Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 232: The Lumberjack Paradox

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: Why are lumberjacks happier than lawyers? [3:06]- Should I leave a good job to gain more autonomy? [32:34]- Should I quit my trainer job? [38:31]- What does Cal’s workday look like? [45:52]- How can I create a career without skills? [54:48]CASE STUDY: The Slow Lawyer [58:38]Books Cal Read in December [1:05:33]Links: - washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/06/happiest-jobs-on-earth/ - frugalwoods.com/2021/09/15/mr-fw-retired-and-we-paid-off-our-mortgage-frugalwoods-fire-is-complete/ - bench.co/blog/small-business-stories/paul-jarvis/ - calnewport.com/blog/2017/05/22/john-grishams-15-hour-workweek/ - itsfreetime.com/aboutThanks to our Sponsors:This episode is sponsored by Better Help: betterhelp.com/deepquestionshuel.com/questionspolicygenius.comnotion.com/calThanks 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, the show about working and living deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. I'm joined by my producer, Jesse. So, Jesse, this weekend, I was reading my physical copy of the Washington Post because, as I often emphasize on the show, in my leisure life, I strive to be as much as possible like a depressed. I read newspapers and listen to the radio and I sit on the porch with a rocking chair holding a pitchfork. Maybe not the pitchfork part, but I aspire. I aspire to be in my leisure life like a depression era farmer. Anyway, so I'm reading the physical newspaper and I come across an interesting article in the business section of the Washington Post.

This is from Sunday. The title is the happiest, least stressful jobs on earth. So it looks like here there is new data, new data on how people feel about how happy their job makes them, as well as how stressful their life makes them. And I'm looking at this here. This is a Bureau of Labor Statistics. They were adding these new questions to their standard American time use surveys. So they kind of wanted to understand what jobs make us happy, what jobs make us unhappy, what jobs stress us out, what jobs don't stress us out. I was a little surprised actually by the top choice.

So what was the happiest least stressful job from the survey? I was less surprised by the bottom. What was the least happy most stressful job? Let me quiz you, Jesse. What do you think the happiest least stressful job in America is, according to this survey? Probably some volunteer job was somebody that's retired, you know. I thought you were going to say podcast. producer. And the fact that you didn't say podcast producer tells me everything I need to know.

You're out of here. All right, good guess. And what about least happy, most stressful job? What would you guess? Most stressful job, I think, is air traffic controllers, aren't they? Okay. And then you think that's also the least happy? Least happy lawyers. So you are 100% correct about least happy. Least happy, most stressful does turn out to be lawyers. The surprising question, the surprising response was a happiest least stressful. Lumberjacks.

Really? Lumberjacks. Followed closely by agricultural, various other agricultural jobs, so farmers and then also foresters. Yeah, exactly. So if you're like a forestry agent or something like that. So I thought this was a good, deep question for us to dive into in today's episode, which is why are lumberjacks happier than lawyers? I think by unpacking this,

we're going to get some interesting insight into how to get more depth and meaning out of almost any type of job. All right, so let's actually jump into this article to get an answer. I have the physical copy here, but we also loaded it up on the tablet. So if you're watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, this is episode 232. You'll see this on your screen if you're just listening.

I'll narrate it. So I have the article here. I should give credit to the writer, of course. This is Andrew Van Dam. This came out on January 6th, 2023 online, the physical paper much more recently. All right. So to start off in this article, we get what I was just talking about here. We have an analysis based on thousands of time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. and they found the researchers quoted in this article found agriculture logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness and the lowest levels of self-reported stress. This is over all major industry categories they looked at. Here's the actual questions they added. So in four recent surveys, they added to the time you survey instead of just asking what activities are you doing.

they were asking people how meaningful their activities were and how happy, sad, stressed, pained, and tired they felt on a six-point scale. So these were the questions they used to get this data. Some other things I want to point out from this article, health care workers and social workers rate themselves as doing meaningful work. In fact, they're at the top of the meaningful work ranking scale. By far the most likely to say they're doing meaningful work, but they rank low on happiness. they also rank high on stress. If we look at stress in general, the most stressful sectors

were finance and insurance, the single most stressful occupation, lawyers. Right? So interesting. Even jobs that felt very meaningful could be low happiness and high stress. Jobs like lumberjacks

weren't particularly highly ranked on meaning scales, but they were happier and they were less stressed. Now, this is, you know, a bit of a puzzle. I mean, let's give this a name

because I like to give things names. We can call this the lumberjack paradox. Why is this the case? And the reason why this is a bit of a paradox is if we think about it, I mean, lumberjack jobs and farmers and forestry, but we'll focus just on lumberjacks here.

It's not particularly meaningful in the sense that what I'm doing is connected to a bigger cause that I feel is really important. That's rarely the case. It's also physically perilous. I have this on the screen here. They point this out. This job, especially lumberjacks, is particularly perilous.

They self-report the highest levels of pain on the job, right? So it's a physically demanding job. You're more likely to get hurt on the job. The actual activity from moment to moment is often, let's say, not wrote, but very physical and demanding. Yet they're happy, yet they're less stressed. So what is the answer? Well, when it comes to this particular survey and that particular observation, of lumberjacks and related jobs being happier than white collar jobs.

The answer they honed in on for this particular example is just what Jesse pointed out. They take place outside. So when they were doing this time you survey, they found that being in the great outdoors ranks in the top three for both happiness and meaning among locations in which measured activities occurred. Only places of worship consistently rated higher on those meetings. So they said, look, our data shows that whether you're working or not, when you're outside, you're more likely to be happy. You're more likely to be less stressed.

Lumberjacks, farmers, foresters, they're outside a lot. And so they're reaping that benefit throughout the day. If you're a lawyer by contrast, you're not outside. So you don't reap that benefit. And you have high stress because of the nature of your job. So this leads us to a broader answer to the lumberjack paradox. and this is the thing that the idea that we're going to explore throughout today's episode, which is the idea that the characteristics of your workday matter as much as the content of your work.

Especially in American thinking, we tend to focus a lot on the latter. What specifically do I do for a job? We assume that this is where we're going to find meaning, it's where we're going to find happiness, and it's going to be the main thing controlling our stress. Am I a doctor? Am I a lumberjack? Am I a podcast producer or am I a drug dealer, similar professions in terms of their drain on society? Isn't that right, Jesse?

