Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 25: Student Shutdown Rituals, Optimal Deep-to-Shallow Ratios, and the $20 Million Question | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about shutdown rituals for college students, deep-to-shallow work ratios, and what I would do with $20 million (and why that's the wrong question). I also play some question roulette and give you a peak into my own efforts to live a deep life with my backstage pass segment.I will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Should I learn one hard thing or multiple easy things? [5:21]* Shutdown rituals for college students [6:39]* An optimal deep-to-shallow work ratio [12:56]* Getting better at writing scientific papers [15:05]* Richard Hamming's advice to keep your door pen [16:42]Question Roulette [25:19]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Succeeding with blogging [28:51]* Bullet journals [35:51]* Getting my students to not use their phones in class [39:42]* Working with groups that only communicate on social media [40:44]Backstage Pass [46:08]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Developing personal life philosophies/politics/ethics [50:35]* Small versus big changes for transforming your life [56:43]* What I would do with $20 million [1:03:00]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. 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 where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, it's a beautiful day outside, so naturally, I decided where I needed to be was in my windowless studio here in the Deep Work HQ in downtown Tacoma Park, recording this podcast for you, my loyal listeners. Now, before you feel too bad for me, you should know I was at the pool all morning with my family and we're grilling tonight. So it's not like I am going to miss out on my vitamin D quota for the day, but I did think it was poignant that on such a beautiful day, I am sacrificing to bring you what you need, which is answers to deep questions. Actually, the real reason I bring this up is because some of you listeners have been asking me, how does recording podcast fit into my well-known 530 rule? So long-time readers of mine know that I have this work habit where I say,

I am done with work at 530 on weekdays and no work on weekends. And I work backwards from that. It's a concept I call meta-productivity. You put the boundaries in place first and say, okay, I'm not going to work backwards to figure out what do I have to do to hit these boundaries? And then that pressure can actually lead. you to a lot of tactical concrete productivity innovation. So you're working backwards to hit a concrete goal can unlock a lot more innovation than just trying to pile up productivity habits and see where it gets

you. So my 530 rule, as my readers know, is no work past 530 and not on weekends with three exceptions. So book deadlines, those enable weekend working, academic paper deadline. So I'm a computer They're scientists, which means we publish in peer-reviewed conferences that have specific deadlines once a year. So that also unlocks work outside of my normal hours, especially if the deadline is like in the evening on a weekday or on a weekend. That'll break the 530 rule. But the third notable long-term exception I have to the 530 rule has always been blog post

writing. I would famously write my weekly blog post in my big leather chair. usually in the evening, usually after my kids were in bed. Sometimes I'd put a record on. Sometimes I would have a drink. And of course, when I say famously here, I mean there's something like 17 people who know about it. So famous on the scale of nobody knowing on it.

If no one knowing about it is not famous, then I guess we can say it's famous. But that's my 530 rule. My readers know about it. What about podcast recording? I tend to do the habit tune up mini episode. I record those either Wednesday or Thursday morning. I do those during work hours.

For this one, though, for the main episode, I've decided to treat it like blog post. It's something that can exist outside of the 530 rule. And so about half the time I do record this over the weekend like I'm doing now, the other half of the time I will do it on Monday morning. So there you go. The 530 rule has a little bit more flex in it, but otherwise remains more or less unbroken,

even during these busy times. As always, I want to thank those of you who subscribe to the podcast, those who have been reviewing it. It really has been helping. I want to continue with the segment I started recently where I actually pick out a recent podcast review to read out loud here on the show. I call it the review of the week.

And so let's do that real quick. All right, so this week's review of the week comes from Lennon Lover with two R's. I'm guessing this is not there. real name, but you know, I could be wrong here. Lennon Lover wrote this review just the other day. Cal's insight and perspective has been life-changing for me. I've changed my approach to social media thanks to reading digital minimalism. I feel a welcome shift to my relationships to others and my relationship to focus slash work. I am no longer wasting hours on Instagram and I'm back to reading multiple books. Cal is awesome. Thank you. Sincerely Mark Zuckerberg. All right. I added the

Zuckerberg thing to the end, but linen lover, I appreciate the review, very kind words, and thank you for helping to get others into this weird idiosyncratic world of depth that we celebrate here on the Deep Questions podcast. We have a really great show ahead of us. In addition to our typically fantastic questions, we'll be playing some question roulette and do another entry in the backstage past segment where I let you in on some of the activity is going on in my own attempts to live a deep life. If you want to submit your own questions for the Deep Question podcast, sign up for my mailing

list at calnewport.com. That is where I send out my semi-regular surveys to solicit these queries. All right, that is enough intro. Let's get started, as always, with some work questions. Ferris asks, should I spend my time learning one hard thing or multiple easy things, when doing deliberate practice. Well, Ferris, if it's easy, you're not doing deliberate practice. You're performing. This is the key distinction.

When you're doing an activity that you can already easily do, you are not actually getting better because there is no stretch. There is no sense of you being pulled past where you're comfortable. And when you don't have stretch, you don't have improvement. Repetition of what we know how to do well does not, after a while, make us better at that activity. So I think by definition, if you want to do deliberate practice, what you're doing should be hard.

It should be a strain. It should not be that fun. You should not fall into a flow state. You should be forcing yourself to concentrate, pushing yourself past where you're comfortable, into that realm where you can just barely do it or just barely cannot do it. That is where the stretch is happening. That is where the skill will build. So Ferris, I would connect a word hard with deliberate practice when I have that in your mind. Now, you don't always need to be practicing.

There's a big role for performing. There's a big role for flow states in deep work. If you want to get better at things, think about that activity as being necessarily hard. Okay, Prangel asks, how do you successfully apply your advice of a daily cutoff time when you're in college? So this is like a good callback to the 530 rule that I mentioned in the intro to today's episode where I don't work past 530. I think Prangel's question here is a good one. If you're a college student, having a cutoff time like that, a set time at which you do your shutdown and that's it is a little bit more difficult.

And this has to do with the reality of the college student schedule, which of course is different than say the normal knowledge work work schedule where you go to an office, there's standard work hours, it's nine to five. When that's over, there's a natural point to have a cutoff. In college, you have various classes throughout the days. there's clubs to go to, maybe you're involved with athletics, maybe some of your classes are later. A good amount of the core academic work at college

sometimes happens at night. So the idea of having a set time, I don't work past X, I agree, Prangel, is not a great fit necessarily for college. So what should you do in terms of controlling your time like this if you're a college student? Well, in a lot of my writing, especially in my classical writing on student advice, I was a big advocate of what I called the student workday. And this is where you would take all of the regularly occurring work in your college student life,

the stuff that you knew was going to happen every week. This problem set is due every week in my algorithms class. I have a reading prompt every class I have to do in literature, whatever. And you find time for that on your calendar, the same time, same days every week, you put it on your calendar and you have it repeat. And you do this for all of the work that you know that you're going to have to do each week. All the problem sets, all the reading, all the prompts, all the lab reports, whatever it is. You find the time.

