Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 265: Big Ideas for Deeper Living

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

In this episode, Cal visits eight of the most influential books in personal productivity, identifying for each a single idea that ended up most resonating both with his own work and the culture more generally.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Today’s Deep Question: What productivity ideas from other authors are the most worth paying attention to? [4:54]  - How do I time-block for the unanticipated “a-ha!” moment of insight? [40:23] - Is my life as a surgeon dooming me to a reactive life? [45:19] - Is it possible to read too many productivity books? [52:10] - Is the Deep Life influenced by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? [58:55] - Am I a disciplined worker if I only respond to deadlines? [1:01:09]  The 5 Books Cal Read in August 2023 [1:09:31]  Thanks to our Sponsors:  cozyearth.com hensonshaving.com/cal mintmobile.com/deep moshlife.com/deep  Thanks 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 a distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, have you noticed, it's that time of year, have you noticed the extra gear over in the office, the piles of what looks like Christmas lights hooked up the circuits? I did see those. I got to tell you what I'm up to. I think my listeners will appreciate this. So for Halloween, I have a front porch.

And I typically put Halloween lights all the way around this front porch up below the gutters. So what I wanted to try this year was programmable LED. So this looks like a normal strand of Christmas lights. But there's a data bus connecting every one of these bulbs. They are individually addressable. by a microcontroller, so you can program any type of arbitrary pattern of lights you want. You can turn each light off and on and set as color and brightness individually. So I have 200 of these lights.

I'm powering them off of a 12-volt power source, which is enough to get brightness down the entire line without power injection. And I'm building a control box, a waterproof control box that's going to have the power sources, an Arduino nano that I'm using, that I'm mounting with screw terminals into that. box. It's going to have the power sources for the lights, the power sources for the Arduino and all the wiring between the Arduino and the lights. So I can program, and I think this is very important, Jesse, a very important use of my time. So I can program arbitrary interesting patterns for the lights. It's going to be cool. It's awesome. So here's the pattern I just programmed last night. So maybe this is where I'm going to start. I have, it's alternating. I'm doing green and purple.

So just look up at the gutters, and it's going to be green and purple lights alternating. Just every other lights green, every other lights purple. And then after a while, if you're watching it, you're going to see sort of randomly popping up different green lights turning the purple. It's sort of randomly just da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then suddenly basically a snake of green is going to shoot down the line, just changing everything to green again. And then the purples come back at every other and it stabilizes. I think I'm going to be stable for like three or four minutes at a time and then go through this pattern every like three or four minutes. That's what I'm working for.

Then the other thing I'm working on. And again, this is, I can't emphasize this enough, Jesse. This is a very important use of my time because I have very little else going on. I've also bought some infrared motion sensors. And so I'm thinking about wiring up a control box for the door. I live on a corner. So on my other door, having what looks like, oh, there's just some, you know, like orange Halloween lights wrapped around the columns of the porch.

I'm going to try this, actually having an infrared motion sensor rigged up so that as you walk past it, it does a quick light pattern. You're like, what? Did that just change when I walk past? So again, this is important stuff. Now, people mock me

for my, all the effort I put in the Halloween, but I do have to say that you might be listening to this podcast right now, so I'll make the shout out. When I was up in Hanover, they have a writer friend up in Hanover, KG, Delatonia, the nonfiction writer and now novelist. Anyways, she lives up there and she was telling me that she also takes Halloween very seriously.

They convert their property into a mega sort of Halloween haunted farm type thing every Halloween. So great minds think alike. Maybe this is just a writer thing, but we take Halloween very seriously. So with the lights, you have them in the office room, you program there, then you bring them over your house? Yeah, though if I need to reprogram them, I'll have this box mounted. where I can just open the box and plug in a USB cable to the Arduino and just sit right outside and alter the code on my laptop. Flash in new code and then just seal the whole thing back up again. So it's all the material to the left the computer?

It's not the three. It's not associated with the 3D. No. So also I should say at the moment I'm printing for one of my kids a spaceship on a 3D printer. So we got a lot of activity going on in the Maker Lab portion of the DeepWork, Deep Work HQ. you. That's what I think we should do, by the way, Jesse. There's a big building, you know, the bank building in our town. Yeah. It's unoccupied right now. You should make that into a big maker lab. Yeah. That'd be cool, right? Yeah. Like woodworking,

electronics, big laser cutters. Someone should get on that. All right. Well, something that is open in this town, and this is my segue to today's deep dive is we do have a new bookstore, people's books, I know people books, people's books. I'm getting the plurals wrong. People books, I believe. New bookstore here in town right down the street. I really love that I can now grab my coffee, one block to one side, and bring it to the bookstore, one block to the other side. The reason why I bring up the bookstore, though, is that it got me thinking about a book-themed deep dive for today's episode.

A couple weeks ago, I previewed the cover for one of my upcoming books, and I got some e-moving. messages about what other productivity books are good or what books do you recommend, and I thought this would be a cool deep dive. What if I went back and selected eight books that are vaguely in the space of productivity, if we're going to use that term sort of vaguely, eight books that were very influential for me in that space? And for each of these eight books, what if I went through and identified a single idea that I thought was really important?

Not necessarily the biggest idea from the books, though in some case that is true. but just a idea from that book that has resonated with me ever since. I thought that would be fun to do, a book-themed deep dive. So that's what we're going to do today. Our deep question, we're going to explore, what are the best ideas from other productivity authors? All right, let's get started. I'm going to bring up pictures of these books on the screen.

So if you're just listening to this, you can find the video at the deeplife.com. This is episode 265. The videos are linked at the bottom. All right, so the first book I have on the screen right now, the OG, the goat of the productivity book space that is Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A very important book in the space also led to, I don't know, five or six years of everyone having numbers in their titles. So I don't know if that's a good legacy or a bad legacy. I think we've gotten past that now. But for a while, after the seven habits came out, there were so many books that had the eight habits of this, the six habits of this, the nine laws for this. We sort of moved past that, but that was a trend it started. All right, this book is a little bit older. It's an incredibly influential book. It has sold millions upon millions of copies. I read this when I was in high school. So it was very influential on me for a long period of time. So what's the big idea I want to pull out of this book? Start with the end in mind.

All right. So this is a key notion from Covey, which is productivity for productivity's sake is meaningless. Why are you being more organized? Why are you keeping better track of things? You need to figure out what it is you are trying to do with your life, with your work, in your role as a parent, in your role as a community leader. And all of productivity should be working backwards to support that vision. So it instrumentalizes productivity towards much more philosophically or spiritually important goals. That is a very influential idea, not just for me, but for anyone who's writing in the sustainable productivity or the sustainable productivity or the humanist productivity tradition. A lot of that goes back to Stephen Covey and seven habits of highly effective people. So if you know what you're trying to do, then you can care about. oh, this is why I'm organizing my calendar and keeping track of my task and making sure that I'm balancing the important but non-urgent work with the non-important but urgent tasks that are pulling for my attention.

All of these really good on-the-ground tactical productivity ideas that come out of this book are all aimed towards big picture goals. What am I trying to do in these different parts of my life? Obviously, this resonates with how we talk about productivity on the show. It resonates with the notion of the deep life. it resonates with lifestyle-centric career planning. Covey's Shadow looms large in a lot of what we talk about here. So that's an important book. Don't be turned off by the number in the title.

