Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 269: Don’t Get Started

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

After an episode in which Cal reviewed ancient wisdom on cultivating a deeper life, he turns his attention back to more recent advice. Focusing on three of the more unconventional but unambiguously effective ideas that he has proposed in his twenty years of professional writing on these topics.  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  Deep Dive: Getting started is overrated [6:29]  - How can I become more confident in social settings? [36:15] - Is it ok to be an ordinary person? [40:52] - Is it important to have friends? [46:41] - I took a pay cut to become a teacher again. How can I better organize my life to prioritize craft? [49:36] - Is it ok to use YouTube to discover new ideas? [57:28]  Reader’s React: Is Productivity Natural? [1:05:04]  Links:  calnewport.com/dangerous-ideas-getting-started-is-overrated/ calnewport.com/treat-your-mind-as-you-would-a-private-garden/ calnewport.com/should-you-work-like-maya-angelou-or-eric-schmidt/ calnewport.com/on-tire-pressure-and-productivity/  Thanks to our Sponsors:  moshlife.com/deep zocdoc.com/deep hensonshaving.com/cal mybodytutor.com  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. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm excited about the show today. We've got a deep dive in which I am going to reach back into the archive of Olden days, Cal Newport. That's going to be interesting. got a good collection of questions to follow. And then I'm trying something new for the final segment. We're going to do a segment in which I read readers' reactions to some of my recent work.

A little bit of a back-and-forth dialogue going on. Now, if you're listening and you want to see some of the websites and articles I'm referencing today, go to the deeplife.com slash listen and find episode 269. The videos for each episode or at the bottom of the episode page. Before we get into all that, however, I was hoping, and Jesse, you'll maybe give me permission here. Permission granted. To geek out a little bit on a productivity strategy? Yeah, let's do it.

That's what I wanted to. We're going to just briefly, but I want to geek out on something. So a couple episodes ago, this was 267. I had a deep dive about why context shifting throughout your workday is making you tired than you think. There's actually a big source of what's making you tired is the fact that your brain keeps trying to switch context once every day. few minutes. At the end of that deep dive, I gave a specific piece of advice that was new, a sort of rare new piece of productivity advice in the Cal Newport Cannon.

I said when dealing with your inbox, if you want to minimize switching your attention back and forth from message to message to different contexts, because that's really exhausting. What you should do instead is what I called single threading. So pick a particular topic like scheduling emails and just answer all. all of those emails and then pick up another topic like a particular event that you're scheduling and just go one by one through those emails and what I argued is because you're sticking with one context for multiple emails in a row this will be much easier on your brain it will feel less exhausting it'll also go quicker well anyways earlier today I was talking with someone who listened

to that episode and he gave me a sort of advanced gloss on that tip so I got excited because I'm a nerd and I figured let me share this here so he was a a Gmail user, and he said he tried the advice. It worked great. Much less exhausted clearing his email went quicker. But what he decided was even better was to create a label in Gmail for each of the main types of threads that he most commonly comes across in his inbox. There was definitely he told me a scheduling thread. So for emails about scheduling. I don't know what the other ones were, but I think they maybe were specific to particular projects that were ongoing,

so he manages multiple projects. And he says what he does now is he goes through his inbox when his email checking time and labels and archives everything. So you label each message with the topic, the thread, and then you archive it. So it all disappears.

So they're all actually out of view. And now to clean your inbox, you're starting with essentially an empty inbox. And then you just show all of the emails with one particular label. filter for that label. All you see in your inbox now are those type of messages. Oh, here's all the scheduling messages. And you just go through them, boom, boom, boom, until it's empty again. And then you say, okay, where's all the messages that has to do with this

particular project? You just see those and you just go through those again. So you're really isolating the context of the emails that you're answering. Now, I figured you could extend this even further and just have a miscellaneous tag for stuff that doesn't fit into any of the your existing label. So you can really get that inbox down to zero. And then you clear out each of those labels one at a time. Anyway, this seems maybe finicky. Maybe this seems nitpicking. But the report from my friend is that it works fantastically.

It makes cleaning an inbox significantly less onerous and you go faster. So that's the magic of context shifting. It is productivity poison. Avoiding it really can change the tenor of work. So anyways, I had to geek out on that. little insider email productivity tip. Are you going to try it? Oh, I'm for sure going to try it.

