard and a lot of what we actually do when we're trying to get after it, quote

unquote, in our work is ironically counterproductive. It makes us more miserable. It's not maximizing useful output. And so slow productivity is saying, why don't we go back and rethink what we even mean by productivity, especially when it comes to knowledge work to try to find something that's more sustainable, that's going to make life more meaningful, and it ultimately is going to produce better stuff. So it's like a narrow first stab at the Great Rethink.

and then the deep life is much broader. The deep life is where you say, you know what? We're going to move to Kentucky. So quiet quitting kind of helps define it. And then from there you can start. Quiet quitting or quiet quitting is a response to the same underlying impetus that my books are coming out of, which is people starting to rethink work. It's rolling their life and what they're trying to do with their life more generally.

All right. So we've got a couple good blocks of questions here. First, I want to talk about a new sponsor to this show that I'm excited about. And that is Hinson shaving. this is the type of thing I like. Okay, so here's the idea here. I mean, I have a script, but let me cut to the idea of what I'm really excited about here. This is a family-run business that specialize in really high-precision parts manufacturing for the aerospace industry.

So they have manufactured pieces for the Mars Rovers. They've manufactured pieces for the International Space Station. They use these high-precision CNC routers that can build things to really, really precise specifications. So they had this idea. They were looking at the world of shaving. What they figured out is the problem in the world of shaving is the way the razors are mounted. If the razors are loose or too much of it is exposed, it bends up and down.

It's like a diving board that moves up and down. And that's what catches your skin. That's what causes irritation and nicks. And so they realized if you could build a really precise, razor body, so the actual handle and thing at the end of the razor, they could hold a standard razor blade perfectly, firmly with just the right amount showing, then the blades become the easy part.

10-cent standard blade is fine. All of the magic isn't getting a precisely built handle, and that's what they did. They designed this beautiful, precision-generated metal shaving handle that you use with just standard 10-cent razor blades and get a incredible shave out of it. So the way they explained it to me is they built a great razor

and a terrible razor business. So unlike the subscription services, unlike the disposable razors where the whole business is we're going to keep selling you these high-priced, poorly made razors that blades that you use for a while and throw out,

here you buy this one really nice handle and then, you know, for 10 bucks, can have two years worth of blades. The blades are no longer the easy part. So I like this idea of super high quality, precisely made beautiful objects that do a job really well. You don't have to have all the plastic and all the waste. You have this nice piece of aluminum and you use just standard blades

and you get a really good shape. Their precision is 0.0013 inches. That's how far their blades extend. That's less than the thickness of a human hair. You can't do that unless you know how to make super precise parts. So I was a fan of this company. I have my Hinson's shaver. It's fantastic.

Now you pay more for the thing up front, but you're not buying the replacement blades. You're not doing the subscriptions. You're not doing the going to CVS and getting the things in the plastic box that they have to come and unlock to whatever. You buy the thing once and you use it with 10 cents blades. You will be winning in terms of how much you paid really soon.

So I don't know. This is one of these things where I'm actually a big fan of the product. So here's the thing. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit henson shaving.com slash cow to pick the razor for you and then use the code cow and you will get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Now the key here is when you go to the site and you choose your razor, add the two years. supply of razors to your cart, and then when you enter the code Cal, it'll just make them free.

But you have to add the razors to your cart and then enter the code Cal when you check out, and you'll get the two years worth of razors for free. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal and use that code Cal. So I was on the phone with them, Jesse, right before earlier today, and I knew I had to get over here and I had to restrain myself because I wanted to shave. Well, I, shave, but I had a lot of questions about the high precision C&C routers. I'm like, does it start with a block of aluminum?

Like, how do these things work? It's, you know, because it's a cylindrical, like, precision-made thing. I'm just really interested in that technology. Yeah. I also thought it was cool that the thing that built my razor also built parts for the International Space Station. So that's cool. I also want to talk about, speaking of well-made, really interesting high-tech products,

I also want to talk about 8 sleep. This is, I think, again, really cool technology. I like seeing really cool technologies. So the 8 sleep pod is, they call it the ultimate sleep machine, but what it does is a sleep technology that can control the temperature of your sleeping experience. You put the pod over your mattress and you have precise control over what temperature you then want that mattress cover to be at. So the way I use it, why I like this product,

like most people like this product, is you can bring your temperature down. It's hard to get a good night's sleep if you're hot. And if you bring the temperature down with your eight sleep pod to be just a little bit cooler, the quality of your sleep significantly improves. You can bring it down as cold as 55 degrees. he's, I was thinking about A-Sleep, Jesse the other day, I was watching reruns of curb your enthusiasm. And this is the later seasons where he's arguing, he's arguing with, I forgot his girlfriend, I forgot her name, about the temperature they sleep in and she likes it warmer and he likes it cooler.

But the premise is like eventually she gets sick and he's going to have to care for her and he was trying to break up with her before she got sick and he just missed it. But then the doctor is there, and the doctor's like, and this is really important. You're going to have to really keep the room warm. You know, I think it's going to be really important for the, really important for the healing process. You really, I think, for sleeping, need the room to be 80, 85 degrees. You know, as I thought that was funny. The eight sleep, the eight sleep would be just what he needs there, what Larry David needed, because he could bring his side of the bed down.

So there's data about this. Eight sleep users experience up to 19% increased recovery of the 32% improvement in sleep quality, 34% more deep sleep. Their newest generation is called the Pod 3, which allows you to do tracking. You can track sleep, track health with these sensors. Health tracking use these sensors that are in there,

so it's getting pretty high tech. But mainly, it really is a game changer to go to bed and the thing you're on is not hot. The pod is not magic, but it can feel like it. So go to 8Sleep.com slash deep to start sleeping cool and save $150.

on the pod. That's eight sleep spelled out, E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash deep. Eight sleep currently ships within the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., as well as select countries in the EU and Australia. All right, so let's get into some questions. Jesse, what's our first question of the day?

Okay. So our first question is from Esther. She's a 48-year-old physician in New York City, and that's what she has to say. what did your parents do in your childhood and teen life to help motivate you to be as organized and efficient as you are? What lessons can I learn to motivate my teenagers to pursue excellence and all that they do? Well, it's an interesting question.

So if I go back in time to think about young Cal Newport and what he was exposed to growing up, I mean, there is some interesting stuff to perhaps mine from back then. My mom is very organized. I mean, she'll tell this story that she wasn't organized. When we were very young, she was not as organized. And we lived in Houston. It was kind of a hectic setup because she had the commute from north of Houston and the downtown. It was a very long commute.