Now, obviously, you have to fit this time in between classes. You have to fit it in between clubs. You have to fit it in between athletic performances, athletic practices, whatever. You get it all on your schedule. It's like a job. When I hit this, I do this. When I hit this time, I do that. You don't even have to think about it.

There's no planning involved. There's no scheduling involved. There's no willpower involved. It's just your student workday. You just execute. That takes care of about 80 or 90% of your academic work. And then what you have to do for the one-time or infrequent work-requent work-requiring efforts, such as exams that have to be studied for or major papers that have to be written,

you make one-time plans for those big assignments. And again, you go back and say, when am I going to work on this? How early do I have to start? So basically what I'm talking about here, is you're allocating your time way out in advance for your regularly occurring student efforts, because as a student, I don't want you having to think too much about, should I work now or maybe work later? Because you're always going to answer later, you know,

because you seem like you have a lot of time and that's what night is for and I'll go to the library, but then your friends, you know, are rolling the keg down the hallway as you're just stepping out to bring your books to the carol next to the stacks. You know, well, maybe I'll just wait a couple more hours. You know how that goes. So you want to take that decision-making. away from you and just say this is when I work on this, this is when I work on that. Now that may give you not, it may give you a clear cutoff time. Probably not. You'll probably

find you have to use evening hours on some days and some late afternoon hours on other days. But it gives you a similar type of clarity. This is when I work. I know when it is. It's predictable. And when it's done, it's done. And I know I'm done. Now, crucially, if you try to go through this student workday exercise and realize, I can't make it all fit. You know, it just doesn't work. I'm using every hour of the day until late at night and I still can't fit all the regular occurring work for this course is with my clubs, with my job, with my athletics. I just can't make it all fit. Well, if that's the case, this exercise forces you to recognize that you're doing too much. You know, I usually have this happen again and again when I would help MIT undergraduates

work on their student schedules and their student stress. When I was at MIT as a graduate student writing books and giving speeches about student advice, I would because of this help individual undergraduates at MIT because I had that reputation and I wanted to be helpful. Those are hard-charging elite students and this would happen all the time. I would say, let's sit down, let's make your student workday schedule and it wouldn't fit. And say, okay, you can't be a double major and be in four clubs. It just doesn't fit. if you have to work, you can't have three majors and be the president of this. I'm looking at your calendar.

It just doesn't fit. You do not have a Hermione time turner. A reference I should add that I'm making mainly because me and my boys watched that movie last night. It's not just, I want to clarify, I don't often riddle my speech with Harry Potter references, but my boys are into the books. Now we watch the movie, so I should be given a pass. here for Hermione reference. We'd say basically okay if it doesn't fit you have you do too much it was an important signal. All right so Prangelo I'm being a little bit off track here but what I'm

coming back to saying is that I think college students should do this your work is so repetitive in the sense that you kind of know what's coming. There's not a boss that's going to show up and be like drop everything the litigation just came through on this client we have to go fly to Belgium the file the briefs. I mean it's pretty predictable work so schedule it all out and then you can see if it fits you're going to have clarity you'll know when you're working, you know when you won't. You're not going to procrastinate. You're going to have more control over your time.

And if it doesn't fit, at least you're going to learn that in black and white. And there's no escaping the need to then make a change in order to transform your college life into something more reasonable. So thank you for that question, Prongall. It's always nostalgic for me when I get to go back and look at some of those topics about student life that I used to really think so much about. I used to speak so much about and write so much about. So that was a nice trip down memory lane. Al asks, in your opinion, what is the best ratio between shallow and deep work? Well, Al, the best ratio is one that is clearly specified and that you have a buy-in for

from your boss, from your supervisor, from your team. The exact number? Oh, that really depends on your job. You know, it's going to be different. If you're a computer programmer, you're optimal deep-to-shallow ratio. that's going to look different than if you're in customer service or if you're a manager versus support staff versus an academic. So there's no number of deep to shallow hours in a typical week that is optimal. But what is important, what is always necessary to make a deep

to shallow work approach to your work succeed is having that number be clear and having everyone who's relevant be on board. That is the key to the deep to shallow work ratio method is that you sit down with your boss or your team, you say this is what deep work is, this is what shallow work is, both are important, what is the optimal ratio of deep to shallow work hours for me in a typical week that's going to produce the most value for our organization? You get everyone involved in making this decision so everyone's on board because when everyone agrees, two to one, one to one, three to one.

one to three, whatever it is. When everyone agrees, this is going to maximize the value you produce. Now you can start to get people on board for some changes because then you measure and say, well, I'm way off this ratio we thought would maximize value. So we need to change something so I could get closer to this clear cut value, this easily quantified value that we think is going to optimize value. And then people are going to be on board for that because they were on board with the ratio. So that's what I say.

The number, I don't know. It'll depend on what you do. It'll probably shift via experience. has to be clear. You got to have the relevant people on board that this number is what you should be hitting. Because once they are, you'd be surprised by the changes. You're able to quickly induce in your working environment. Okay, Joanna asks, how do I get really good at writing scientific research papers? Well, Joanna, you write, you get really good at writing papers by first writing really bad papers. But you write them and you work with your advisor, you work with

your classmates, you do the best you can, you try to publish them at the best place that you can. And then you say, okay, how do I do a little bit better next time? Next time you're going to write a bad paper, but it's going to be slightly less bad. You try as hard as you can. You push yourself. You're deliberately practicing. You want it to get accepted at the best place you can. You take the review seriously. You take the feedback seriously. You do the best. you can. The next paper is a little bit less bad. The next paper is a little bit less bad than that. At some point you look up and say, huh, this paper that was a little bit less bad than the last one is actually pretty good. And then after a while, you're like, yeah, I write good papers. Keep pushing

yourself, better venues, more citations, better topics. And you go from, hey, I write good papers, to I write really good papers. So that's how you get there. You start by writing bad papers and you get better each time. It's just like asking how do I get my mile time significantly improved. There's nothing I can tell you that's going to make that mile time better tomorrow. Every evidence-based answer to how you're going to increase your mile time involves a lot of running in your near future and a lot of panting and a lot of you running miles pretty slow. But the slow miles come before the medium miles that come before the fast miles that come before the winning ribbons. All right. So that's my advice, Joanna.

