Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 234: Ambition without Burnout

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: How can we be ambitious without burning out? [8:23]- How do I create a hit podcast? (Special guest JORDAN HARBINGER) [41:59]- How do I overcome boredom in my purposefully under-scheduled life? [1:01:57]- How do I manage multiple side hustle projects? [1:06:11]- Do I need two planning documents if I have two jobs? [1:13:14]- How do I get my 15-year-old brother to stop using his phone so much? [1:15:30]Something Interesting: The slow productivity of Maryam Mirzakhani [1:23:48]Links:screenrant.com/calvin-hobbes-bill-watterson-merchandising-lost-millions-reason/web.archive.org/web/20150302235823/http://www.calnewport.com/blogwired.com/2014/08/maryam-mirzakhani-fields-medal/thedeeplife.com/podcasts/episodes/ep-115-jordan-harbinger-what-is-the-future-of-podcasting/   Thanks to our Sponsors:grammarly.com/deepladderlife.com/deepmybodytutor.comexpressvpn.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, the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work H.Q. I'm joined by my producer, Jesse. Hi, Jesse. We have a musical accompaniment to our recording today. The construction crew below has a good beat going. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. You probably don't hear it at home, but just so you know, Jesse and I are bobbing our head around to the background. music. Jesse, you may have noticed I'm increasingly taking over the workspace in our production office with an increasingly ridiculous amount of home electronics and digital

electronics tools. You see there's now a video game control stick and like an arcade style control stick and buttons hooked up to an Arduino. Yeah, you're doing the 3D printing, right? And 3D printing. Yeah, so I have a production office is also a maker lab

that I use with my kids. I bring it up, however, because in my interest to indulge this particular family hobby we have. I want to put the bat signal out to our audience here. I'm looking for something very specific and I'm hoping there's someone in our audience who can help here. For whatever reason, that's kind of complicated, but I am increasingly interested in purchasing a video game cabinet that has vintage circuitry and the circuitry is pre-microcessor. So I'm talking video game circuitry from that period where video game cabinets had timing ICs and, you know, hard coding bitmaps and

diodes on the circuit board. There was no actual processing unit. You had to make all that logic work. I think it's a really interesting period in the history of digital electronics. This is a field I study and I write about it. For whatever reason, I want one of those, but I know nothing about that world. How do you find those? What's a good one?

How much do they cost? So if you happen to have some expertise about vintage video game cabinets and vintage video game cabinet circuitry, send the note to Jesse. He's more likely to see it than me, Jesse at Calnewport.com, and he'll pass it along to me because I am basically a giant kid. That's so good. But speaking of giant kids, the topic I want to talk about today was actually inspired by a conversation about a comic strip.

So when I grew up, I was a big fan of Calvin and Hobbs, the Calvin and Hobbs comic strip. Were you a Calvin and Hobbs guy, Jesse? Not so much. This was my thing. I was obsessed. Anyways, my oldest was obsessed and my middle child's reading a lot of it. And my sister just sent a note about his, my nephew is really getting into it. So we were talking about Calvin and Hobbs on the family text thread.

And it sent me back down a rabbit hole I have explored fruitfully before about the creator of Calvin and Hobbs, Bill Waterson. And what's interesting to me, and I'm going to pull up an article. cool. Let me just load on the browser here. So if you're watching this at YouTube.com slash calendar port media, you'll see this on the screen, but I'll narrate for those who are just listening. What a lot of people don't know who are casual

Calvin and Hobbs fans is what Bill Waterson did, or in particular what he did not do, which was cash in on the full lucrative monetary potential of his strip. So what I have loaded on here is an article. here is the headline of this article why Calvin and Hobbs creator Bill Waterson

turned down $100 million and that was the estimated amount of money he would have made if he had merchandise Calvin and Hobb. He refused. There is no officially sanctioned Calvin and Hobbs merchandise which is crazy when you consider

if you're a merchandising person that one of the two main characters is a stuffed animal. I mean, this is a comic strip that is built for merchandising. He probably could have made $50 million alone on Hobbs dolls. But he said, you know what? I want the comic strip world to live in the head of my readers. I want to leave it all on the page.

I don't want Calvin talking in a cartoon. I don't want a voice. I don't want a strip on, you know, Saturday morning TV resolving the question about whether or not Hobbs is real or just in Calvin's imagination. I don't want to know what his dad sounds like. I don't want to see Calvin and Hobbs sheets and underwear. I just wanted to live in the comic strip. So he turned down $100 million.

Number two, second thing that makes Bill Waters in a fascinating character, after doing this strip for a decade, 1985 to 1995, he's at the peak of his popularity, peak of his abilities. He said, okay, I've said what I need to say, walked away. Disappeared. And he won't do interviews. He won't, if you try to track him down, he'll push you away. If I just need to clarify this for like a retrospective we're doing about your work, he will ignore you. He just walked away and said, I'm done.

I did what I need to do. It was a great trip. I'm proud of it. And now I'm going to go paint landscapes, which is what I think. This is the best I can find out as he's doing landscaping paint, basically like hobbies. No one really knows. He just kind of disappeared back to Ohio and disappeared. There's even a whole documentary about this searching for, I think it's called searching for Bill or searching for Bill Waters.

He's like, I did enough. I'm gone. So what's interesting to me about this is that Waterson, on the one hand, was clearly an ambitious person, right? I mean, he honed his ability. He wanted to have a strip. You can read about this in the 10th anniversary edition of Calvin and Hobbs. Great book because there's a lot of annotation and narration from Waterson. He worked really hard.

He wanted to be in newspapers and do something innovative. He tried a couple strips that failed. This one really took off. And then he really pushed himself to make this strip better. One of the things he did, for example, once he had some clout, once his strip was very popular, is he demanded the ability to have a guarantee of a full half page for his Sunday comic. Now, this is important, and this is an insider baseball detail, but if you read most Sunday comics, you'll notice that the first few boxes, the top line of the two or three strips that makes up the Sunday comic is usually a throwaway joke. and that gives the newspapers the option of cutting off that top line altogether. So some newspapers will just put in the bottom two of your three rows for your Sunday comic and some will put all three.

Waterson said you put the whole, I want the whole space or none, which allowed him to get rid of the throwaway joke and start making Sunday comics that did not conform to rows or boxes, but you could have images that took up most of the space a lot of you in the newspaper. So he cared about craft and the art of what he was doing and he pushed it. So he's a very ambitious guy. But at the same time, he didn't just keep saying what else, what's more, how do I get higher up on the scoreboard? He turned down the $100 million. He turned down doing this for 30 or 40 years. He turned down, let me get involved in TV projects and movie projects. He stayed focused on one thing, did it well, was ambitious, and kept the overload and the stress and the continuing ratcheted up at bay.

Now, you can compare this if you want to point a contract to Charles Schultz. creator of the Peanuts comic strip. Last year I went and toured the Charles Schultz Museum, which is in Marin County, so sort of north of San Francisco. You come away from that museum and you say, this is a busy guy, right? I mean, not only did he do that strip until at the very end, his hand was shaking too much with age and age-related decline that he couldn't draw anymore, but he did it to literally the last point that he could.

He had so many different business endeavors licensing that. He had Emmys from doing the television specials. He was involved in movies and charities. And it was an incredibly complicated life that he had, very busy life. So very different than what Waterson did. So I thought that was interesting. And I'm going to use that to inspire the deep question that we are going to get into in today's episode, which is how can we be ambitious without burning out?

So like we normally do, we'll start by doing a deep dive on that question. After we do a deep dive on that question, I have five questions from listeners that are all on the same general theme of the tension between ambition and burnout. So we're going to be really focused on this issue throughout. And then at the end of the show, we'll have a final segment where we'll just look at something interesting unrelated. Let me just give you a little bit of teaser, a teaser for what's coming up for our very first question that we're going to tackle and the question. portion of the show. We're going to have a special guest call in and help me answer the question. I'll even tell you who it is so that you can be excited about it and keep listening. The very first question is about building out a podcast to be more successful, the ambition

to do that. And we have calling in later in the show, friend of our show, Jordan Harbinger, the host of the incredibly popular Jordan Harbinger podcast. Former guest interviewed him I don't know, a year or two ago. Anyways, he's going to call on a little bit later. He knows that industry really well, so we're going to learn a lot from him. So that's our plan. Sound good, Jesse? Sounds great.