Yeah. No, thank you. I'm just joking. I'm just mad. I'm still just mad you didn't say podcast producers the happiest job on earth. So we care a lot in American culture about what is my job. The reality that I think is being emphasized by the study summarized in the Washington Post article is that the characteristics of your workday. independent of the specific content of your job, the characteristics of your workday can matter

just as much. Those lumberjacks are happy not because on paper there's something abstractly really exciting or meaningful about being a lumberjack, but because of the characteristics of the workday. They're outside. They're fresh air and other things going on. I'm going to summarize here in a second, but the characteristics can play a huge role. So what I wanted to do here was list. I wrote down four different characteristics of a workday that are relatively independent of the content of your job that seem to have a big impact on how happy you are in your job. All right. So I want to go through these four because what I want to do, of course, is generalize our toolkit

here beyond just telling people quit your lawyer job and become a lumberjack. Let's have a more nuanced approach on this. So I'm going to numerate four characteristics of work days that really has an impact on your subjective experience of work. Number one, the setting of your work, right? This is what we got with the lumberjack data. Being outside, for example, tends to make human beings happier and less stress. Things like stressful commutes, busy offices, having an ugly home office.

It's, you know, in your laundry room and it's loud and it's cluttered. All of this can matter for how you, your subjective experience of your workday. So where it is, you do your work, what it takes to actually get there. Number two, the stress generally. generated by your work. I say this is a characteristic of your workday as well, is how much stress you encounter, independent of the specific source of this stress. This also shows up in the data summarized in that article. Lawyers and healthcare workers, one of the reasons why they're not happy, is that their jobs have many moments of stress, and humans don't like to be constantly exposed

to stress. So if your job has these constant rate of moments of your cortisol going up, that heart rate getting going, that feeling of anxiety growing. If that's happening all the time, you are likely to be less happy about that job. Again, independent of the specifics of the content of your work. I would say the major source of stress is overload, especially in white collar work. So this would be your job has too many things coming at you, too many things on your plate for you to be able to really juggle. So you're constantly context shifting, which is painful, constantly falling behind on things that you think need to be done, not even sure about everything it's on your plate, that is probably the most common source of acute stress in white-collar jobs.

This type of thing matters. The third characteristic of your workday that we're going to talk about is the clarity or simplicity of your work. Humans are upset when we have lots of ambiguous tasks and obligation to deal with and it's unclear how to deal with them. It's unclear what to do next. Let me just tell you a specific example from my life that I think highlights this. It's a trivial thing, a logistical and active logistical organization I needed to do with my teaching assistants. And there was a little bit of ambiguity about how to do it. I wasn't quite sure if I had the right information or, you know, it's complicated in the details.

But it's trivial is the main thing I'm trying to emphasize here. It was I don't really know how to take the next step towards organizing it was office hours or something like that because I'm missing some information or something was unclear. That was a huge source of stress for me. I didn't want to do it. It was hanging over me. Something that is on paper a very simple, let me just think this through and send some messages, but it was ambiguous what to do next source of stress. So the more of that type of work you have on the plate, the more stressed you're going to be.

If you're constantly contact shifting, constantly trying to figure out how to put out fires whose entire scope you don't quite understand, it's going to hurt your subjective experience of work. remember this makes me think of the movie office space you know office space jesse the mike judge movie yeah do you remember the ending of that movie no so for those who don't know office space that mike judge movie i think this was like 1999 or 2000 and the the main character had this job at a generic office park office building doing something vaguely involving software development he filled out tPS reports etc right so it was a it was a a send-up, right, a send-up of

the inanity of modern knowledge work. And I won't spoil the whole plot, but where he ends up in the end, he's very happy is a construction crew where he's just shoveling debris. Now, it's actually the building. I will spoil it. It is the

building of his company because it got burnt down to the ground. But the reason why he's happy is not because of his company burnt down because of the simplicity. He's like, he shows up. I'm moving this stuff into here, this is what you want me to do. And he had this sort of great piece about it. So that's sending up a true point, which is clarity and simplicity about what you want to do.

The lumberjacks have this, of course. The job is clear. We're cutting these trees, we're moving these logs. Here's what has to happen. The final characteristic of a workday that really matters for your subjective experience is control over your work. So this is about having autonomy about your hard and easy period. It's not that your job is always easy, but you can control it. All right. We're going to have a busy period here. Then I'll I can pull back here. I have the reins of my own career. I can slow it down. I can speed it up. I'm not always being evaluated by a boss. I don't always feel like I'm in a performative state of trying to act like I'm busy. That sort of autonomy over how you actually apply your efforts. That's natural. When we don't have that, that can also be something that pulls down our happiness, pushes up our stress. All right. So we have four characteristics here. The setting, the stress, the clarity, and the control of your. your work, all of this, again, is agnostic to the content of your job. These are characteristics that are more general than that and really matter whether or not

you're happy or not really matter about how stressed your job actually makes you. So the practical implication here is that when we're thinking about the deep life and in particular the craft bucket of the deep life, how does our work fit into our vision of the deep life? We should care as much about the characteristics of these jobs as we do the specifics of what the jobs actually are. We should engineer for the characteristics of our work, just like we might engineer to get in better shape, or just like we might engineer to live in a place that has more activities

that make us happy. We should care and engineer for those characteristics. So what I want to do is go through those four characteristics again, and for each, give you a concrete example of someone who has engineered their career to emphasize or push that characteristic in a good direction, just so we get a sense of what this type of lifestyle engineering actually looks like. All right, so let's go back to the setting of the work. I mentioned the setting of the work can really matter. So I want to give an, oops, the wrong browser. I'm going to give an example here. Again, if you're watching at YouTube.com slash CalNaport Media,

you'll see this on the screen. Otherwise, I'll narrate it. I want to give an example here. This is Nate. I guess I'll call him Nate Frugal Woods. It's not really his name. I don't think his name is private. But he has a blog, him and his wife, Liz, who I know and who I interviewed and wrote about in digital minimalism, they have a blog called the Frugal Woods. So they refer to themselves as the frugal woods. And so I have a picture of Nate and his two daughters up on the screen now from their website. But what I really want to show was his house. So here's what Liz and Nate did. And I'm going to focus on Nate's job in particular. They were living in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. it, so near Harvard and MIT.

