Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 238: The Joys of the Reading Life

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

The reading life is a deep life. The screen-filled life can be primitive and exhausting. Which one do you want?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: Why is it important to read books? [7:23]- Should I buy physical copies of books I enjoyed on my kindle? [30:45]- How should I organize my notes when writing a non-fiction book? [34:38]- How do I train myself to become a reader? [40:34]- How should I build a library? [50:25]- What does Cal think about Sam Bankman-Fried’s claim that books are worthless? [55:12]Something Interesting: [1:02:21]- Napoleon’s solution to inbox overload- Rethinking productivity: impact vs. velocityLinks:abc.net.au/religion/maryanne-wolf-cultivating-deep-reading-in-a-digital-age/102001224reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/11fphcy/til_napoleon_bonaparte_refused_to_open_his_mail/itamargilad.com/velocity-vs-impact/Thanks to our Sponsors:grammarly.com/tonemybodytutor.comblinkist.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm going to make an announcement about something that you in particular have been working on in recent months, which is our new-ish website, the deeplife. So we soft-launched this a couple months ago just to get used to the interface and to start populating it in content with content. But the deeplife.com is the official home, among other things, of this podcast. Every episode has its own page at the deeplife.com where you can listen to the episode, find it in all the various players. Also, any videos related to that episode can be found right there on the episode. page as well. So that is going to be the home for this podcast, the site for this podcast. It's also the home for all of the video that we produce. So all of the video we produce related to the podcast, as well as the standalone videos that we produce infrequently now, but probably more frequently in the future. All of those will be housed in addition to on

YouTube at Cal Newport Media, YouTube slash California Media, they'll also be housed at the deeplife.com. So if you want to watch podcast episodes, watch clips from episodes, watch other videos we've done like our weekly update videos, but you're suspicious, for example,

of the YouTube recommendation algorithms, watch them at the deeplife.com. Nice, clean interface in our environment. So if you want to understand the idea behind this, I mentioned this briefly sort of buried in a recent episode in my answer to one of my questions, but the reason why I've launched

this separate website, the deeplife.com, is that I'm trying to get some clarity between my work as an academic and writer and public intellectual, where I write books and academic articles and public-facing articles for The New Yorker. And I explore a lot of topics all roughly within this general frame of technology and its impact on culture and society. I want there to be some clarity between that world and the direct engagement I do with you, my listeners and readers with things like this podcast, like my videos, on the specific goal of trying to cultivate a deeper life. Because unlike other, I would say other personalities that are out there where their entire existence is tied up in their direct engagement with their readers or listeners.

They're a YouTube podcaster and that's it. I have this whole other life in the world of ideas. So the way I see it is I'm a thinker who writes and thinks about a lot of things. I spun off this separate move at the deeplife.com with the very specific goal of being, as I say at the top of that website, the online home for the deep life. movement. So right now it's where my podcast is. Right now it's where my videos are

conceivably in the future, the deeplife.com and the movement it represents could have some other voices on there as well. Maybe another show on there or other types of video series. So anyways, that is the deeplife.com is the home for the podcast. That's where you're going to find pages for every episode. That's where you can watch videos without

having to see YouTube recommendations. Yeah. That looks good. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm in a hat tip. Jesse kind of is the mastermind behind keeping it humming. But it seems like it's working great. Like we have all the episodes are in here now or something like this. We have a pretty big archive.

We might in the future add transcripts, start adding transcripts to pages as we go forward as well. We haven't done that yet, but when we do, that's where to live. Each episode has its own page. We've got to start producing more video though. Yeah. I like video. I get suspicious about YouTube sometimes.

So it's nice to have a place people can go to watch those videos if they don't want to actually be. in the YouTube universe. Yep. Though we're always happy to have you at YouTube, YouTube.com slash Kandaport Media. That is the YouTube page where all these videos of these episodes and our clips are housed. All right. So you may have noticed, or you may notice, if I drag a little bit in today's episode,

I was sick this week. You know, Jesse knows this because we actually had to reschedule this taping because I was too sick to do it on the original time that we were going to record. But being sick, and this is why I wanted to bring this up at the top of the show, the day when I was the sickest, which was on Wednesday of this past week, I had an interesting epiphany. So I was really run down, and it was nauseous, my head hurt. I couldn't read books. I tried. I couldn't concentrate. I was like, I can't follow this.

But I could read the Internet on my phone. And I believe, and this is a precise quantification, I believe I read on that day, and I'm looking up the number here, all of the Internet. And that's the right way of quantifying it. But it stuck with me for a second. My mind was run down. I was sick. I was out of a fraction of my energy. I was still able to do stuff online.

I could read stuff online, but I couldn't read books. And it occurred to me, there's something different going on in book reading. something much more demanding than when I'm scrolling on my phone. And this is honestly what I was doing in the comment section on the talk gnats.com web blog, which has the best online discussion community on the internet for the Washington Nationals baseball team. Those are interesting guys. I could read that. I could read Mark Zuckerman's articles on Masson about, you know, what was going on with Josiah Gray's delivery.

couldn't read even relatively straightforward books. So then I came across it. This was on my mind. I'm starting to get a little bit better. Fortuitously, one of you, my listeners, sent to my interesting account, Newport.com, address, an article that got right to the heart of this. And I'm going to bring this up on the screen. So if you're watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, this is episode 238,

or if you're watching at the deeplife.com. This article I have here up on the screen is called Success and Circuit Lies. how do we cultivate deep reading processes in a digital age? It's from February. And it's written by Marianne Wolfe. Marianne Wolfe used to be at Tufts. Now she's moved to a NeuCner at UCLA. She's an expert on the neuroscience of reading.

In particular, she's done a lot of breakthrough research on dyslexia. What actually happens in the brain with dyslexia, she wrote a great public-facing book called Proust and a squid, which I really recommend. This article had in it a lot of great insights. about why reading is a special or exceptional activity for human beings, why it does something for us that other types of consumption in media doesn't and why we should be worried about losing it and be eager to fight to get more of it.

These points were all embedded in this article. So what I want to do today, the deep question I want to dive into today, based on this article as a starting point, it's going to be why is it important to read books. So let's look at some quotes from this article. There's a lot of different things going on here. I've pulled some quotes out of here, not in their order that they appeared,

but in the order that I think they're important to our discussion. So let me grab the first quote I want to start with here. All right, here is Marianne. And again, I have this on the screen. If you're at YouTube.com plus Californiaport Media, this is episode 238. All right. So let's start with this quote. No human was born to read. Literacy requires a new plastic brain circuit. Plasticity allows the circuit to adapt to any writing system and any medium that catches that circuits reflecting mediums characteristics, whatever they are.