Ambition and burnout. All right, so let's go deep on this question. What I want to do when it comes to dealing with these issues is highlight the two extremes, the two extreme options that people tend to think are their only options when it comes to ambition. So on one extreme, we have what I'm going to call grand ambition. Now, when you have a grand ambition, what this means is by the time you reach a certain level of accomplishment, you're already looking forward to the next level with hungry impatience. When you harbor a grand ambition in a given direction, just the existence of someone who is at a higher level or doing it better than you can be a source of unease, can be a source of disappointment. You can find yourself even falling into Schadenfreude when someone was doing better than you fall.

So grand ambition is never happy. It wants more than where you are right now. So for example, if you are a writer with grand ambition, you want to be the best selling writer in your space in the world. There being three people selling better than you, is itself going to be a problem? Maybe in money, it's not just I want to be wealthy. It's I want to be richer than anyone I know.

And then when I get there, if I hear of someone who has more money, I kind of want to have that much money. That's what grand ambition looks like. It's not entirely negative. There are pros and cons. There's a reason why grand ambition is common. One of the pros is that can push people to the extremes of their potential, right? So if you have a Tom Brady-like character in the world of sports,

who has the grand ambition to be better than any quarterback ever, that clearly pushed him to keep improving, keep innovating, extending this career as long as he could, racking up Super Bowls, racking up record. So grand ambition does take incredibly, talented people and help them actually extract the full potential of their talent. Ambitious goals can be satisfying to set. This is a second pro of grand ambition.

There's some sort of endorphin release that happens when you say, you know what? I'm going for this. Especially once you start to make some traction, it's not all negative. That actually can feel really good. I'm going to conquer the publishing world. And when you get that first book and then that first bestseller, and then you see that advance grow, it feels good. Humans like having ambition.

So again, this is not all negative. The cons, of course, are somewhat obvious. One overload. This is the Charles Schultz versus Bill Waterson example. When you keep pushing yourself to do more, take on more opportunities, be more successful, you're taking on more work. The number of things you have going on simultaneously increases. As we've talked about multiple times on the show, as you increase overload, you increase stress because there is an overhead from everything that's on your plate, meetings and phone calls

and cognitive space. And you only have a limited amount of resources to dedicate to that overhead. So when you have enough things on your plate, their aggregate overhead overwhelms what you actually have resources for and you get stressed and it's a source of anxiety. I assume Charles Schultz had a somewhat stressful life on a regular basis, definitely much more so than Bill Waterson. The other con of grand ambition is disappointment. You know, Tom Brady, if we're going to return to that sports example, he did really push it.

He did become great. He did break these records. He did win all these Super Bowls. He's probably really disappointed with last season. And there is no end to, okay, but what about this? What about that? I suspect, for example, let's say you're J.K. Rowling and you write the bestselling book series of all times. But she also then went on to write the screenplays for the more recent Harry Potter movies, which are like, okay.

I bet that disappoints her. I bet she's thinking, man, there's better screenwriters than me. I'm not winning Academy Awards. These movies are okay. So the grand ambition does also spawn disappointment. And it tends to obscure the possibility of gratitude. It's hard to have gratitude and just be thankful for what you haven't accomplished when what you're really focused on is, well, this next. level. That's where I need to get. I'm not there. Why is he there? I should be there. Makes it

very difficult for you to actually enjoy at any one moment what you already have. So grand ambition has pros. Grand ambition has cons. Those cons have led to an alternative, which is the other extreme, no ambition. And this is something we hear about, I think, more often. And typically the no ambition pitch comes at it from the angle of, look, your ambition to want to go do things, to take on challenges, to work harder at things. It's all constructed and it's probably underneath it all exploitative, right? Now, there's different variations of this argument. So if the person making the argument, let's say, has a college education from a good college, they might come at this from like an early 20th century Marxist standpoint. Like, hey, this is all part of the Marxist superstructure to get

make you into a source that the owners of capitals can exploit. You know, that's why you feel so ambitious because it makes money for these companies. If you went to graduate school, you might come at this for more of a postmodern perspective, more of like a postmodern critical perspective and say, well, actually, the whole construct of ambition is itself just about power hierarchies and a play towards supremacy. So depending on your flavor of sort of tedious theory, it will sound a little bit different. But this no ambition theory in its end comes back to the same commonality. Like ambition is something that we should be distrustful of.

It's probably someone taking advantage of you. So quiet, quit, enjoy the sunshine, wait for UBI, and all will be well. Well, just like with grand ambition, there are pros here, right? There's no clear villains and no clear heroes in this particular dichotomy. So with no ambition, presence and gratitude, which no ambition supports, is actually really nice. Like to have moments of like, I'm just really happy about this nice town where I live or like this meal that I'm eating or I'm just sort of reading a book outside by a river. And I just enjoy that. No ambition makes that type of presence and gratitude easier because you don't have that itchy, hungry impatience in your mind about who's doing better.

what else could I be doing? What's my next grand plan? This was a key message, for example, from Ginny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing. We need to spend more time not orienting our activities towards some sort of goal. And that's actually a good message. Also, look, most people are not Tom Brady.

Most people are not J.K. Rowling. So there's something to this idea of, we don't all want by default to get really charged up with ambition because you could say I'm going to be the next Brady or rolling, almost certainly you won't come anywhere near. So maybe why waste that energy? So there's some rationale for the no ambitious theory. The cons is that we are miserable without goals.

If there's not something that we're going for, something that's important to us that we can see ourselves making progress towards, it is very hard to live a fully relaxing life. It's why, you know, Ginny O'Dell can write, very sagely about the importance of taking time to do nothing. But at the same time, Ginny O'Dell also spent a lot of time writing that book and spending a lot of time promoting that book and is writing a new book now that extends those theories somewhere else.

There is a fundamental ambition of I want to do these things. And if I'm not doing something, if I'm just sitting around waiting for my UBI check and enjoying the sunshine, I'm not going to be happy. So that's the key con of no ambition is that it tends to make people miserable. And we will see in the question portion of the show today, we have at least one question that captures someone struggling with that tension of I don't want to be overwhelmed, but I'm not doing enough and I'm bored. And this is kind of making me miserable. So we got grand ambition. We got no ambition.

What I want to offer is a middle ground between the two so we can pull from both pros and try to avoid both cons. And I'm going to call this middle ground pragmatic ambition. This is something I realize I've been. working on in my own life without there actually being terminology about it. So I'm trying to actually lay some terminology and frameworks around this notion, but it's not a new notion. My definition of pragmatic ambition has two elements to it. The first, it's something,

a pragmatic ambition is something that within a year or less, you'll have either accomplished it or have a pretty clear signal this is not going to work and can move on from it. So the timeline, the timeframes we're talking about, for pursuing pragmatic ambitions are relatively speaking short. And the second element of my definition of pragmatic ambition, if accomplished, it should provide a clear and compelling ongoing benefit. So something that's really satisfying or enjoyable or fun that will remain a source of satisfaction

or enjoyment or fun into perpetuity. This is something I've accomplished and now I can really enjoy this. as a recurring source of positive affect. So I want to give you some specific examples here from my own life of pragmatic ambitions. I'm going to load up a webpage over here. All right. So the first example was early in my career as a blogger. So I started the study hacks blog at Calnewport.com before.

Now it's primarily an email newsletter, but used to be back then primarily a blog. And I remember relatively early on in the lifetime of that blog, I set a pragmatic ambition for that part of my life, which was I never wanted to have to pay for a book again. Now, what I mean by this, I'm going to show you. If you're watching it on YouTube right now, I've loaded up an old version of my blog using the internet time machine, the way back machine.

So this is March 2nd, 2015. Just a snapshot of my blog. Oh, it's a screen not working? Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, never, the screen is not working. Let me just tell you what's on here.