It's actually closer to MIT. It's in between MIT and Harvard. They lived there in a row house and they were stressed. He worked in computer programming, IT type stuff for a nonprofit. She worked in a different policy shop or nonprofit. And they decided they were going to leave

the city. And they moved to the house that I'm showing you on the screen now. It's in Vermont, central Vermont. It's 66 acres on a mountaintop. Beautiful house showing it on the screen. And most of it's forest. I have another picture to show you here.

I'm showing very scenic pictures. All right, here's what I want to show. Most of it's forest, but they have meadows with, they have farms on here, a barn, and then they have all these hiking trails that they maintain. So it's very scenic, isolated up on this mountain side. What's interesting about what Nate and Liz did is that Nate kept his job as a computer programmer for this nonprofit. because he was good and he had career capital and he said, I want to work remotely before that was fashionable. This farm is isolated, but it has due to rural internet,

some rural internet programs, high-speed fiber for the internet. So he can work from this isolated farm. So he worked from this isolated farm, still doing his normal job, but now interspersing this work on the computer screen with a growing list of outdoor activities that he found to be meaningful or stress relieving or engaging. And I've heard the whole list from him. I won't go through it all, but he chops a lot of firewood because they heat their house off a wood-burning stove. They have this long driveway that's sort of the bane of their existence.

So he's constantly tending to the driveway, cutting logs that have fallen across it, tending rivets or ruts. I mean, I don't know about this stuff, but you know what I mean, driving skid steers and doing things with chainsaws. He grows food. He manages the chickens. They started doing sugar mapling. He maintains the trails on the property.

So like all this outdoor work, whenever I would see a picture of Nate, he was almost always in Carhart coveralls. Whatever those suits are you wear, those Carhart suits when you're living in New England and working outside. And he's just back and forth, working on that stuff, working, taking breaks, Indians work early, going out and doing that. This is someone who engineered the setting

in which their work happened in an extreme way. He's a happy guy. He loves doing all that stuff. When I see how much he loves doing all that stuff, I feel bad for 10 year ago Nate living in Central Square in a small row house, that version of him.

He must have been way less happy than he realized. All right. Example number two. Let's talk about controlling stress in your job. I'm going to point towards Paul Jarvis here.

So those who are watching the YouTube channel will see I've loaded an article from Bench called Entrepreneur on the Island, a conversation with Paul Jarvis. There's a picture of Paul here. There's probably a theme you're probably seeing here, Jesse. He's in the woods walking a path in a field on his property towards a greenhouse that him and his wife used the grow vegetables.

I like the outdoor rural settings. Here's what you may recognize the name Paul because I've talked about him before on the show. He wrote a book that I blurbed that was called A Company of One where he made the argument that you shouldn't grow your small business. business as you get better. Instead, use that career capital you're growing to make your business have a smaller footprint on your life. So if you get really good at what you do, instead of saying, great, I can triple my business and hire five people. You say, great, I can work half the hours and make the same money. So it was a really cool book. I thought it was a really good idea. Well, anyways, he has done this in his own life. So he was a web developer and he was good at it. But dealing with

clients for Paul, like a lot of people, is a stress vector. There's demands that you have. You have to answer. There's personalities that sometimes clash with your own, and there's an unpredictability about it. And if you're like Paul or someone like me, that the unpredictability stresses you out, that was a big source of stress. So he shifted from client work to now he does more, I would call it, like, esoteric one-off projects. He'll build a software tool. He'll write a book. He has a newsletter. He'll build a different software tool. And then that tool eventually he'll move on and do something else. So it's things that he completely controls the schedule for. Now, it's not highly lucrative work, but that's fine because him and his wife moved to this rural plot of land on Victoria Island off of Vancouver.

That, again, has good enough internet for him to do his work, but they live cheap. It's near a surf break. She likes to surf. He has a greenhouse. They tend their land. And he works on projects on his own schedule. So this is someone who, again, engineered the characteristics of their workday. away from what they identified as specific sources of stress.

Let's look now at the third characteristic we mentioned before, the clarity or simplicity of your work. So I'm pulling up here a blog post I wrote about John Grisham, the author John Grisham. We've talked about him recently before on the show, but I think he's a great example of this. He has a very simplified approach to life as an author. He doesn't have 15 different irons in the fire.

He's not trying to develop television shows and write movie scripts and direct and have products and build a James Patterson style partnership deal with his publisher where he has seven authors working under him and they publish 10 books a year that are all John Grisham presents. He doesn't want to do any of that. He wants to write one book a year. That makes him more than enough money. And then he wants to go on and do other things with his life. So in this article on my blog, which is from May of 2017, I summarized some things I learned deep diving on Grisham's routines. And I'll just point out a couple things here. Grisham primarily writes his novels during the winter months on his farm.

During this period, he works five days a week, starting at seven and typically ending by 10. So you do that math, that is a 15 hour a week work week. He writes in a period outbuilding on his property that, you know, used to house an antebellum summer kitchen. He and his wife refurbished the kitchen to maintain his period details, adding only electricity and air conditioning. Crucially, it has no internet. Grisham says, I don't want the distraction.

I don't work online. I keep it offline. Grisham maintains strict rituals for his writing. He starts work on a novel on the same day each year, starts writing each day at the same time. He works on the same computer. He drinks the same type of coffee from the same cup. He always starts a new novel on January 1st and is usually

done by the end of March, then he shifts over to editing. He aims to have the manuscript polish and submitted by July, which leaves them half the year to do other things. So this is someone who engineered the characteristics of their workday towards simplicity. That was a conscious decision he made. Clearly, he had a lot of other options. A final example is about having control over how your work unfolds. We saw a little bit of that with Paul Jarvis.

Another example is friend of the show, Ginny Blake. I've loaded up here on the page. So if you read her latest book Free Time, and there's an interview I did with her on this show, God, it must have been a year or so ago. I don't know. I lose track of time with this show, but I have had Jenny on the show to talk about this.