So we'll start with this point. It's a big point that was made in Proust and the squid. Humans aren't meant to read. It's a highly unnatural activity. we hijack significant portions of our brain that were originally evolved to do other things, and we retrained them to do this reading, this reading activity that humans invented. It's a cultural innovation that's relatively recent in the history of our species. But what Marianne is saying here is we're reshaping our brain to this new activity. So the specifics of this activity matter. So what we're reading, how we're reading it, what format we're reading in, actually can have an impact on how the brain is shaped.

All right. Second quote I want to read here. This is now about, let's dive into how different mediums can affect how our brain is shaped around reading. The medium of print advantages slower, more attention, and time requiring processes. The digital medium, by contrast, advantages fast processes and multitasking, both well-suited for skimming information's daily bombardments. Marianne has a little interesting piece here where she says,

stop for a moment and think about that sentence you just read. Did you really read the whole sentence? Or did you skim and bounce around some words? Because as she goes on to clarify, that's really how we engage with words on screens and web browsers on social media, etc. We skim, we jump around. There's things called Z patterns and F patterns.

We'll read the. first line to middle section. Our eyes jump around. We feel like we're going fast, but we're missing a lot of information. So different types of reading, digital versus physical, requires different types of processes. So does this matter? Well, let's see. Here's what Marianne says.

To skim to inform, as we do when we read on digital, is the new norm for reading. What goes missing, however, are deep reading processes. which require a quality of attention increasingly at risk in a culture and on a medium in which constant distraction bifurcates our attention. These processes include connecting background knowledge new information, making analogies, drawing inferences, examining truth value, passing over into the perspectives of other, expanding our empathy and knowledge, and integration and critical analysis. Here is the key quote about summarizing all these things we get from reading a physical book,

deep reading is our species bridge to insight and novel thought. All right? So let's think about what they're saying, what Marianne is saying here. We have to reshape our brain to read. If we're reading on a screen, we tend to do what she calls skim to inform.

We jump around and see ideas, try to get the gist of what's going on. When we instead read on a physical page, we instead are prioritizing processes that give us all of these all of these advanced human cognition behaviors as we get the analogies, inferences, truth, value, passing over perspective,

empathetic, putting ourselves into the shoes of others, integration, critical analysis, the things that she describes as our bridge to insight and novel thought. As Marianne Wolfe goes on to summarize those traits we get from physical books but not digital, To deploy these interactive processes requires nearly automatic decoding skills and purposeful attention that moves, as William James once put it, from flight to purchase for thought.

Imperceptible pauses and reading can lead to lightning speed leaps in our thoughts furthest reaches. By contrast, when we skim, we literally physiologically don't have time to think or feel. So this is a big idea that's being made here. Slowly reading full sentences one after a time as we do when we look at a physical page is supporting and kicking off all of these incredibly advanced deep thinking processes that are at the key of what makes humans human. And it's not just being able to think clear, it's also being able to be more empathetic, it's being able to integrate the ideas you're seeing into other ideas.

What she's emphasizing here is just the ability to pull. pause and just think for a moment about that sentence before you move on to the next, allows you to integrate it successfully into existing structures of thought, therefore growing a much more sophisticated understanding of the world. All of this comes from the pace of reading, the style of reading that happens on physical pages. On a screen, on a phone, on an iPad, we don't get that. We're skimming around, and we literally physiologically don't have time to think or feel. So we're not able to integrate the thoughts we're reading.

we're not able to examine them successfully for truth value or understand how they fit in or challenge existing schemas. We do not have the physiological or psychological space for empathy for the other people. So what we look for is arousal. Hey, this makes me mad. This makes me laugh. This makes me, you know, excited about something. This makes me, you know, scared. Emotional kind of captures our attention.

And we look for keywords about, do I like this person or not? Is this on my team? Do I agree with this idea? not. It's a primitive engagement with information. Does this affect other types of thinking? So if we spend most of our time reading in a digital screen instead of reading on a physical screen, will that impact a way we think not just when we're engaging with text, but when we're trying to do other type of thinking and other aspects of our life? Here the article provides evidence that yes, the answer there is yes. Mary Ann points towards a recent study that was

published in JAMA Pediatrics by a group of researchers from Singapore, McGill, and Harvard. It looked at over 500 young children. What they found is increased screen time at a young age, was associated with weaker development of the brain regions responsible for the executive function skills that cover attention, impulse, inhibition, and some aspects of memory. So they're not getting the cognitive training, that book reading, that book reading, in physical books gives you. And without the training, you're not developing those skills.

So it's not just the act of reading itself while you're reading allows you to do this deeper thinking. It's cognitive strength training. It's making those parts of your brain's able to do that type of thinking better in the future when you're doing other cognitive activities. Now, is this just for young kids? Well, no. Marianne goes on to say this same sentence, she's referencing a sentence that summarized what I just

said, could as easily describe the experience of older children and indeed adults. So, to me, these are important points. Reading a physical book in a slow deliberative and careful manner. Sharpenes a type of innovative, empathetic, creative, and critical thinking that is otherwise hard for humans to access. It requires us to literally rewire our brain to do that type of thinking, and without a concerted effort, we will not develop those skills. If we avoid the slow and deliberate reading of actual physical books, if we mainly consume

information on screens, constantly keeping up with the news on Twitter, looking at what's going on on Instagram, jumping around highly engaging websites or following links on social media, even very highly educated people will do this and convince themselves, I'm really up on things. I know what's going on. I'm jumping back and forth between these substack quotes that I saw quoted in other tweets. You feel like you're really engaged, but you're not doing the type of reading that supports innovative, empathetic, creative, and critical thinking. So what happens is the sophistication with which you understand and later make sense of information is decreased.

And your ability to apply sophisticated thinking in other contexts is also atrophied. avoiding books is like being in ancient Sparta and avoiding doing any physical training. You're going to be bad at the main activity that your civilization prioritizes. For the Spartans, it was physical war. For us as cognition, you're making yourself much worse at that if you avoid physical books. Now, if we think about this even more literally, and we go with this idea that Wolf pushes, that training our brain to do this type of innovative and empathetic and creative and critical thinking is something that's unnatural. We have to hijack huge portions of our brain and doing this very difficult unnatural activity that is sitting there and holding a codex and trying to decode the sentences that we have to do something incredibly unnatural again and again to train our brains to be this higher order of human.