And then my dad had to go the other direction and we were always cobbling together child care. And I think it was a little busy. And then we moved to New Jersey. And once we moved to New Jersey, we were old enough that she was staying at home at that point. And I think it was very stressful and chaos. to try to organize the lives of four elementary school age kids. But she had a friend she met. She had a friend who was Mormon who really pushed the Franklin Covey system, right?

Because Covey is Mormon. So the Franklin Covey system, which is based on part on Stephen Covey's thinking, was very popular among Mormons before it expanded to be more popular generally. So my mom became a, like a diehard user of the Franklin planner, like using it the way exactly following the rules. And it transformed life. So it killed off that stress. It was a very organized household. So I was exposed to that. So subliminally, I might have taken in.

Organization helps. But I was not a very organized structured kid. I was haphazard. I would leave things until the last minute. I was not a kind of type A. let's get things lined up, tackle them one by one, get things done at the highest level of quality. I was not like that until college. It really wasn't until college when I got serious about my academic career that I began to get more systematic about organization.

Because at that point, I cared. It was not really until then that I cared how well I did my options in life. For whatever reason, I don't quite know why I had a chip on my shoulder. I just had this sense of I think I have some talent. I think I'm a smart guy, but it's on me to make something of this. I don't know where that came from, but that sense did not emerge for me until college. And then I got very organized and structured and developed the type of ideas I talk about here. So I don't know if I subliminally took in some things from my mom growing up that I'd then put into action once I was ready to put into action or if it was unrelated.

but it certainly wasn't I'm 12 and really good at planning things. So from a parenting perspective, what this is telling me is you probably cannot engineer a child into being more organized, into being more driven. You can demonstrate it in your own life. You can demonstrate the benefits of a structured life, less stress, more control, more opportunity. more options. Things in general are more interesting, less chaotic. I think kids do pick up.

They appreciate the stability. They will pick up the stability. So that might be something that is actually imprinted. It's sort of a show-don't-tale strategy. I do also think it's important to talk with kids, specifically about building intentionally a life, a deeper life. These things matter. Discipline is important for this reason.

It's how you make the most of the talents you have and the opportunities you have and make the most of your time here, knowing what's what you want in life is important. Engineering around that's important. Here's why we live here. Here's why we have these jobs. Here's why we left this. We really think about this.

Here's why community is important. You know, I spend all this time volunteering over here because I think it's important to serve other people. Being really clear about the elements what makes a life deep, I think is, again, probably very important. Not that they will then say, yes, dad, yes, mom, I'm going to start doing this tomorrow. But they remember that lessons when they get to a place where they realize, oh, I'm on my own.

I got to figure myself out. I got to figure out what to do. And they can look back and say, here's an option to try what my parents did, what seemed to be working for them, what they explained to me and taught to me. Now I am ready, 19, 20, 21 years old. Now I'm ready to try this out. And so there might be this period of frustration where you're demonstrating through your actions, you're just through conversation, you're explaining what you figured out

over time as an adult about how to approach life. and you're not seeing it reflected in their day-to-day action. You're like, man, if I was 17, I'd be doing this so much better, but it's still useful what you're doing. Because it's giving this option into their toolbox. So when they're ready to start pulling tools for the toolbox, which will be out of sight of you after they're out of the home, it'll be in there.

And they might be more likely to pick it up. The other thing I would recommend is you have to resist, you have to resist the, the, uh, appeal of using your kids as a proxy for your own accomplishments. This is a big D.C. area thing. I think this is true in other major cities as well. I'd be interested from our international list.

It's how common this is. It's so easy. If you're like a relatively accomplished adult who has kids and you look at your kids and say, you know, the competitive structures where they exist, what's required to stand out, man, that's not so hard from the perspective of an adult as compared to like trying to get partner at this law firm that I did. And so let me just push these kids into accomplishments that are visible and impressive. And by proxy, that will reflect well on me. And you get a lot of this.

Now parents are saying my kids and their accomplishments are going to reflect well on me. And you know what? It's a lot easier to have them do the work than me have to do the work. It's a lot easier to say, you know, go back there and keep practicing the clarinet than it is to actually have to practice it yourself. and you used to kids as a proxy for your own accomplishment. This, I think, is a problem. I used to study this in a lot more detail. In my 20s, when I was doing more work on student stress.

High school student stress was an area that I used to give talks on and do a lot of writing on. And there's a real problem with this approach. What happens is, is you can burn out the motivational drive of your kid. So they get turned off on this idea, this extrinsic motivation of like, man, it's go, go, go. If you've got to do everything at the highest level, why don't you have the highest grade, your parents are getting a real kick out of, hey, you got to the most advanced, you know, you're in the most advanced reading group, you're on the best select team,

you're the first chair and the whatever, and they're getting all this, whatever, this energy out of it. They feel like it reflects well on them, and you're burning out the kid's motivation drive, and then they're going to go through some sort of simplistic rebellion where when they're looking at their options, a sort of more intentional, careful discipline, which is really important to life. They're not going to pull that option on their toolbox. Because I did the discipline thing when I was 17 and it burned me out.

And now that I'm, you know, I made it to whatever, Brown, I'm going to go the opposite direction. And it's not great. So I'm just going to throw in that thing. You want to demonstrate the intentional construction of a life that includes discipline and organization. You want to talk about it and why it's important. but don't I mean the kid has to pull it out of the toolbox themselves and they might not be ready to pull it out when they're 17 and if you force them too hard to do it you might and I don't want to strict this metaphor but you might end up breaking that tool early and then they won't have it when they need it later on in life when you you coach a lot Jesse I don't know what you see but yeah like sports culture around here yeah no you nailed it I mean though you work with some fantastic athletes I mean I think it's a difference if it's you're really gifted you know athletically first you know

example. So like let's let's foster that and like really make that a part of your life. But there's this whole second tier of, you know, young people, athletes where it's like you don't really need to be away every weekend at these tournaments. You don't really need private coach. Like, it's fine, but you're not, you're not going to play D1 college. Yeah. So, uh, so why is your, why are you spending so much time? It's like other than I, you can get addicted as a parent to the like, we're on this team and we got selected for that team. And every time that happens, you, as the parent, somehow it makes you feel like physically stronger. For sure. There's some pretty intense parents out there as well.