In her book Free Time, she talks about how she left her job at Google, started a company. The company got to be too demanding a source of stress, a source of unease. So she simplified it around sustainability. What makes this company maximally sustainable? And I wrote down some things here.

She works with what she calls a delightfully teeny team, which is not too many people. She doesn't want a huge amount of employees. She is very into processes now. She does not want to be a bottleneck for any of the things their company does. So she focuses more, for example, on licensing her material as opposed to doing individualized coaching of different clients. She has a huge amount of control over her workload and schedule,

which is, I think, best exemplified by the fact that she takes off two months each year to not work. She just built her schedule around that. Now, as she says, she could be making more money if she was whatever hammering the big keynotes or the one-on-one consulting, but her goal is not to make more money, it's to make enough money with a job that's very sustainable and interesting. So again, she engineered the characteristics of her work. Here's the point I want to make about all four of those examples. We don't know this if we just write down what is these people's jobs.

These type of details are not captured there. If I say, what are these people's jobs? I would say Nate is a computer programmer. Paul Jarvis is a software developer. John Grisham is a writer. Jenny Blake runs a small business consulting company. There are so many different ways you could experience those four jobs. jobs I just mentioned. And the examples I gave, the characteristics of the work days that these

individuals experienced were engineered radically to make that experience better. So the content of your job is not the sole determinant of how you experience it. You can engineer these characteristics, and by doing so, really change how you experience your job. All right? So we don't have to become lumberjacks, but we do have to care about whatever our equivalent is of working outside. How we work matters as much as what we work on. Jesse, that's my conclusion from that piece. I like it. Well summarized.

Outdoor matters, but this other stuff matters too. And I think we get stuck. Young people get stuck on that in particular. They really get stuck on just what is my job or what do I want my job to be as opposed to how do I want it to actually feel. Yeah. Yeah. So what I want to do is as we now do, I have five questions and case studies I

that are all relevant to this general topic of engineering the characteristics of your workday. So I want to do five questions, and then at the end we'll switch gears, and I'll talk about the books I read in December. First, however, I want to mention a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast. I'm excited about this one. This is Hewel, Huell, H-U-E-L. Hewle Black Edition is the product I want to talk about in particular. It's a high-protein nutritionally complete meal and a convenient shake. This is a meal replacement shake.

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All right. So now we're going to do some questions again. I'm trying to make the questions we poll be relevant to today's deep question. Today's deep question is about engineering the characteristics of your work to make your work more happy and less stressful. All right, what's our first question, Jesse? All right. First question is from Yosef, a 36-year-old programmer. I like my current job as an AI developer, but I'm considering learning web development. My motivation is lifestyle design. Data and AI are mostly related to large companies, which means working as a full-time employee.

web development is more flexible and suitable for freelancing or consulting, doing multiple small projects. You could be your own boss, leave me time to follow my passions like music and philosophy. What should I do? Standard question when thinking about happiness in your careers is should I leave my current job to go to another job that's more flexible? There's a story I tell in my book, So Good You Can't. What is it? So Good. I'm so good. I, why can I remember my own book title, Jesse? So good you can't ignore you. They can't.

They can't ignore you. Yeah. So good they can't ignore you. Let me remember my own books. I don't know if that's a good sign. Maybe it means I'm productive or maybe it means I'm getting old. All right. So in so good they can't ignore you in that book, I talk about this exact question.

And I tell a story. And I believe the woman's name was Lisa. And she was, I'm trying to remember here. I think in marketing or something like this. So she was in marketing. Her particular position was somewhat stressful. And she's like, I want more control over my time. I want a more flexible, slower-paced job.

And so she took a yoga instructor certification course, quit her marketing job to become a yoga instructor. And the point I made in that book is that within whatever it was, six months, that had not worked nearly enough to replace her income. and she was actually on food stamps at that point. And the argument I made is you have to be careful just thinking about, you know, what is this job going to offer me? Oh, a yoga instructor, that's more flexible.

That's less stressful. I don't have to do email. That's fine. But what do you have to offer to the world of yoga instructing? In this point, in this particular example, Lisa just had an online certification. There's a lot of yoga instructors. It's a very competitive business. She was not able to offer enough in that marketplace to actually build up the sort of demand

do it allow her to have a stable income and actually live this much more flexible life? The answer I then concluded is you have to care about career capital. Career capital is my term for the rare and valuable skills that you possess, the things that are of actual value to the marketplace of jobs. So if you have career capital, rare and valuable skills, that gives you leverage. You can use that leverage to try to get in your work things that you desire. So this, Joseph, is how I want you to think about more autonomy. Having more autonomy while still being financially sound is very desirable. Lots of people want that in their work.

So you should expect to need a substantial amount of career capital to offer in return. Just because you want your job to be more flexible doesn't mean you actually can get that in your life unless you have something to offer in return. So I want you to do this calculus and thinking through what you're doing with your career through the lens of career capital. Right now you're working on AI development, data science and AI development. If you shifted to web development, you're starting from scratch. That's a very competitive marketplace. To make a good living as a web developer and enjoy flexibility, you have to be really good at what you do. And even if you're really good at what you do, you might not get it. Remember earlier in the program, I gave the example of Paul Jarvis, who was a very good web

developer, but still eventually switched to living cheaply and doing one-off software projects because the stress of dealing with the clients was something he was just done with. But let's say you do get really good. You can pick and choose your clients. You do two at a time. They pay you really good money. You take a few months off. That's going to require a lot of work.

You're going to have to be better than a lot of other web developers. So think through what would really be involved in getting that good. Don't delude yourself into thinking, hey, if I do a summer course online and web development, that'll be me by the fall. So think about this all through the context of career capital. The flip side to that is in addition. to just trying to evaluate how much skill would I really need for this other job to give me these traits I want, these characteristics I want, ask the question of in my current job,

with my current career capital, which for you has to do with your ability to do AI relevant programming, are there other ways I can apply this leverage? And they might be unusual and they might be somewhat radical, but if I was to really take my skills in my current profession out for a spin, what is the full range of possible modifications or ways forward I might be able to imagine or ask for? That's often the more fruitful direction. I'm an in-demand AI programmer. They really like me here. Hey, like Nate Frugal Woods, who we talked about in the first segment of the show, I'm moving up to the mountains in Vermont, but I've got good fiber and I'm going to work project-based but I'm done at three every day because I have to chop wood. That's often where you're likely to

find the tractable solutions because you already have the capital, the career capital developed. It doesn't mean you might not be able to develop new capital in another area. You just have to correctly assess how long of a path that's going to be. So that would be my advice, Joseph, is in addition to thinking about what is really required to be a really autonomous web developer, ask, if I get even better at what I'm doing now, are there options I'm not thinking about? They might be non-standard.

you might be the only person at your company doing that. But if you're good and they want you, you would be surprised by how many options you actually have for manipulating or modifying the characteristics of your workday to be things you enjoy more. All right. So good, they can't ignore you. That makes sense.