If we're not doing that, if we're substituting that time with screens, we are in a literal sense evolving our brain backwards towards our preliterate tribal selves. We're going backwards to the type of brains we had before the advent of literacy and the impact that had on the plastic formation of how our brain actually functions. I spent all day last Wednesday sick on the internet. And here was my conclusion, it's a terrible place. Seriously, there's no empathy. The thinking is simplistic. There is a automatic knee-jerk meanness to any perceived outsiders.

In other words, if you're bouncing around Twitter and social media and substack fights going back and forth, it's a digital Paleolithic tribe. It's exactly what Wolf would predict. If you don't do this effort that makes us more than what we used to be, we're going to go right back to what we used to be. And when I see Twitter today or what 10 years ago would have been Tumblr fighting with 4chan and before that, you know, who knows, what I see there is the human brain going backwards. It's going back to where it's comfortable. Where's my tribe? How does this make me feel?

Who's the bad guy? I want to feel something big right now. And when we do that, we get away from what characterizes and distinguishes humans, the modern human from any other animal or beast that's ever come before. You know, Aristotle identified in the Nikomachian ethics, concentrated deep thought, the ability to sit here and manipulate ideas just within our head as the essence of what it means to be human,

what separates humans, our teleological endpoint. So to voluntarily move backwards from that is something that we should be cautious of. All right, so I'm being pretty philosophical here. Let's get more concrete. What is my recommendation for, you know, my listeners here to the show?

I think we need to think about a serious reading habit as an exceptional activity, one that you need to isolate and support and really prioritize in your life, no matter what else you think is important in your personal definition of a deep life. I'm increasingly convinced the serious reading of good books needs to be in there. So I have seven suggestions I want to give. seven suggestions about integrating real reading into your life. Number one, always be reading something challenging. I don't care if it's fiction or nonfiction, but something that's challenging. Ideas you have to grapple with characters whose psychological reality is difficult or pushes you into new psychological or emotional places like in fiction, but challenging. Number two, read real books, not on a phone, not on an iPad.

Kindle, I think, is okay. We're going to get into this later with a question later in the program. We have a good collection of questions coming up. But for now, I'll just say, Kindle's okay. Physical books are okay. Don't read on your phone. Don't read on your iPad. Wolf goes into this in this article.

It's where the other distractions are. And you're going to read in those old ways if you're trying to read on those same devices. You're going to read in the skim style. Number three, read when possible and awesome. awe-inspiring locations. I don't like this mindset that reading is a take-your-cad-liver oil type of grin and Barrett,

ice bath type self-flagellation behavior. Make it awesome. It's sunny out. I'm going to go to a park and sit on a bench or hike into the woods for 20 minutes and bring a book by, you know, Thoreau, read at a coffee shop in the morning, or as I would occasionally do

when I lived in Beacon Hill for a while when I was at MIT, go to a pub. That's it. The British are great at this. Americans are terrible at this. The art of being a grad student that has a book that's a little bit too hard, but you have a heffawise in a back corner of a pub.

It's great. It opens up. Great. I'm excited to read. This feels like the right place to be doing it. Take your time. It's number four. Take your time when you read.

Go slow. Seek to understand. If you're reading a complicated book, use secondary sources to push yourself. So read books about the book you're reading. It will give you things to look forward to push your understanding, and you'll come back to the book and be able to come at it more sophisticated. Again, I'm not a big believer of just immerse yourself in a complicated thing and you will just grow. No, don't just grab Ulysses. Read a book about Ulysses.

So you have some understanding of what was going on with modernist English literature in this point. Why is this so important? What are you looking for? Number five, the quantity of books finished in the reading life is less important than the time spent. actually reading. So reading regularly, slowly and deliberately is what matters. The quantity of books that translates to will depend on two things. One, happenstance, the length of the books you happen to be reading.

And two, just has your skill increases. As you get better at reading, you might finish books faster. Six, keep notes. Keep notes when you are tackling an idea that's important, maybe you've read multiple books on it. start a document somewhere keep notes this helps you practice puts you in the mindset of I'm not just reading the sentences

I want to actually try to extract information from these sentences you're going to slow down you're going to allow those purchase for thought that William James talked about that pause in between that allows you to say hmm what was said here reminds me of what was said there and it changes the way

I think about what I wrote the other day that's where real interesting synthesis happens and finally to support all of this reading when it comes to your life with screens, especially phones and iPads, try to reduce the use of screens

as a default response to boredom. That should be a plan thing. It's okay if you say, tonight I'm going to watch a show that I'm going to stream. Or there was a baseball game today and at breakfast, I am going to check on this site,

that site, and this site to get the analysis of what happened there. That's perfectly fine. What you want to avoid is when I'm bored, whip this out, hey, TikTok algorithm or Twitter social dynamic, show me some stuff that makes me feel big.

That you want to avoid. You want your brain to not crave that so much. You want your brain to be more comfortable with not having the big feelings at all moments so that when it comes time to do deep reading, it doesn't complain. All right, so that's my advice. So here's my summary here. The reading life is a deep life. The screen life.

The screen filled life can be downright, primitive. which one do you want? It's all about books, Jesse. So I like that deep dive because, as you know, we like to do one theme on the show each week. And so we have five questions coming up and they're all about reading. Yeah. So I'm excited about it. I love reading questions. Yeah, I like it too. It's a popular topic too. A lot of people watch those types of videos.

They're always interested in the books you read each month. Yeah, so we got five good reading questions that I want to dive into from you, my listeners. Before I do, I want to briefly first mention a, uh, one of our favorite sponsors of the show, and that is our friends over at Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkist before. The Blinkist app allows you to understand the big ideas from over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcast in just 15 minutes.

You know, I'm realizing, Jesse, that's a little bit ambiguous as worded. One potential reading of that is the Blinkist app will allow you to digest 5,000 books worth of ideas in 15 minutes. See, I think that's too much of a summary. But that's not what it means. What it means is you can select from over 5,500 books,

and for any one of those books, get a 15-minute summary that you can either read or listen to while you do something else. Those summaries are called Blinks. If you want to adopt a reading life, like we just discussed, there is no better sidekick than blinkus because here's what it allows you to do. triage potential books to let into your life. You say, I'm interested in this topic. Here's a few books on it.

Which one should I buy? You listen to or read the blinks on all three of them. You get the big ideas. And quickly, you can kind of hone in. This one seems like it's a blog post. It's expanded. Oh, this one seems serious. That's the one I'm going to buy.

That's the one I'm going to read. So if you're a serious reader, Blinkist should be your sidekick. They also have this new feature called Blinkist Connect. in which you get two accounts for the price of one. So you sign up for one, and you can gift an account to a friend. Jesse, you and I both use Blinkist.