Yeah. That, you know, push a lot. And it could be difficult for like the head coach too because they're always. Do you have parents? Well, I don't want you to talk out of school. But just abstractly speaking, do parents, parents interacting with head coaches is something that. Oh, it's very common.

At the high school level. Very common. It's even common at their college level. Like, there's like college coaches that I couldn't have to deal with some parents. parents for sure. That baffles me. As someone who did a little bit of D1 college athletics, I couldn't imagine

a parent coming in. Definitely exists. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, hey, look, I had, if this helps, I had none of that growing up. I think we had a lot of kids and it was busy

and we had good structure and we had good routine and good role models in our parents. But like, we were never, at least I wasn't. there's never this thing of this particular activity you're doing, why can't we be doing this at a higher level? And it worked out okay for me. Everyone is going to have to look into their toolbox of how do I build my life at some point.

And I'm just just my theory. Make sure the right tools are in there and don't be frustrated that they're not ready to open the box at 15 and 16. Some kids are. But some kids aren't. All right. What do we have next, Jesse? All right.

Next question is from Max. He's a 40-year-old. marketer from London, and he says, I've been asked to start writing regular articles for my company. I'm struggling with this assignment. I cannot find my voice. When I write, I come across as very rigid and contrived. How do you write your articles? That's a good question. How do you actually craft an article? It seems like it's a easy thing. They're not that long. It's not a book. but more than a few people like you, Max, have faced the reality

when it comes time to write what needs to be a smart, good article in this case representing your company that it's hard to do. You don't know where to start. So, you know, I have some tips to share.

Let me just start with the preface of I have been writing professionally, you know, for over two decades. And it's all I do. All I do is write. I write every single day. I showed you on the show last week.

My keyboard is completely worn away after just a couple years of use because of how much I write. I write academic articles. I write public consumption magazine articles. I write books. I write essays every week for my own newsletter. And so I've been working at this for a really long time. So I only say that just as a preface that don't, don't, let's say, read one of my recent articles and say, why doesn't my stuff just sound like this?

What's wrong? There's 20 years of work that goes behind that. So it's a process. You get better and better with work. So I want to start there. so that you're not, and forget, okay, maybe don't use me as an example. I don't want you reading, you know, John McPhee and saying, why don't I sound like that? He spent a lifetime honing that ability.

I do have some specific advice that I wrote down a few things here about article writing. One, spend more time thinking through your idea, your thesis, before you write, preferably do this on foot. I think interesting articles, good writers, spend a lot more time thinking about the point they want to. to make and the pieces that go into that point. They spend a lot more time thinking about that than you might realize. I think amateur writers get started too quickly. And especially for an idea article, you're not going to figure out on the page. There might be passages you figure out on the page.

Like, let me just go for this and then see if it's working or not. But you're not going to figure out, here is my big point or the thesis and the four things to support it. That has to be done on foot. And it can take a long time to get there. You can try and not like what you have and you have to keep thinking before you start writing. All right, number two, for this style of article you'll be writing,

and I can see from your elaboration, it's like a philosophical angle on ideas related to the products your company builds. So for that type of philosophical idea type article, start with a standard structure at first. I think it's a good way to enter into professional article writing. So there's a, you know, one of the standard structure is going to be, you know, you open on a illustrative example that leads to the nut graphs. This is where you're actually explaining. Here is the idea I'm going to try to convince you of in this piece.

And now you suddenly understand what that example that you just read was about. So you create a little bit of narrative tension, which you relieve partially with the revelation of your thesis. Then you go into elaboration. All right, let me work through this connection idea. Let me support it. Give you the necessary caveats. Now they have a complete understanding of the idea. The narrative tension has been fully released.

And then your conclusion should pull back, have a callback to what you open with. And then there's a sense of completion. So like that's standard idea writing 101. You build up narrative tension. And then the release of the tension pulls the reader through the article towards the end. And the callback gives them this sort of satisfying sense of completion to the whole story they just went through. Similar things happen if you study, you know, Aristotle's poetics and storytelling. similar types of structures and goes back a long way.

Three show don't tell. One of the big differentiators in these type of articles between amateur and professional writing is to professional writing is a lot denser, by which I mean it's points are established with quotes, citations of specific examples. So it's denser. There's a density of citation.

I don't mean formal, you know, you're doing some sort of AP style citation, but it's your showing don't telling. such and such said this, such and such example, went for 14 years. This car in 1950, I had on average this malice per gallon, and now by 1990, it was this me, malice per hour, show, don't tell. Related, this is a piece of advice number four. Be wary of the conversational voice.

All right. It's a real temptation, I think, when people are new to this type of article writing to ask rhetorical questions and have more colloquial asides of you would think this is the case, but it's not really. what would you do if you were suddenly faced with $10 million? Maybe not what you would think if you blah blah blah. The conversational tone reads amateur. That's more acceptable, I think, in a sort of personalized blogging world, but you want to avoid the conversational tone.

So the colloquial idiomatic expressions really avoid rhetorical questions except for maybe occasionally. And this is my bugaboo. I think rhetorical questions and idea writing is, you know, it's my very very. version of using cliches. It's, I think it's weak writing. Don't ask rhetorical question. Show, don't tell. Show don't tell.

Move it forward. And then finally, don't write for the sake of writing. It really comes through an article writing, as well as book chapter writing. You see this a lot when people are writing books that maybe they're not writers. It's based on their expertise. It's you're like, man, I know that you know how many words this chapter needs to be. And you are trying to get to that word count. That comes through really clearly.

That's what I call writing for the sake of writing. Like there's no real reason for the last two paragraphs to be here other than you're trying to get to 2000 words. Professional writers look to pull the rip cord on whatever passage, idea, or paragraph they're working on as soon as possible. The sooner I can get out of this, the more comfortable I am with this. So go back and read, you know, some New Yorker articles. And you'll see this. They're out of each argument as quickly as they can. Like, what's the essence of what I'm trying to say here?

when we cite this, it's different than this. We also see it here. Ripcourt, I'm out. Next thing. You don't see this dragging out of like, you know, and maybe this and maybe that. And let me a rhetorical question here. And let's go back and summarize. And so when you're writing Ripcourt, I actually, in this lower productivity book, I'm writing now, the voice I'm using that book is, I know the right way to describe it.

but I'm really trying to non-over-elaborate things. I guess it's a little bit more, not enigmatic, but a little bit more declarative because it's supposed to have a sense of some timeless wisdom. I literally, on multiple occasions when I'm editing something,

have written rip-cord, rip-cord, rip-cord. As a reminder to myself, like, get out, get out, get the point, get out, get the point, get out. The reader is smart. They'll fill in the details. Don't over-explain. All right. So those are my tips.