I'm going to try it too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my issue is I have, I already try to do this by the fact that I have five inboxes. So I'm already doing this because I have too many jobs. Yeah. So I have Georgetown.

There's a New Yorker inbox. I have a personal inbox. I have a Cal Newport Media inbox. And then we have a couple different other, we have a couple inboxes in Cal Newport Media. Yeah, there's like my main one. There's like the interesting suggestions one. Anyways, I have a lot of inboxes that's already trying to contextualize, but I want to do this within each inbox.

Because we all have this experience where you start cherry picking messages in your inbox. I can't answer that. I can't answer that. Okay, I can answer this. It's because the context shifting. Your brain is already trying to single thread you. It's like, no, no, no, no. I can't answer this email where someone is asking us to schedule a meeting.

I can't shift over to a scheduling context right now. Let's just keep going on these emails about the conference coming up. Because the mind, once it's loaded a context, it moves much quicker. And I suppose it's pretty easy to see all the labels, right? So you don't forget any. You see them on the side. Okay. Yeah.

So you see them on the side. And I think you even see how many messages unread are in each label. So you can, if you're just moving unread messages into these labels, you can see account next to them each of them as well. It's like you know, oh, this label has messages in there. There we go. Right off the bat, a little bit of a productivity. I don't want to say hack.

I want to say evidence-based organizational tactic. Because that sounds more corporate. All right, let's get rolling with the show. So what do I want to do today? Well, last episode in episode 268, we looked at some ancient wisdom that we took out of Marcus Reelius' Meditations that seemed relevant to the modern task of trying to build a deeper life. In today's deep dive, I want to look at three unexpected ideas from my own writing over the last 20 years that turned out to be surprisingly effective for helping people escape the shallows and move their life somewhere deeper. So these are ideas that are unexpected, not the traditional things you would hear, but over the years I've learned work really well.

So we've shifted from ancient ideas from last video and episode to modern ideas today. So the first idea I want to start with is something I posted on my website in June of 2008. So I have this loaded up on the screen for those who are watching. And the title of this essay from June of 2008, back when I was young and baby-faced and a doctoral student, MIT, is titled Dangerous Ideas, Getting Started, Getting Started, is overrated. And I start off by saying, look, attend any talk given by an entrepreneur, and you'll hear some variation of the following. The most important thing you can do is get started.

A little bit later in the article, I say, but here's the problem. I completely disagree with this common advice. I think an instinct for getting started cripples your chance at long-term success, and I suggest that on the contrary, you should develop a rigorous thresholds that any pursuit must overcome before it can induce action. So I get into this a little bit. Why should we be wary of getting started? And I nod towards survivor bias, noting that, hey, people who did something successful

then look backwards or like, well, you know, I'm glad I didn't wait. So you should get started as well because if you're also going to end up doing something as successful as me, why wait, let's just get started. argue that survivor bias or survivorship bias might be one of the reasons why we hear this advice. But when I looked at people in real life who seem to have been done impressive things, here's what I noticed. And I'm reading from my article again.

I've noticed that people who succeed in an impressive pursuit are those who established over time a deep emotional conviction that they want to follow that pursuit and have built an exhaustive understanding of the relevant world, why some succeed and others don't, and exactly what type of action is required. This takes time. Often it requires a long period of saturation in which the person returns again and again to the world, meeting people and reading about it, and trying little experiments to get a feel for its reality.

This period will be at least a month. It might last years. So this is what I had noticed when I got more serious about studying success and impressive accomplishment, I noticed that the key was not action. And if anything, action seemed to get in the way, because as you launch all these different initiatives, not really understanding the world, not really with a deep conviction of this is what I'm going to do this, this is worth doing, those pursuits trail off, they trickle off and they fall apart.

You do that enough times. And what you get out of all this frenetic motion is, well, you get the smoke from the friction, but no actual noticeable forward progress, you're much more likely to get despondency than you are success because you begin to author this story that says, I don't know, I've tried a bunch of stuff nothing seems to work out.

I can't imagine myself succeeding. Those who do really impressive things often have instead those two other ingredients. They have a deep conviction that this is something that's worth doing and it's worth taking the time to do and they really understand how it works and how people who do this actually succeed.