If you go back, if you go back and look at my blog from years back, what you would notice is on the side, I had a little column that said some things I like. And there would be a link typically to the notebook I used to use before I had my own time block planner. I would use black and red notebooks. I had a book on deliberate practice. So Anders Erickson's sort of epic book, the road to. to excellence, and then I had, Geron Laner's, I am not, you are not a gadget, which is a very influential book

for me. So I would have those three things on the side of my blog, and it says some things I like. Those were Amazon affiliate links. So if you clicked on those and bought either that object or anything else following that link, I'd get a little cut of it. And what I learned early on is you could have Amazon, instead of giving you money,

convert everything you earned into Amazon credits. And they would just email you once a month, just a little code. Hey, this code is, you know, $250 worth of Amazon credits. And so what my goal was early on with my blog was I want to have enough readership that I get enough Amazon credits from affiliate links, that the amount of these credits in my Amazon account is always above zero. And so I can just buy books without thinking about it, without ever really using a credit card. If I just see a book I want to get, go to Amazon and buy it. And there's always just, just, just enough credits in my account that I don't have to worry about it.

And I did reach that goal. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was tractable. It wasn't something that was going to take me five or six years. Once accomplished, though, it was like this great source of ongoing satisfaction, something I could enjoy. Like, I can just buy books, which, you know, as a grad student, this was a big deal. I can buy books whenever and not have to worry about it. It's a pragmatic ambition, but it gave.

me a lot of pleasure. Okay, here's another one. When I first started out writing books, so you know, I wrote my first book as an undergraduate at Dartmouth. It came out right after I arrived at MIT to be a grad student. My pragmatic ambition of when I got into book writing, my first pragmatic ambition is I just want to be able to go to a bookstore. I love bookstore so much. I love books so much. I grew up on them. And to see my, at least one of my books there, Just like in this bookstore, I could find one of my books. And so I published my first book and I moved to MIT. We're living near Harvard Square.

The Harvard Co-op in Harvard Square was actually a really big supporter of my early student books. They would have them out on the table for years. They'd bring them out for graduation. And I got a lot of ongoing pleasure, those first few years at MIT, to go over to the Harvard Co-op and just sort of see my book on a table. even on occasion I would see someone walk by and pick it up and look at it. That was great. And early in my writing career, that was a pragmatic ambition, not I'm going to beat

J.K. Rowling. It was like, I wonder if I can just have books in a bookstore or with my blog. It was not this is going to be a money factory and I'm going to make a living off of it. It was, wouldn't it be cool if I could buy books with abandoned and never have to think about what's this going to do to my credit card bill? pragmatic ambitions. This podcast, I'll give you my third example for my life. Initial goal for this podcast was I would like it to be able to pay for a cool office space that I can hang out in.

Make enough money that it can cover the lease payment of an office space near my house. The timeline, because you have to go back and look at the timeline, I started this podcast early in the pandemic. I recorded, I don't know, like four episodes of this thing. before my wife said, you're out of the house. You can't record this in here. We have too many kids. Like, we can't be quiet and we're not going to be quiet. And you have to go find another place to do this.

And I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do about this. But right around this time, so this was early in the pandemic, this is when Ryan Holiday started texting me pictures of this building he had bought in Bostrop, Texas, where he lives. And he was going there to podcast and the right and the read. And he had this building to go to, and especially early in the pandemic when I was kind of trapped at home. I'm like, man, that looks great. So he was kind of nudging me like, oh, you have to have your own space. My wife kicked me out of the house. It turns out Ryan, Ryan's wife had kicked him out of the house too. She's like, we're not going to be quiet. You got to go somewhere else.

And so I was like, I'll lease the space. So I lease the office space to Deep Work HQ without really a way to sustainably pay for it. I said, I'm going to give myself a year. I can cover these lease payments for a year, just, you know, I'll put aside some money for it. But this is not sustainable. So I have to make my podcast successful enough that it can pay for. The office, office lease. And it got there before the year was out. And I get enjoyment out of this every day. I'm here all the time. I have all my crazy electronic equipment there. Jesse's around. As Jesse knows, like I have various friends who'll sometimes come and spend the day doing remote work from the HQ. And it's sort of cool to have people around. And I can just get a lot of gratitude out of that. Again, that's a pragmatic ambition. The alternative approach would say, until I take down Rogan as the number one podcast, I'm not going to be happy. That is a grand. Grand ambition. Instead, I came out of pragmatically. Wouldn't it be cool if I could have a space near my house where I could just hang out

and podcasts? And it's every day I get enjoyment out of it. All right. So there's just some example for my life. Other examples, Bill Waterson, right? That's pragmatic ambition. He wanted a really successful comic strip that would earn him enough money that he wouldn't really have to worry about money and work.

And he did that. Had an impact on the field, made some good money, not $100 million, but enough that he can live comfortably in Ohio and paint his landscape. and he did that and he enjoyed it. And now he enjoys what he does now. I think Tim Ferriss is another interesting example of this where he focused in his pragmatic ambition to, I want to podcast, I want to be influential,

I want to be successful enough that I don't have to worry about money and therefore have to go off and write big books, which every time he writes one of these big books, it practically kills them or have to do events or speak. He just wanted simplicity, as far as I can tell, just based on his public comment. and the podcast was really simple. I just want to do this, and I meet interesting people,

and it's fascinating, and it makes enough money that I don't really care about money. He has a very small team, you know, he doesn't have a warehouse full of people, and he doesn't even really care Jesse that much about YouTube. I guess now he's doing a little bit more, but it's not a profit maximization business. He's just like I like podcasting. I want to meet interesting people and have an impact on the public sector, but that's it. I'm happy with that. I don't have to figure out how can I get on the list of the top earning, you know,

the Forbes list of top earning authors each year or something like that. That's a pragmatic ambition, huge source of meaning scratches that itch of wanting to do things, but is not this relentless what's next, what's next. So what's the key to making pragmatic ambition succeed? I have two. Number one, when you accomplish a pragmatic ambition, you have to put in effort, to enjoy the fruits. I need to just go to my office and I'll do this.

I'm going to go to my office, like write a blog post or something and just like enjoy it or bring like a breakfast and just read a book and just go out of my way to make sure that I keep coming back to making myself, remind myself why I'm gracious and have gratitude for this, right? The blog thing was a similar thing. Just like don't forget. Put an effort. I'm going to go buy these books. I don't have to buy this cool.

like I don't have to pay for books. So it actually takes an ongoing effort to continue to be pleased with what it is that you accomplish and the good things is putting into your life. So it's like a gratitude practice. It's very important to extract the full impact of pragmatic ambition. The other thing is you do not have to. It's the other key. You do not have to have pragmatic ambition be a substitute for grand ambition.

What it does is give you a more sustainable route there, which is lateral. This is the second key to pragmatic ambition. So once you've accomplished a pragmatic ambition, you can then set your sights on, in that same particular field of endeavor, the next level up, and make it a new pragmatic ambition, something that you could accomplish within a year or so or know that it's not going to work within a year or so. But don't do it right away. You accomplish pragmatic ambition, one, give yourself at least three months of just enjoying

the fruits of that. And then if you set the next level up in that same endeavor, okay, here's my next pragmatic ambition, continue to enjoy the fruits of what you just accomplished while you're working on the next one. And so if you don't get to the next level, if that particular plan doesn't work out, you'll know that in about a year or so. You never gave up and join the fruits of the initial one. And then you can decide if you want to try something else or not. And in this way, you can ladder up towards more and more impressive accomplishments while maximizing gratitude and satisfaction along the way, while enjoying what you have now while you're continually working on what's coming next, but in a way that's much more sustainable.

This is what's happened with me with podcasting, for example. The original pragmatic ambition, as mentioned, was having a cool office suite near my house that I could come to and friends could come here and I bring my kids here and we work on the Maker Lab, and it's great. And I still enjoy that every day. I was here last night with all three of my kids. We rotate. My four-year-old came.

circuits. My eight-year-old came. We're doing CAD design and 3D printing to my 10-year-old came and we were wiring up these joystick controllers to our Arduino, right? Still enjoy this every day. After a while, though, I put in place a second pragmatic ambition. Okay, what's the next level up that I want to work towards while I enjoy the success of the first one? And the next level up I worked towards what the podcast was, if the revenue of the podcast matched or surpassed my salary as a professor, I felt that that would give me confidence in my academic life to take more risks and to maybe shift what I'm focusing on or go after more risky or ambitious topics, to be more emboldened to experiment and leave the narrow path in academia, if to say.

psychologically speak, and I said this other thing, this ongoing thing I have, the podcast, generates as much money as my salary. Somehow I just thought that would give me confidence. And it does. And it's something once accomplished. I now actually try to keep reminding myself with that. Like, this is great. I'm really, I have a lot of gratitude for this. And I want to take advantage of this by taking risk in my academic work. I want to work on interesting topics. And it's, again, now I have two sources of ongoing gratitude. And so pretty soon I will probably put in place. pragmatic ambition number three for the podcast if and when I get there. And I don't know what it's going to be. And I'm no hurry. And when I do put that ambition in place, I'll try it for a year while still enjoying and reaping the fruits of the pragmatic ambitions I've already accomplished. So all these examples, I'm giving all these examples to try to lay out a sense of this new way of approaching ambition.