I guess I gave one, two, three, four, five ideas here for making those articles really look a lot better. Just to reiterate my my original point, also, you will get better with time. So don't compare yourself to your very favorite writers and say, why am I not there yet? You want to be better than you were with the last article you wrote.

And so hopefully these tips will help. So with the example, then the nut, what's the nut again? So that's where you actually lay out what the big idea is going to be in the article. Okay. Right. So, like, imagine something I was right. Let me, let me draw a quick example from writing I've been doing this week. So, you know, I opened a section of a chapter.

I'm talking about Georgia O'Keefe. And I was talking about how busy her early careers. I think I talked about this on the show last week. This is the example, though. So I'm telling the story about Georgia O'Keefe and how many different jobs she had all over the country. And she ended in the summer, she would come back east and go west. And it's just this really busy life. And she really was trying to study painting, but would have to take these long breaks.

And she needed to really uncover potential was going to need something more. That more came when she started getting involved with Alfred Stiglitz and their family owned this land by Lake George. And she started going up there with him and became unlocked the most prolific period of her career. So kind of hearing the story like this is interesting. The nut there is then pointing out, so this particular section, seasonality. This is what George O'Keefe was demonstrating.

Seasonality. Different times of the year you're working on different things with different intensities is something that we've sort of lost track of but it's actually really key to the human experience and something that we should try to get back.

There we go. So you have this opening story like what's this, why this is interesting but what's it all about that Nutgraph explains it but you still have narrative tension because you want to say, well, why is that true?

You know, why is seasonally important? Can we really get it back? what happened to it. Now you want to have that be resolved. That's the rest of that chapter, then resolves those questions. So that's an example there. Got it. The alternative would be you could just come right in and say,

seasonality is very important. Here's the definition of seasonality. I will now get five reasons why. And that's fine. But this is the difference between having narrative tension and not. Yeah. It's textbook versus like, okay, I want to see what happens next. All right. What do we got? Speak in it next.

What do we have as our next question? All right. Next question is from Joe. He's a software engineer from Minneapolis. Do you use anything like a someday maybe list? And if so, how do you manage it? All right. So someday maybe for those who don't know, that's a getting things done, a GTD reference. So in his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen recommends keeping a Someday Maybe list. So it's projects that you're not actually actively working on now, but you might one day. The point is, In Allen's book is you don't want this rattling around in your head. You don't want this idea you have for something you might want to do one day having to be maintained just in your brain because anything you have to maintain just in your brain can become a source of stress. You can become a source of anxiety. You want it in a written down somewhere where you trust it won't be forgotten. And so he says just have this one list.

I think it's a good idea. Something like that is a good idea. You need a place or places where potential ideas are captured that you trust they will not be forgotten. Now, I actually think this is a piece of my system, my personal system that I need to improve. My someday maybe storage right now is distributed among multiple different role-specific systems, which is probably not optimal. So, for example, I have role-specific trello boards where I keep track of tasks and related obligations. We've talked about this in a lot of other episodes. Each of those boards has a column labeled backburner.

That's one place that certain things go. But these tend to be, the things I put on a back burner list, don't tend to be grandiose ideas. It's more, you know, we need to someday probably update our such and such software. I don't want to do this now. Well, it's something we should probably do. We should think about, you know, improving our setup for having calls on the podcast, like something just said I talked about. That's like on a backburner list.

I'm not working on it now, maybe, but it's on a back burner list. So those are there. Then in my online note taking, and right now I use Obsidian, which we have a question about coming up. There's places in there. So I have a document in there for my academic research. And in particular, my academic research on impact, technology on society and digital ethics, something I'm just starting to do some more work on. There's a page in my online note taking for that.

For the podcast and media company, there's another place where I keep track of visions for the future. That's too many places. So core idea one is yes, Alan is right. You need place or places you trust to keep ideas so they're not going around your head. Two, I have a system right now that is too distributed. So I want to fix it. What am I probably thinking about doing?

I'm thinking about having some sort of rooted someday maybe set up where there's a core route to where all these ideas are stored. Like that's all I have to remember is the root. This is my someday maybe document in my online note taking software or my someday maybe directory in my Google drive. And then from there I can link out or spread out to here's stuff for this part of my life. Here's ideas for this part of my life. So I'm going to do something like that.

and I'm going to root my system. But it's a good question because I think it's an important piece of organizing an intellectual life that we haven't talked much about. You're going to have to put that on your someday maybe list. It's a circular irony. Improve your someday maybe list. You put that on your, I need to start a someday maybe list and I need to put that on my someday maybe list. I think this is the productivity nerd version of if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it.

Oh, well, enough for that nonsense. All right, what do we got? Let's keep rolling. See, I'm getting quicker now, Jesse. Okay. I'm picking up the pace. So next question is from Sam. He's a 28-year-old PhD student.

And he says, I found the 500 words a day formula for slow productivity to be a useful frame. However, as a PhD student in computer science, a lot of my work doesn't involve much writing. How would I adapt the 500 words a day target for my research? So the content. The context of the 500 words a day reference there from Sam is at some point, I don't know, maybe a few months ago.

On the podcast, I talked about John McPhee. And I think I was probably talking about an essay I wrote for my newsletter, whatever. The point is I was emphasizing that John McPhee is seen in the context of his entire career as being very productive. He's written all these books. He has the Pulitzer's. He has the National Book Award. and a huge bibliography. But he doesn't actually work that much on any given day.

In fact, his target is he admits just to write 500 words a day. So this was a classic example of slow productivity. This working at this natural sustainable pace over time can produce great stuff. So if we expand the timeline at which we're evaluating productivity to be a career or the last 10 years, as opposed to having a narrow timeline of today or the last. week, you get this much more sustainable rhythm of work. You don't have to be busy or killing yourself every day with work to produce stuff that you're proud of. Okay. So Sam is saying, what is the equivalent of 500 words a day if you're not a writer? And I think that's a good

question. So we could address this first of all just specifically in terms of Sam's particular context, which is a PhD student. And look, I see that. I feel your pain there, Sam. I used to do a lot of appearances at boot camps, graduate student dissertation boot camps that you see this at Georgetown

and I would also do it at a nearby Catholic University when I knew some professors over there. It's very common that you would do

these once a year gatherings. They're called dissertation boot camps where grad students get together to hear talks and motivate each

other to work on their dissertations. And I was a broken record at these boot camps because all of the advice was always centered

on right every day, get your writing done. Don't forget to write. Because in a lot of disciplines, writing is the actual primary activity that pushes a thesis forward. Not the case of mathematics. Not the case in computer science. You write papers eventually, but research is not writing. It's solving math equations, trying to figure out theorems, running experiments.