You have volunteered for me to actually bring up, allow me to bring up your Blinkist app on the screen here. Yeah. Let's look at this real quick. Let me just jump over to it. So for those who are watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, I've logged into the Blinkist app here.

The reason why I wanted to do this was just to show you one other thing, which I like about Blinkas is they have these things called collections. So it will also help you discover new books. So I'm looking at some collections on the screen here. Here's one. Friend of the show, friend of mine, Adam Grant, Adam Grant's book recommendations.

So I'm going to click on that. And what you get here is a collection of 14 books that Adam Grant is recommending. So you have like From Strength the Strength by Arthur Brooks, parenting by Gene Olin Wing and so on. obviously this is a nonsense list because none of my books are in it. But the point is you can also have books recommended. And so there's 14 books in this list. Click on any one of these things.

Get the 15-minute summary to see if you want to buy it. I'm telling you, if the reading life is something that you think is important and you really should, Blinkist is a great sidekick to have a long to ride. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven day free trial, you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com slash deep. Remember now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account.

You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. I also want to mention our sponsor ExpressVPN. In many prior ad reads, I've explained why you need a VPN so that your internet provider or people who are sniffing your packets as they move through the air from your device to a Wi-Fi access point, can't tell who you are talking to on the internet with a VPN. You have a secure connection to a VPN server that talks to the sites and services on your behalf. There's a kind of fun extra bonus reason why you might want a VPN like ExpressVPN is that if you choose to connect to a VPN server in another country,

the websites or services you talk to think you are in that country. I was messing around with this recently, for example. I watched the office by logging into an ExpressVPN server in the UK and then log it into my Netflix account because, Netflix, UK, has the rights to the office, whereas Netflix in the U.S. does not. It's on Peacock. So you could fill that in for all sorts of other regionalized shows, thinking about, you know, the show Vikings on Canadian Netflix, for example, or Korean dramas.

Go to a Korean server connecting the Netflix. You can see suddenly Korean dramas that you want to normally see in the U.S. So that's a cool bonus feature you get in addition to the security and the protection and the privacy is like, hey, you can put yourself into different countries. Actually, the way I use that most often, I would say is when I'm traveling overseas and I'm homesick and I want American Netflix, I just want to watch a show.

I'm in a hotel room somewhere in Berlin. Connect to a VPN server in the U.S., go on Netflix, and Netflix thinks you're back in the good old US of A. So VPNs are vital. They also let you do fun things like that. ExpressVPN is the one I use because I think it has the most servers. I love the available bandwidth.

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ExpressVPN.com slash deep to learn more. All right, Jesse, we got now five questions from our listeners, all related to our central deep question about. why we should read more books. These are all book-related questions. Who is first? All right. First question is from bookish. I've thought about buying used physical copies of all the books I've read on Kindle that I found worthwhile, but it seems wasteful. Would this be crazy? The TLDR here is no. And before I elaborate on that, let me briefly detour to address the topic I put a pin in earlier, which is Kindle used to read.

Is that the same as reading physical books when it comes to the advantage talked about by Marion Wolfe? I would say almost completely yes. It's pretty close. And the big issue, this is what Wolf points out, the big issue with reading on a phone or an iPad is it's the same screen we do all this other distracting behavior on, and that's what pushes us into these skim patterns. Kindle, we only use to read books.

and so it does not seem, at least anecdotally, to induce that same skimming mindset. I mean, the Kindle is not really even a screen in the traditional sense of, let's say, an iPad or a phone where you actually have different color lights being projected from these very small pixels that form an image. That's not exactly... It's not how a Kindle works.

A Kindle is actually electromechanical. It uses a technology called E-Inc. And all it is is a grid of very small disks laid out like a grid. One side is essentially white, the other side is essentially black. And there is a little wires. Think about it like there's wires

to every little one of those things. And if you put a little electrical pulse to one of the disc, it flips over. So what's happening with the Kindles when you switch your page, there's a pulse to all these disks which flips them over into a pattern and now what you're physically looking at,

these physical discs, white on one side, black on the others, have all been flipped in a way that what it shows you is to page with your text. So there's no light behind it. It's not shining pixels at you. It's actually physically a pattern of white and black physical discs. That's why you shine a booklight on it like anything else.

It's like you're reading paper. It really is like you're reading paper. Electricity is only used to flip those. It's not steady state supported by electricity. That's a little bit in the weeds, but I think it helps explain why the experience are reading a Kindle really can be like reading a physical book in a way that reading on your iPhone is not. All right, let's go back to bookish's question.

Is it crazy that if you like have a library book in your Kindle and you love it, that you go and buy a copy of it? No. I don't even think it needs to be a used copy. Collect books that are important to you or you think are important. I think that makes a lot of sense. What better thing to collect? You have in a single codex that instilled wisdom that might have come from years of effort and it had a real impact.

This very narrow thing that cost you $22 or $18 on Amazon has the ability to permanently rewire your cognitive configuration, change the way you understand the world and live your life. I mean, what's more powerful than that? And you get it for $18. Yes, celebrate these things if they've made a big difference in your life. Buy a copy of a book that you think is really good. Have a library in that way.

you're also supporting the construction of this art. You're supporting writers who put all these efforts into it. I'm not one of these people that thinks we should minimize our books or that having books is somehow fetishistic. I mean, I think it is one of the most important artifacts for the reasons we talked about in the deep dive that began the show. They alone among all sorts of different things human produced are responsible for literally evolving the human brain, allowing us to move to a higher, more sophisticated, creative, empathetic state of being, I think that's something that we can celebrate. So yeah, buy the books, bookish. Buy the books you like. All right. What have got next, Jesse?

All right. Next question is from Patrick. I'm a theology grad student. I just signed my first nonfiction book contract. I've been using your paper research database method, but I'm worried it won't be flexible enough for a full book. What do you use to track notes for your books? Well, Patrick, congratulations on the contract. that's a call, callback to early calnewport.com, the, what do you call it,

the paper research database method. I remember writing this. It was an article for my blog years ago. And if memory serves, I had read an article or watched documentary about how the Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction writer Taylor Branch collected and organized the notes

for his epic three-part biography of March Luther King. And he used a paper research database. And again, this is me pulling back pretty deeply into my memory banks. I did not refresh my memory of this article before the show. I believe he used a Microsoft Access database. So that's how old this was. And what he did is he immersed himself in essentially every source about King's life. And when I say every source about King's life, I don't mean he read a lot of books about King. He did more than that. I don't just mean he went and read important academic papers written about King. He did more than that.