Okay, Christian asks, in his famous talk, you and your research, Richard Hamming said the closed door is symbolic of a closed mind and advocates for accepting constant interruptions at the benefit of getting, quote, essential clues, end quote. Well, Christian, that's a really important lecture. It's kind of an underground hit among science types with an interest in productivity. It was given by Richard Hamming, who was a famous Bell Lab scientist. He gave this talk in March of 1986 at the Bell Communications Research Colloquia series. And essentially, the goal of this talk, the way he describes it early on, is I want to talk about how serious researchers can do, quote, Nobel Prize type of work. And Hammy knew what he was talking about. He didn't have a Nobel Prize, but he was surrounded.

founded at Bell Labs at that time with people who did go on to win Nobel Prize. So he sort of knew what he was talking about. Now, he did end up, what did he win? He won the Turing Prize, I believe, for his work on coding theory. There's an ICCI Prize that's named after him, the Richard Hamming Medal. I mean, this guy knows what he's doing. So back in October of 2015, I wrote a blog post titled, How to Win a Nobel Prize, notes from Richard Hamming's talk on doing great research.

I took the transcript of the talk and I tried to pull out of it what I thought all his big ideas were, including the idea that you mentioned about keeping your door closed. Now, let's put a pin in that keeping your door closed idea for now. Let me briefly summarize. I thought this would be interesting. I pulled up the old article. Let me briefly summarize the ideas that I pulled out

of Hamming's famous, you and your research talk. Number one, luck is not as important. as people think. All right. He thinks people, hard work plays a big role there. His second idea, knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. So if you're constantly learning things or constantly doing things a little bit more productive, the advantage that gives you builds up over time in a compound interest style fashion.

Idea three, become comfortable with ambiguity. I think anyone who does theoretical research is familiar with this, this notion of I don't quite understand what's happening here, but I'm still going to move forward. Idea four, creativity requires focus. Obviously, I like this idea. You really believes you must focus without distraction on a problem for a really long time until you're really able to start to have insights come through. Idea five, important work comes from important problems. If you're not working on something that people really care about, then the progress you make is not going to matter. Idea six, keep your door open. All right, this is what

Christian asked about. We'll come back to this in a second. Idea 7, transform isolated problems and the general problems. Actually, this was very influential to me as a theoretician. He really talks about how you start with some technical specific problem and try to generalize out what's the core puzzle, what's the core toy problem, what's the core insight that lays at the bottom of making progress here. I had a really important mentor, visiting professor during my first few years at MIT that really pushed that lesson. He's an amazing researcher. It's very influential for me as well.

And finally, idea eight, sell your results. Right. So he says a lot of scientists think that marketing your work is distasteful or awkward, but he thinks it's necessary because everyone is busy with their own work. So you should learn how to a, write clearly, be, give good, talks, give good formal talks, and see, be really good at giving informal talks. So he basically says, if you've done something really important, you got to do a lot of selling so people understand that you did. So Christian asked about this, keep your door open quote. It does go, it seems at first to go against some of the things I've written about before, about focus, about not being interrupted.

I mean, this seems almost contrary to the deep work hypothesis. This idea that you should have your door open, it seems like you're embracing or inviting constant interruptions like Christian noted. Well, if you look deeper, the picture here is a little bit more complicated. I actually write about Bell Labs in particular in my book Deep Work. And there was a lot of what Hamming was trying to talk about here, that is this sort of serendipitous collision of specialists who work on different things, but when they meet each other and mingle. new cross-discipline innovation, really cool problems. Nobel prizes emerge from these unexpected serendipitous interactions.

And that's what he means by keep your door open. If you read his talk, what he's being clear about here is that you don't want to be too much of a specialist. So in some sense, the door is, it's almost metaphorical. He's saying you don't want to just say, these are the problems I work on. I never want to talk to anyone else. I never want to be bothered. He's like, you want to talk to people, you want to run into people. you want to be exposed to ideas.

Because you never know where that big, important next swing is going to come from. So how do we square that with not doing a lot of context switching and sort of scuttling your ability to actually concentrate? Well, what I wrote about Bell Labs and Deep Work is that their physical architecture, the physical architecture of that famous Bell Labs building in Murray Hill, New Jersey, deployed what I call the hub and spoke system. So the hub in Bell Labs was this massive hallway that all the different offices from all these different departments all connected to the same massive long hallway

that all fed into a common area dining room that all the disciplines ate in. This was a conscious and unusual choice. The obvious thing would have been to build the Bell Labs campus like a college campus. There is a physics building. There is an electrical engineering building. There is a communication theory building that had their own hallways

and their own dining halls. And they did it differently. They said they're all going to be in the same building. They'll all share a small number of hallways. They'll all eat together. So this metaphorically kept the door open. You know, people like Hamming would meet people like Shannon and they would meet each other in the hallways.

They would meet each other in the dining halls. And there would be William Shockley, you know, sitting over here next to Hamming. And then over here, Shannon would be holding court. However, whoever the specific personalities were, it mingled together a lot of different disciplines. And that was great for the intellectual productivity of Bell Labs. But here's the other thing about Bell Labs. The actual physics work, where Shannon would sit down there and work out information theory, where Hammond would sit down to work out the mathematics of coding.

theory where Shockley would figure out the material science behind the initial transistor. That happened in offices. That happened with doors shut. You would expose yourself on a regular basis to interesting ideas, and then you and a small team would go to your office and shut the door and there would be a blackboard and you would concentrate without distraction to make progress. I think that hub and spoke system is the right way to think about innovation. You have to be exposed to interesting things, and then you need to be enabled to actually work without distraction on what you uncover. Exposure, focus. Exposure, focus. That's what Hamming meant. Don't just make your whole career working on the problems you're comfortable with.

Expose yourself to other people, but for sure, you know, for sure, when it comes time to actually make progress on one of these projects, you have to shut that door both physically and metaphorically and focus without distraction. So Christian, That's a good question. Hamming is wise beyond his years. I do recommend looking up that speech, and you can definitely use my blog post how to win a Nobel Prize

as a useful guide to figuring out what Hamming was talking about. All right, so on that note, this seems like a good moment to play some question roulette. The idea here is simple. I take a question selected at random from those submitted by my readers, a question I have not seen before until this very moment and then I try to answer it on the fly.