And so I used to come to these boot camps, and I was a broken record. I would say, stop saying writing as your generic verb for working. For a lot of people, the core of their work has nothing to do with actually writing. So I feel your pain, Sam. Writing should not be seen as a universal verb for doing deep work in graduate school. But what I want to do here is generalize out and answer this for people in general. I don't want to get to academia specific. So let's just be in general, how do we translate this general philosophy of 500 words a day to other types of work?

what I think is key here is this notion of slow and steady and timeline expansion. If you expand your timeline on which you are evaluating your productivity to something at the scale of years, then often a varied slow and steady approach is going to work quite well. And when you're evaluating your production

on what you really care about at that type of expanded timeline, you begin to see the futility or the performative unnecessity of really hard days. I'm just burning the midnight oil. I've been writing all day. I'm going to write until midnight tonight and wake up really early to write. You could do that. And maybe in the moment you'll be like, man, I know I'm being productive because look how hard I'm working. But when you're talking about what do I produce over the next five years, that's not sustainable.

It also doesn't really matter. working quality work again and again in the right setting, giving the work the respect and the support it needs to be good. Going up and down in intensity, you know what? I'm taking a week off. I didn't get there tomorrow. I was sick today. I didn't write.

Who cares? We're talking about the end of this year. Did you produce something that you're proud of? And that is going to be best served by slow, steady quality. So I think that's how we generalize John McPhee's 500 words a day, is you don't have to be exhausted or frantic today to having ended up

produced something great next year. You need to slowly accrete good quality work at a reasonable rate. And that also happens to be a much more sustainable way to live in work.

So, you know, that's what I would say, slow, steady. Don't not work, but don't be so proud of yourself for, you know,

staying up real late. That just means you forgot a deadline. And, uh, you will guaranteed when a Pulitzer Prize like John McPhee. All right, Jesse, what have we got? All right.

Next question is from Will. He's an economist from Tacoma Park. We won't be able to meet him at Republic. Did you say, and he has to say, did you say you were using Obsidian now? Why the switch from Rome? That's what, yeah. Well, first of all, maybe it's what we should do with the Republic space is because I learned from obsidian from another friend of mine in Tacoma Park.

there's a big booster. So shout out to Scott. So me and Scott and Will, we could just create Republic into a space where people gather to geek out in incredible detail about various Zetelcast. It inspired electronic note taping systems. All right, Will, I did. I am using Obsidian now for nerdish reasons. And just to give the really high level explanation,

Rome, well, I like Rome too. Actually, Rome has its uses as well. Rome is a nice interface. Obsidian is based off of text files. So when you're taking notes in Obsidian, yeah, you have this interface for taking notes. You can link the notes together. But what you're doing is actually writing in what's known as markup, so just a generic markup language in text files. And what the Obsidian interface is doing is just reading these text files.

files did sit in a directory on your computer where you pointed it and it's just reading those text files and you can go in there and read them it's just plain text with markup markup symbols around it to indicate this is bold this is a list this is a link and let's say if this links to something else and you know it just the other document is just there in the markup and so when you go through your notes and obsidian it's a nice interface you can click around and format and do these type of things but nothing lives in the cloud there's not some proprietary format that's on AWS instance somewhere. It's text files in your computer that you can go and read.

You can open it up and text edit. You can change it. And when you look at it with Obsidian, it will be, you will see those changes. So Obsidian is just an interface that allows you to edit text files in your computer and displays those text files in a nice way. So I like that.

It's full control. So Obsidian could go away. I have all my notes. I could read them just directly with a text editor or get any other type of markup reader that exist and still read those notes. I mean, I only need to use Obsidian because, I might like its interface.

Now, I use Dropbox with synced backup. So, like, my Obsidian setup is in a directory that's auto-sync to Dropbox. So all of these notes are automatically also updated and copied to Dropbox. So everything's backed up. And so if I get a new computer, I just re-sync to my Dropbox directory structure and I have those notes there. So the notes live in multiple places. I'm not going to lose them. Anyways, that's why I like it.

It feels like a sophisticated version of my database. dependence on plain text files that I already use in other parts of my productivity. So that's a nerd reason. I think for a lot of people, that doesn't really matter. So I would not use this reason as a general recommendation that everyone definitely needs to be on obsidian. But if you're a CS nerd like me or presumably like Will, it is kind of cool. All right. So I want to try something somewhat new here.

We're trying to do more case studies on this show. This is the feedback we got that people would like. to hear more details about real people's experiences, putting these ideas in the practice. As I've mentioned, the medium-term goal is a call. We want to have people call in live and actually interact with me. That's all complicated. Sound is complicated. Don't even get me started on that, but we're working on it.

In the meantime, I'm also soliciting you can send in text case studies in the same question survey that you can use to submit your questions. That link is in the show notes. But I wanted to read one today from Josh. He was a network engineer who's in his 20s. All right, so here's what Josh had to say, and I'll just read this. A World Without Email got my team and me through a crisis. I got a copy of it on pre-order, and just after it arrived,

my wife and I went on vacation to Puerto Rico. It was really lovely being able to just read about a better way to work while sitting on the beach. And returning home from vacation, my IT team suffered. an unexpected crisis, and I was thrown into a demanding management role. I'm the kind of person who likes to feel in control, and the one mission I could give myself to preserve some siblings of that feeling was to make sure that we didn't drop a single ball in response to this crisis. As a team, we had minimal shared documentation and we had no central work repository, so I didn't even know what engineering work was happening. My first thought

was to collect all work items into a task board, just like a world without email lays out, but I didn't have the time to wait for corporate procurement to approve an enterprise Trello subscription, and we didn't have a way to get the team onto any sort of taskboard, so I ended up creating a minimum viable product out of folders on a shared drive. We had a folder called Active Work. Inside of that folder, we had a new folder for each work item. The folder name was a short description of the task itself. Inside that folder was a notes.t.file that detail the task any emails pertaining to the task were copied and pasted into an emails.txt file, any working documents were also saved in that folder.