I don't mean that he went and read every newspaper article that mentioned King during King's life. He did do that, but he did more than that. He would actually go and say, King was in this town on this day. Let me see what's in the newspaper in that town in that day. Just so I can see what's going on. What was it like in Selma in 1954? on Tuesday, April 17, right? And so to organize all these notes,

he put everything into a database that was all keyed by date. Everything had a date, and then he would summarize what's going on. He would either transcribe relevant notes and what he observed from it. And he just spent years and years doing this. And the reason why he did

is that when it came time to write his biographies, he could say he had a timeline, okay, I'm at the point now where I'm talking about what happened in the summer of 1951, he could essentially have his database spit out everything basically at all relevant to King in those three months in chronological order. And then he could immerse himself in all of that and from that be able to pull out a very nuanced,

contextualized narrative about what King was doing, not just King's specific actions, but what was happening in the country at this time, what was happening around King. So it was a really cool method. Patrick, I think that is probably too inflexible for your book unless you're writing historical nonfiction and you're going to spend a lot of years on it. But I can tell you what I do because I've evolved my paper note-taking systems over the books I've written. I've published seven. I've now in the middle of book number eight.

I finished the first manuscript doing edits right now. So I've done a lot of books. I have to write my books much faster than Taylor Branch. I might have five months to put out one of my books because I have to fit this between other things like being a professor, etc. right? And so in my systems, I can say what I tend to prioritize is speed and reducing friction. I want to be able to capture as much relevant information as possible and get to that relevant information as quickly as possible while minimizing obstacles. The lower friction I have in collecting, organizing, and reviewing notes, the more notes I can take and the more I can

pull from when I'm trying to actually pull together my ideas. So I can tell you for my most recent book, the book I'm writing now on slow productivity, I have moved to a system in which everything, with one key exception I'm about to tell you, everything goes into Scrivener. So I write my books in Scrivener, but I also keep all of my research notes in Scrivener. I have a bunch of folders and documents within those folders. I have PDFs I've dragged in there. I have a bunch of websites. Typically what I like to do is put the URL of the webpage and then copy all the text and

put that in the Scrivener, too. So I don't have to go to the website again, all the information. is right there. I just have random observations of my own. It's all organized in folders, and the folders have subfolders, and those subfolders have subfolders, because it's incredibly easy to just throw stuff in there. And that's where I write. So all the information is already where I write. I write in Scrivener. So everything I might need for a chapter when it comes time to write that chapter, I've just been throwing random stuff in the folders for all sorts of chapters for months. And when it comes time to write a particular chapter,

I can just go to the folders relevant to that topic and review everything I have there. It's all right there. It's like Taylor Brandt saying what's everything that anyone ever wrote about King in the summer of 1954, but in this case about slow productivity. And I have all my notes. And then if I'm working on a chapter, I'll start with that, build an outline, say I need more information here, I need a better story here, I need to think more about that here, and then I'll go get more research to throw it all in the scrivener. So I just take the notes and put them directly where they need to be when I'm actually going to write. I don't want there to be intermediary, I don't want those notes going into other note-taking systems

or not been taken from those systems and pulling back into my book. And that's because I write fast. And I think the less friction I have, the more notes I'll be able to take, the deeper my writing will actually be able to be. All right, so that's what I do it. Other systems could work too.

But again, I don't think that Taylor Branch method is relevant unless you're Robert Caro or Taylor Branch or Robert Gross, you know, someone who's writing a book or they just spent the last decade on. All right. in the weed, Jesse, I like this. Are you impressed that I remembered that paper research database? Yeah.

I think I got that right. I almost want to look it up now. I don't know how old that is. I think I got that right. I remember writing that article. So good for Patrick for he's an old timer. That's good. It's been around for a while.

All right. What do we got next? All right. Next question is from Sambit. I have a strange relationship with books. I buy a lot of them, but I can't read them. After the first 10 to 12 pages, I feel bored and I stop reading. I can, however, listen to a long podcast with full attention.

How do I become a reader? Well, Sam, but the key thing is you have an ambition to become a reader. So let's give that a checkmark. The second thing I want to point out here is you have inadvertently provided us, I think, a really good case study of one of the big ideas from the deep dive earlier in this episode. You can listen to long podcasts, no problem. But you're having trouble with books. That just emphasizes in my mind the exceptional nature of book reading when it comes to all cognitive consumption activities.

I mean, podcasts are complicated. It's not like you can't pay attention to something. You're able to focus on a podcast. You're able to listen to me and what I'm saying. So it just goes to show you that there is a unique, complicated, but ultimately essential cognitive dance that happens when you're grappling with sentences written on the physical printed page. So it's a good case study that you're providing us here. All right. So what you need to do is train. I don't want you to despair. You're not, there's no such thing as I'm not a reader. I am a reader. There is, I have trained to read or I have it. And if you haven't, how do you fix that? You do the training. It's just like I wouldn't say I'm not a runner because I just tried to run a 5K, having never jogged in my life, and then it go very well. I would say, I am not in shape to run a 5K. But I'm sure if I trained within a few months, I could run these on a regular basis.

So I'm going to give you a training regime, Samib, that I'm going to suggest about how you become a better reader. All right, so we're going to start with books that you are excited to read. So we want to take out of the equation early on the boredom factor or the comfort with intellectual discomfort.

So this could be genre fiction. That's really exciting. You might even want to start with, you know, short stories. I recently read Ted Chang's, original short story collection of sci-fi short stories. It was excellent, right? But they're 20 pages each. They're really gripping. You know, whatever. So it could be genre fiction or it could be nonfiction, pragmatic nonfiction, like the type of books I write. Like, yeah, I want to read digital

minimalism because I'm really motivated to spend less time on my phone. And so you're motivated. I'll read atomic habits or memoirs. I'll read, you know, Goggins' memoir because I want to get fired up or get some discipline. So start with books. You're excited to read. Forget about what they are right now. It's just about time on page. two, find a cool reading location or ritual I talked about in the deep dive. It's going to help you here. Going to the coffee shop, 20 minutes while I finish this one cup of coffee. I'm going to the pub, bringing the book with me.

If you go to a pub, it has to be an English-style pub, and you need to wear a scarf or an ascot. You got to use your accent. And you got to use that. So you've got to come in with an ascot, preferably a beret. If you're going to wear a shirt, it should be striped like a French sailor. And you need to say, good day, Marquip, a pint of ale while I peruse my book by David Gagins. You have to talk like that. And they're like, look, this is like a member of the lost generation.