Relatively short-term goals, sustainable payoffs, incredible effort invested to be gracious, about those payoffs and to pay attention to those payoffs, laddering towards the bigger things, one pragmatic ambition at a time, with plenty of breathing room in between each of those beats. So ambitious is good. It's good to have things to move towards in your professional life or outside of your professional life.

They can play in well to a deep life plan pursuing these ambitions, moving up what you're capable of, but you've got to be careful about how you do it. Pursuing hard but proximate goals and reveling in the gratitude and appreciating of accomplishment. I think that is the sustainable strategy. That is the Bill Waterson strategy. He might not have that $100 million, but I'm pretty sure he's a pretty relaxed guy and still did a lot of good in the world. So that's my new theory, Jesse.

I have a couple questions. So risk in your academic work, what do you mean? Like more arcane, like research topics? I'm shifting more interest. And there'll be some more official things to talk about this sometime soon. There's various things being signed. etc. But I'm getting much more involved, for example, in Georgetown's emerging focus on digital ethics. So that is more of an alignment of some of my public-facing writing on tech and society with my academic work. So shifting a little bit, well, not a little bit, but shifting increasingly away from just core computer science theory and doing more academic work about the impact of tech so that now I could be covering these topics at multiple scales of sophisticated.

So on one end, it can just be on the podcast. Let me just give you a piece of pragmatic advice in response to a question about what to do with, you know, tech in your life. Somewhere in between, it will be like my New Yorker work and my books, public facing, but I've really thought these things through. It's a little bit more sophisticated. And then at the full end might have actual like academic work, peer reviewed work that's working and thinking about and trying to lay intellectual foundations. I love this idea of having a conciliance across all these things I'm doing. That's a really risky thing to do. Why? Well, because you're leaving your bread and butter. Oh, okay. And in academia, respect, promotion, a lot of it comes from what people in your very narrow field think about you. So it's not an easy thing to do. Yeah, I see you're saying now. I feel for whatever reason, having the podcast be successful somehow gives me confidence to let me change things around. Yeah.

So it's psychological, right? I'm a tenured academic. It's not like if I pursue the wrong topic, I'm going to get. fired and I need a fallback income. So it's a way more psychological than that. But it's a for me, it was like an important but attainable goal once accomplished. I can keep leaning on as a way of like a continued source of inspiration and courage. Yeah. And like confidence is such a huge thing. Yeah. And then lastly, what do you think Waterson's doing after Hobbs? Like what do you think he did? I probably just sit there, right? It's hard to find too many details. So I, you know, I mentioned landscape

painting. That's actually one, as far as we can tell, because he did some, he had some art shows. So he got really into landscape painting. I know that that's one thing he did. He at some point for a few weeks drew, like as a guest artist, a ongoing comic strip that exists. He like took over that comic strip and it was somehow, it was a charity thing, right? So somehow the money that raised was going to charity. But otherwise, no one knows. Like it really is mysterious. Like, you can't interview him. He will not respond. interviews interview request. I was poking around.

I don't really know what he's up to. But, you know, he's not stressed. $100 million is so much money to turn down. Yeah. It wasn't like they came to him with a check for $100 million, but it was these licensing deals would be worth $100 million probably in their lifetime. You would make probably about $100 million in a 20-year period.

Yeah. So, you know, not really that impressive. If you're going to spread out my $100 million over 20 years, I mean, come on. Is it even worth it? Yes, he's an interesting guy. All right. So what we got now is coming up a collection of questions that all are related, one way or the other, to this topic of ambition and burnout.

So we can actually see how the ideas I just talk about, play out in real world examples, including our very first question. We'll have a special guest host helping me answer it, Jordan Harbinger. First, however, I want to mention one of the longtime sponsors of this show that makes the podcast. podcast possible. And that is our friends at Grammarly. I want to talk in particular about their premium, Gramerly Premium's advanced tone suggestion feature. So let me be really clear about this. Writing clearly is a superpower in the modern knowledge work setting. So much of your work as a knowledge worker today is emails, it's reports, it's slacks, it's typed language, trying to communicate back and forth with other adults. If you can do this really well, you are just viewed

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need a VPN. You don't want your internet service provider to know that you're visiting Calnewport.com. Correct. Yeah. Use ExpressVPN and your secret, your shameful secret will be safe. All right. So let's do some questions. Again, all these questions should relate one way or the other to the general theme of today's show.

Our first question was about podcasting, the ambition to build a podcast. And so I asked good friend Jordan Harbinger, host of the Jordan Harbinger show, if he would call in and help me answer it. So, Jesse, let's see if we can get Jordan on the line. Sounds good. Here we go. All right, so it looks like the next question we have coming up is about podcasting. So I figure to get to the truth here, we should bring on to the show the person I know in this world who knows the most about podcasting.

That's my friend and friend of the show, Jordan, Harbinger. Jordan, thank you for agreeing to call in and help me here. Yeah, my pleasure. Long time listeners will remember, we did a whole episode together, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes where we went deep onto the whole state of the podcasting industry at that point. But if you've not heard that episode, Jordan is the host of the Jordan Harbinger show. One of the best interview podcast out there. Jordan, you've been doing this for a long time. I have memories.

And my memory, I was being interviewed by you, and this might be an exaggeration, you know, when I was in elementary school. Yeah, that might be an exaggeration. But it has been 16 years. I think I've been doing podcasts for about 16 years. So depending on when you graduated from elementary school, that is possible. You were always a little ahead of your time. I am. Well, you know, I'm 11 years old right now.

So I don't know if that's a surprise, but I aged fast. It's a hard industry. I'm a dougie-hous. Benjamin Button style. I do have to say. And what I like about your show, of course, is the mix of guests. I think I think you're top notch at this that you will go from a A-list celebrity to, I mean, the last episode I heard it was an Egyptologist. Am I saying that right?

I mean, it's like an expert on ancient Egypt. You'll even occasionally have, you know, bums like me on. So just to kind of, you know, the shake it up. But I think you're the best in the biz at interviewing your show is sort of a standard. Thank you. Definitely at the top of my list. So, I appreciate that. Who else am I going to call?

Okay, so here's the question. It's from Nathan. I've edited this a little bit. What are all of the different factors that have to come together for a podcast to break out? No, I think we have to define breakout probably. Sure. I think what he means is probably to get an audience where the creator can make a living. You don't want to define breakout as, all right, I'm the next Andrew Schultz.

Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, whatever it is, because that type of success comes from using social media effectively over time, going on the Joe Rogan podcast a bunch of times, ideally, and getting a couple million dollars in free advertising. You know, that kind of stuff really helps. But ideally, if you're able to create a show and make a living off of it, then the factors that need to come together are going to be consistently good content, but over time. So in social media you can go, let's say TikTok, which I don't use, but I know enough about it from reading about how toxic it is. And I know other social media. So it's two guys talking about social, two guys who don't use social media talking about social media. But what we do know from that is you can

go viral from one or two posts. You can end up building a little bit of a following, and you can go from there. With podcasting, it's kind of the opposite. You don't really go viral. It's really hard to share podcasts. You build one tiny little brick at a time. You put out a good episode. your current audience of 50 people hears it, they share it, they say this is really good and interesting, you do that for a few years and suddenly you've got enough, let's say, traction or momentum to start monetizing it. And then from there, you can start scaling it, and it's really all about consistently good quality over time, not one or two hit, posts or interviews. That is how you do it. And all of the other things that people think grow podcasts are kind of, it's

almost like a myth, right there. Oh, I've got to be posting shorts on TikTok. I got to be posting shorts on Instagram. Cool. You might gain a couple of listeners a day doing that, but the juice usually ain't worth the squeeze. And retention is a real thing in podcasting. So if you're doing a show and it's 30 minutes or an hour long, you're asking people to commit to you. So if the content isn't that great, but you have really good marketing and social media, you're going to get a whole bunch of people in and they're going to leave. And it's kind of like trying to fill up a water bucket, but there are holes in the bottom. You've got to plug those holes up if you're going to be carrying that bucket from the well back to your house. So you really need to have that basis of consistently

good quality. And that doesn't mean celebrity interviews. That means stuff that people can really sink their teeth into, whatever niche you're in. So that's why you see successful podcasts that are very niche. Like my friend runs a podcast where she just reads court documents and talks about what's in the court documents for famous cases. It sounds really boring, but they do a really good job because she's actually just reading court documents, and she's like, this is what this means. And people love it. It's very hard to do what, it's harder to do what I do.