This is actually a much deeper book than you might be thinking if you've never read it. All right. Book number two, another classic from the genre, David Allen's Getting Things Done. Now, people think about getting things done. don't know the book. Often caricature what they think it's about because of the title. So those who are writing in the more recent anti-productivity camp often see that title and say, well, this book is part of a whole industry that valorizes getting as much

things done as possible. Getting things done is all that matters. That accomplishing more task off your list is what matters. and it's part of this productivity, Protestant work ethic complex that just tries to push us to do more and more. But David Allen's book is way more complicated and interesting than that. I actually wrote a whole long-form New Yorker piece about this a few years ago called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

and it's about David Allen and it's about Merlin Mann and it's about the evolution of the productivity industry and it's a cool article and it's a rich topic. Now, your first hint, if you've never read this book, your first hint that there's more going on here than someone just saying, do more work, is the subtitle. Look at the subtitle of this book, The Art of Stress Free Productivity. Stress free and art are in the subtitle. This is not what you would expect from a book that's about how to crush your task list. So what's really going on? Well, if you read this book, you see what Alan cares about is psychological. sustainability. His concern is, as you get more and more to do, which by the way, he just posits as an

unfortunate reality of modern work, not as a goal that you're pursuing. He says, this is the unfortunate reality of work as the 90s give way to the 2000s, is that we have more and more to do. This is very stressful, and I want to find a way to make this unavoidable reality of modern work less stressful. How do we get more psychological sustainability from a world of work that demands a to-do list that are 50 things long, email inboxes that are clogged, inbox trays that are overfilling. So he's not pushing. It's good to do more work.

He says, how in the world can we survive that reality? How do we prevent that from being too stressful? So one of the big ideas from his book, the idea I want to isolate here, is that open loops generates stress. So open loop is his term for some sort of obligation or commitment that you've made that is not captured somewhere that you can trust. It's an obligation or commitment that you're really just keeping track of in your mind. Alan is pointing out that is a major source of stress and anxiety in work.

If you answer an email and say, yeah, I'll work on that project. And you're not really keeping track of that anywhere else but in your brain. It's going to use up brain resources and be this little engine that generates a little background thrum of anxiety. And if you have 50 or 60 things that you're sort of supposed to, to be working on or you said you've been working on, and you don't have it written down anywhere or you've written it down somewhere that you don't trust you're going to look, each one of those things, each one of those, what he calls open loops, little engine of anxiety going in your brain.

And it all adds up. And that's what stresses us out. And that's what makes work psychologically unsustainable. So the entire program in getting things done is full capture. How do you have a single trusted system where once something gets written in it, you do not have to think about it. You know you will see it there in that system when the time comes. How do you build a system like this and make sure that everything that you've committed to, be it implicitly or explicitly, whether it be very large or whether it's just, hey, call back

and give me this information? How do you make sure that everything you've committed to is in that system so your brain can just be free of trying to remember it, free of the stress of forgetting? And just focus on whatever you're doing right now. Now, does this actually work? Well, there's some issues. I mean, Alan was working on this just as email and the hyperactive hive mind was getting out of control. So the book is really right pre that period. I think the world of checking an inbox once every five to six minutes makes the getting things done methodology not so cleanly apply. People now use their inbox to keep track of things. There's much more interruption, distraction when you have to keep checking these inboxes. So it's not a panacea for our modern

world. But I think the key about this is that he's trying to reduce stress. And the way he's trying to reduce stress is recognizing that keeping track of things in your mind is one of the biggest sources of this bad feeling. So don't do that. Have good systems, have full capture. So that's the big idea from Alan. Misunderstood. I think when you really understand him, you see he's much more on the side of humanist productivity than he is the straw man that the anti-productivity camps often make him out to be. when you Google is book, your article is one of the first things that comes up.

Oh, there we go. You see Google getting things done? Yeah. Oh, there we go. Deep work and getting things done. We're often in competition for top spot on Amazon's, I guess, time management list. Mm-hmm.

So the books that live at the top of that list are deep work, getting things done, the four-hour work week, and essentialism, which will also, two other books will talk about. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we're all in the mix up there. All right, let's, speaking of these, let's go to book three. Tim Ferriss, the four-hour work week,

escaped the nine to five, live anywhere, and joined the new rich. This book came out in 2007. I remember this book coming out because my mutual friend with Tim, so Tim and I shared a mutual friend of Rete Sethi, and I remember in 2007, Rameet, saying, hey, Cal, you got to read this book. This friend of mine, Tim, has, He's done some crazy things.

This book is really going to blow up. You've got to read this. And I listen to it on audio. I remember for all of those sort of Cambridge people out there, I was living near Huron Village in Cambridge outside of Boston. I remember listening to this walking on Porter Street towards Porter Square. I don't know why I have this memory. I just do to go to the Brueger Bagels near Porter Square listening to the four-hour work week.

It's just this really clear memory that I have. Very influential book. I also wrote a New Yorker article about this. There's a good piece from a couple years ago where I interviewed Tim. And I interviewed him about where the book came from and what the reaction was like when the book came out. This is also a book that I think has been overlooked in recent years. I don't really know why. This is one of the questions I asked in that New Yorker piece.

What Tim was talking about in 2007 is actually super relevant to what people were talking about in 2021 and 2012. When they were thinking about post-pandemic, rethinking their lives and the role of work in their lives and where they live and what they do and what their life is like and everyone was rediscovering this idea of there's more to life than just work. And Tim had written the defendant of book on this and wasn't part of the conversation but should have been. So what's the core idea I want to point out from the four-hour work week? It's the notion that work is a tool to use in implementing an ideal lifestyle. This was very influential to me because Tim basically separated your ideal lifestyle from work. So you figure out what you want to do. He called them mini retirements.

You know, he had all these examples in his book of people in their 20s that would live in Argentina and take tango lessons and rent a helicopter to go up and drink some Malbecke up in the mountains. These really sort of amazing things that are like people in their 20s would really care about. You're like, look, there's these cool lifestyles. work is just about funding that. And once you know that, then you can start to get pretty clever and say, well, how much money do I need? Well, I can reduce that amount

if I live overseas in a place where the dollar is stronger. And he goes into all of these systems for automating your work and simplifying your work and basically creating little money engines, not things that are going to make you rich, but things that would generate enough money

that you could do tango in Argentina. And he called that lifestyle design. Now, I think it got dismissed in part because the specific examples he gave were the examples that, again, a 28-year-old in 2006 would be thinking about. But the broader point underneath this book, I think, is much more general and much more impactful, which is this idea that it's the lifestyle ultimately that matters. Work is something that supports that. And it might support it by just being a money source and you want to minimize its footprint as much as possible.

Or it might support it much more substantially, like what you're doing with your work, helps put into your life specific things that you like or lets you live in a place you really like, but you have to see it instrumentally. And again, this was really different than the way that people were seeing careers in the period leading up to this book. The first decade of the 2000s, this was the rise of passion culture. It was the peak of passion culture. It was the peak of this idea that the secret to happiness was following your passion with your career, only through matching your job to what you loved.

Could you find passion? and Tim said, forget that. The things you're going to make your life happy might have very little to do with work, but you know what? In this new world of technology and internet, you could probably find ways to make enough money if you're a smart person and have some advantages.