What we got next? All right. Next question is from Nick, a 28-year-old personal trainer. Hi, Cal and Jesse. I have a question about my career as a strength and conditioning coach. and my interest in creating a deep life. I love the training side of what I do, but I work long hours and my pay is stagnant,

so I'm starting to resent my boss and the company. Unfortunately, there are no better gyms for me to go. I'm currently looking for adjunct teaching positions. I have a master's degree, but I'm not sure about leaving fitness. Many personal trainers build an online or contracting business, but these take months or years to build. Any advice you may have is appreciated.

it. Well, Nick, I think your solution is, I'm going to hire you. We're going to work two hours a day into building the Scars Guard body from the Viking movie. And that's just what we're going to do. It's just me and you, and I'm just going to get unreasonably large. Actually, Jesse, yesterday, my sons and I were watching a series on Disney Plus called Limitless. I mentioned this to you maybe with Chris Hemsworth, the guy who plays four. Yeah.

Yeah. In this particular episode, it kind of overlapped him starting to film the new Thor movie. So they kind of gave some insight into how he prepares for those movies. So this gives some insight into what Nick and I will be doing together. It turns out, I mean, he stays in good shape because he's been doing these movies for a decade. He has to add in the six-month period before one of these shoots, 30 pounds of muscle. Really? 30 pounds of muscle. Which means he has to eat, he eats like 10 meals a day.

Wow. Yeah. And then the other thing we learned from that is when they're on set, if it's a shirtless scene, there is like a long weightlifting session he has to do right before he goes on camera. They get pumped. So they're doing like all of these like curls and pull-ups and all this type of stuff right before they run and get on camera so that they have like the, the, he has the pumped muscles. I mean, I don't know how that works. And then also they dehydrate themselves. That's interesting.

So they're like bodybuilders. They're super dehydrated so that the veins will pop. And then they pump up right before. And then they have like 30 extra pounds of muscle that's almost impossible to maintain because of how much food they have to eat to keep it there. So anyways, Nick, you and I, that's what we're doing. All that. Just me. I'll be like the liver king.

Still doing the same podcast material. No shirt, four muscles, 20 minutes of pumping up right before every episode so they can get bainee. I mean, I think this is what the audience is looking for, Jesse, when it comes to content about living deeply is vainy muscles. All right, Nick, let me give you my first reaction from your question is that my concern is that you're in your mind right now taking a, what is essentially a random walk through the career space. You're just bouncing off one idea to another. I don't know, I guess I could be an adjunct professor or maybe I could just do like an online thing. but that seems like really hard, and I don't like my boss, but there's no other gym, so I can't do anything else. You're just ping ponging.

You're ping ponging off a different career ideas without any actual grounding in research or systematic thinking. So what I want to do is, first of all, slow you down and say, okay, you're unhappy in your current situation that I get. You don't like your boss and the way he's treating you. That's an issue. You know, my book's so good they can't ignore you. I really talk about that as being one of the small number of things that really disqualification. as a job, regardless of all the other attributes. So we need to find you something different, but we have to take our time here. I don't want you to jump haphazardly from one thing to another.

So number one, go through the lifestyle-centric career planning exercise we always talk about, really lock in your vision of what you want your ideal lifestyle to be like, all aspects of your life, not just work. Now we have a target that we're working backwards from when thinking through different career opportunities. Our goal now is not just, is this a thing, I could do. Our goal is, is this on a path I can articulate that brings me closer to my ideal lifestyle? And that might lead you to very different options. Next, as you explore these different options, pretend you're a business journalist and you're

writing an article on the reality of that industry. Talk to people. What is the job really like? What's the pay like? How does it fit into their overall income streams? What's it like being an adjunct professor? What do these people do in addition? Are any of these people happy or do they have a lot of complaints about it?

What's going on with people doing online coaching? Who's successful and who's not successful? Can you build a whole livelihood on it or is it just an adjunct? All right, you say there's no gyms nearby. Where are there gyms you would like to work? Maybe they're in different parts of the country, but that's actually a part of the country that might satisfy some of the other things on your list that goes into your ideal lifestyle. Maybe you need to leave where you're living.

And maybe there's something holding you back there. Like, well, there's whatever, one family member there, but what if you moved over here? And then you had access to outdoor fitness and you could start an online presence from which you could build an online coaching. Meanwhile, there's gyms there that are hiring. So you could start doing personal training there with an ad. I mean, you can start to get options that are grounded in research on the reality of options and guided by your vision of an ideal lifestyle. So this is what I'm trying to get you to do here, Nick, is to slow down and be more systematic. Don't bounce.

Don't just random. That's no good. That's good. Maybe I should just do that. Let me fixate on this. I see that all the time. Someone just fixates on an idea. It doesn't really necessarily make sense.

It has all these other issues to come with it. It's going to make these parts of their life worse to fix this. But if you're just bouncing around, we'll just going to stick to things randomly. So let's get more systematic. Lifestyle articulation. Research options. Consider different locations. And then really work through things carefully.

What's going to get me. closer to my ideal lifestyle. The combination of decisions you come up with in the end might be very different than anything you're considering now. Strength and conditioning coaches are hard, you know, especially for the ones like small colleges and stuff like that. It's a hard job or it's hard to get. It's a hard job. Yeah. You have to be there like really long hours. Yeah, you know, I edited the question down, but he talked about evening hours. Like he's there a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing about those coaches, you have to be so energetic for each client.