I wouldn't recommend interviewing people that you're interested in as a niche. It's a really crap niche. You're going to grow really slowly. The better you can niche together, niche down, I think they call it, the better off you're going to be. So don't make it about your personality unless you are a personality for a living. like Andrew Sheltz or Joe Rogan, do something where you're like, this is the radio-controlled plane podcast where I talk about radio-controlled planes and not about what I did last weekend, unless that

involves radio-controlled planes. I only talk about that. So that speaks to the content, right? You're not yammering off. It's well-organized. It's delivered well. It's edited and produced well. And you do that over time. And that's what grows audience. And more importantly, keeps audience listening to you over time. Right. People try and go too broad. They try and make themselves a personality using podcasts because they look at guys like me or Lex or Andrew Huberman or whatever and they go, oh, I can do that.

Yep. A lot of that is luck, time in the market, experience, picking a really good niche and having the qualifications to go for it. And as in the case of Huberman, who's like a, you know, scientist in his niche, that is not a that's not a strategy most of us can reproduce. That's interesting. Okay. And so when you say, and I'm just, I'll ask a follow up on Nathan's behalf. So it sounds like when you're talking about content, content, which makes a lot of sense to me. Content actually captures multiple factors. So it's not, it's a lot of what you're actually saying, but you're also counting in there, how does the podcast sound? How is it written? Is it tight? Is it professional? If you're going to read court documents for celebrity cases, I'm assuming for that podcast to work, you have to figure out the form. for doing that that's actually listenable, that you figure that out, that we do this, and then it's this, and this is what's interesting, and here's what's not.

And so you're saying obsess on content writ large, though, basically everything that is going into the listener's ear, you want to be thinking about all sorts of different angles on that. How could I do that better? Is this compelling? Why would I keep listening to this? Is there anything that's catching my attention as like, ooh, what's that? Why is there this? Why is the sound echoey?

Why is this, he's rambling? So it's really an obsession with everything that comes out of that earbud into the ear, continuing to push that better. Agree, yeah. It has to do with, and I'm not saying you have to hire a producer for $500 an hour to make and have music behind everything. What you should avoid are the easy enough, easy to correct pitfalls. I was listening to a show the other day.

Really interesting content, really, really good. The interviewers weren't bad. But there was a point at which the dog was barking and he goes, hold on guys, I got to go let my dog out. And there's just silence for like 30 to 40 seconds where this guy goes and lets his dog out and he left it in the show. And I thought that was an inside joke at first, but later on I heard his phone ring. And then he got a phone call and took it for a second and said, I got to call you back and hung up. And I thought, oh, this is a person who doesn't understand that every minute of mine you waste, you're telling me you don't value my time. And so that's not a good look

for a podcast host. The tighter it is, the better. And I'm, I'm, really cognizant of that. I read all the books for my guests, if they have them, when they're on the show, as you probably remember from me interviewing you. And people will say, why aren't your interviews two or three hours like so-and-so's podcast? And the answer is, because I don't need them to be. I read the book. I know where the important stuff is. If you're digging for gold and you have a map where the gold is buried, you don't have to spend three times the amount of time looking for it and meandering around and, you know, talking about aliens or whatever. You can focus on the topic and a task at hand and that's really really beneficial because now I can get the best bang for the buck the best

per minute value for my listener and that's what keeps people sticking around I routinely get feedback like wow I heard so and so on your show and I heard them on this other show and the three-hour interview on this other show had less actual meat on the bone than your 49 minute interview with that same person and and that's really what that does is says to the listener I value your time we're going for it right this is going to be high high signal low noise and that that retains people and it's why like that comes through in your show for example because there are other people who are going all in on the interview format and what you're saying by the way makes sense don't try to be you don't try to be joe rogan if anything else is just a grind

if to try to get enough guest on yeah a lot of the even up-and-coming host whose names i won't say any particular names um it wanders and okay and your show does it right it gets right to the meat of it. And you're saying, yeah, because you spend a lot of time. You read the books. You think about it. You're really obsessing about I want this to be very interesting. You're not just putting weight on I'm an interesting guy, which is like the Rogan, like, Joe Rogan gets away with that. He's like, I'm a professional talker. I've been podcasting for 80 years. I'm an interesting enough guy at this that like we will chat for three hours and I can somehow make that interesting. But that's like saying, you know, I can pitch a baseball 102 miles per hour. Like, yeah, that'd be great. you're probably going to get a reliever role, but that's not a strategy for everyone else to try to follow. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I would even argue, and look, this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I would argue that Joe Rogan would be a better interviewer if he would read and prep the interview before the show. Because his curiosity takes him to a lot of interesting places, but he could also keep that curiosity while not just meandering around and then getting stone and talking about DMT.

But again, I know not everybody agrees with that. that's just my two cents that's the style in which i do my show which is more focused and in look even if i'm wrong about joe rogan we're not wrong about the other 10 000 joe rogan want to be clones out there who are trying to do the same thing and wondering why they can't get traction that's one of the reasons all right so then one other quick follow up just a timeline question i'm going to put some actual projections on this so let's use my own show as a case study it's two and a half years old is this does that put it pretty much still in the finding your feet finding your audience stage that's is that relatively young sometimes for a podcast i'm where am i yeah in a life cycle of a long-term show

it it sort of depends on the niche right if you're a true crime podcast you can get traction in season one and it's like wow this is the biggest thing look at how many downloads this murder murders people getting murdered in parks podcast is crushing it right that's different than this is a guy who answers questions or gives advice that might take that could take years to get traction that's why i always tell people like don't try and emulate what i'm doing mine i had an 11 year runway before this stuff was really or seven years you know before this is really doing something the better of an niche you pick the better off you are the more narrow venece you pick the better off you are so i don't know two and a half years you got plenty of traction on your show is it going to be bigger and

two and a half more years, of course it is because you're doing well, but you're, you know, look, you've been teaching for a while, so you bring that skill set in. You've got professional recording equipment and help, so you've got that skill set. You work with some really good advertiser, or ad sales guys that I know and some production people that I've worked with, they're good. So you've got, I would say, performance enhancing drugs in your repertoire here, right, with those kinds of things. If guys are in their garage basement, their college students, they're doing this, they can't

afford to hire people. They've got whatever they got. Their acoustic environment is what it is. They can't go to a studio. The microphone they got is the biggest expense they have. It's going to take a little bit longer because they're not necessarily going to have the option to have professionals helping them out. Does that mean their shows going to stay small? Not necessarily. But again, you know, I'm thankful for the amount of time it took me to become successful because during that time I learned how to interview. I don't think you can really speed up experience that much. Of course you can a little, but it's very difficult to do it. So I'm almost, you wouldn't want to start a podcast and then end up on the top 10 shows all overnight.

Because what'll have, you wouldn't want Joe Rogan to find you and go, come on my show and have 10 million people go and listen to your show. And 9.9 million of them go, that was terrible. This guy is terrible. You want to slowly build that audience, that loyalty over time and have them share because the snowball is packed tighter. if that analogy makes sense, right? The people stick around longer. Your experience speaks for itself after a bit of time. You really do have your niche set.

Your personality is set. Your style is set. It's something that's really hard to rush. Yeah. And I agree with that example because I'm just thinking I know a lot of people who have gone on Joe Rogan's show. And nothing particularly explosive happened. But when you see like the other characters you mentioned, like Lex or like Andrew, doing frequent guest spots.

They were doing that at a time, especially in Lexus case, where he had a very matured product ready. I mean, he had been doing the AI podcast for a long time. He had found his voice. He had a good audience. That's a whole different situation. So now you have your thing figured out after years and years of work. Then you start getting big exposure.