All right, so let's load up this week's entry in the question roulette. Garavav asks, How do you figure out a plan for being so good that can't ignore you, say in some software development role? Well, that's a good question. If you want to become so good they can't ignore you, you have to build up skills that are rare and valuable. Rare and valuable skills are developed through,

deliberate practice. So you have to put yourself into a situation where you can stretch beyond where you're comfortable. That stretch will actually increase your capacity and then you will be a little bit better. You repeat this enough and enough, just like lifting heavier and heavier weights will eventually bold your biceps. Your skills will improve. Now two caveats here, how do you figure out what skills to improve? Take that question seriously. It's all. often not obvious. What a lot of people do is that they choose a skill that they want to be useful. They like the idea of that skill being useful because it seems like it would be fun to train. Like it would be hard but not too hard. They enjoy doing it. But there's a difference between the

skills you want to be rare and valuable, the skills you want to be useful and the skills that actually are. You have to look around and try to study your job environment. What's being rewarded? What's not? Who are the people that have a lot of a time? me. They were the people who are having a fast rise. What do they do that I can't do? Like right now, what am I seeing concretely is rare and valuable? That would, to use the terminology, if my book's so good, they can't ignore you,

give you a lot of career capital to invest. You might not like the answer, but you have to confront what the real answer is. Second, how do you actually design activities that are going to stretch you past the point where you're comfortable? In a professional role where you already have the job, I would say projects are the best way to do this. You know, commit to, I will do this project. And there's no way for you to do it without learning the skill that you don't quite know how to do. If you're a software developer, you know, you jump into a element or a piece of the code base where you don't have as much

expertise and say, I'll tackle that. Now you're going to have to pick up that expertise. Or say, I'm going to get the performance of this section down, which means you're going to have to dust off your algorithms textbook and maybe actually do a little bit of asymptotic analysis. maybe a little bit of dynamic programming. Maybe you're going to have to do solve some recurrences to figure out if you're divide and conquer recursive algorithm is actually going to give you a good boost over the more intuitive iterative solution is currently in place. Commit to something designed to push you pass where you're comfortable

because they're expecting results. The only way to get the results is to actually learn something you don't know how to do. That pressure will push you to do the learning. You'll do the straining. Then you'll get better. All right. So that's a good question. So that's what I recommend deliberate practice. Be very careful and honest in choosing what to practice. And then if possible, actually design projects to help you do this practice as opposed to undertaking such efforts in a more abstract manner. All right, that was a good round of question roulette. Let's do some technology questions. Caesar kicks things off by asking for bloggers.

are there any books that you would recommend to get started? Well, Caesar, I can't think of any particular books. I mean, in some sense, blogging is simple, like the way the technology works. You just sort of get a WordPress site, you type in what you want to say and you publish, right? There's not a lot to learn from a technical sense. From an audience-building sense, I think it is very complicated.

I don't really know of any great books that really breaks this down, but I can give you my personal experience as someone who has been blogging since 2007. And what I've learned is the type of blogs that tend to grow a, not just a large audience, but an energetic audience, the type of audience that's going to be fulfilling to write for, the type of audience that's actually going to, there's going to be a positive impact on them to your writing,

the audience I'm assuming sees her you're looking for. If you want this type of audience, you have to have an interesting point of view. You have a point of view on a topic that people care about. That's maybe it's provocative, maybe it's aspirational. That's a big one. Maybe it's just really interesting. Maybe it's very useful, right?

You know, maybe for investors, your expertise on this topic is going to be really useful. So it's interesting or it's useful or it's provocative or it's aspirational. That's what gets an audience excited. You need to couple that with, too, being the right person to be writing about topic and to have that point of view. So there might be an audience for a very aggressive system for understanding oil futures. That might be very interesting to a certain audience, but I'm not the right person to write about it because I don't know much about oil futures and who cares what I think about oil futures. There's got to be some reason then why you're writing about it,

something about your own experiences, your position in life, your expertise. It's really hard to skip that, right? It's really hard to jump past that and say, I just want to be an expert on this topic for which there's no real reason why I'm the expert. And then three, you have to write in a way that is good. You don't have to be Hemingway, but you actually have to have a sort of non-amateur writing style. You have to be able to actually deliver a point coherently with some narrative momentum, not get things trep up, avoid red herrings, points that you introduce that you don't ever come back to in the end. So you want to actually build up some writing skill. If you can do those three things.

Have a really interesting point of view on something that people care about, be the right person to write about, and write about it at least in a non-bad way. If you can do those three things, then you just publish and repeat, publish and repeat. That's how audiences build. You know, that's how I got started. I had a point of view about how to be a successful student. It was a point of view that focused a lot on strategy and tactics. You know, my point of view is that most students were bad at being students.

And if you took it more seriously, you could have significant improvements to both your academic performance and the quality of your life as a student. So that was a very strong point of view that to a lot of my fellow students was very interesting, very aspirational, very provocative. I was a good person to talk about this because I had an Ivy League education. I was at MIT and I had written well-received books already on this topic. topic. And I had been writing since I was in college. I was a calmness for the newspaper. I was, I wrote for the humor magazine. I was the editor of the humor magazine. I knew how to write. Again, I wasn't him in a way, but I knew how to write. That was my mix. That's how I satisfy those three criteria. And that's how my audience began to grow. So Caesar, that's my, this is my book

for you right there. This is my five-minute audible original, you know, how to start a successful blog. That's all you need to know. If you can do those three things, publish repeat, publish repeat, an audience will grow. If you're not doing those three things, you might have a harder time. It's just because you think you're interesting and just because you think you have something to say doesn't mean that others will agree. You know, I talk about this in deep work. Blogging is a much more honest and brutal medium than social media. There's this collectivist aspect to social media where attention is basically traded in a reciprocal relationship. I will pay attention to you if you pay attention to me regardless of the quality.

That was the fundamental original social media compact. I will post some picture about something going on in my life and you're going to click like or leave a little comment and I'll do the same for you. We'll all feel like we're getting attention and we'll feel good about it. Blogging is not like that. Man, it's the Wild West. There's tumbleweeds. There's tumble weeds blowing when you're first putting stuff up there on their blog.