Why do you, what's the appeal of that job? Like is there, is that on a trajectory towards like I could be a strength and conditioning coach for like a D1 sports program or something? Like what's the, if he's at a college and yeah. That's the dream. I mean, I think there's like five college strength and condition coaches or whatever that make over a million dollars a year. Right.

So there is a winner take all kind of trajectory in there. So you should understand that as well. Like this is the thing about those trajectories is figuring out like, am I actually on this trajectory or not? Yeah. Or have I already started? I'm over at this small college. If this is where I'm starting, I'm never going to be, you know, the Notre Dame or USC head strength and conditioning coach. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. All right. What do we got next? Oh, we got a question from Ben. Hey, Cal, I'm curious. What does your typical work day look like? Is it closer to a typical 9 to 5 or are you up early burning the midnight old?

Well, Ben, I'll tell you about my workday in a second, but I got to say I was having fun walking over here, imagining what my critics think my typical workday is like. So I know that I do have some critics out there that are pretty vocal, and their assumptions about my workday are probably quite different from the reality. So I thought it would be fun to go through a critics assumption about what Cal Newport's normal workday works like. So I would say the critics would probably assume that I'm up at something like 4.30 in the morning. This is when the head of my extensive household staff would come in and prep me on what was going to happen in the day.

Maybe the head of the household staff would say, Dr. Newport, I wanted to tell you something about one of your children. And I would say, enough away with you. Do not bother me with such trivialities. I have productive work to do. My worth and meaning as a person is based off of the labor that I produce. for the owners of capital. Do you not realize this away with you? After that, I would then go to my extensive underground layer,

paid for by a massive inheritance that I came into very young in my life. In this underground layer, I would don minority report style, augmented reality goggles where I would have a souped up trello board where I could move cards around, like Tom Cruise, a minority report at extreme speeds. Next to me would be a coach who I insist dress like early 20, century labor consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor, including the mustache, with a stopwatch, looking for any inefficiencies in my action.

Because again, as I would tell people frequently and declaratively throughout my day, my worth as a person is defined by my labor, which I owe to the owners of capital. I would take a break maybe around lunchtime. This is when James Clear and Tim Ferriss would come over. We'll take supplements and weightlift for two hours before confidently convincing each other that we understand how everything in the world should be done. Another couple hours of quick work on my Trello board. At this point, I would then take some time to go to whatever manuscript of a book I'm currently writing and then look for any examples that feature women that I could swap out for examples featuring men instead. So I'll go through and do that swapping out.

Patriarchy preserved. I'll then return to more work. maybe by the evening and I'll take some time to just stare at a poster of Marcus Zuckerberg and just mutter you

you five minutes face timing with my family seven more hours of work boom 2 a.m. I'm back in bed. That is what I imagine my critics think

my work day is actually like the reality is much less interesting from the very earliest days of my gradstststststs student career. I've maintained what I call fixed schedule productivity where I fix and advance the hours I want to work and then work backwards to make my career fit into those hours. For me, that is roughly nine to five. So when I drop my kids off at the bus stop, I'm usually home by like 830, but then it takes some time, you know, maybe I shower some of the things. So usually I'm

starting work by nine. And I like to be done by five, though I'm often done earlier. When I'm writing, I'll also put in writing sessions on Sunday mornings. I'll occasionally also do like an evening writing session for my newsletter or something like this. That's just an old tradition of mine, but that's 90 minutes once a week. What I do during those roughly 9 to 5 schedule, it just depends on the time of year. So if it's the summer or like it was last semester for me when I had a teaching release and I was writing a book, those days are going to be very heavily focused on three to four hours of deep work writing right off the bat than anything else that has to be done before I shut down for the day. Other parts of the year look different.

right now, for example, I'm in a teaching semester. I'm not writing a book. I just submitted my manuscript. And so I have a much more standard sort of professor schedule. Jesse, I actually brought my computer. So I thought what I would do is I'm going to grab it and just I'll load up my calendar for this week. I'm not going to show it to you, but I will walk through and just quickly summarize like what each of my days looks like if this is helpful. All right.

So I've grabbed my calendar now for those who are watching the YouTube channel. You see I'm looking down at my screen. So for this time of year, where I'm just sort of in a normal teaching semester, not book writing. All right. Here was my week. Just looking at the things around the calendar. Monday was Martin Luther King Day. The Monday of the week we're recording this.

So there was actually, I didn't have to teach. Nothing on my calendar, actually, for that Monday. Tuesday was also a very light day in terms of appointment. So I don't even remember what I did on Tuesday. I think I watched a movie in the afternoon. I think I actually, over lunch, I watched Downhill Racer with Robert Redford, 1969. Fantastic sports movie. I highly recommend it.

Wednesday was a teaching day. So I did some work on my course in the morning, drove into campus at 10, taught, office hours taught, came home, worked out, the day was over. today. I was actually up early today because my oldest kid had a early morning orthodontics appointment, so I woke up. My wife came to that, and while I was waiting for my other kids to wake up, I actually did some podcast work in the morning. Then I did some administrative work. Now we're podcasting. And then I'm going to do a relatively early shutdown and worked out before I pick up one of my other kids at three. Tomorrow, I'm going in for, oh, tonight I'm also going to do some writing. I'm kicking off a new New Yorker piece. So I'm going to do writing probably at the local

coffee shop tonight because I need to get out of my normal routine to get something hard started. Tomorrow I'm going to campus for a faculty meeting and then adventure working. So I'm going to go to a scenic library to continue writing. That's my week. So it's like not that interesting. No day am I working past four or five. Some days I have appointments. Other days I have less appointments.

So it's not exciting. Where's your adventure writing going to be? I don't know. It depends how crowded various libraries are. I think we're early enough in the semester that I might still have options. You mean at school? Yeah. Because my thought is if I'm going into Georgetown for a meeting,

I might as well take advantage of the fact that I'm in a new location to work in interesting places. So I like, for example, the bioethical library in Healy Hall at Georgetown. If that's crowded, I'll go to a lesser used floor of the main library on campus. If I have thinking to do, I like to walk. So there's these trails that go up through Glover Park, down from the canal up through Glover Park. intersected by Reservoir Road.