You can actually harness it. So that all makes sense. And I will say, okay, so because I'm closer to Nathan where he would be if he's starting a podcast than obviously you are right now, Jordan. you've been doing this forever. My thing, Nathan, is this is very hard. This has been basically my experience is podcasting is very hard. There's a million aspects to go into it, but just the writing of material, communicating clearly, making it interesting.

It's a slog. People do not want to give you their time lightly, and it's really hard to earn it. And it really does feel, to me, I don't know if you have the same feeling so far into your career, Jordan, but for me it's, you know, month by month, season by season, and it always feels so slow to me. I feel like, why can't I gain trash it? Now, if I zoom out, I say, okay, there's a reasonable trajectory here. I remember I started taking on advertising when I could hit 15,000 downloads an episode. Because you could do two episodes a week and aggregate to 30, and it was like the barrier of entry.

And now we'll do maybe 50,000 downloads per episode zooming out. I'm like, there's a reasonable trajectory there. Every inch along that way has been frustration. I agree with you. not growing. This is barely growing. And also, stupid download calendar. It's very seasonal. So you're always having, in the short term, dips because it's, you know, July. And so you always feel like you're losing listeners. You really have to zoom out before you feel like you're making any traction. It's true. Final follow-up, when do you know to pull the rip court? Most podcasts don't succeed.

So let's say you're into it. I'm committed. I'm putting time into it. I want this to succeed. I'm willing to spend time. What's the signs that this is. not going to, you're stuck at 10,000 downloads or whatever it is. This is not going to grow enough. It's not where it needs to be. It's not going to grow anymore. What are the signs for pulling to ripboard? Sure. So I was speaking with Andy Duke on my show is a recent episode. I wish I had the number in front of me, but she talked about quitting. That's her new bit of work. She's a professional poker player. And she talks about kill criteria. And so kill criteria is where you say before you're, but the worst time to make a decision is when you're in it. So you say,

if I'm not able to pay for the expenses of this podcast by next year, I'm going to stop doing it. Or if I'm not able, if I'm not enjoying this in six months, I'm going to stop doing it unless it's making X dollars, right? It's something like that. So look, the first thing is, it could be a hobby. That's totally okay. In fact, I'm usually against people turning hobbies into jobs because it's a great way to, it's a good way to ruin your hobby.

So if you're doing a podcast and you like it and you don't have that many, listeners, who cares? Just keep doing it. It's a hobby. But if you are deluding yourself and saying this is going to be my job, but you have 500 listeners and then a year later you have 600 listeners, it's very unlikely that you are going to build enough traction to create a living for yourself. Again, if you enjoy doing it, who cares? Just keep doing it. But don't try to make yourself the exception in your mind that you're going to be the special one who's going to turn this thing into a job overnight because it's very, very hard to do. And so I would set up kill criteria and I would say, look, if I don't enjoy it, I'm going to

stop doing it. And if you're trying to monetize this and you're sort of halfway there, like maybe you're making a few thousand dollars a month or a year and it's not enough to quit your job, then you have to decide what you're comfortable with. If you're spending 20 hours on your podcast, but a lot of it feels like work and it's not paying for itself, set up kill criteria where you decide this is when I'm going to stop doing it and this is when I'm going to really go for it. There's not a go-all-in type of thing unless you're really hitting those financial metrics. What I usually recommend, instead of trying to figure out how

to make this your job, is partially monetize it if you're in that position to do so. Let's say you're making $500 a month. Use that money to take the part of it that you don't like doing, maybe the editing you don't like doing. Hire an editor. Now you've got a hobby where you just do the fun parts. It's like if you're really into radio control cars and you've got to. money from it, let's see you're making a YouTube channel for that, and you're making a thousand dollars a month. Take that money and pay someone to fix the cars when you break them. Then you're just running them, right? Now you've got a great hobby where all the stuff you don't like doing is not your problem anymore. That's the way to do this. Start outsourcing as

much stuff as you can so that if you do hit that sort of inflection point where you're making enough to make it your job, you're not then doing everything yourself and becoming miserable in the process. You've already outsourced everything else. So now your hobby happens to be lucrative. Now that's the best position for you to be in, in my opinion. Jordan, great advice. I appreciate you coming on. Help me with this one because I'm usually just grabbing in the dark. Also a great time to announce my new podcast. It's called Deep RC. It's all about radio control cars. And I just get into it. It's four hours per episode, and we do circuit schematics. We just walk through the circuit schematics. It's scintillating audio, We actually have no plan for the episode in the beginning whatsoever.

Exactly. Exactly. Whatever we want. Yeah, it's me and eight other people and we record it outside. All right, Jordan. On AirPods. On AirPods, exactly. I appreciate it.

Everyone, Jordan, the Jordan Harbinger show. I think it's the best interview podcast out there. If you want to see how a pro does it, listen to that. You won't regret it. All right. Thanks, Jordan. Thank you. All right.

Well, thank you, Jordan, for helping me on that particular question. Let's move on to a few more questions that you, the listeners, have sent in. Jesse, what do we have next? Next question is from Hannah, a 27-year-old math tutor. Hi, Cal, your book on Deep Work helped me finish my Ph.D. Now I've cultivated a life where I only work four hours a day, but I'm stuck with what to do with the remaining time. I feel like this is the lifestyle I planned for and dreamed of while I was in academia, but now I have it, and I'm bored. Any advice?

Well, I like this question because it helps underscore one of the points we made during the deep dive earlier in this episode, which is there are cons to the limited or no ambition approach to life. So what Hanna was going for, and this is a perfectly reasonable goal, is I want a lot of flexibility and autonomy. I want my work to be interesting but not take up too much of my time. And she has achieved that transforming her PhD into a job that requires about four hours a day. and she's bored because there's no ambitious goals that she is pursuing. There's no sense of progress. There's no sense of gratitude or enjoyment that she can invest into things that she has already accomplished. So this shows the issue or the problem with just saying, man, if I just had less, then I would be happy.

So what should you do, Hannah? Well, we're going to increase the ambition in your life, but we're going to do so with care. And in particular, I'm not so worried about the amount of time something requires. I worry more about the autonomy. So we're going to assess various options to add into your life, new obligations or pursuits. But when we do this, we're going to titrate in these new activities carefully to make sure that you are not sapping away your autonomy excessively. So let's say, for example, you bring in a additional professional pursuit. You are going to, so your PhD is in, I'm assuming mathematics since you're a math tutor.

So maybe, you know, you want to write a really good expository book on a otherwise complex field of mathematics. It's like really relevant now or something like this. This is like linear algebra for artificial intelligence or something like that. That could potentially be a hard project and ambitious project, but one that, you have a lot of autonomy over. So, like, you're reading and writing on a lot of days, but if you wanted to go away for two weeks and not write or weren't feeling well, no big issue, right?

That is very different on the autonomy scale than if you took, let's say, a second job, and now you're scrambling every single day. You have to get this other work done and you're falling behind. You're losing control of your time. So as we add a new ambition, which you need, just add an ambition that gives you a lot of autonomy. The second piece of advice I'd give you here is use both sides of the professional, non-professional coin.

So you might add in some professional, additional professional ambition with autonomy, balance that out with some extra non-professional ambition. I am going to learn how to program 8-bit video games on an Arduino because this is what you should be doing with your math degree, Hannah, trust me. It's definitely not frustrating. Everything just works every time.

But those, you know, you have a lot of, it's easier to gain autonomy in non-professional ambitions because it's usually just something you're doing. doing. No one cares if you take a month away, a month off from your hobby, etc. So that's what I would say. Let's start adding some more ambition back in your life. I think your vision of having no work was what's going to make you happy was flawed. But because you're in this nice, comfortable position of it's not like you need the money. Focus on maximizing autonomy. Things can be hard, but make sure it's flexible in how you execute them. And let's get that ambition level up.