So for example, we might have a folder named Design Data Center Core that would contain a notes.txt file detailing all the design considerations and a working diagram and a spreadsheet also in that folder. If I were to take ownership of a task, I would modify the folder name to indicate that. So now it might say Josh, colon, design data center core. That way, an alphabetical sort of the active work folder

would isolate all of my work. As I finished a task, I would update the notes.t.txt file with closeout notes and change the folder name to completed, Josh, colon, design data center core. We could focus exclusively on a task by opening that folder. We could share notes and feedback between team, members by dropping a TXT file in that folder.

We could see work in progress at a glance. We had a way to gather detailed information about a task without actually having to own the task and start working on it. We only used that system for a couple of months, but it accomplished its goal. We didn't drop or forget even a single task. There were no external teams at my company that felt like they needed to escalate issues to my manager. We were able to share the increased workload to the team, even though I was primarily the one

collecting information about work items. from there we were able to move to a real taskboard and 18 months later our little team is now seen as an agile transformation leader within our broader organization. All right. It's a cool case study because two reasons. One, it highlights something I say often on this show, which is when it comes to organizing work, especially in teams, start with the process first. what makes the most sense for us to organize our work and then to figure out what tools you need to implement that. And that is exactly what Josh did in that story

because they couldn't procure the right tools fast enough. They said we can just use text files and folder names and it worked great. What mattered was the process. And then once they got approval to switch to a taskboard, oh, they switched to a taskboard, but it was that process that they switched to a taskboard. And it didn't really matter if they were implementing it

by changing the name of folders or if they're on a Trello board, it was the same process. And so I think that's really cool to see. And then two, I just like that specific setup. That's a cool system. Folders for each thing that we're actively working on.

All of the information relevant to that thing, go into that folder, including relevant emails, have a key read-me file in each folder that gives you the overview of exactly where everything lands, put your name into the directory title, So we know who's working on what? That's a great system.

And see what Josh said there. Josh said all of the incoming was directed at him. So this was a, in the elaboration, he explained, it's an IT team within a big organization. So IT teams get hammered with, build us this, fix this, add this new feature, implement this system. It's all day long.

It all came to Josh. And yet he said, he felt like all this work was very, intelligently distributed to the whole team everyone was working on different things beautiful collaboration

and because they built a process here that made sense so anyways great example Josh I appreciate I appreciate that those specifics and I appreciate that

opportunity to talk about when you get specific about workflows as opposed to just saying look we're all in Slack let's rock and roll things can get a lot better I like how he says

when he does the alphabetical shirt you can just show all his work right there there's definitely an ITE flavor to that system. Yeah. Well, if you put your name in the folder and you can alphabetize folders, alphabetize folders, but it is true. Like existing technology is great. Yeah.

That's not the problem. The problem is not that someone hasn't built a fancy web interface for what you're trying to do. The problem is you don't have a system, that you're just on email. Like, did you get my last message? Why don't you respond? So good for you, Josh. All right. Let me talk about a sponsor real quick, before we move on to our second block of questions.

It's one of our longest standing sponsors, one of my favorite idea-related companies, and that is Blinkist. As I often say, ideas are power in our current world, and the best source of ideas is almost always books. The issue is figuring out which books you should read and which books you don't need to. That's where Blinkist enters the picture. they offer 15-minute text and audio explainers called Blinks of over 5,000 non-fiction books spread over 27 categories.

They're also now doing shortcast, which gives you summaries of long-form podcast. So here is how you use Blinkist. You're interested in a topic, right? So you're interested in crypto and blockchains. You go find two or three books, blockchain revolution, blockchain, etc. Listen to the Blinks.

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Okay. It's something that you should have if you're serious about the world of ideas. I read it blank today, actually. Which book? It was a physics book. It was like pretty cool. And the thing I like about it is because, you know, you listen to a lot of podcasts. You see a lot of, you read a lot of articles and stuff.

You get all these lists of books. And then you're never going to be able to read everything. Yeah. So it's like it's a good little way to, you know, maybe cross off some of those books on that list that you want to get an idea of. That's a smart idea. Yeah. So you listen to a podcast, you hear seven book recommendations. Do the blinks for all seven books.

Like you'll have the main ideas of those seven books. And maybe one of them you'll read. I mean, I don't know if you have this experience, Jesse, but for me, it's like really obvious. It's very bimodal when I'm reading a blink of a book. Whether I'm like, yeah, I got what I need. And whether I'm thinking I got to read this book. There's a cool feature on the app too where when you're going through the blink, it's got like the little timeline down below so you know how much more you have.

as you're reading it. So just hanging out. That's how I should evaluate my own book. So I should go back and read the Blinks. If this doesn't make me want to buy the book, I need to go back and make a better book. So right now, Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial

and you'll get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off a seven-day free trial. blinkist.com slash deep. I was laughing when I was thinking about you said physics.

I was imagining reading a blink on Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity and you just open up the blink and it says

E equals MC squared. It was talking about that actually. That's great. All right. One of the sponsor I want to mention another long time friend of the show

that is Express v. If you access the internet places outside of your home or your work, you need to use a VPN. And we've explained this before on the show. This is CS Security 101. With a VPN, you do not directly connect to a website or service. You instead connect to a VPN server with a secure encrypted connection. You tell that server, this is the website or service I want to talk to.

That server does it on your behalf and then sends the information back. you over the encrypted connection. Why is that important? It means the people who are watching who you're talking to. So the people who are sniffing the packets you're sending to the access point at Starbucks. All they know is that you're talking to a VPN server. They have no idea what site or service that server is going to talk to on your behalf or what you're asking for because that's encrypted. All right. So you need to use a VPN. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. And it's because two things. have a lot of servers.

So for a VPN to work well, you want there to be a server to connect to to that's not that far away. If you are in Washington, D.C., you don't necessarily want to go through a server in Australia. That would add extra lag. So the more servers, the better express VPN has a ton. Two, they have a lot of bandwidth, fast connections.