They know the world, they've read about the world, they've met people in the world, they've taken little steps in the world. They're pretty locked in, okay, I understand what's going to happen here. You need both of those things if you're going to survive the ups and downs of getting really good. And as I argued there, that takes time. You have to really come back to something again and again. In my own practice, I think of this as the circling period where I'm circling a particular pursuit. Maybe I should be doing this.

I'm not sure. Let me back off. Okay, let me come back at it again from another angle. Let me talk to someone else. Let me gather some information. Now let me wait three months. All right, let me come back to it again. And you circle and you circle learning and encountering until either one of two things happens.

The potential pursuit becomes inevitable and unavoidable. And then you launch down that path with your eyes blinkered forward, your jaw set with conviction, or your ardor begins to dissipate. And you realize, yeah, this probably wasn't the right thing to do. This has happened to me again and again. It happened to me with book writing. Happened to me with academia. It happened to me with podcasting.

And this podcast was launched in 2020. 2020 was not the first year I had a thought about a podcast. I've been doing podcast at a regular rate since roughly about 2014. I've probably been on a couple thousand different podcast episodes. I know the field. Well, I circled this for a long time until I really understood it, really understood why it would make sense for me, really understood what it would take to succeed, which direction I would have to go. And that all took time until finally it became inevitable. I have to do this.

there was no real doubt when the time came by the summer of 2020, okay, this is something I definitely have to do. All of those pieces had come together. It took a long time. But that was important because I had that conviction in this particular case study, because I really understood the world, I've been interviewing podcasters I've known, I've seen the ups and downs up close,

I knew the numbers cold. I was willing to put in the time required, and this does take a lot of time. I mean, Jesse will tell us because he's been here as well. He's seen this stuff takes time. And we were talking about the numbers the other day, the big initial milestone. And we crept up to this number. We first started signing with an ad agency.

I could get 15,000 downloads on an episode. And that took a while. I think it was a whole year before we signed with an ad agency. So we could do two episodes a week and maybe get up to 30,000 downloads. We're now pitching 65,000 downloads. That took a long time. It took a long time to get to 15. It took a lot longer to get from 15 to 65.

it doesn't jump. And in fact, it comes back down again. Jesse always hears me complain about our downloads graph. Because to me, and Jesse, you'll admit this is true. Whatever scale I look at these graphs, no matter when I look at these graphs, it looks like our downloads are going down. I'm always like our downloads are going down. And yet when we zoom out, they're up.

And I don't know when this up is happening, but my point is that it's hard. And if it wasn't locked in, I'm willing to spend five years, five years to make this thing that's something really big and impressive. If I wasn't willing to do that, it probably wasn't going to happen. And that's why it took five years from me to decide to pull the trigger. So that was my first piece of contrarian advice was be careful about getting started. Here's the issue, though, of course. Won't this lead to procrastination?

Maybe you will never get started. And I do want to acknowledge that this is an issue. Fear of success, perfectionism, procrastination becomes a much heightened issue if you say I really have to be sure before I get going. And I think a lot of people have faced that issue. But my argument is the right solution to that issue is not just get started on everything right away because that's going to be just as unsuccessful. The place where we should be focusing if we care about the psychology of action, the place we want to be focusing is on how to walk that tightrope,

not getting started too early and yet at the same time not avoiding starting altogether. That's a very difficult psychological tightrope to walk successfully, but it's hard and there's no way to avoid that. that's what we should be focusing on. That's the challenge. And we can't get rid of that challenge by saying, don't try. And we can't get rid of that challenge by saying just start right away. Neither of those is going to work.

We can't avoid that psychological complexity. This stuff is hard. It's hard work. You shouldn't start right away, but you should start eventually, but maybe not on this thing. And how do you know when it's the right time? You don't really. You just learn and you think and you build that conviction. And it's complicated and it's difficult.

And we should just admit that. But just getting started on everything, it's not going to get you there. there's a famous Guy Kayasaki. Do you remember this book, Jesse, Guy Kawasaki book, The Art of the Start? No, I never read it. It's a good title. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think at some point I wrote a book or a post called The Art of Not Getting Started or something like that. Because I don't know. That was definitely in the air at the time. All right, let's do another unexpected idea that proved then surprisingly effective in helping people cultivate depth. This idea, I'm going to, I wrote about this, I believe I ended up writing about this in deep work, but this is where this idea first emerged, because this post is now from 2010, July 2010, so two years after the getting started post. Also in the summer, maybe this summer is when I have my best ideas. The title of this article from 2010, treat your mind as you would a private garden. Well, this is interesting.