You can make enough money to go do things cool right now. I think it's a really influential idea. Definitely an influence on me. I think you see that in lifestyle-centric career planning, work backwards from the lifestyle. I think you see it in my deep lifestyle thinking. work is in there, but it's in there along with other sort of things that you're all deploying towards the vision of making your life deeper.

Before Work Week is an influential book, and I mean, really think it helped kick off this notion of work to live as opposed to live to work that's really kind of dominant right now in our discourse about productivity and happiness. All right, book number four, bring it up on the screen here. This is Greg McEwey. Inns essentialism. This book came out a couple of years before deep work. Very popular book, very influential.

I know Greg, I think Greg may have been on this podcast way back in the early days. I've certainly been on Greg's podcast. You know, the early days of this podcast are hazy, but he's a friend of mine. I like to think of him as a friend of the show. So essentialism, what's the idea I want to isolate there? saying no can make you more valuable. So the whole book about essentialism is about doing less things. We do too much in work and we should do less things in work and why you should do that and how to do that.

But there was a story in there that really stuck with me. And the story was of an employee that was overwhelmed. I forget exactly what industry is in, some sort of management consultancy type thing, really overwhelmed with work. And so he hatched this plan of, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to partially retire. maybe I'm just going to do some consulting on the side. I can make this work financially. So he knew he was going to leave the job.

So he said, why not before I actually leave the job? Why don't I launch an experiment? What if I just say no to most things? Because this was his big problem, is that all these different bosses and colleagues were always throwing stuff on his plate. And he thought the way to get ahead was to be agreeable and say yes to everything, be the person they could count on to, I'll take what you want me to do and I'll get it done.

And it was really exhausting at him. That's why he was going to quit. He's like, well, what if I just, before I quit, I just said no to most things. He just kept my focus on the really most important projects. He's like, hey, I'll probably get yelled at, but I was going to leave anyway, so why not? He tries this experiment. And what happens? He gets promoted.

He starts saying no to more things, and he gets promoted. Why? Because when you say no, in the moment, of course, there's a little bit of social uncomfortableness. But no one's tallying that up somewhere. your score of social uncomfortableness and how high is that getting. What do they notice is the work that you're actually completing. And by being able to focus on a smaller number of things and do those things better, he began to gain more attention for the great stuff he was producing.

And that was way more valuable than him saying yes in the moment. So he didn't end up needing to leave his job. He fixed his overload problem by just saying no. Instead of it being something that he had to figure out, how can I get my employer to tolerate me doing less, it turned out that his employer celebrated him after he started doing less. Now that's not always possible, right? Different jobs have different social dynamics and power hierarchies,

but I think this core idea that doing fewer things better can produce more value for you and your employer than doing lots of things mediocre is very influential. It not only justifies the whole program of essentialism that McEwen talks about, it became a core plank of slow productivity, the first principle of slow productivity, which says do fewer things. This is not just about, I want to be less stressed. It actually can be a strategy for being better at what you do, whether you work in a big company or just handling clients on your own. So essentialism did really well, and I think in part people recognized overload was an issue, and there was some optimism in this idea that doing less is not just a survival move. it might actually be a move towards advancement.

All right, let's roll along here to a more recent book. It's one's by my friend Oliver Berkman, 4,000 weeks, time management for mortals. This came out in 2021, did very well. In both the UK, where Berkman's from and here in the U.S., the book did very well. I like to take a small amount of credit for that because I helped convince Tim Ferriss

that you would like this book. And he did. And then he had Berkman on his show. And having Berkman, being on the Ferris show, pushing a book that Ferris likes helps you sell books. I don't know if you know about that. But that does pretty well. Anyways, this book did really well. It really hit a chord for a, what we think of as sort of an exhausted in-phase pandemic audience of people who were just burnt out from work and Zoom.

And this book hit a really good chord. All right, so what's the big idea I want to pull out of 4,000 weeks? Accepting you don't have time to do most things. Excepting you don't have time to do most things that you want to do can help you chill out now. All right. So let me say that better. Accepting that you don't have enough time to do most things can help you be more relaxed right now. Oliver does a better job explaining this to me.

But what I'm getting at here is that basically the core of this book is this notion that you're only going to live on average about 4,000 weeks. That's not that much time. So most things that you could do, you're not going to do. So instead of obsessing about the border of like, well, what if I could have done this and I didn't this, enjoy the things that you are doing and be okay with you're not doing most. If you can't get close to doing anywhere near the whole list of possibilities, you're

saying no to most things anyways. Why stress out about that small border of things that maybe you could squeeze in but you didn't? What if you just didn't squeeze in the extra thing and said, I'm okay with this? I like what's going on with my work. It's sustainable right now. I like the people I work with. It's flexible.

I like what I'm doing. That's good. I have like this hobby. I like this hobby I work on and sometimes I don't. And the sunset's nice. It's a push towards more of a present focus on presence, a focus on savoring what you do have. A focus on accomplishing more things, making that list longer. isn't necessarily going to make me much happier,

but it could create a lot of unnecessary stress or self-recrimination. So it was a call to slow down. To be happy with what you did have. A lot of people were feeling this coming out of the pandemic, so I think this book hit the culture at a really good time. They weren't looking to add more to their list.

They were looking to simplify and be okay with that simplification. So again, it's a big idea. Influential on my slow productivity philosophy as well. Doing less things. keeping the pace natural, try and do those things really well, but being okay with it taking a lot of time.

That's a very congruent with an Oliver Berkman 4,000 weeks style mindset. All right, moving on. The sixth book I want to talk about here is Ginny Odell's How to Do Nothing. This is a book that came out the week, I think the same week as my book, Digital Minimalism.

So there's a period there. These books were seen kind of as being in similar a similar category. So we did some things together. The books were reviewed together often. The New Yorker had a Gia Tolentino piece that co-reviewed my book and Ginny's. The New York Times Book Review did something that had my book and Jenny. So we were sort of intertwined there for a while because we were both dealing in part with distraction in the attention economy.

This book was very successful. New York Times bestseller, Barack Obama put it on his list of recommended books, his reading list for 2009. 19. So it's a good book. It's a deep book. It's a complicated book. It has more of a foundation in actual academic thinking than a lot of other books in this space. There's a particular Italian Marxist philosopher that Jenny is very influenced by. And so you have a particular academic lineage from this particular Italian Marxist that is being updated to apply to the social media age by Jenny. So it's more academic than a lot of books in the space, which I think is part of part of, part of, its appeal. But the idea I want to pull out of this now, which I think was important, is the notion that the attention economy's monetization of our attention led us to increasingly monetize our own time. So what Jenny is trying to say here is the attention economies of these apps that want you to look at their apps on the phone. For clear capitalist reasons, see your moments of attention as a resource to commodify.

and sell. Okay, so we know this. TikTok wants you to spend more time looking at TikTok because it can package up your attention and the data describing that attention and sell it. Same for Instagram, same for Twitter. What Jenny is saying, okay, this influences the way that we then begin to personally think about time. We're so used to this notion now.

We've been trained by these economic forces, this economic reality. We've been trained to think about moments as something that can be transformed into something that someone's going to value. It becomes hard to do. to just exist and be present in a moment. We could be monetizing this.