There is none of these collectivist reciprocal attention relationships in blogging. If this is not compelling to me, then I am not going to come read it. And so blogging is quite brutal in that way. It's not like you do not want to be blinded by the experience of being on Instagram and you know people and they're your friends and they say nice things about your post because you all know each other and everyone's being civil. blogging's not civil right

in blogging you come in there with your Instagram style post it's like Marty McFly in the beginning of Back to the Future Three showing up in the Hollywood Western costume and pretty soon Biff Tannen is shooting

his revolver at his feet I don't know if this is an upgrade for my Hermione references Back to the Future three references if you're wondering yes me and my boys screen that movie recently as well. But all I'm trying to say here is I think this is an interesting dynamics is there. And this is not your question. It's just something I think is interesting. It's a part of the genius of social media is it took something that's very desirable. People paying attention to you.

Something that used to be very hard to get. And it created this weird reciprocal world where everyone just trades attention almost independent of quality. Just you know me. So you have to say pay attention to me, but I'll pay attention to you. And then everyone got to share of that. and that's what initially drew people into social media. And blogs don't have that. Blogs are brutal. It's the Wild West. It's tumbleweed.

But the flip side of that is that it pushes you to be smarter about what you write to improve your writing. And when you do earn an audience in that hard circumstance, it's a loyal audience and it's an audience that can be very sustaining to you. So, you know, I like that hardship of the blogging world, even though it is more brutal. because in the end, I think it produces more value for you and your audiences. So, Caesar, go for it. I hope my advice helps. I hope I am subscribing to your RSS feed soon. All right, Gavin asked, do you use or have you used the bullet journal method?

Yeah, Gavin, I'm very familiar with the method. I actually blurbed writer Carol's book, the bullet journal method. I've also written some blog post about the method. I like it. you know what i what i like in particular is two things one that is self-contained that you have this one physical artifact the notebook in which your whole life is organized everything's in there it's not in your head it's not spread out i think that's good i also love the fact that you're able to customize it that you use your bullet journal to track things like books you've read or ideas you've had or money

you've spent and and it's all here and organized in this book it's like basically taking your your working memory of your brain and extending it, like a RAM upgrade to your brain. So I think it's a really great system. I don't personally use it because I think the one shortcoming of the bullet journal method is that it's not well adapted to a lot of knowledge work settings for a couple reasons. One is email electronic calendars. I mean, so many modern offices today, everything is driven off of these shared electronic calendars.

The bullet journal method, your calendars, your appointments, your meetings are all in this paper notebook, but a lot of people can't get away with that. It has to exist on this calendar. They have seven meetings a day. A lot of their life is spent on these calendars. Also, it's not a good match for email. You're getting hundreds of emails a day, each of which representing multiple new obligations that you have to somehow clarify and put into your world.

It's just too much task. It's too much work to capture on paper with a pin in most cases. You can't be transferring your to-do list from one page to another, from one notebook to another. If you're a typical knowledge worker of a certain rank or higher, you may have somewhere north of a thousand different things on your plate at any one point, and they're complicated and nuance and evolving and they connect to your calendar. Now, as I've said before when I've talked about the bullet journal method, the fact that Ryder's approach is not well suited for this avalanche of electronically mediated work that defines knowledge work is not an issue with writer's system. It's actually a sign of what's bad about how we do knowledge work. Ryder's system represents, I think, a much more compatible approach to how the human brain should work. It's well suited for roughly the amount of work and things that the human brain should be keeping track of.

So I think it's actually accusatory towards standard knowledge work practices that something elegant like Ryder's method can't keep up with the chaos. So that's basically where I am. I love his method, but my task lives. on these Trello boards. One board for every role. The columns describe the status of the task. There's files and discussions and extra information on the backside of these virtual cards.

Everything's heavily connected to my calendar. And then I plan out my week using text files. What's my weekly plan? I time block plan my day, use my time block planner. I have these now. They'll soon be available for the rest of you. my planner's being published in November, which is all to say,

I have to have a more supercharged system just because I have seven jobs. But I love writer's method, I think is great, for example, if you're a freelancer or a solopreneur. I know a lot of graphic designers love it. I know a lot of freelancers love it. So definitely check out his system.

I stand by the blurb. I gave his book. And for those of you who can't yet use his method because of the terribleness of your job, I feel your pain. and I'm doing the best I can with my books and podcast and writing and everything to try to change that state of affairs. Okay, Samuel asked, how do you get students to not be on their phones in your class?

Well, Samuel, what I do is I teach really hard subjects and then I sort of let Darwin take over. You know what I mean? Like, hey, you want to use your phone? You're welcome to use your phone. That first problem set or that first exam coming back will give you some negative feedback. back about that decision because I teach hard stuff and you got to focus on what I'm saying. You have to try to understand what I'm talking about as I'm saying it. You're trying to build understanding as I talk.

There's such a context to which price to look at your phone and back to what I'm saying and looking at your phone that it's almost equivalent to not listening at the lecture at all. And when you're in a complicated subject like algorithms like I'm teaching now or theory of computation like I taught last spring, if you're not really listening to the lecture, that's a lot of catch up to try to do. And it's really hard. And so I just think there's a Darwinian process here. Students learn pretty quick.

Huh, I should probably pay attention. All right, let's do one more technology question. Darren asks, how do we deal with businesses and groups that we care about, but that insist on communicating only through social media? There's elaboration. He talks about, for example, the use of Facebook groups or groups or organizations that use their Facebook profile to make a number. announcements.

Well, Darren, I talk about this in my book, Digital Minimalism. I talk about the various ways that people join what I call the attention resistance. Now, these are individuals that use often high-tech means to go in and use social media tools for very specific, intentional, high-value purposes, while a great-time-value purpose, while a great-to-time. reducing the ability of these tools to hijack their attention or cause a lot of negative harm to their cognitive state or their mood. So, for example, there's a group you really care about, you need to know what they're up to, and they use Facebook groups.

This was probably one of the most common examples I heard when I was studying the attention resistance. One of the most common responses was to find ways to get into Facebook to look at the post from a Facebook group without seeing anything else, without seeing a new, newsfeed without seeing anything pulling at your attention to try to get you down that digital rabbit hole. There's a couple things you can do here. Some of the people I interviewed talked about using browser plugins like newsfeed eradicator that just took the news feed takes it off the page.