Where did this notion come from? It's not mine. It comes from a book that I read around this time that was influential to me. And that was Winifred Gallagher's 2009 Ode to Focus wrapped. R-A-P-T. Now here's the thing about this book. Gallagher, who does fantastic science writing, begins her book talking about her own cancer diagnosis.

To quote her here, not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind. And I'm going to read from my post here for a second. She realizes that this disease wants to claim her attention and that this was no way to live with what may be the last moments of her life. So she launches an experiment to reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting it towards the things that matter most. Quote, big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6.30 p.m. Martini. Dollar comes away from the experiment with a good prognosis for a disease and a visceral approach. appreciation of a surprising fact.

Quote, life is the sum total of what you focus on. Yet most people expend little effort cultivating this focus. She goes on to suggest that you should treat your mind like you would a private garden, carefully tending what you allow to grow in there and keeping out things you don't want. This idea was very influential to me, and I think it is more relevant today to our culture writ large than it was back in 2010 when I was first writing this article. Let's start with why this idea is important. There's almost an epistemological, philosophical truth embedded in here where Gallagher

is saying there is not just an objective world out there that you are observing and noticing things about. It's not, here's the world, and either you're seeing it or you're not. Your experience of the world is constructed inside your mind. It's based off of, in general, the types of things that you're are paying attention to, right? It's just like if you are the victim of a crime, let's say you're mugged on the subway, for a while, your view of the world is, when you go on the subway again, is very much going

to be one of anxiety, intention, and fear and seeing everyone around you as someone who's potentially going to cause trouble, because it's the same people that you might have seen the day before you got mugged, but the way and what you pay attention to can really change the way you experience your world. And Gallagher is saying writ large, this is true, that even with all this terrible, objectively terrible stuff happening in her life with a cancer diagnosis, by focusing relentlessly on stuff that was good and important, it made her happy, made the world she was in seem much better, even though these bad things were happening in it. What you pay attention to really affects your subjective experience of life. So why is this very relevant

today more so than it was even when Gallagher's book came out because of phones and social media. So now we are seeing this effect significantly amplified. Because of our phones and social media, because of the engagement cues of algorithmic curation and the push towards trying to attract attention as long as possible on these devices, you can really be thrown into a world that is constructed algorithmically. Every five or six minutes, you're checking your phone and seeing news and social media post and newsletters that are coming from this engagement ecosystem that can incredibly color

your experience of the world. Think about people you know who are very online. They tend, for example, to be very cataclysmic. They think the world is, you know, a day or two away from a major civil war and really the only thing that's going to get in the way is before that can even happen, there's going to be a climate apocalypse that's going to fuel an even worse strain of COVID to turn people into zombies that are going to steal election results as a way to try to keep certain books out of the libraries or something, right?

I mean, if you're online all the time, you're like, my God, the world is falling apart. It's what you pay attention to. Colors your experience of everything in the world. Anything you see, innocent conversation you're having with a parent at your kid's school, like everything suddenly is colored by this. We should treat our minds like a private garden and say, I don't want to see the world as being a few days away from, you know, the Civil War climate pandemic apocalypse and we're all about to die.

I like Winifred Gallagher, enjoy my 630 martini friends going to see the movies. So this is something I think that has proven to be really effective. It's care what you pay attention to. How much news do you read? When do you read it? Why do you read it? What engagement sites do you allow yourself to turn your attention towards? How much of your time and attention do you want Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk to monetize?

I mean, at what goal do you say, I think they have enough money. I have better things to do than to be involved with that. Why are you watching sort of YouTube videos of people crashing into things when you could be reading a book like Winifor Gallagher's book or reading a classic, trying to put yourself into the mindset of a great thinker from times past to push yourself instead of, again, watching, though they're entertaining, you know, videos of people falling in the fountains because they're reading their phone. I mean, what if you were going back and watching great films and reading secondary sources on them

so you're prepared? Let me try to pull this apart. Understand why this movie is good. There's so much stuff you could be paying attention to that points out the good in the world that gives you appreciation for quality. That makes the world seem like a place where the miraculous can happen and people, are divine and there's really interesting things that are always around each corner.