I could be documenting this and putting this on Instagram where it could get likes. So even though we don't directly participate in the monetization of our attention, Instagram's not sending us a check for the amount of eyeball minutes that are video captured. We still adopt this mindset of time

is something to be commodified. Time is something to be productively transformed into attention, into something that is valued by someone else. And she says in that mindset shift, we lost a lot of our humanity. And so what was her suggestion, her recourse to this reality, was do nothing. Relearn how to do nothing. Relearn how to just be in a field watching birds.

So Odell is an amateur ornithologist. She likes looking at birds. For no other reason than it's just, I just like to see this bird and it's peaceful out here. And isn't that nice? that she says it's become an act of resistance, a political resistance to do nothing, to go do something just for the enjoyment of doing this with no documentation, no mindset towards the monetization of this moment, capturing attention, trying to document it for others. I think this really hit a chord as well.

In 2019, we had reached this peak of new dissatisfaction with the social media age, and her message was just right. because she was given a complicated critique for why we feel the way we feel. It's a really cool idea. I like it. Doing nothing is an act of resistance. And even when you strip off the sort of Marxist anti-capitalist framework of thinking here, there's a deeper truth that I think most people recognize, which is that there is a deep satisfaction and an experience that's had just for the experience.

We know this. This has been intertwined into both secular and Eastern philosophical traditions for a long time. time. However, we want to explain why this is true, we derive great satisfaction out of being able to just spend a moment, just being there in that moment. So Adele, I think, gives nice support to that timeless claim. I've got two more here. Speaking of timeless claim, here's another book I really liked. It's called Make Time, How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. This is by Jake Knapp and John Geraski. They're from Google. And what they had done over at Google, if I understand the backstory right, is that they had taken this sprint methodology that's very popular in software development.

You say to a small number of programmers, work on adding this feature for the next few days and do nothing else. And then let us know when you're done. And over at Google, they had adapted this to other type of work, not just programming. Let's just work on one thing as a group and just do that without distraction until it's done. and make time they then are generalizing this idea into personal productivity, how to you spread this idea into your own personal productivity practices. The key piece of that I want to pull out is the following. Design your days around focusing on what matters most.

The rest will work itself out. I think that's a key idea. Prioritize, I want to work on this thing that really matters. And maybe that means for a few hours every day, or maybe I put aside an entire day and do nothing but work on this thing that matters. And that can make you uncomfortable because of the emails you're missing and the task you could be crossing off your list. But Jake and John say this is the engine of your success.

It's a really important stuff getting done well. Everything else will work out. It'll work out. People won't notice, they'll forget. But if you accomplish the core things you're supposed to do well, everything else will follow. I think it's a great idea. It's one that, of course, I preach in deep work. It's one I preach in my new book on slow productivity.

and I think Jake and John have a lot of great examples to back it up. All right, one more book, one more idea. Final book. It comes from our friend, Laura Vandercam, her personal productivity classic, 168 hours. That's the number of hours in a typical week. You have more time than you think. That's the subtitle. Kind of interesting tension with Oliver Berkman's 4,000 weeks.

It's all about you don't have that much time. So stop trying to do too much. And Laura's is you have more time than you think. It's because we're operating on different scales. Here's the core idea from Laura's book. The core idea I want to pull out here. You're not working as much as you think. Your sensor overload comes from what you're doing with your work hours.

This was the big surprising point from Laura's book is that she had a lot of people actually keep track of their time. She calls it the time diary method. People actually keep track of what did I do with every hour of my day. And then she went back and she said, She studied these time diary logs. What she saw is there's often a big disconnect between how busy people think they are and how much work they're actually doing. So you'll ask someone, well, how much are you working?

They're like, look, I've got to be doing 60, 70 hour weeks. And you look at the time diary. You say, well, no, you're working 35 to 40 hour weeks. Now, what do we take away from that? Well, we could just say, yeah, suck it up. You're not really that busy. But no, the real message to take away from that is why do you feel like you're working so much? if even the time diaryality says it's not actually that much.

And it's because it's how we approach our work. It's this fragmented way we approach. This is me throwing on my spin here. This switching back and forth rapidly between many different things, the cognitive tax of overload of your mind knowing you have more things going on than you can even imagine completing. This all stretches out and exaggerates our senses of busyness. So what of Laura's big messages are,

if you're more careful about your time, organizing when you work on what, being careful about what you bring on your plate, be careful about your systems, without even having to substantially change much of what you're actually working on from a quantity standpoint, you can make yourself feel much less overworked. If you just get a little bit more intentional about your time, you might have more time to work with than you think. This idea, of course, resonates with me as well. My multi-scale planning philosophy, multi-scale time management planning philosophy

is a perfect way. it is built around actually confronting the reality of your work and your schedule and making the most of it. And it does make a big difference. And again, this is something I think the anti-productivity advocates often get wrong. They think about these systems or they think about books like Laura as being focused on trying to fit more in. Oh, you have more time than you think. Great, we can fit in more work. That's not Laura's point.

Her point is you have more time than you think. So if we get smarter about how we organize your work, you can be less stressed. Same thing with multi-scale productivity planning. the anti-productivity people will say, oh, the whole point of multi-scale time management is to try to fit more work in. That's not the case. It's about trying to take the work that you already have

and make it more sustainable. The more you can control, the more you can turn down the volume of the stress and the overload. So anyways, Laura's book there is very valuable. All right, so, Jesse, those are the eight books. There's so many other books that I really like. Yeah. If I'm omitting a book here,

it's not because I don't think it's important. It's just these were the first eight that came to mind. eight that have really big ideas I like. There's another eight more I could probably list. Yeah. There's also other ideas in each of these books. I'm just trying to pick out one idea in particular that I happen to like. We could do future books and future episodes.

We really should. We really should. And of course, left out of this is my own books. Of course, those all have big ideas. So what we have now is we do have some questions that are all roughly orbiting this theme of productivity and productivity books and big productivity ideas. I mean, that's a broad topic. So we had no trouble finding those questions.

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because this is the Henson's business. Before they got involved in razors, they worked with aerospace parts manufacturing. We're talking about parts for the ISS or Mars rover. So they know how to engineer incredibly precise parts. They've engineered this beautiful piece of aluminum. You put a single 10-cent safety razor blade into a hinson razor. You screw it in, and it's so precisely milled, or whatever the term is, that the edge of the blade extends miniscually past the edge of the actual razor. So no wobbling up and down diving board effect, which means no necks, no clogging, but a really clean shave with just a single blade.

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And then when you add the promo code Cal, the price of the blades will go down to zero. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal and use that code Cal. Metalworking or soldering? Metal working. I looked it up. Yeah. So they're precision metal working at Henson's Shavy. I think we probably need like a metal, precision metal mill in my maker lab.

Yeah. So I could just mold aluminum. Yeah. And you could incorporate that in your light project. Custom aluminum precision parts from our light product. All right. Of that nonsense. Jesse, let's do some questions.

Who do we have first? First questions from Diana. I'm a researcher and I'm trying to get better at time management. one issue I keep running up against is that I can't control nor anticipate when exactly I'll get that critical aha moment of insight for a project. I feel like the work that happens after the said aha moment is the most productive, but I obviously can't write chase dead ends and mull over the RQ for an undetermined period of time why I'm struck on divine inspiration as an activity in my delivery plan. Do you have any advice? Well, Niana, this is a common question. what happens when you have a big idea

and you need to work on it but you already have a plan for the day and it doesn't involve you working for the next two hours trying to chase that a big idea. Well, you have two options here. So option number one, if the idea is important,

work on it. Because you have to remember if you're, let's say you're planning your day using something like time block planning. Of course, check out timeblock planner.com for my own second edition

of the time block planner. But if you're time blocking your hours, it's easy to get into the mindset that you are playing a game where you win if you never change your plan. If you build the perfect plan and you stick with the plan and if you leave the plan, then you've lost. That's an easy game to fall into because our mind likes these simple binaries.