Just go to your group and you look at your group post. There's other ways you can do this as well. Some people talked about bookmarking the groups page or the events page of a group and they just go to that bookmarking and it would bypass their newsfeed. Of the people would adjust their Facebook profile just for using a particular group, so they would unfollow everybody except for the relevant people in the group

so that their newsfeed would only have posts from the Facebook group that they cared about. What they all shared is, they said, I know what value I want to get out of Facebook. I know the value that Facebook is trying to suck out of my life. I'm going to set things up so that I can win and they won't. That's the attention resistance. Once you know why you're using a piece of technology,

you can now optimize how you use that technology. This keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. The idea of users optimizing how they use tools like Facebook makes him very nervous because once you say this is actually the value I get out of Facebook, 99% of the time you spend on there doesn't have to happen anymore. And you can just follow a bookmark straight to the group you care about. when you can use a plug-in like News Feed Eradicator and only see posts from one group,

how often are you going to be on Facebook? Twice a week, five minutes at a time for 10 total minutes. That's great for you. You've got your value, but that's devastating for Facebook. They need you on there for 50 minutes plus per day on average to actually just maintain

their current revenue numbers. So that's the attention to resistance. Once you know why you need to use social media, figure out a way to just use it in those purposes. By the way, though, Darren, you'll notice that every one of these examples involved a computer browser. That is a universal through almost every attention-resistance strategy. They never use social media on their phone. Never on their phone.

That's like launching a commando raid against the enemy camp during the middle of the day. You are in their territory, on their terms, and you are likely to get picked off. That's what it's like if you use a social media. social media tool on your phone. Those apps are absolutely optimized to hijack your attention and having it be there on your phone as a potential source of distraction at every single moment throughout your day. You're really stacking the deck against you. So almost every attention resistance strategy starts with get all of this crap off my phone.

It's on my computer. I access it with a browser. I do not save my password. And I have one of those strong saves. password so I have to go get out a Post-it note and type this thing in manually and it takes me 15 seconds. It's not the end of the world but it's friction. So I can't just jump over in a moment's boredom. Some effort is involved if I really want to go log on to one of those sites. And then I have my plug-ins or my unfollow strategies or my bookmarks or whatever, right? And again, you've really

moved the odds into your favor. Now you're doing a halo drop in the middle of a moonless light straight into the core of their compound. You're much more likely to be successful. So Darren, there are definitely value-producing uses for social media, but if you know what they are, you can optimize for them, and you're going to keep Zuckerberg up at night. But get it off your phone, do it on your browser, use technological support, get active, get aggressive,

you'd be surprised how much you can take that cost-benefit ratio that represents our relationship with social media and move it decidedly in your favor once you get serious about it. All right, let's do a little backstage pass. So this is the segment where I give you some insights into my own daily struggles to live a deeper life. So I guess the big news this week is the movers are coming on Tuesday. The movers are going to begin moving some more significant furniture up here into the Deep Work HQ. In particular, I am focusing on what I call the Deep Work layer.

The large room I've been talking about on this podcast that I'm trying to transform into a place where I do email-free deep efforts, in particular reading, proof-solving, and writing. And so I'm excited about that. That room has been relatively empty for now. I'm a little bit nervous about it as well because, you know, it's a lot of hard work to set up a space. But, you know, I think this is going to be an experiment that'll capture my attention and probably be worthwhile. while. So what am I doing for now? I might paint. I'm not sure about that. But in terms of furniture, bringing in a nice rug from my study, I'm going to go now with a two-armchair situation, if possible. I think my infamous big leather chair can fit through the door. So I want to bring that here, and I have

another leather chair I want to bring here, both with very bright lights that can shine right down on them for reading and nice in tables. I have a desk over by the window. two bookcases are in here. I'm actually going to empty out my library for my study. And I have a lot of books in my house. And so I can replace most of those with backup books. But my core library, the one that I reference while I write, I'm going to move that whole damn thing here to the Deep Work HQ and fill up those

bookcases in the Deep Work layer. So I have them there next to my desk where I can grab and read. My wife has supplied me with some big plants, which I appreciate. I am going to have a mini fridge and a tape. I have an old vintage bar cart that I'm bringing in there. Probably going to have a TV in there as well. This seems like it would be useful. And so that's the plan.

The whiteboards, because obviously I need whiteboards. If you know me, you know I need whiteboards. I'm focusing on the hallway. When you first come in, there's a relatively long hallway that leads to the various offices in the Deep Work HQ. I'm going to put two side-by-side whiteboards right there. It's right outside the entrance to the Deep Work layer, so I can go there and work on the Whitework.

board and turn around and go back and sit at my desk or sit in my armchairs. So we'll see. I'm excited about it. I hate moving. It's a pain. Setting new things up. It's a pain. But I am losing my study to our homeschool.

So I do need a place to get this work done. And I am absolutely going to at least try at first my no email rule. No email in the deep work layer. I can do it at home. I can do it in the Maker Lab. I can do it in the podcast studio. I cannot do it in that room. I want my brain to associate that room with disconnection.

You're in there to think. You're in there to work. You're in there to occasionally mix a drink when it's been a particularly hard day. You're in there to jump down the fireman pole to the bar in the restaurant below, yelling beer me, as we talked about in an earlier episode. I do feel like I should clarify, by the way, that the beer me phrase, I was being facetious. that's an Andy Bernard reference from the office. I do not actually think that that would be a cool thing to yell

as I came down a fireman's pole into the bar below my office. I'm sad that I have to clarify that. I think it says something about how little some of you think about my state of cultural hypness, but I am being facetious with my claim that I am going to, on a regular basis, yell the phrase beer me, as I slide down a pole installed in my office that leads to a bar in the restaurant below. All right, so I just wanted to clarify that.

All right, so that's what's going on inside my life. I am excited but nervous about getting version one of the deep work layer going. I will keep you posted as to whether or not this psychological experiment of completely detaching email from that space actually does end up successful. All right, let's go on with some questions about the deep life.

Matthew asked, how do you organize ongoing development of your personal life, philosophies, politics, and ethics? Where do you fit in the reading, discussing, required? Given the incredible complexity of ethics and politics and general life philosophies, how do you organize your time to try and develop well-researched opinions on various parts of life once out of college? Matthew, that's an excellent question to be asking, especially in this current moment. So one thing I would recommend is humbleness.

You know, it is impossible to actually have well thought through Emerson style self-reliant, independent philosophies or takes on every major issue relevant to living a ethical, politically engaged, philosophically rich life. And so I think some humbleness is always useful. I don't really know. I don't really know enough about that. Tell me more about that. Okay, that's interesting. Let me try to understand what you're saying here. So this is how you do this part of your life.

This is how this political view unfolds. Here's its basic structure. You know the sort of humbleness of like, I don't have a strong stance here because I don't know a lot about it. Get used to saying that. It's not a failure. It doesn't mean you're dumb. It doesn't mean you're engaged. It means that you care.