And I'm going to add three. Why not? Third, the software is easy, runs in the background. You turn it on with a click and you're just using, using the VPN without even thinking about it. Of course, there's other advantages to VPNs. locality stuff. Oh, I can't access UK content on Netflix

that live in the U.S. Hey, connect to a VPN server in the UK. Netflix thinks you're in the UK. So it's kind of cool stuff you can do. But this is just basic CS. You need a VPN. ExpressVPN is the one I recommend. So get your money's worth from your internet

and get security and privacy at expressVPN.com slash deep. Don't forget to use this link. ExpressVPN.com slash deep. Don't forget the slash deep. That's how they know you came from me. If you use that slash deep, you will also get three extra months

of ExpressVPN for free. Check on my time here. Oh, we're doing well. All right, so let's move on to our second block of questions. What we tried to do here is, as we often do try to do, is make the second block a little bit more deep life philosophical.

First block, we got into the weeds on some things. Second block will get a little more philosophical here. So what do we got, Jesse? All right. First question here. It's an anonymous question. And it states, how do you think about long-term career or work issues in the face of seemingly growing accidental threats such as climate change, economic disparity in the world, and new technologies such as AI? I mean, I think the key there is stop using so much social media, stop reading so much online news. And let me explain where I'm coming from with that answer. First, let's begin with the premise that there always has been and there will always be to varying degrees up and down, a lot of distressing stuff happening in the world.

There is nothing exceptional about our current moment. I think back in a circumstance like this, think about a question like this, I think back to the Irish Christian monastics of the early medieval period, the late dark ages. this was a very rough time. There was a lot of bad things happening. There were diseases that could kill 30, 40% of a population of a continent in just a couple of years. There was no political stability. These monasteries were often raided by, for example, Vikings where everyone would just be murdered. This was not a time where you're like, yeah, pretty peaceful.

I'm pretty happy about things. But what were those Irish monastics doing? They were very carefully preserving and copying over a lot of the intellectual fruits of the ancient period. And you know what? We're glad they were. We're glad they worked in this terrible time because it was actually in a lot of these monasteries that we maintained our only copies of some of the key ancient philosophical and mathematical text that then helped spur the Renaissance a couple hundred years later. There's actually a book about that I read called How the Irish Save the World. I think that's what it's called.

But I use that example to say in much worse circumstances of our today, people working on things that are important ended up being really important for humanity. We are glad that our forebearers in much worse situations than today

that had to deal with the entire continent is half dead and will probably be murdered within a week. That is worse. That is a worse situation than we are unsure about what the average temperature increase is going to be over the next 100 years.

They still worked on what they thought was important. They still pursued a deep life, and we are all the better for it. So that's the example I wanted to give there. You know, Ezra Klein had, he wrote an article in New York Times op-ed about this a couple months ago, where he was hearing this about climate change in particular.

He was hearing more and more people from his circle who were saying, well, why would we even bother having kids? why would we even bother trying to perpetuate humanity because of how bad climate change is going to be? And Ezra was like, look, I'm very concerned about this topic. Obviously, I'm very much progressive on this topic. But my God, we had kids as a species in much worse times with much worse things happening on the horizon and much worse things happening at the moment. We still continue to perpetuate the species. And we're glad we are because we want to be here in all the good and the art and the beauty and the beauty and

love that has been formed that all those centuries past all these other past hard times, we're glad that all existed and were better for it. So even as her client had to write something that says, guys, ease up a little bit, right? Like humanity faces tough stuff. All right. So that's my generic answer to that question. The reason why I cited social media and online news was just to emphasize that both of those things can make this reaction worse.

I think we're getting this question in part because there's the online culture for various reason, some intentional, some unintentional, can give you this sense of immediate existential threat that is paralyzing in a way that, let's say, in a pre-in-net age, wouldn't have. And so I was being somewhat facetious when I said, my answer to your question is, how do I do this? I don't use social media. I was being sort of facetious, but I'm also being somewhat serious. There's a couple different effects going on here. Certainly there's the police blotter effect.

start reading the police blotter for your town and suddenly it will seem a lot more violent and crime-ridden than you thought about it before. It's because you are seen consolidated, all the bad things that have happened over time in a relatively large area concentrated. And our mind is not used to that. It's used to gathering, aggregating observations

from our actual immediate vicinity. I saw a crime happen the last three days in a row. This is dangerous, right? Like that's the way we're supposed to. see things. It doesn't, this warning system is not good at here's a list of all crimes from this million person city over the last six months. It can't put that in the statistical scale. The internet makes that even worse. So now you have Twitter cybernetic curation, distributed curation algorithms. So the effect of all these individuals making retweet, non-retweet

decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power log graph topology graph, does a really good job of centering, surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or will catch. our attention and all these bad things are happening in the world course to this network and all get brought to your attention. And it's like the police blotter effect magnified. You're like, man, it's just crime everywhere. Everything's falling apart. Or if it's political news, democracy is days away, days away from failing. Or if it's climate change news, it's like I'm surprised I even am alive today. Like, how is anyone alive? Because it is essentially the day after tomorrow's style vortexes of Arctic tornadoes destroying cities as far as I can tell because

are all these things I'm seeing because the volume, I see so many things and such a large volume of these things, this must be a real problem. Our mind cannot do statistical modeling of like, yeah, but this is over 350 million people in the country. I don't know. That's probably not that many.

So social media can do that. You also have to be worried about sensationalism. There's this idea of like if it bleeds, it leads, new sources of trying to get clicks. I think that's partially true, right? I mean, I mean, I think that is true. So like being sensationalist and talking about how bad things are, maybe is good business.

There's also something else that's happening now. I mean, I read this interesting analysis from the Neiman Center about sort of recent developments and a lot of sort of mainstream media publications where there's a few different things going on here. But like one of the things that's going on is there's definitely more, there's definitely more of a sense. kind of comes out of the linguistic background of critical theory but there's definitely more the sense that the role of reporting is in part trying to actually shape the world

so part of your job as a reporter is to try to push the world towards what is just so I think that the dominant academic theories right now come out of French postmodernism which has a real linguistic deconstructionist background so it's very language focused

and it's like you can't just be neutral as a writer according to these theories you're going to affect the world one way or the other, so you need to aim yourself towards what is the good. And so you might see this. There's like obvious applications, like sort of post Donald Trump election. You're going to see coverage philosophy

that's like really what we're trying to do here is this is such an existential threat. It's like our reporting needs to help. Don't report something that could be positive, for example, because the bigger issue of we need this person out of office would not be certified by that. I think some of that has bled over into other types of issues. I think we're seeing a little bit of that

with climate change. So a serious issue to be addressed. But there's also a sense in the reporting of trying to challenge the people who are not worried about it. So typically this would be on the other political tribe. Well, I dare you not to be worried about it now. Well, what if we ratchet up? Now I dare you.