I win if I do this, I lose if I do that. But it's not the point of time block play. Why are you planning the hours of your day so that you can have intention about how you spend your time? What are you trying to avoid by time blocking your day? wasting particular time and energy doing low value activity for the moment or switching back and forth between a lot of things. You don't want to squander the time you put aside for work. You want to make the most out of it.

So a time block plan gives you some intention. So what happens if a really good idea pops up? Well, working on that really good idea sounds like a very intentional use of your time as far as I'm concerned. That's not wasting your time. That's not squandering your time. and that's not just being distracted and letting three hours go. That's an incredibly productive use of your time. I have an idea that's important to my work and I'm going to work on it.

So the big idea comes up, work on it. And then when you're done working on it, next time you have a chance, cross out the remainder of your time block plan and build the best plan you can for the time that remains. That's it. That satisfies the goal of I'm being very intentional about my schedule. So once you leave that mindset that somehow not changing your time block plan is winning, and instead say what I'm trying to avoid is just not having a plan, then you'll feel completely fine about pursuing a big idea in the moment.

All right. Now, let's say here's option number two. Let's say it's an important idea, but it's not critical that you work on it in the moment. Your bigger concern is you don't want to forget it. Let's say, for example, you're working on a book in the background. Now, in a particular day, you have a pretty busy day that has nothing to do with your book. You have some meetings, you're trying to get progress on some work stuff that's due, and you have an insight right in the middle of this

for a chapter that you're going to work on your book. Like, you know what? If I did this with this chapter is going to be much better. You don't want to forget that. But you also don't want to, in this case, it's not the best use of your time to deep six the rest of your work schedule to start working on your book. What you can do in these cases is have a place anywhere

to capture notes about this. Take five minutes. Okay, think about for chapter seven, this, this, this, this, this. And then just put a note in your capture system. system, process my notes on the book chapter. So if you're using something like a time block planner, you just put it right there in the little task list.

Remember, I wrote down notes, and I don't care if you wrote the notes in a $500 remarkable dedicated to books or in a text file that you just do in your desktop. The point is you have a capture system when you say process notes about books. And now you can move on and return back to your time block schedule because you know at the end of the day, as you go through your shutdown routine, one of the things you're going to do is process all those tasks you've jotted down. And when you see the task about, hey, remember those notes I took on my book, you can either move that into your permanent task system to deal with later or take some time right there to

move those notes over to wherever you're working on your book so that you'll see them next time you work on them. And then that's handle. So if it's something that's important long term, but not important that you work on it in the moment, this is where you just throw down the notes somewhere, put up placeholders, what David Allen would call a stake in the ground in your task system, so you know you won't forget it so you can move your mind back 100% to what you're working on. And you move on.

All right. So Dan, don't be worried about plans changing. That's fine. What you want to do is be intentional. And if you have a lot of ideas you don't want to work on in the time, just make sure your capture system and shut down routines are up to code, as they would say, because the key there is to make sure that this doesn't sit there like an open loop in your mind and distract you from the other work that you're returning to.

All right. Who do we have next, Jesse? Next question is from John, a surgeon. Time blocking was always my safety net when my schedule got hectic as an undergrad or medical student, but it's nearly impossible to do now that I'm a surgeon. Surgeryers get added or removed at a whim, new patients who need me to be seen immediately show up without notice, etc., etc. And this isn't just a one-time thing. I would say 75% or more my days are shaped on the fly.

This variability is in addition to the sheer time burner of my job. pretty much 80 hours a week. I need a new strategy to help me get things done. I hate the list reactive way of things, but that's how I'm been getting by. Well, John, surgery is one of these jobs. There's other jobs, many of which are in medicine, but others that are in other fields,

that are by definition reactive. It's, I'm a surgeon. If there is a surgical emergency, I have to go do this surgery. There's also then going to be suddenly post-stop checkups and other things to get thrown on my schedule. So it sounds like you have a fundamentally reactive schedule. You're not going to be able to time block that.

Your days are going to be built around. Here is my major thing I have to do and being flexible. So what's the right thing to do in those cases? It's to simplify everything else you can about your job. If you have one of these fundamentally reactive jobs, you want to focus on doing these things in your case surgery as well as possible and trying to minimize everything else. You cannot, I mean, you can, but I'm going to say you should not.

Take the mindset that you might have had as an undergrad or in med school where I am going to establish my impressiveness by doing three or four different things. And you're going to be so impressed that I'm doing my studies and running this organization and training for this merit. I'm doing all these things at once. And your impressiveness, your impression of me is going to be driven by the quantity of different things I do. You have to abandon that mindset. You're a surgeon. You want to be a good surgeon. You want your life outside of surgery to be as flexible as possible so that if something

pops up, you're like, this is what I'm doing today, this surgery. And this is a life where you're going to have downtime in between these things. Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility. That's what you want to be aiming for. The stuff you do have to get done, it's fine. You can tackle it day by day, have a really good capture system for your task, be like ongoing heuristics, flexible heuristics for. regular work. Hey, if I could get three sessions a week in on my whatever duties as director

of whatever lab at the hospital, I'll be fine. So that could be helpful too. Okay, this day I have room for one of these sessions. These two days, I didn't, so I need to fit one in these last two days. So flexible heuristics, good capture systems for task, fit in work where you have time during the day. Don't over-schedule yourself. Do all that, but keep your overall number of obligations small. You're a successful and impressive person. It's hard to be a surgeon. Do that well. don't do other things especially as you elaborated in the longer version

of this question you have a new you have kids they're new your family's young and growing and I'm seeing in your elaborated version this question

these like national organizations you're involved with you've got to get rid of all that I'm already impressed with you for being a surgeon so just do that well with huge flexibility and that's what makes

a job like that sustainable if you try to do the other thing I want a huge high skill high time demand, unperictable job, and do five or six other things. There's really no recourse to that

except for you stay up really late, you work every weekend. And my point there, John, is why? You're doing interesting work in helping the world by being a surgeon.

Is it really so important that you, what, become department head or at your hospital at a young age or something? You know, is to what end? You're making a lot of money.

You're doing something important. It's high skill that's satisfying. So I've been increasingly pitching that to people that have fundamentally reactive jobs. They say, great, make your life easier. Make your life as easy as possible, given the reality of the highly reactive job. That's pretty similar to the student advice you give too for, you know, kids, like,

not doing too many activities outside of school and just getting best grades. Yeah, don't do, make your schedules easier. Yeah, it's like the number one, when I used to work with college students, you'd give talks about college student stress. The number one source of college student stress was schedules that were too hard. Mm-hmm. And there's very little you can do about a, scheduled that's really, really hard.

If you have two majors and nine activities and a job, there's nothing I could do to make that student's life sustainable. It's just too many things. And I would say, what you've got to do is do less. I used to have these slides when I would give a talk. I had this case study. I don't remember the guy's name. It started with, it was like Tof or something like this.