Essentially, essentially we have Steinbeck here. All right. Then I'm going to say, so that's the setup. scheduled interval training. Five days a week you're going to read 10 minutes at a time. Do that for at least two weeks, then up into 15 minutes. Do that for at least two weeks, up at the 20 minutes. You're giving your mind support.

I'm excited about the book. I have an awesome accent in a bar somewhere. Everyone just thinks I'm awesome. You're fighting the secretly beautiful but kind of nerdish women because they have the glasses on. When you take off the glasses are actually models that are just so attracted to the fact that you're clearly like a serious intellectual because you're asking out and you're reading in the pub. You're fighting off women as you're trying to read.

So you've given yourself, you've set it all up, and now you're doing a very reasonable amount of time, 10 minutes at a time. You do it for two weeks. You can go up to 15 minutes. You're pushing your mind's comfort actually reading beyond a few pages. And then once you get to 40 minutes, stop upping your time. Fix that as the time you're going to read four to five days a week. And what you're going to start upping is the complexity of your books.

So you get really comfortable. at reading most days for 40 minutes, and then you start upping the complexity, slightly harder books, slightly more challenging books, and you sort of push yourself up the ladder. It may be a year or two of this. You can get to the point where you're ready to actually tackle classic books, really complicated books, books that require secondary sources. I'm going to read the secondary source first, then I'm going to read the book. I'm telling you, one year, Sam bit, you're going to be a reader.

He's got to train. Now, why you have to do more training than other people is other people just inadvertently or through whatever circumstance or through inclination or how they were raised just got more of this training already. So they've already done the training. They grew up with a family of athletes. They ran every day. Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad in Austria made him do push-ups before he could get a meal. He had an advantage. By the time he got to the military and started bodybuilding, he was around it.

Okay, you didn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad making you do push-ups in the cognitive realm. so you got a little more training to do. It'll take you a year. You'll catch up. Actually, you don't want Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad. Actually, his autobiography is good. Fantastic. I listened to it, but I love that.

It's such a great autobiography. But his dad was from a generation of Austrian men who post-World War II were just depressed alcoholics. Yeah. Just trying to grapple with, you know, it's not like he was a member of the Nazi party or something, but they were all sort of complicit in what was going on. And it just was so, there's just a destroyed generation of men. So advantage of Ronald Schwarzenegger,

extra push-ups, disadvantaged, depressed alcoholic sort of Nazi collaborator dad. So I would say you could probably just figure out a push-up routine on your own. All right, that's kind of going far as far afraid. It is a really cool biography. You know what I like about that book is I love his, the fact that Schwarzenegger comes over here in weightlifting.

and basically becomes a millionaire before he really gets in the movies by just he builds he does these businesses other people don't want to do like brick lane and stuff like this yeah and invest money in real estate in uh not Santa Monica where was he investing in a beach I think yeah yeah investing in real estate by the beach just doing a hard for a mail order to business yeah he like built up a fortune and then was like oh I'm going to get in the movies that um so your answer to sambit reminded me a couple of things about location. I went to the Library of Congress a couple weeks ago my friend gave me a tour and now was like pretty inspiring. Yeah. I have,

it's expired. I told Jesse I have a researcher card there just because I like to go and work. You know where I would work when I go to the Library of Congress was not the big room with the spot like the desks that are all in a circle but in the like the arts

and industry library it's pretty cool because it has these like 1920s art deco like light fixtures and it's a cool place. Yeah. I told you. Jesse that I got to find a way to write a book at some point soon that requires me to access to collection at the Library of Congress just so I can spend days in that massive reading

room and have people like bring me. Because if you're an academic, you can get a researcher card and they'll just have these awesome collection. And it takes them a couple hours, but you can basically get any book you want and they'll bring them all to you in a cart to your desk and you can work on it all day. And so I need a reason to do that. The other thing I do, thanks to you, is I put on my weekly plan every week just some of the stuff I want to get through because I get a lot of magazines and I have different books. You put reading on your weekly plan. Yeah. Specific though.

And then I'll like, if I have like a pile of New Yorkers, I'll just like get through a couple of them. So you might put like Thursday afternoon. I'm going to like do some New Yorker reading. Yeah. Yeah. So I put like what I want on and then when I do my daily plan, I just. put it in there. I'm going to read this. That's nice. So you have a cue of what you want to read that week.

Yeah. When you're doing daily plans. Otherwise, I couldn't keep track of it and I'd forget about certain things. So now I just kind of... I like that strategy. So it's like, here's my reading cue for the week. And when you're doing a daily plan, you're used to putting aside time for reading, but now you could actually pull something from that cue and say this specifically is what I'm going to read. Yeah, it's been working out. Yeah.

And the other thing that I do, too, is especially after going to library Congress and, you know, looking online and stuff, it's like, he's got to be comfortable knowing that you're never going to read everything. Like, there's so much stuff. And you just get through what you can, just kind of what you talk about and slow. I'm surprised by how often I'm a big library guy. We're a personal library person. and the next question is going to get at this. I'm surprised by how often I'll get a book.

Like I just finished a book last night that I originally bought five years ago. But I kept it in my library. It's like this is a book I want to read. And sometimes you have to wait until you're in the right mood. And it took five years. And I read it and I finished it last night. Yeah.

You know, and I'm surprised by how often that, this is why I love libraries. How often that'll happen. You know, sometimes I'll buy a book. I'm like, I'm not going to read this right. now, but I want to own this, and I think I'm going to read this. I think it's an important thing to have. I get to these things, and it can take me years, but I cycle back to things. All right. Speaking of libraries, we have a good library question. Let's do this next one. All right. Next question is from Quran. I'm becoming more of an avid reader, thanks to Gal. How should I build my library?

All right. Well, I'm a big fan of, as I just talked about libraries, my current library set up just so we can calibrate. So now we're down to we have we have one. one full bookshelf here in the HQ, then in my study at home, the whole room is built in bookshelves. Now, on one half of the room, it's all kids' book. We have a really great collection of kids' books at various readers' age, and then all the other shelves are adult books. And then in our living room, we also have a full wall of built-in bookshelves. So I sort of have, you know, kind of three major libraries.

I'm a big fan of personal libraries. how do you start one from scratch? Well, all right, I have a method. Here is my method. You start with a single bookshelf, and you start filling that bookshelf somewhat haphazardly. You know, you buy books that are interesting. You go to use book sales.