I love those trails I used to live by them. So I'll often leave campus and walk up and down those if I have thinking to do. When the weather's nicer, I have a bunch of outdoor spots on campus where I'll bring my laptop to write. It's too cold this time of year. But, you know, when I'm writing a hard article and it's hard to get started and get a hard article going. So I like to do this trick whenever possible. Use interesting locations to try to get the juices flowing. If you're on chapter 7 of a book six months into the writing, you're just, let's just go.

You know, you start each morning at your office. When you're starting something, you're like, this needs to be, I don't know how I'm going to even do this. You know, you want to be at the, whatever, at the coffee shop or in the woods or somewhere kind of interesting to shake it out. But the reality here, Ben, is my work day is not that interesting. I don't work crazy hours. Now, the two things I will say is during my actual work hours, I'm locked in. I time block plan. I don't waste time.

I mentioned that I watched a movie on Tuesday. That was scheduled well in advance. This 90-minute block that I'm going to sit and watch this movie. It's not something I just casually did because I was procrastinating. So I do work really hard when I'm working, but I don't work an unusual amount of hours. The key to my apparent productivity is that over time, a lot of things pile up. So when I work, I work hard. I'm careful about what I work on.

I am usually working on a couple things at a time. I keep making slow but study progress on multiple things at a time and things finish. And then you look at the end of the year and so you wrote all these articles and finished this book and did all these things. But they weren't being done simultaneously. It's just the steady application of a reasonable amount of intense effort over time aggregates us on pretty cool results. All right. Let's do, I have a case study. Let's do one more question.

I didn't have a case study I want to share. All right. next question is from mortitz, a high school student from Germany. I worry that to create it the career I want, I need to be really skilled at something. I worry that I don't really have found an activity which I find so fulfilling as to accomplish that. Do you have any recommendations on getting started? Well, Mortis, it's good that you're thinking about this at an early age. I also want to reassure you that you're still at an early enough age that you should not need to have your whole career figured out. Now, I think what you're expressing here is maybe the German equivalent of the

follow your passion mentality that's here in America. At the core of follow your passion is this notion that you can figure out in advance at the beginning of your career journey, what it is that you're best suited to do and therefore use that certainty to actually guide you through the work required to get there. My big argument is that that's rarely the case. Really cool. careers that are meaningful, that require a lot of skill that create impact, they often unfold more haphazardly and in a less predictable fashion than most young people imagine. So as a high school student, I would focus on, you know, figuring out how to be a student, treating it like a job, letting that open up various university opportunities.

As you go to university opportunities, choose a field of study that matches the skills you already have an interest of yours. Do well at the university level. Again, treat your studying like a job, the type of things I talk about in my book, how to become a straight-A student, be efficient, autopilot schedule, time control, etc. That's going to open up opportunities.

Choose an opportunity that is well-matched to your skills. You're getting, at this point now, the career capital you built up in college or university, you're actually now really able to deploy it and use it as leverage. and that's interesting to you and that has interesting opportunities down the line if and when you continue to get good

and then just start doing that. I mean, really, it's often not until you're five years into a career opportunity at a university that was, you know, well-suits your skills and interesting, that you really get to start doing cool things, that you've built up enough skill that now you can shift your job role

or go over to another company or start your own thing. So that's down the line. Right now, just be a good high school student, get to university, Figure out how to ace that particular job. Open up opportunities. Choose an interesting one.

Put your head down, do really well. Look up after a few years and say, okay, now I'm ready to take my career capital out for a spin. And that's when things really do start to get interesting. Jesse, it's I have it in, I think I have it in the library, but the German edition of So Good They Can't Ignore you. Maybe this says it something about Germany. But, you know, in America, the book is called So Good.

can't ignore you. It's focusing on the positive. The German edition, it's a newspaper on the cover, and the headline translates to, I think it's called the dream job delusion. I like that. It's very German. So the Americans are like, yeah, be so good and you're going to find meaning, but this is just an alternative way. And the Germans are like, ah, that dream job delusion. You delusioned to think the dream job. That's not how it works. Efficiency. efficient effort applied towards a pragmatic goal for dream job is delusion. Bon. I don't know.

Bon is, I don't know what that means road or something like that. Oh, well, let me do a quick case study before we get to the books I read. All right. So our final case study, again, all of these questions and case studies are trying to relate to the central theme of today's episode, which is engineering the characteristics of your workday to be more satisfying. All right, this one comes from Dana, a 40-year-old lawyer from British Columbia. So she, Dana, or it might be a he, I'm not sure, wants to redeem the profession of law.

We said earlier in this episode that it ranked last in terms of happiness, ranked last in terms of stress. So it's the most stressful, least half-ful job. Are all lawyers doomed? Dana says not necessarily. Let's listen to this case study. She says, I work as a lawyer in civil litigation in a small firm. It is a deadline-driven client service profession. You're suggesting that people focus on lifestyle-centric career design

where you try to figure out how work fits into your life has been very informative. For example, I have turned down jobs as well as offers a partnership in this firm because they offered less freedom in my schedule. At present, I work more as a contractor who can dictate my schedule and quota of cases. If I took a more traditional path of buying into a partnership, then I would probably have to take out a loan or repaying money to the partners for a share. Alternatively, if I went into the public sector or a larger firm, then I would lose autonomy.

I have found that lifestyle-centric career planning is indispensable. That's what it looks like when you engineer the characteristics of your workday. You reject the inertia towards what everyone else is doing and say instead, these are the characteristics I want in my job. I'm pretty good. I have some leverage. I have some say over how my working life unfolds. What can I do to get more of these and less of that?

And for Dana the lawyer, she said, okay, I know everyone else thinks being a partner is the ultimate goal because I guess ultimately that's the highest prestige and or the highest income. But who cares? I make more than enough money as a non-partner lawyer. What I want is autonomy. So no, I don't want to be a partner. I want to stay right here. I want my relationship to be a contractor-type relationship where I tell you how many cases I want to take. gone, and then I will do those cases really well.