I would also use my pragmatic ambition framework in doing this whenever possible try to build up to these things with concrete projects you can accomplish within a year that give you these clear sustainable results that happen afterwards that you can over time keep reaping enjoyment from. So maybe use the pragmatic ambition framework to choose these and to approach them. Maximize autonomy. And I think you're going to get yourself, you're going to get this formula tweaked to a point that's going to be to be a lot more. satisfying than your current setup. All right, what else do we got, Jesse? All right. Next question is from Jessica, a 30-year-old executive assistant. I work a busy nine-to-five job as an executive assistant. Outside my full-time job, I work on academic and creative projects that I hope will eventually land me a professorship. Working on these side

projects on top of my full-time job feels overwhelming if I work on all of them every day. I really can't make any progress, but if I focus on one at a time, I lose momentum. Well, Jessica, this is a good problem. It's kind of the opposite of the one we just heard. So Hana had not enough things to do, not happy. Jessica has too many different things she's doing, also not happy. So here we have in these back-to-back questions, a clear illustration of the grand ambition, no ambition dichotomy that we talked about earlier.

So Jessica, what I'm going to recommend here first is that we make a semantic distinction between two different types of, we'll call them optional pursuits, optional pursuit. So not your primary job, things you have some say into whether or not you do them or not. I want to divide these type of pursuits into what we'll call background activities and projects. And I think you're going to find this useful to think of these two things differently. background activities are things you do on a set schedule on a regular basis that become a part of just the background pattern of activity in your life, right? So let's say, for example, you exercise, you have a good exercise routine. That's a classic background activity.

It's just a part of your life. You've built your life around, you know, I exercise every other day for 45 minutes. You know, here's what I do. That's a classic background activity. in your particular context of pursuing an academic life, and you elaborate it, it's not in the short version of question we read, but you're elaborated version of the question. You have a doctorate. You have this realistic path back to an academic position. So let's say reading, keeping up with the literature, is important that that could be a background activity.

You know, I read a journal article every week. I just, I select it on Sunday. I read in the mornings before I get to work. that's an example of a background activity as well. I want to contrast this to projects. It's a one-time effort that has a clear, now I'm done, conclusion. The projects are where I want you to focus on one at a time. So you might have multiple background activities that are relevant to your overall ambition here

to return more towards an academic professional configuration. You might have two or three things. I read a journal article every week. Every month, I join this reading group, the talk about something. I contribute a book review every quarter to this magazine. I just do this. It's just background activities. I've found where they fit into my schedule.

I've autopileted them. I know where that time is. It's just like me going to the gym or walking my dog. These are just things I do. So you can have multiple background activities that are all giving you a slow and steady accumulation of positive advantage. You're learning new things, you're publishing new things, you're building your skills. And that's all adding up in the background. But in terms of just here's a project that's going to be done at some point and it's taking a lot of extra effort, only do one of those at a time.

In your question, you told me in your elaborated version that you're doing three different major things at a time. And that's too many. Now you say you're worried about losing momentum. Well, if you're doing these background activities, you're going to feel like on these key areas in your pursuit of your academic career, you're always, you're always, you're always, you're going to be doing these background activities. you're going to feel like on these key areas in your pursuit of your academic career, you're always making progress. There is no lost momentum. And then the projects, yes, you're doing one at a time.

But momentum, just do one at a time. That's your momentum. And then when you get that to a good milestone, you have to wait then for whatever, like a peer review to come back because you were writing a journal article, then you can bring in another project and keep working on that until a milestone. I think this notion, your fear is, I think, that if you're not doing these big projects all at once,

that you're not somehow accomplishing enough things. But we've talked about this many times on the show. That's just an illusion. When you interleave projects, it's not like you're spending the same amount of time on all three. You're still only, in each moment of time, you can only really be working on one. So you're working on three projects,

but at a third of the pace is if you were just working on these one at a time. So it's not like you're getting more done if you're interleaving all these things. You might as well just focus intensely on one project till a clear milestone, doing it well, with plenty of time and space for deep work and focus. And then when you're done with a milestone, move on to the next.

Over time, you'll end up, this is a slow productivity principle. Over time, you'll end up accomplishing just as much, if not more, doing one thing at a time, giving it your full attention, at a natural pace, that if you try to do everything at the same time. You just have to trust that if you zoom out to the next two years, you'll end up in a better place, even if over the next two weeks, you feel like you're only working on one thing. So do that with your projects, but support this with background,

activities that you've autopileted into your schedule that make sure that you're constantly making progress, small but steady, slow steps towards the skills and knowledge you need to get towards your ambition. That combination of the stuff always happening in the background that's useful, plus these bigger swing projects, one at a time, that's the right rhythm of trying to actually build a new direction for your life, build a new career, build up an entirely new skill set. I think that's what plays best with the way your mind actually operates. Don't try to interleave many large things simultaneously.

Same principle of the side projects are one to two months long. Yeah, I think that's fine. Like, do one for one to two months. Yeah. Yeah. And then once that's done, do another one. The background activities really do help here because it gives you a sense of continuity of progress. Otherwise, you worry, like, well, these other, this project's only working on this one relevant thing.

And these other things are relevant. I'm not going to get to them for another six months. But the background activities can help just give you this background sense of, well, I'm reading every day. And I'm writing this review column every month or whatever. it is. So like I'm, I'm out there constantly making progress, even if in my project life, I'm just stuck on this one project and maybe it's not really, I'm not really making much progress. So it helps get over that fear of I'm not moving quick enough. Also, the slow and steady accumulation of like, I just read a journal article every week, write a review every month, for example,

do that for two years. The amount of work that piles up is like equivalent to like a full-time project you spent three or four months on, like quit your job and put all of your energy into Like that slow and steady stuff really does add up. I don't think people don't give enough credit to the slow and steady autopilot into your schedule. Turn it on. Get the flywheel going. Come back two years later and see what's been accumulated. That actually can do.

That does a lot more work than people think. They put a lot of focus on the big, bulb project. This thing, this paper is going to change the world. But they forget the last three years of reading an article every week is what gave them the framework that's going to allow them the one they write a great paper. It's like you can't forget the background that. Yeah. All right, let's keep rolling. What do we got next?

All right. Next question is from Derek, a 34-year-old engineer. I have a full-time job and a side hustle, which is drastically different. Should I make multiple strategic planning documents? Yeah, I thought we should do a technical nuts and bolts productivity question here. Two completely different professional endeavors. If you're a multi-scale planning officinato, so you do daily planning, which is informed by weekly planning, which is informed by strategic planning. Should you have two different strategic

plans? If you want, if you want. I don't. I tend to just have different sections in one professional strategic plan. If you'd rather have it in two documents, that's fine too. I don't think it really matters. Derek in his elaborated form of this question said one of the reasons why he was worried about having multiple different documents is that there would be some sort of context switching cost. That's not relevant here. Derek. you look at these things once a week, right? So there's no ongoing issue that you had to look at two different documents when planning your weekly plan. So that's going to be up to the user.

I will say one reason why I do keep my professional strategic plans together in one document is that I kept finding that there are points of overlap. And so you might say, well, wait a second. Your writing is very separate from your academic work, which is very separate from your media company podcasting. So they should each have their three documents, but I kept finding points that were unifying all of them. I kept finding that I would have, for example, okay, here's my plan for managing my time this semester. Here's my rules I'm using this semester. And those rules would involve all those different roles. And I was like, well, what document does this go into?

The Georgetown one, does it go in the media company one? Is it going to the writing one? I just figured out in the end it was just – this stuff has more overlapping than I think just have one big document. It's fine if there's a section that's something that's not. talking about a writing specific thing and a section talking about a computer science specific thing. In a section that talks about a time management approach that I'm putting in place this semester that covers both.

And so for that reason, I keep them in one. If two works for you, it doesn't really matter. Like you're not doing something bad if you break your strategic plan into two. All right. Let's do one more question here. Sounds good. Next question is from Mark. My 15-year-old brother is addicted to his phone and regularly logs four plus hours a day

on TikTok, YouTube, etc. He vehemently avoids reading books or anything else intellectual. How can I pull him away from his phone and towards more rewarding activities? Well, now, Mark told us that he's 17 when he elaborated. So the 17-year-old, worried about his 15-year-old brother, Mark, I think what you need to do is beat better habits into your brother. See, I just think you have to, if you hit him hard enough, he will feel compelled to follow your advice. Now, I'm joking, I have a bunch of boys. It's very hard for boys to give advice to their other siblings. They hate it. I honestly believe my 10-year-old could be on fire. And if my 8-year-old said, there's a bucket of water over there you should use to put out that fire, my 10-year-old would say fire has many benefits, including the ability to heat a room or be able to cook food. So it is very hard for brothers to give advice to other brothers. But the reason why I

put this question in here. Why is it relevant to our discussion of ambition and burnout? Is because what your brother is missing is pragmatic ambitions. He does not have these in his life. This is something I learned when I studied phone overuse for my book, Digital Minimalism. The issue is not so much, these things are so negative and addictive that you have to stop doing the negative or addictive thing. The issue for a lot of people is that these things, the TikTok, the excessive YouTube, is really good at filling in an existential void in your life. You don't know what to do with your time. In fact, you're not happy when you have nothing to do. You're left alone with your own thoughts, and you don't like being there.