And it means that you actually value self-reliant thinking. And I think people are actually be more impressed with you for doing that than if you instead try to do the standard thing of just bluffing through and being like, well, yeah, well, obviously, I think I read somewhere that that's actually not quite true. And I mean, I got to tell you guys, I don't know how much, how much discussion today, especially just looking at local, just around you, people you know having conversations, the degree to which Twitter has influenced people's discussions, this idea that if I, if I don't like what you're saying, or that's not the, that's not the view I have,

idea that it's probably like a hundred percent wrong and can be easily refuted with a very simple dunk, that's Twitter. Twitter has really changed our understanding of how rhetoric works. I mean, any rhetoric teacher out there must just be shaking their head in depressed sorrow when they see the state of rhetoric today because it's just not how it works. It's just very rare. Very, very rare that you come across a circumstance where someone's point on something is just dead wrong and in 250 characters, you can make that crystal clear.

But that is the sentiment that Twitter promotes and people bring that out into their discussions in the real world. And so you have this rhetorical dunking culture, which I think is just intellectually so unsophisticated. And Matthew will not get you closer to a sort of rich set of personal political views and philosophies and ethics. So that's a bit of an aside. So just have some humbleness.

Yeah, okay, I don't know. I don't know a lot about that. I'll hear what you have to say about it. It might be a little bit skeptical internally, but I also am not going to try to just rush in and pretend like I know or cite something that I kind of heard but say it with a lot of confidence or try to dismiss it with a dunk because that often doesn't work. Two, what do you do when you do really care about something?

Well, Matthew, I talk about this all the time on this podcast. You have to read the best things you can find on that topic. If there is a particular view that resonates, like I think this is right. That's great. Make sure you understand what's right. but then you have to read the very best critique or alternative. I don't want to be a broken record, but I think this is important. In that dialectical clash between the two ideas is where really deep understanding actually grows.

If you have not subjected a philosophy or an ethics or a political stance against the very best alternative slash critiques, then you do not really have a philosophy, ethics, or political stance. You participate in an intellectual groupieism. I like the idea of that. those people in the parking lot at that concert seem like they're having a lot of fun. Okay, I'm going to go follow that band around. That's intellectual groupieism. Until you've actually read the best articulation of the point of view,

the best contrary, the best critique, and the best alternative, and let those things clash, you don't really have a deep understanding. An epistemological humbleness is probably, probably the stance that you should be in until you've done that. So that's what I would say. One by one is you find things that are important. to you, read about it, develop your view, subject to the critique, let your roots grow deep. And Matthew, if you do this over time, you will find that the number of issues within the realms of philosophy, ethics, and politics in which you actually have these deep, rooted,

self-reliant, independent views will grow. It just takes time. And so if you're one year out of college, there might be just one thing where you feel that way and you're humble everywhere else. If you're a professor giving your last lecture, right before you retire at the age of 65, there is probably a very rich set of such topics on which you have deep understandings. It's just something that takes time and that's good. And that journey of trying to continually evolve and sharpen and increase that toolkit

of philosophical, political and ethical positions in which you have deep read stances, that is a key portion of living a rich intellectual life and something that I highly recommend. So Matthew, that's what I have to say. One by one, build that up. Be humble about things that you have not yet had to time. to subject to that type of intellectual rigor. And of course, reject Twitter-style rhetoric. It is a fantasy that most things in life can be easily dismissed

because you don't like them with a 250-character-style dunk. The world of rhetoric, the world of philosophy, the world of debate, and argument, the world of ideas, has always been more complicated than that. Kind of have to put on your big boy pants and say, let's go read some hard things. Let's go hear some things we don't want to hear. let's get after it.

Let's lay some deep roots and then we'll have some intellectual confidence on which to build the rest of our hopefully deep life. All right, that was good. I appreciate any question that allows me to say mean things about Twitter. That's kind of like my form of meditation. All right, let's move on here.

Tino asked, which method is better to begin living the deep life? Doing a complete revamp of your daily routine like Jason Ben or doing it slowly, as James Clear suggests in atomic habits. Well, Tino, there's a lot of different approaches to this. There's one that I have been advocating

off and on this summer on this podcast, so I will just briefly summarize it. I think you'll find it pulls on ideas from James and Jason as well. So here's what I've been arguing. You first start by identifying the key buckets, the areas in your life that you think are important for actually crafting an existence of meaning and satisfaction. The sample areas I've been talking about this summer,

I gave them all names that started with C. So if you'll remember, Constitution, which is like your health or craft, which is like your career or contemplation, which captures things like philosophy, ethics, and religion, or community, which captures things like connection to other people around you or competence, which captures like a general feeling of efficacy. So you find buckets like that, which you think are important.

What I recommend is that your first step is to try to identify in each of these buckets a keystone habit. So something that you do every day that's easy enough that you can actually do it, but hard enough that it's not trivial. And that signals to yourself that you take that bucket seriously. So for your craft bucket, it might be, you know, I do two hours of deep work. to start every morning for your constitution bucket. It might be a baseline exercise routine you do every day. But something that signals to yourself, this bucket is important to me. And there's something I do every day, even though it's not trivial.

I do it every day. And that signals I take this bucket seriously. Track these keystone habits in a notebook. My time block planner that's coming out in November actually has a space for every day for tracking these habits for exactly this reason. Track it. If your mind knows your own. going to be writing down whether or not you did something, you're much more likely to do it.

It also gives you concrete evidence about whether you are actually doing these things. And if you see that you're missing a particular keystone habit again and again and again, you might want to tweak what it is. So this is the first phase, is trying to come up with a collection of these keystone habits that you actually hit every day. It might take you a while to get this right. But once you have it, once you're rock and rolling, you're going to be in the deep life mindset.

Ah, I am the type of person. who will do non-urgent, optional activities because I think they're important to my life and make my life better. That is a crucial mindset shift and absolutely foundational if you want to construct from scratch a deep life. That's step one.

Once you have these keystone habits and the mindset that they engender, I then have been recommending this summer when I talked about this previously, that you rotate, through each of these buckets, spending one or two months on each. And when it's the turn of a particular bucket to be under the spotlight, that is when you begin to make more significant overhauls to that particular aspect of your life.

So when it's the month or two that you've put aside to look at constitution, now you're really reading about diet and fitness, you're finding role models here, maybe you're hiring a health the fitness coach. Now you're starting to make more major changes in how you eat and the fitness routine that you're building on top of whatever that keystone habit was laying the foundation. You're thinking about sleep. You're using an aura ring. You have some inspirational podcast that you listen to.