I will control my workload. I'm happy with the money I make here. That's engineering the characteristics. Now, I didn't read these details in the episode, but Dana sent a huge amount of information about her organizational systems that her and her legal assistant use. That's the other aspect of that is she's really dialed in. It's really kind of cool. It's insider baseball, so I didn't want to get into all the details on the show,

but they have these really detailed systems for keeping track of each case. what needs to be done each week. They group together tasks by type so that if the legal assistant is going to go pull records for one case, she can see all the other cases that need records pull so she can do it all at once. They have a system they use to pass notes back and forth on cases without having to just interrupt each other. They use agile-style weekly check-in planning. So that's the other aspect of this is that Dana plugged in the organizational systems to try to shave the rough stress edges off of the work that she does do. Let's get the processes dialed in.

Let's make this less haphazard. Let's make this less interrupt-driven. That's controlling the characteristics of your workday. So I thought that was a good example to end on. All right, so that's our discussion of today's theme. I want to end the show by talking about the books I read in December. First, I want to talk about another sponsor of the show. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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All right, Jesse, it's late, but better late than ever. This final segment, I want to mention the books I read in December 2020. As you might recall, December for me is thriller December. It is the month in which I like to read adventure or thriller novels. That's the genre that it's a genre I really like. there's a lot of holidays in December. So it's a tradition of mine is to read more thrillers than normal in December. So I read three thrillers in December, Jesse, and I will go through them all right now.

All right, the first one I read, The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfeld. This is a action thriller that takes place in an alternative timeline. So it's in the 70s, and it's positing an alternative timeline where we did a few more Apollo programs. and I don't want to give too many details away other than there's gun battles happening in space with the Soviets. What was cool about this book, what attracted me to it, is that Chris Hadfield, the author, is an astronaut. So this actually has realistic details of how all the 1970s era Apollo space program technology actually worked. He actually understands space and what this world is like. So I like that idea that it was written by an astronaut,

a book about astronaut murders. It's pretty good. The next one I read was Recursion by Blake Crouch. I want to flag this book for a second because I read a lot of thrillers. Recursion is about as platonic of an example I have found of perfection in pacing. It's like a master class in thriller, structure, and pacing. really that this piece of it is brilliantly done. It's date lined chapters, and you're moving back and forth between two timelines, and those timelines kind of catch up.

And the way it moves back and forth, back and forth and ratchets up is just a precision plot construction. It's a book that's really hard to put down once you pick it up. I was really impressed by it. I mean, actually, I was so impressed by it that I was a little bit disappointed when I went back to read a prior book of Blake's, which was good. but man, with recursion, he has the pacing just locked in. It's the best thriller pacing I've read, one of the best thriller patients I've probably ever read. When was it written? This book would have been, I don't know, the last 10 years or something like that.

It's like a time, I won't give away everything that happens, but the way it opens is it's, there's a, it's playing with time. So he's a techno thriller writer. He's like our age. He's not like, I used to say relatively young. I guess we're not that young anymore. But there's this virus sort of happening where people are having memories of different lives suddenly appear. And it seems to be contagious, like people nearby have the same thing happen.

And there's a detective that's trying to unwind like what's going on. And then it starts to unravel. And then you get a plot line from back in time and it catches up. And then it gets crazy at the end. Anyways, perfection in structure and pacing. The last thriller I read in December was the last juror by John Grisham. I just had it from a Little Free Library here in Tacoma Park. Here's the thing about being a rider like John Grisham.

If you have that one or two huge successes early on, you can just keep writing books that don't have to be blockbusters. Like if the last juror was written by someone else, you know, like that's nice. Yeah. You know, but because he wrote the first. firm because he wrote the Pelican brief and the client and he became such a superstar, you could just write these books where they don't have to be bangers. It's just interesting.

It's just, ah, it's a guy starting up a newspaper in the small Mississippi town that he likes to write about. And there's a trial. And 20 years later, like, some of the jurors start dying all, like being killed, right? And then they kind of figure out what's going on. That's the book. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. But if this was the book you ran instead of the firm, you wouldn't know the name John Grisham.

So it's a good gig if you can get it. There's another thriller I didn't quite finish in December, so I'll get to that in the January. So I really read four in December, but the fifth one I didn't finish until into January. So we'll get it with the next list. All right. I read two other books as well, non-thrillers. One was called Living with Frankenstein by Stephen Schollney. Skoln.

This is, I'm working on some things with artificial intelligence. So this is like a small philosophical tract about machine sentience. And this is like a gentleman scholar has this thesis about, you know, what does it really mean for technology to be conscious? And he has a much lower bar for that and things were already there. I needed it for something I was doing. What I enjoyed more was John Meacham's and there was light. John Meacham's new Lincoln biography. It was very good.

Very good. So Mietcham is taking a, he's looking at Lincoln through the lens of, in part, ethics and in part religion. So the virtue ethics worldview of Lincoln and then also the impact of religions on Lincoln. I think the early part of Lincoln's life, I really enjoyed the way this Meecham treated it because what he does good in this book, and I've read a lot of Lincoln books. What he does good in this book is set context. So there's a lot of primary sources that he pulls from the set to context. So it's one of the better, for example, depictions of Southern culture and during the pre-war period because he pulls from sermons and newspapers and headlines to try to really understand the reactionary culture that was emerging in the South in defense of slavery. And understanding that really helps make sense of some of the big historical things that happened.

He goes to primary sources to get there. another thing I learned from Meacham, which was really interesting, was I didn't know this, and I read a lot of Lincoln. Lincoln's family, when he was a young kid, was attending a church, one of these rural churches that was very anti-slavery. So he was exposed to anti-slavery thinking in part because of this was the early exposure he had to it, was in church, which I hadn't heard. I had heard about the, there's a labor argument, you know, his dad, was a poor working class white in Illinois were worried about the economic ramifications of slave labor coming into their state. So I had heard that piece of it. So he grew up in an anti-slavery household, but he was inculcated with a religious anti-slavery message. And Meecham went

back and found here's the preacher and here's the type of things they talked about. So I thought that was all good. Once they get to the war and the presidency, it's like really fast. He just covers it in, you know, 70 pages. It just, It moves by really fast, but enjoyed it. All right, Jesse, those are my five books from December. Next month, we will talk about the five books I read in January. We'll try to do it a little bit sooner next time. All right, well, that's all the time we have for today's episode.

We'll be back next week with a new episode. If you want to submit your own questions, there's a link right in the show notes. If you want to watch these episodes instead of listening, go to YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. See you next week. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

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