Well, here, here. You're going to be dead. Here's a headline. All of your children will be dead by Sunday because of climate change. Now I dare you to say you don't care. there's this sort of one-upsmanship that you've seen in the coverage of climate change. Even where the on-the-ground information hasn't changed much, there's still the same concerns and whatever, is you see this one-upsmanship of, well, what about this threat or that threat?

We're going to put it on the page more, and we're going to try to ratchet it up. And, again, that comes out of this new philosophy, perhaps, of journalism is trying to advance towards the just and away from the non-just. You get more of that, too. There's some of that early in the pandemic as well, where, okay, what, What's the pandemic policy that we think is going to be the best? How do we then in our reporting be careful to support that? Don't talk about this. This would see doubt.

Really push this. Oh, look, there's some popularity going around this idea that doesn't affect young people. Let's quickly get on our front page, aprop of nothing, an article about a 30-year-old who died because we need to push back on that. So once you see coverage trying to shape how people trying to shape how people, um, you're understand things or trying to push things towards the just, on alarming issues like climate change or the pandemic, you're going to get also increasingly

alarming coverage. Because that, in theory, would serve the purpose of getting people to care more, but it has the side effect of getting people who say, why should I even work. All right, so that's a bunch of words. But honestly, get more local.

Serve your community. Serve your friends. Care about the people around you. Move more of your attention landscape to the locality that your brain evolved to expect, which is these are people in my town and these are people in my organizations, spend more time immersed in that world. You're scaling the concerns to concerns your brain can deal with and concerns where you can actually make a difference.

I do not subscribe to this idea that you are somehow not being a good global citizen if you're not marinating yourself and story after story about negative things that you can't do anything about. I guarantee you you will still know about climate change. even if you're not surfing every day, 10 or 15 climate change damage porn type articles. You'll still know about it. But instead of surfing those 15 articles,

how about we want to fix the playground that's down the road because it's a good place. These kids after school, they need it if they don't have it here. How do we get that change? That's the scale at what your mind's supposed to work. So let's spend more time there. All right, what time we got here?

I think we got time for one more question, Jesse. Okay. So we got a question from Michael. He's a 41-year-old engineer from the UK. This is what he has to say. I have worked hard to clarify ideas outside of my work that feel important to be. However, I still struggle. For example, creating a garden is something I've always envisioned my life for a long time.

But now that I'm doing it, it feels like endless drudgery, labor, and effort. However, I've sunk so much effort and expense into getting here. I cannot just reset and walk away. Is it normal to find conflict between one's cultivation of a deep, life on paper and how it actually happens in the real world? That's an interesting question. Let me give you a short answer and a long answer, Michael. The short answer is stop gardening.

I won't tell anyone, Jesse won't tell anyone. You don't like it. And I get it. Like here in D.C., here's what I've learned. It's often the season in which you would be maintaining a garden or a yard, it's often terrible outside and it's not that fun because the humidity is roughly whatever it is. I don't know how to measure humidity.

I guess it's due point. The humidity is terrible. You're in a swamp. It's hot. There's bugs and there's mosquitoes and, you know, this is why God invented air conditioning. So I'm stop gardening. You don't like it.

Long answer. And we talked about this last week too. Be wary about a mental conception of the deep life that is too heavily focused on hobbies. That is not going to be a successful recipe. If all you think about is what do I do outside of work in terms of my leisure time,

what's going to be like interesting and fulfilling to me, it's too self-focused. That stuff matters, but it cannot be central to your conception of the deep life. If you go back and think about the deep life bucket,

so we're talking about craft, community, constitution, contemplation, and celebration. What you talk about as hobbies is maybe just in celebration. I mean, I don't know if you, the constitution,

maybe like there's some exercise you do that could be hobbyish. Sometimes in craft, there could be something like you're really into an instrument. You might put that on their craft. But most of the deep life is more about keeping your body in shape, serving your community, engage in your brain in the world of ideas and philosophy and theology so that you can be a moral, intellectual being, so that you can follow Aristotle's theory that it is in deep thought that humans reach their deepest, potential. It's craft. Okay, I'm spending my 80,000 hours in my life in a job. Like, what am I doing? Am I producing things of value? Am I a leader to other people? Am I a useful member of my community?

A lot of that is not what's going to make me, you know, entertain me. What's going to be something that's kind of fun to do. And so if you really go through those buckets one by one, the reason why this works is that the human brain is not so happy if all it thinks about is how do I make myself happy, you know, how do I be happy in the moment? Like, that's important in moderation, but basically the history of ideas tells us that just the hedonic pursuit of what's going to be fun doesn't work as an organizing principle for life. So when celebration is just this one part, like having things you really enjoy doing, then it's the stakes are lower. You're doing other things that's sacrifice and service and important and you're going to be a lot more

confident and fulfilled. And then when it comes to that, let's say, celebration bucket where it's like appreciating the things that makes life cool, having gratitude, then I'm just going to suggest to have a more experimental approach. Don't dive in fully into something that you hope will be something you really like because you might not. So,

guardian, I don't know, let me get a garden box and see if I like that minimal impact. If I really like it, expand out with that bucket larger and larger. People who have these big, all-consuming hobbies usually work their way incrementally. to discover what's the right fit for you.

So just don't go into it. Don't just say, like, I want to be a cinephile. I think that'd be cool. I'm going to sign up for this film course and start watching all these movies. You might not actually like movies that much. You're right. But instead, I feel like I've always liked movies and I've started to study them a little more and I'm enjoying that.

So now let me ratchet up to like go watch this series at the local theater. Now I'm going to sign up for this film class. When things ratchet up in terms of self-directed autonomous non-instrumental hobbies, that's how you figure out what you really like. Okay. So stop gardening, you don't like that. Experiment with other things. But remember that it's just one small piece out of many on what goes into making a deep life.

And most of what makes a deep life deep is much less about what is going to make me happy tomorrow and more about what's going to make my life feel more grounded. What's going to make my life feel more centered and meaningful and important. And that's very different than enjoying pruning your roses. Let's see here. We had a couple other questions. but I think this is probably a good, probably a good place to wrap it up.

Sounds good. All right, everyone. Thank you for submitting your questions. If you want to submit your own questions, look at the link in the show notes and I'll show you exactly how to do that. You can watch a video of this episode and clips at YouTube.com slash KalnewportMedia.

We'll be back next week with a new episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.