It was kind of weird. He was a student, and he had this interesting case study where he had gone to a study abroad in Australia, I believe it was. So before he went to a study abroad in Australia, he was completely burnt out. And because he had multiple majors and all these clubs and a job and he was really stressed out. And he went to Australia. And for a bunch of contingent reasons, he couldn't get a job because he was from a different country. He couldn't get all the normal hard course load because you had to get majors approved.

And he couldn't get most of the courses approved. And it turned out to do activities, extracurricular activities, you had to pay for an activity card that he couldn't afford. So he was doing a under-scheduled course load, no activities, no job. It was this huge epiphany for him. He's like, wait a second. I just have more than enough time to focus on my courses. He crushed the courses because he had so much time to focus on them. The professors thought he was a star.

So he comes back from the study abroad, cuts off all the activities, reduces his major, gives himself this huge schedule, hugely open schedule, crushes his courses. His professors think he's a star. and all these opportunities opened up. Yeah. And the slides I used to use was he took a snapshot of his calendar from now at the time with his simplified schedule. And it was like course, course, empty day, course, like just all this white. And then he used the time machine feature on his Mac to go back a year earlier and take a snapshot of his calendar on the same week from a couple years before. And it was just completely full of stuff.

I used to show those two side by side. So yeah, doing fewer things is such a powerful tool. But you just get trained. I'm sure John, I'm going to a surgeon. Yeah. Great grades, you know, went to a medical school, crushed at a medical school, got a good residency, got a good fellowship, always impressing everyone. So he's just have this mindset of, I do a lot of things. And that's what makes me impressive.

But by the time you get to the thing you're going to do, you're going to be a surgeon, no, just do your surgery well. And engineer the rest of your life to be as livable as possible given that reality. Yep. Yeah. People don't often think that. All right. Let's keep rolling. next question's from rachel you've often mentioned how the business of books is to continue to keep

contact coming as the demand never ends how should one couple this insight with the plethora of productivity and south help books that are constantly published can there be that many new ideas well rachel my advice is every time you're tempted to buy a book on any topic really if you want to maximize your return instead go and buy multiple copies of my books because you know you're not going to be let down by my books. Everyone should just buy my books again and again. Now, are we running out of ideas? Here's the thing, Rachel.

Your premise is correct. So when you say here, the business of books is to continually keep content coming. It is true the point that publisher's biggest issue is actually they don't have enough books to publish. Because there is a lot of books or bought each year. There's a lot of people buying books. The more books they can put out in some sense, better. So why do they have a hard time getting enough books to fill their pipelines?

Well, it's actually because their standards are high, right? I mean, for a publisher to publish a book, they want it to be a good book, well-written with a good idea, written by someone who makes sense that they wrote it. So this is why I'm saying if you can cross that bar as an aspiring writer, I have something to say that people care about, I can write it well, and I'm the right person to write it. You're not going to have that much of a hard time getting a book deal. book publishers are not in the business of gatekeeping so much as in the business of desperately trying to find good stuff to publish. But what does that mean for the reader?

Well, there's a lot of readers and there's a lot of genres. And so I would not worry that in your particular genre you care about that there's going to be too many books. So let's consider productivity in particular. I think there's this understanding, this vision of the world of productivity books that a lot of people hold and I think it's completely disconnected from reality. So if you talk to a lot of people, their guess at the productivity book space is that there are hundreds of these books being published every year

and most of them are saying, you've got to hustle, you've got to do more things. Business is great. It's bad to not be working. How can you do more work? You hear this straw man vision of the productivity book industry is discussed all the time. I mean, people are always setting up like, you know, I'm so brave because I'm pushing back against all of those books that are saying the more task you do, the better.

And I'm saying you should do less task. And look, I might get killed for this, but I'm so brave. Here's the reality. No one's publishing that book. I don't remember the last time I've seen a book. I went over eight productivity books at the beginning of the show. None of them are saying, how do you do more work? How do you fit in more tasks?

I can think of essentially, I don't know, one book that's ever really been about that. And there was this book called Extreme Productivity, and it was just a no-nonsense guide for executives. It basically said, look, executives to succeed, you have to do a lot of things. And here is how I as an executive balanced a bunch of different things and tried to fit more in, because he was being honest. If you're a C-suite type, it helps. That's like the only book I can think of in the last 10 years that even was in the vicinity of saying, how do you do a lot more things? Also, the volume of books being published in the productivity space is pretty small. I know this space very well.

I know all the writers, all the major writers in the space. I know the major editors in this space. This is not a space that has a huge number, especially if we're talking about big publishers, their high-quality titles, like books coming out of portfolio at Penguin, for example. You're looking at these books, there's not that many that are coming out. And they tend to be pretty thoughtful and have a pretty specific point of view. you know, like I have my book on slow productivity coming out. The last book I wrote that was about work productivity, I guess you go back three years to get like a world without email, but really that was more a critique of work.

You got to go back six years before that or five years to get too deep work. I mean, these books don't come out that often. So, Rachel, I want to worry about it. If you're, look at books about work and productivity that top tier publishers are publishing. These are thoughtful titles. there's not that many of them, by the ones that resonate, they're going to have ideas that are good.

It's just simply not the case that these big publishers are publishing nonsense. They're just not, there's 10 ways to get more done. Does not exist as a major publication book. No one is publishing that right now. It does not exist.

So I think you're okay, Rachel. This might not be the case in other genres, but the productivity genre, I think, is not as crowded or as poor quality as you might fear. You know what, Jesse, it's to the point now where if you published a book that was like 10 ways to get a lot more done, that book might

actually do well because it would be so different than everything. Yeah. I mean, every book right now in productivity always starts the same way. I'm not one of these guys telling you the, you know, to get more done and hustle, where are these guys? I cannot find these books. I think if you leaned into the opposite and are just like, do more stuff because that's what matters. 50 tips, the contrarianism of that actually, ironically, paradoxically, paradoxically, might make that book sell really well.

Well, one of those guys you could probably find, you know, from those, like on YouTube with those long, yeah. Yeah, YouTube. Stuff like that,

social media. YouTube has this weird productivity culture, but YouTube has a lot of weird cultures. Because there's just a lot of people publishing videos on there. There's a whole culture on there are people who just work like 10 hours

and they film it. So here's a 10 hour video of me working. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. But YouTube just does this on every topic, On every topic, there's going to be a subculture where people push a topic to an extreme because that makes for interesting watching. I mean, it's every topic. If you're in the bread baking, you can find a whole YouTube subculture about I'm 100 loafer.

I bake 100 loaves a day, you know, or I bake the biggest bread you've ever seen. It's just extremes work well on YouTube. So every topic has a subculture of extremes. But that does not stand in for how the publishing industry thinks about productivity. But if you take your advice, you like, we never see it because like we're on social media and we have those YouTube blog. That's true. But the authors that write those other books probably do see it because they probably on social media.

Yeah, that's right. You're right. Those of us writing these books were not as seen on YouTube with like, here's a video of me just working a little bit and then going and doing something else. It's not that interesting, I guess. I'm hanging out with my kid because I didn't work that much today. Oh, well. All right.