Hey, let me try this. Books you want to read right away. Books you want to get to at some other point. If you live in a town like I do with a lot of little free libraries, hey, this book looks interesting. I'm going to grab it from there. Right? So you're kind of filling this bookshelf with books you've bought,

books you've read. books you might want to read some really good and some are like, I don't know so much about this. Once the book shelf is full, then for a while what you do is the replacement rule. When you get a new book, you say, I have to make room for this on the bookshelf. So let me take off whatever sort of very low on my ranking of books on here. What's a book? This is probably my least favorite book that's on here. This is kind of dumb.

Replace that with the new books. You're replacing sort of worse book with new book. You do this for a while. So now you're kind of cycling through the same bookshelf. That bookshelf's quality on average begins to increase. And after a while, most of this books on these bookshelves are pretty good. I mean, they've survived this calling for a long time. Most of the stuff that was, you know, here's this random book on quilting that I, you know, got at a yard sale and I never really did.

That stuff is gone. And now your bookshelf is pretty good. Then you can buy a second bookshelf. And you can start kind of doing that same process over there. And you do that until you have the number of shelves you think is appropriate for where you live and your interest and how you feel about books. So I'm a big fan of that. Phil, then replace for a while to get the average quality up and wait until a shelf is of high quality before you actually move on to get a new shelf. I mean, there's a whole art to library tending.

And I would say, Jesse, if the personal libraries we've seen or looked at at the show, probably our man, Ryan Holiday. wins. He's got a lot of books. He's got a lot of books. It helps to be, so Ryan and I have the advantages of writers. We get sent a lot of books, which is great. And I buy a lot of books because I feel like it's important for my job. Yeah.

But still, he has a lot of books. I have a lot of books. He has a lot of books. So. They had a bookstore. Yeah. Eventually I had to get a bookstore. Hey, bookstore is supposedly coming up to Coma Park.

Really? Yeah. Are you involved? I don't I don't they're they're new to the town um we're having coffee with them oh he's gonna or he or she is gonna love you yeah it's a family yeah you have kids so I don't know I just was like look I want to I want to meet these people yeah just like give us just give a sustained round of applause and I'm excited about the idea of having you'll be a good customer yeah yeah I'll be there all the time what I'm going to tell them is I'm going to do like three or four days a week multi hour long signings like just usually not going to be people there coming to see me because I'm going to be there something like 15, 20 hours a week. I'm just going to show up a lot randomly and just like have a book. It's going to be like, and this is sad, not sad, but there's one of our favorite museums

is the Air and Space Museum out by Dolis. And it's, I think it's cool that they allow people who have published books about their experience and usually like military aviation come and like, sign books or whatever, but they don't really promote anything. They just have them on a table sort of over by the bar. So they're always just sort of there and I always feel sort of bad about it because as an author you really are empathetic to unpromoted book signings. It's the worst.

It's nothing worse. We've all had it. You're on book tour and like three people show up or whatever. But anyways, I'm going to lean into that. Just unsolicited. That's good news. Yeah. So I hope that works out.

We'll be able to like around the corner from here. Great. All right, libraries. All right, let's do one more question. We've got time. Sounds good. Next question is from Sarah. Would Cal like to comment on this quote from Sam Bankman-Fried?

I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think that if you wrote a book, you effed up and it should not have been a six-paragraph blog post. Well, if you don't know who Sam Bankman-Fried is, look it up. I think this question will make more sense. Sarah, here's my answer. Let's look at the state of my life today and the state of Sam Bankman-Fried's life today, someone who prioritizes the creativity,

innovation, empathy, and critical thinking that is developed by reading and someone who prefers six-paragraph blog post. Where would you rather be? Whose life would you rather have right now? I'll leave it there and rest my case. Have you seen pictures of Sam Binkman-Fried? Recently or? Yeah, I wouldn't look at them for book advice. I wouldn't look at them for fashion advice either. I'm doing a panel in San Francisco later this spring,

and we were talking with some of the other panel members, and we were joking. So is the dress code Sam Binkman-Fried? Because you do these panels with, there's a picture of him doing a panel with former president, Bill Clinton, and he's wearing shorts, cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt. He was like that in the commercials, too. Yeah.

But his parents and professors, right? Yeah, lawyers, a lot professors. So you think you must have read at some point. Yeah. I mean, he's obviously an intelligent person. I mean, went to MIT and everything. I just think his, I don't know, his brain got a little, that brain got shook up somewhere. Something done broke.

I think it's because he didn't read enough. He's a PSA. This is your brain. This is a PSA. This is your brain not on books. And then there's just like a quick montage of Sam Bakeman-Fried. And then they're like, this is your brain on books. And it's me at a table all by myself in the new bookstore in Tacoma Park with an ascot and a striped shirt drinking a beer.

Use your English and your French accent. Mixed together. Yeah. Yeah. Flexing furiously. Because you got them both. Got them both. Well, they're both intellectual people.

All right. Enough of that nonsense. All right. So what I like to do in the third. act of the show is shift away from our main question and talk about some interesting things that readers have sent me. Before we do, let me mention another sponsor that made this show possible. This may be our very first sponsor. I got to go back and confirm that from way back in the pre-Jessey days, but that is our good friends at Grammarly. The feature I have been messing around

with with Grammally that I am most impressed by is Gramerly Premium's Advanced Tone Suggestions. This is why this is so important in a knowledge work world and especially in an increasingly remote knowledge work world where more communication is textual. Emails, chat under the Zoom window, Slack communication. The quality clarity of your writing plays a big difference. Now, I actually think there's an opportunity embedded in this evolution of our office landscape. There's a lot of issues I have with the shift towards everything being textual communication, but there is one opportunity for you, the listener of the show, which means if you get really good at clear textual communication, you get the sudden competitive advantage over everyone else.

You come across as more confident and smarter and more on the ball just because you're writing better. So there's no other time in the history of the world of business where clear communication, clear written communication, is more important. Grammarly Premium, and in particular, Gramerly Premium's advanced tone detector can help you get there faster. So I have a couple examples I want to tell you here, Jesse, of the tone detector in work.

All right. So I have some real sentences here, real corrections from the tone detector. So one thing it can do is help you with confidence in your communication. So here's a real sentence. We may want to consider providing an update. Here's the suggestion from the tone detector for increasing confidence. We should consider providing an update. Seems like a small change, but you come across more confident in that email and that

Slack makes a big difference. All right, here's another thing the advanced tone detector does. Reframe negativity. So here's something you might write. This marking strategy isn't right. Just throw that in a slack message. But that's going to come across as negative. People might feel attacked.