You start looking at Jocko Willinks 430 in the morning, watch picture on Twitter every morning. You are doing a much more serious overhaul. And you're giving yourself some time to figure out how to get that right. You come out of that overhaul. Now you're someone who actually seems like you're. take that area of your life quite seriously. Then you rotate to the next one.

Now we're looking at Kraft. I mean that a couple months. What's going on in our career? What's going on our workday? I'm going to revamp my productivity system from scratch. I got to get out of my inbox. This list reactive method of productivity is failing me. I've been listening to Cal.

I need to do capture, configure, control and figure out how that's going to work for me. I guess I'm going to have to set up one of these stupid Trello boards that he's always talking about. I guess I'm not going to be able to just sit in my inbox. I guess I'm going to have to say, God help me, schedule shutdown complete, out loud, every day where people might hear me or whatever. Maybe you're going to make a change to your job, right? But one bucket at a time, one to two months, you cycle through all of them, now you have a much deeper life. Then you look and make sure your keystone habits are still going, you're still firing,

those still work, you take a breather, then you rotate again. and then you rotate again. I suggest kicking off one of these rotations either every new year or every year at your birthday, whichever you prefer. And throughout all of this, keystone habits, every day track them.

Keystone habits, every day track them. That foundation keeps you in that mindset if I am someone who cares about my deep life and will do non-urgent, optional things to amplify it. And then you do these overhauls. Some will be more effective than others. You might spend the whole month you get too ambitious about your community bucket overhaul,

and it kind of all falls apart. It didn't quite work. That's okay. You'll get back to that again, but you do these overhauls again and again. The big things are going to stick. Then you're going to improve them. You're going to add new things,

and a deep life will grow. All right. So that is my sort of patent pending method from going from a shallow life to a deep life. You know, James has great stuff. Jason has great stuff, but you might want to give this a problem. approach a try as well.

All right, let's do one last question. Mike asks, what would you do if you had $20 million? Are you offering, Mike? Because my answer is whatever you want, man. Whatever you want, I'll do it. All right, I mean, I assume the spirit of this question is the career introspection. $20 million a year from doing my math right at a 4% safe withdrawal rule. if we use that basic rule,

means that you could probably withdraw about $800,000 a year, inflation adjusted into perpetuity without hurting the principle. So what would you do if money in that sense was not an object? I think that's the spirit of the question. The idea being maybe this will give you some insight

into shaping your own career. Mike, to be honest, I don't think my life would be that much different. And the reason is is that I basically, I already went through this, exercise years ago. I mean, put the dollar amount aside. I went through this exercise of what do I want in my life? What things resonate with me? And then what type of career capital would I

require to actually get my things in my life? So I think autonomy was very useful to me. That really resonated with me. Autonomy was very important, especially over my time, how I work, when I work. Intellectual endeavor was very important. You know, I knew I I had some horsepower in my brain, so I wanted to do work that actually revved up that horsepower and tried to do some things that mattered. That was very important to me. There's a few other factors that I'll sort of leave obfuscated for now. But it's pretty clear to me what I was looking for, even as far back as college.

And none of these things, by the way, had anything to do with a specific job. None of it had to do with a passion. None of it had to do with the content of a job. These were generic traits of a working life that resonated. Then I worked backwards and kind of figured out, okay, what? the best path to sufficient career capital stores to use the terminology for my book so good they can't ignore you what are the best paths to actually acquire these traits and it turned out you could get to these traits that i cared about without needing 20 million dollars and that i think is what is

important mike you work backwards from what resonates to you when you think about other people's careers or lives that people live or things you've read about things you've seen on tv things you've seen in friends or family. What are the underlying traits that resonate so much? And you say, okay, what would it take to get those? And the answer is often rarely, the answer is rarely, well, you just have to be rich. You'd have to have so much money you don't need to work, and only then could you get those traits.

In fact, most of these traits that resonate with people are intertwined with work itself. They're work-related traits. To not be working means you would be much less happy because you could not actually get these traits. It's like my particular example about this sort of intellectual endeavor, pushed my brain to produce things that stretches me, but they're a value and have some impact. Can't do that on a beach.

There's no amount of the $20 million you can spend that will give you that. It's unrelated to money. And so I have a lot of the traits I was looking for, and I worked for a long time to get them, but I worked with a lot of focus. It's why I went to grad school instead of Microsoft. It's looking at the paths here that we're going to give me the autonomy. me that was going to allow me to, you know, I was, I was thinking things through, not just about

money, but about what are the traits I want. And so what I would suggest is, who cares about $20 million? I mean, still, and I want to reiterate this, I will do whatever you want if you're offering me that money. But again, assuming that is metaphorical, don't get too caught up in this notion that if I only had a massive amount of X, then, then I could start doing something. that I was going to enjoy. Then I could make my life into something I'm going to enjoy. That's not the way it works. The sources of fulfillment and satisfaction in people's lives,

these come from certain types of behaviors or properties or traits. You can identify them. And you can work backwards and say what's required to get them. And again, it's almost rarely is the answer going to be, you've got to have a lot of money. Now, it's often going to require a lot of hard work. It's often going to require a lot of building a career capital. I mean, look, my plan for getting like autonomy and intellectual stimulation of my life

involved becoming a 10-year track professor at an R1 school, getting tenure and becoming a New York Times best-selling author. So, no, I don't have $20 million, but I guess that's not necessarily a very easy path either, right? So it's not like it's easy. But this is my response to these type of questions. There's not like some magic job that's going to make you happy. And if you just answer like, well, you know, if I had $20 million, I guess I would sail my boat, I should be a sailboat captain.

That's not the way it works. It's traits. The traits are often agnostic to the content of a job. They often very clearly resonate with you when you are exposed to those traits in action. You can come up with a game plan for how do I get them. What type of field do I need to be in? What type of job do I need to be in? What type of action, organization, and practice do I have to do in that job to actually build up enough capital to get there?

It can be a lot more systematic than you think to build up a working life that's very satisfying and very meaningful. And often, again, it's not going to require $20 million. Though, again, and I go back to this, Mike, I am taking if you are offering. So thank you for that question. And I think that is all the time we have for this week's episode of the Deep Questions podcast. So thank you, everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own, sign up to my.

mailing list at calnewport.com. Look out for the next question survey, which I should be sending out soon. As always, if you want to support this podcast, you could do so by subscribing, rating, and reviewing. I should be back later this week with the next habit tune-up mini-episode. And until then, stay deep.