What do we got? Let's get a couple more in here. Here's a question from Kyle. Your conversations about the deep life remind me some of the seven habits. of highly effective people, and in particular, the goal to start with the end in mind. Was Covey an influence of your thinking? Well, Kyle, very perceptive, because we talked about this in the opening segment of today's episode. Yes, I think Covey influenced me and a lot of people who are in this sort of humanistic

productivity space that's become so popular recently. His early writing that book about starting with the end in mind, figure out what you're trying to do in the different roles of your life. and then work backwards to figure out how your activities can be organized to support those visions. I think it's really important. It grounded productivity as a means towards a more philosophically rich end, and I think that has reemerged in our current moment of humanistic productivity, where people are now thinking about all of this type of thinking as a way to intentionally craft your life.

And so, you know, you see Covey's influence in so many important books in the space. Tim Ferriss, I think that's very Covey. We're seeing it certainly in something like 4,000 weeks or Oliver Berkman's book, right? Again, it's very Covey influenced. You only have so much time. What do you want to do with it? So I think that's a good question. And yes, I think Covey, which I read Young, definitely influenced me that you need a purpose for your productivity,

or you're going to find yourself in this sort of peak 2006 productivity prong making your Macintosh macro so that your KTG KGTD configuration can automatically pull task from your quick search quick silver task bar. You just end up in that world of just optimizing because you think optimizing is fun where productivity systems are like hot rods. It's just you just get fun and tuning them up for the sake of tuning them up,

not because it helps you get from here to where you're trying to go. And that's fun for some people, but that's where you end up if you don't ground productivity and bigger vision. And Covey helped me do that. It's a good book. I recommend people if you haven't read it, read it. It's not what you necessarily think.

All right, Jesse, let's do one more. We got time. We have a question from Carissa. I really like the concept of the Deep Life Stack and especially the emphasis that is the iterative process rather than a linear process. Does the establishing discipline count if the discipline comes through an external pressure

rather than for myself-imposed structure? I went back to school for my master's in my 30s and started off working a full-time job simultaneously. this forced me into a routine where I had to be productive in the evenings instead of leaning into my usual sloth habits like watching TV. Since finishing my degree and returning back to work, I've realized that unless I have an external pressure, then I have little sense of urgency that pressures me to consistently commit to an activity.

So I'm not sure if I established discipline for myself, but have shown myself that I can work even when I'm tired and that the small, consistent effort over time can yield results. Well, as we talk about it on the show, and when we talk about, we talk about the deep life stack, discipline is an identity. So your goal is to convince yourself that you're a disciplined person, by which we mean someone who can make effort towards something important, even if in the short term it's not fun, or even if the short term, there's no pressure to have to do so. So transforming yourself identity into a disciplined person is the foundation on which you could do all sorts of cool stuff in your life. So the exposure to discipline you had by your degree program is useful. It showed you what it's like to have a life that has more discipline in it. Okay, I got to work.

I got to follow a schedule. I can't just do what I want to do. So that's useful. So that's no longer a mystery. But if you want to fully transition your self-identity to one of a disciplined person, the next step and an unavoidable step is introducing some things you do for no other reason than you think it's important. So you do need to have some disciplined pursuits for which there is not external pressure. You do need to convince yourself.

I will deny myself this or pursue this or do this thing when I don't really feel like doing it today on a consistent basis based purely on my own vision for what I want for my life, not because I'm going to fail out of this course or not because my boss is going to get mad. So you still have that step ahead of you. If you're worried about it, I mean, follow what I talk about. We talk about the Deep Life stack. Start with some keystone habits. Two to three things covering two to three different areas of your life. Tractable, not trivial, but also tractable. So not super easy but not really, really hard.

Find that sweet spot in the middle. Make it three different parts of your life, a professional thing, a health and fitness thing, and either a hobby or social connection thing. And get those three keystone habits going. That's how you begin to give yourself this self-efficious, identity of discipline. I can do this even when I'm not being forced to. So non-trivial, tractable, keystone habits,

covering a couple different areas. Do that for a month or two. And then you can start layering in something that's a little bit more ambitious, a more progress towards a more ambitious self-driven pursuit. Do that for a while, and your self-identity is going to flip. When you see yourself as a disciplined person, everything becomes possible. And that's why I push that as the first step in moving towards. the deep life. It's not making the big decisions. It's not buying the Peloton or moving to the

country. It starts with these small habits that you practice doing for no other reason than you think they're important for you and your vision of your life. If you're someone who's willing to put an effort now to shape a vision for what you want in the future, there's a lot that becomes available. All right. We've got a final segment coming up here. I'm going to talk about the books I read in August. But first, I want to mention another sponsor that makes the show possible. Sponsor, but I'm glad to have them. And that's our friends at M-O-S-H. If you're busy and constantly on the go like me, you need to try Mosh.

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I just have to hold this Jesse this needs to be in a holster hanging off my belt that's what I'm missing or in my fanny pack but I'm thinking like in a holster off my belt next to my fanning. panty pack.

While you're installing the lights. While I'm installing the lights because I'm an old man. And metal working. And metal soldering or whatever you looked up. Soldering my own razors. Oh my. All right. Final segment.

Hey, we're full of books today. We should have been, we're like informally sponsored by people's books at Tacoma Park today because we're just talking about books all day. Yeah. I'm just in a book mood. Our final segment like I do every month is I talk about the five books I read the month before.

So we're in September now. So I should be reading about the books I read in. August 2023. All right, so these were all mainly read when I was still up

in Hanover at the Montgomery House as part of my Montgomery Fellowship. This is important because two of these books were written by past

Montgomery Fellows and the copies I read were signed copies of the books that were there on the bookshelf at the Montgomery House.

So the first one of those was at home in the universe by the system biologist Stuart Kaufman former Montgomery Fellow,

former MacArthur Genius Grant winner. This is a public-facing book about he does a lot of work on self-organization, how complex systems can arise in an emergent fashion. How, for example,

if you have enough reactive chemicals just mixed together in a soup, there's a high chance that among these interactions is going to emerge a self-sustaining autocatalytic system. His work ties connections between biology and complexity theory and other types of mathematics.

I love this book. I'm a nerd for that stuff. As a theorist, as a computer scientist, I've done a reasonable amount of work at the intersection of algorithm theory and biological systems. So this was speaking my language. And I liked that it was a signed copy, knowing that this guy, Kaufman, was in this house back in the 90s, thinking about these thoughts. The second book I read was The Soul of an Octopus by Cy Montgomery

who I believe lives in New Hampshire, Vermont I think maybe New Hampshire. This book I picked it up at bookstore, a Still North bookstore up in Hanover, New Hampshire, shout out. I picked it up randomly. It's a science nature book that got a lot of acclaim. I think it was a finalist for a national book award

won some other nature science writing specific awards. it was not what I expected. So I thought this was going to be a real deep dive on how octopuses think and their brains and their evolution and their cool features and there was a lot of this, but really the core of this book

is that it's a novelistic look at the human characters. The book is actually about all of these interesting, often in some ways broken human characters who found healing through interactions with this animal. So Psi is spending a lot of time at the Boston Aquarium, the New England Aquarium in Boston, and it's the volunteers there, the person in charge of this exhibit.

You get this novelistic look at their inner life and how their interactions with octopuses in some sense healed them or saved them. So it's a book about people. And the octopuses in the book are there to draw out this kind of nuanced picture of humans and life and meaning. And it's like, oh, I see why this book won all these awards. It wasn't what I thought. So it's a really cool book, soul of an octopus.