Here's an actual suggested correction from the tone detector for that sentence. The marketing strategy needs to be different. Small change makes a huge difference in the impact on the reader. There's obviously a lot of other things you get with the grammarly product, from even just the basic fixing your broken grammar to these much more advanced tone suggestions and sentence rewrites. But anyway, it's just like having a personal editor who sits there and helps you be a better communicator.

The right tone can move any project forward when you get it just right with Gramerly. So go to Gramerly.com slash tone, T-O-N-E, to download and learn about Gramerly Premium's Advanced Tone Suggestions. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash tone. Let's also talk about our friends at My Body Tudor. If you want to get in better shape, if you want to get healthier, the problem is not information. You know how to do it. The problem is actually accountability.

How do you actually get motivated to continually take that action? This is where My Body Tudor enters a picture. It's a 100% online coaching program. It connects you with a dedicated online coach. They work with you, the specific circumstances of your life, right? Are you, and I'm just being hypothetical here, a 40-year-old male with three kids, 10 or under who are sick all the time and have seven jobs? The workout plan is going to be different than if you are a 22-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger on the bodybuilding circuit in Venice, California, you know, in the 1970. So they build a plan that makes sense.

Here's, let's think about your eating, let's think about your exercising, that makes sense for you. And then, so think magic, you check in every day. You do it in an app, it's real easy. You say, here's what I did, here's what I ate, here's it worked out, here's any questions I have. They give you feedback. And that's where you get the consistency. That's what makes it work. It's like having the dedicated dietitian and trainers that the actors get to train for Marvel superhero movies,

but without having that huge expense of having to pay people to come to your house, because it's all online. Adam and his coaches at My Body Tudor are the best in the world at delivering highly personal accountability and coaching. So if you're serious about getting fit, Adam will give you $50 off your first month if you mention deep questions when you sign up.

So when you sign up, you just mention deep questions and it will give you $50 off. So MyBodytutor, T-U-T-O-R.com, mention deep questions and get $50 off. All right, final segment of the show, something interesting. I usually just talk about one interesting thing that listeners sent me today, Jesse,

I'm going to do three. Going crazy today. Like it. Yeah. Number one, this is visual. Hold on. I'm going to grab something here from the ground. So if you're not watching

at YouTube.com slash calumport media or at the deeplife.com you're missing out here. It's the end of an era, Jesse. I have been made fun of for months now after I revealed on one of our weekly update videos the state of my computer keyboard. Because you may not know this about me, I write a whole bunch.

I had worn away all of the keys on my keyboard from just hitting them too much. Only the like Q and the Z keys actually still remained. All right, here we go, Jesse. Oh, wow. End of an era. Completely clean keys. That comes off real easily, right?

So what it is is just a little silicon thing. Show them the ones that. Yeah, look at that. Yeah. Yeah. So I can actually see the keys. I don't have to touch type all the time. Advantage, and I do like Apple products,

but the new MacBook airs, just the 2018-19 models. The keys were too low. I really care about the tactile feel of keys. I write for a living, and they got too low. Like your keys are a little, on that Dell,

they're a little bit higher. Yeah. That's a much better experience. Adding the silicon cover to my keys gives me an extra little eighth of an inch and you have a little bit more carry on each press. I like it better.

So your next career, is it going to be a Mac or is it going to be? Yeah, I like the Mac ecosystem. But I, this is whoever's in charge of this now, you got to work with riders when you build your keys on the keyboard.

They can't be too low. We got it. We need some spring. You need the fingers to do a little effort and the pound up a little bit. So I'm simulating that with these keys. Gives you momentum. Gives you momentum.

I'm a fast writer when I get, I mean, a fast typers, you might imagine. So I need momentum. All right. So the second thing, is a quote that was sent to me, the interesting at calnewport.com,

email address. This is from a T.I.L. Reddit forum. In a previous episode, readers told me that stands for Today I Learned. So TIL, what TIL means? Is that recursive? Anyways, here was a quote from that forum. Napoleon Bonaparte refused to open his mail for three weeks. By that time, most of the issues raised.

letters had resolved themselves and no longer retired his attention. I like this strategy. Just ignore your email until people have moved on in anger. The only issue is it helps. It's not necessary. But if you can arrange this, it helps for the strategy to be the emperor of Europe. It's a little bit harder if you are not the emperor of Europe to do the strategy.

But still a good one. All right. The third interesting thing I want to talk about is an article. That was sent in from a product management website. Now, this article is, this is a technical. I'm not going to get lost to the technical details. What I care about here is a big picture idea that I think is relevant to slow productivity. So if you're watching this on the screen, you will see the title of this article I have up here right now is called Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity.

focus on this instead. And so if you read this whole article, it's talking about software development. And it says there is an issue in software development to focus on the velocity of features getting completed. How many features do we complete and add to the product this month or this week? And it's this endless hurry-up cycle to push more and more of those features. This article makes the argument that that's not necessarily the way to maximize the value

you produce. So here's a few points. This is actually the summary that the listener sent me along with this article. In software, most new features don't make a positive impact

for users. Because of that, increasing the velocity, that is the number of features you ship per unit of time, can create more waste. If you obsess instead over making a positive impact,

you deliver more value with fewer features. And because existing features, good or bad, slow down the development of new features due to code complexity and the maintenance requirements and supporting them, the positive effect of building fewer but better features compounds as time goes on.

I think there's a cool idea there that is relevant well beyond just software development. Focusing on a smaller number of things that are clearly very important and high impact and doing them very well in many different areas can end up producing more value and therefore more success economically, then just trying to do as many things. This approach, of course, falls out of the three big principles of slow productivity. Do fewer things working at a natural pace obsessing over quality.

So looking at impact over velocity is exactly the type of strategy you might adopt if you are a believer in those three principles. And I can imagine this in so many different areas. I mean, think about academic service. Instead of saying like how many different. different issues can we get through as a faculty during the semester in our faculty meetings. It might be, let's really take our time to figure out what's the biggest thing we could do. Let's do that well and take our time and do it really well.

You know, you're probably going to end up better. You imagine working on client service. Let's try to do this one thing really well, really change that client's business, as opposed to like look at how many things we responded to and got back to him on. I could imagine this impact versus velocity tradeoff happening in a lot of different areas. I love that mindset and so I love this way of thinking so I wanted to highlight that this article is by

Itamar Gillad so good for you smart ideas if your software developer follow the link of the show notes so you can get lost in the weeds here but for everyone else let's just like this idea

Velocci is not always the key to producing more value all right everyone so that's all the time we have for today you can now shut down your podcast and go read a real book. We will be back next week with another episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.

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