And you want your mind to be somewhere. If this was 30 years ago, it would be compulsive TV watching, and if this was 80 years ago, it would be compulsive drinking. And for you in this period, it's this phone has these pleasing. sounds, these pleasing sights, and it just sort of distracts me. And so the key to getting away from that is not just the white knuckle. This is negative, do less negative. It is instead, how do we put the good into your life that makes this other stuff seem less vivid, less compelling? How do we get the pragmatic ambitions of your life that you've succeeded on some and you're living on the dividends of that and enjoying this thing you accomplish and this thing you did and

are laddering up to the next one to the point where you look back at TikTok and say, what is going on over here? Like, do I really want to spend an hour watching this kid do this dance and there's these weird flashing sounds? Or do I want to get back to the 8-bit Arduino video game player I'm making and whatever?

Get the new feature to work because the last one was pretty cool and it was featured on this board and I feel pretty competent about it. So, Mark, the issue is your brother doesn't need to be pushed away from the negative. He needs to be pushed towards the positive

so that the negative becomes clearly, self-evidently, a poor use of time. So you need to, he needs to be engaged in that. Now, how do you actually do that? I mean, again, sibling dynamics are hard. If you just say, hey, brother, you need to read more books. You know, again, if he's like my kids, he will come back and say, paper cuts are a real issue. You know, mine comp was written by Hitler and poisoned a lot of minds and books aren't that great.

If you're saying that they're not going to do it, but what you can do is model it. You can do ambitious, pragmatically ambitious endeavors. Your brother can see you succeed with these things, the enjoyment you get out of it, the way you've structured your life around it, the variety, the engagement, the interestingness that pervades your life. He sees that. He sees that's better. That's self-evidently better than just staring at TikTok all day.

And he sees that now he's maybe more likely to try something. Now you can bring them into something you're doing carefully and casually, but that's what has to happen here. Just haranguing someone that what they're doing is negative when it comes to addictive screen use does not work. They have to make it seem superfluous. They have to make it seem less vivid. They have to make it seem less compelling. And the only way to do that is to add things into their lives that is much more engaging. So pragmatic ambition is the way out of the excessive phone use trap.

And it's a flywheel that once you get turning, it's going to keep turning for a while. So we've got to figure out a way to get that initial one or two revolutions actually going. All right, good questions. That was a topic, Jesse, where we could have a variety of questions, you know, like ambition, burnout, like so many things. Yeah. Cover it. Yeah. So as usual, I like to end the show by shifting to something interesting.

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They're going to help you. It's no longer just you on your own white-knuckling it. It's a great idea for a company. If you want to be in better shape, my-bodytutor.com. All right, let's do something interesting. So as long-time listeners know, I maintain an email address interesting at calnewport.com where I encourage my listeners and readers to send me interesting things from around the internet that they think I might enjoy. I like to take examples from this and talk about them at the end of the show.

So today I have an article to share with you. I believe this appeared in Wired magazine back in 2014. You will see why in a second why I found it interesting. if you were watching the show at YouTube.com slash calendar port media, you will see this article on the screen. And if you're listening, I'll narrate it for you. But here's the article from 2014.

The headline is, Meet the First Woman to win Math's most prestigious prize. So this is about Miriam Mizakani. Merzikani. There's an Iranian mathematician

who is a professor of Stanford and in 2014 won the Fields Medal. incredibly prestigious award in mathematics, like the Nobel Prize of mathematics. All right. So let me show you who this is. So she was 37 and a mathematics professor, so Mirzacani was a 37-year-old mathematics professor at Stanford when she won the Fields Medal. The area that she won the Fields Medal in, I have this on the screen now.

That old chestnut you probably remember from like seventh grade mathematics class, hyperbolic geometry. So she studies hyperbolic geometry, which includes the dynamics of abstract surfaces, man, and all sorts of other complicated things. So

what I'm just trying to establish there is it's a complicated type of math. I like this one point I want to make here. So one of her collaborators says she has a recent theorem right before she won the Fields Medal, which was probably the theorem of the

decade. So she came up with a theorem right before she won the Fields Medal that was probably the theorem of the decade. That's a colleague of her talking about it. All right, so wait, we got a brilliant mathematician. You read this article. You see, you know, she immigrated to the U.S. She won the Math Olympiad, which is hard to do. Smart person ends up getting the Fields Medal, a successful professor. I'm scrolling here because towards the bottom, we find out something about her work habits. And this is what I wanted to highlight. So I'm quoting here from the article. Mr. Gakhani likes to describe herself as slow.

Unlike some mathematicians who solve problems with quick silver brilliance, she gravitates towards deep problems that she can chew on for years. Month or years later, you see very different aspects of a problem, she said. There are problems she has been thinking about for more than a decade, and still there's not much I can do about them. she is in other words a extreme example of slow productivity in action

she is willing to just sit here with problems let them marinate come back at them again and again learning more about them when you zoom in let's say to the scale of a month on a math professor taking this approach she might seem tremendously unproductive you didn't do anything this month you didn't publish anything you didn't solve any interesting new results or prove any interesting steps en route to a brilliant result.

You just sat around and walked and thought and scribbled on paper. And I even have something about that here. Later in the article, we find out that one of the ways that Mirzalcani likes to work is that she has huge pieces of paper on the floor and spends hours and hours drawing what looks like the same picture over and over. So what is this person doing? just drawing pictures for hours and days, and you fast forward, I mean, zoom out rather,

to the scale of years, brilliant results come out. Fields medals are won. Fields are changed. So I had, let's see if I can find it. Here we go. Here's an example.

So there's a particular topic that Mirzacani was working on for years and just marinating in it and reading everything and thinking about everything and going over it again and again. No visible progress. happening, right?

In particular, this problem that she was working on has to do with what happens to a hyperbolic surface when its geometry is deformed using a mechanism akin to a strip-like earthquake or strike-slip earthquake. I have no idea what any of that means. But whatever. That's a hard problem. She's working out for years. Completely unapproachable.

She came up with, after years of thinking about it, a one-line proof that constructed a bridge between this completely opaque theory and another theory that's completely transparent and well understood. This is the type of thing that comes out of slow productivity. For years, it looks like you're drawing on paper and no one knows what you're doing, but what you're really doing is slowly accumulating more knowledge, more understanding, more connections, more possibilities for breakthroughs. And when the breakthrough comes, it can be stunning.

So anyways, I just like that case study. I think we can, we understand philosophy is better when we get to see them in an extreme instantiation. We get to see the idea push to an extreme. And this is a great example of a mathematician. It's very slow in her approach to work and that really worked. Other people in other fields can reap similar benefits. It's like we talked about earlier in the show about background activities versus projects. It's this slow but steady, relentless but paste. I'm coming back to this again and again. I'm writing. I'm writing. I'm writing. I'm reading. I'm reading. I'm reading. I'm improving the podcast 10% every six months. And I'm just coming.

back to it again and again. It's that slow and steady, relentless but pace approach that over time can build to the huge breakthrough, the show that suddenly becomes a massive hit, the writer who suddenly becomes a really respected award-winning voice. Slow productivity is not just a more sustainable way to work. It's not just a rejection of hustle culture or repudiation of those who wants you to be busy. It is in itself a very viable and very successful strategy for doing work that's so good that it can't be ignored. In this particular example, we see that idea in action. All right. Well, speaking of action, I think that's all the time we have for today's show. Thank you, everyone who contributed, whether it was their questions or their interesting stories.

If you liked what you heard today, you'll like what you see. Videos of the show and clips as well as videos about related topics can be found at YouTube.com. slash Cal Newport Media. We'll be back next week with a new episode. 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. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign out for my newsletter at caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.