The only thing that's a little weird about it, and maybe I'm just alone about this, the way Sai talks about being touched by an octopus, so there's a lot of these, a lot of time is spent at New England Aquarium. The octopuses would come over and, like, wrap their tentacles around your arm. The way she talks about this is that it's just self-evidently

the coolest best thing you could ever do. It's like, is there anything better than having octopus tentacles wrapped around your arms? I mean, it's almost weird to the degree to which she fetishizes being touched by octopuses as this, like, self-evident thing. It's like, you know, combing the mane of your pony type. Just like, what could be better? And it does not hit me that way. I was like, this is weird and gross, and the octopus is going to face suck my face. It's going to pull my arms in and rip my nose off with that.

his beak. I would be terrible. It's weird and slimy and they're hard to get off. So that's the only thing that's really weird about this is like, I don't think Cy made the case that this is actually something that normal people like having octopus. She's like, immediately in the book, she's obsessed. I got to get back. I had to get back and have another

encounter with the octopus. So that caught my attention. DeMio seemed weird and strange. I'd be afraid of an octopus. But anyways, really good book. The next book was not good at all. One of the worst books I've read recently. But you finished it?

Yeah, I got it from the Hanover Library. And I was like, oh my God, I'm just going to finish this. All right, I feel bad. I met him once, but he's not going to listen to this. That book was Abduction by Robin Cook. Not a good book. I like Robin Cook. This is the first time ever that you've talked about a book like this.

I just didn't like this book. So this was, he wrote this in the early 2000s. I don't know. He was phoning it in. Robin Cook, you know, obviously writes typically medical thrillers. His first book, which I read earlier this year and talked about on the show, is fantastic. His thriller coma is a fantastic thriller. Most of his books are medical thrillers.

He was a former doctor, and he lives on Beacon Hill and writes these cool books. I really like him as a writer. I went to hear him talk to Beacon Hill Civic Society once, and I like a lot of his books. This book is so damn weird. It's, okay, here's what it's about. And this is, I kept thinking early on, like, this is going to, like, it's going to be in their head and it's going to shift. No. People are in a submarine, they're doing deep sea drill repair or something like that, right?

Which is fine. He knows, Cook knows about this world. He was involved in early Navy experiments with deep sea diving. He was on submarine. So all these details are cool. They get sucked down this sort of vent at the bottom of the ocean, okay. And discover that there is a race. of people who live between the earth's like crust and mantle in a giant underground civilization and they've been there for hundreds of thousands of years.

People just live under the earth when they didn't know about it. And they all speak English and they have all this technology and basically these people are just down in this world of people who live underneath the earth. They don't need sunscreen. They don't need sunscreen. it's just preposterous and nothing really interesting happen it's just it's just the craziest thing

and he doesn't like lean into it it's not a metaphor for things it's not no it's just here we are it's under the earth it's like very unimaginative they're like they wear togas and you know the coolest thing about it is like when their bodies are going to die

they can transfer their brains into like a new body or something and there's like some of the guys the divers who got stuck down there are these like completely caricatured drunken oaths and they kill some people and they're hiding them in the freezer

and they're like we have to escape. I mean, people living under the secret race living under the earth and it's just all played straight. I don't know. I think it was funny to them. It's not good.

And there's like, oh, I guess there's just a hidden race that people live under the earth. All right. Moving on. It's just so stupid. I like Robin Cook.

Do not like that book. All right. Another Montgomery fellow book I read, the affluent society by John Kenneth Galbraith. So his sort of famous work of... So John Kenneth Galbraith is from that sort of generation of highly trained advisors from the Kennedy era. I think he went on to be our ambassador to India at some point.

Economist did a lot of thinking on sort of liberal economic theory. There's this famous book he wrote in the 50s called The Affluent Society, where he's saying, essentially now that the U.S., we're wealthy, right? But we have to rethink our economic policy as a wealthy superpower. We need to rethink how we think about our economic policy than the way we might have thought about it before. So it's a public-facing economic analysis book. He was a Montgomery Fellow. And they had a version that came out in the 70s and 90s.

So he was old then. He read a signed copy of it. It's interesting. People had longer attention spans back then. It's so magisterial. and just, I'm just going to explain these things. I was really taken by the degree to when you're writing these books in the 50s, you did not feel the need to hold the reader's hand.

Okay, I've got, here's my big point. I'm going to get to this point in these three chapters. Okay, part two is all about this. No, it's like long essays, and as you read it, you begin to draw out of it, these different ideas he has. It's more discursive and slower than more modern idea writing. But it was a good book, and I liked it was a signed copy. It made me feel connected. All right.

The final book I read was Lee Bargo's, is the only how you spell her name? I feel like I have that wrong. Ninth House. Can you look that up, Jesse? The book, Ninth House. I want to make sure I'm saying her name right. This was a novel.

So I started reading this up at Dartmouth because this is about Yale, but it's about what if the secret societies at Yale actually knew how to do magic. And it was like dark kind of bad magic. And so all these societies hiding all this magic and there's like a murder mystery and the main character is part of this house. It's supposed to just supervise the other houses. And it's like it's a, it turns out

this is a genre called Dark University. I think this is cool. We're up at Dartmouth. Dartmouth has a secret societies. We were showing the boys the tombs, which is a secret society. There's a concrete Egyptian tomb and it's unclear how you even get in it. It's like one of the secret societies at Dartmouth. You get tapped to be in the tombs and then you go do secret things in this building and, you know, oh, uh, Bar dugo. I said that wrong. Lee Bardugo. Sorry about that. All right. So that would be cool. Like a thriller said in Ivy League school and it has magic. I want to get ready for Halloween, you know. And so it was cool. It's, here's the thing. I don't know these genres very well. It is very dark. So the main character of this book, a young woman who can see ghost, gets beat the hell. I mean, all throughout this book. I guess that's just part of the genre, but just this sometimes it's, There's ghosts doing it. Sometimes it's people doing it.

I mean, she's always getting slammed into things and beat up. It's a weird, I guess that's just part of the genre. It's like they materialized trauma into like big obvious physical trauma as a way of, I don't know. But I like the magic systems and the plot and it was kind of cool. It took Yale and made it into this really dark thing. It gave me an idea for a similar book for Dartmouth. So I want to plant this mind if there's any dark university novelist who went to Dartmouth. I think you could definitely have a book that went back and forth between the founding of Dartmouth.

So this is in the 1760s when Eliezer Welock was, they were there. This was just dark woods by the Connecticut. There was like a road that went through here in one tavern. And they were here trying to cut down these trees and build the log cabin, the Stark Dartmouth in the middle of the New Hampshire woods, middle of nowhere. Can't you imagine a book where you're telling that story and something dark happens, you know, like they come across some sort of like dark evil? And then the other part of it is modern day. And someone's like uncovering on the Dartmouth camp as a modern student. The clues that have been left behind by Eliezer Wheelock and, you know, the old buildings and inside Bartlett Tower.

And you go back and forth. And there's some sort of like dark magic that's released. There we go. So someone should write that book. So Lee Bardugo, who wrote Ninth House and. She went to Yale. So she's sort of like really drawing from her experience there. So there you go.

That's what I read in August. All right, that's a lot of books. By my count, we've talked about, and I'm looking at my number here, all the books. I think that's the right summary of how many books we talked about today.

So I don't know, go buy some books, be inspired. We'll be back next week with another episode, maybe with a few less books to talk about or maybe even more. But until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness to afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.