What you pay attention to matters for how you think about your world. And never have we had to think about that more than in an age in which there are plenty of companies that can reach us through that little piece of glowing glass in our hand and control every ounce of what we focus on. So we need an independence from that.

We need to treat our minds like a private garden. The effect can be phenomenal. You say it all the time too with like books and how long they take to curate those ideas and how long it takes them to write it? Yeah. As opposed to a post or something that may have taken somebody, you know, a few hours. Well, even a post is old-fashioned.

Yeah. A tweet. A tweet. Yeah. Or a comment on a tweet. Yeah. That you then obsessively checked to see if that got engagement. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, here's the thing about a book as someone who's written eight of them now. You spend a long time thinking about those ideas and a lot of people work on them with you and like, are you saying this just right? And that's not even a great sentence. and let's go back and rethink the order of it. By the time you get to the book, you're seeing a sort of crystallized form of human thinking

pushed to a level of consideration that you're not going to see online. So even that can just give you hope for the complexity of human thinking. All right, one more idea. Third idea, this is from 2014. So we're marching forward. We start in 2008 with the 2010, we're up to 2014.

This is September, so it's not the summer, so we'll break that trend. Now, the title of this article doesn't give a lot away. It's called Should You Work Like Maya Angelou or Eric Schmidt. But the quote I want to use for the title of this idea is the following and is buried in this article. Think like an artist, but work like an accountant. All right. So this came from a David Brooks column that I had read back in 2014.

And as I say here, in the top of this article I wrote about Brooks's column, ultimately Brooks's column was about geopolitics, but he began it by riffing on Mason Curry's book Daily Rituals, which really was a phenomenon. I've quoted that book quite a lot in a lot of my own work. And this was a book where Curry went through the lives of famous creatives, scoured their memoirs and biographies and letters, and just extracted everything he could find about their rituals for work. So people love this book, and so Brooks was just looking for an excuse to write about it. Now, however, what was cool about his summary was a couple points he made.

So let me read from my article, which will in turn, quote Brooks. To summarize these observations, Brooks quotes Henry Miller, quote, I know that to sustain these true moments of insight one has to be highly disciplined, lead a disciplined life. He then offers his own more bluntly accurate summary, quote, great creative minds think like artist but work like accountants or to put it in study hacks, Lingo, Deep Insight requires a discipline commitment to deep work. So what was I getting at here? An idea that I think has pervaded my thinking about what we do here on this podcast and in my

writing in the years since, which is there is a paradox at the core of organizational productivity. Right. So that's the term I'm going to use here for productivity that is focused. on organizing the obligations in your life so that you have more intentional control over how you spend your time. I'm trying to separate this from outcome-based productivity, which has more to do with maximizing output per each unit of input. So for organizational productivity, there's this paradoxical observation that the better

you are at that, the more free, creative, and relaxed you can be. And this goes contrary to a lot of people's instincts. People think, wait a second. to be organized is in some sense where creativity goes to die. I'm going to have my planners and my systems and it's so rigid. And there's no room for me to be creative. There's no room for me to just go on a flight of fancy and the following idea or to go into the field with my field's note notebook and have that big insight.

If I structure my life, I'm going to be a boring executive. I'm a creative type. I don't do that. But what Brooks is pointing out here, his lesson, from studying Mason Curry, his lesson that he quoted Henry Miller making, is that actually this organization supports creativity, relaxation, and freedom. To have your arms around, here's the things on my plate. Here's what needs to be done.

Here's when I'm going to do things on them. Here's what I need to take off because this is too much. That gives you the breathing room needed to relax. That gives you the breathing room needed to be creative. Because when you can trust, okay, I have things captured. One of the things you can do is like, great, I'm going to spend all day today just working on this creative pursuit. And you can do so without distraction or guilt because you're not just randomly pushing stuff to the side and hoping nothing bad happens. When you can control your times and obligations, you can realize with precision the impact of everything you've said yes to and have the courage in the pull back.

When you realize exactly what happens with your time and how long things take, you're much more realistic when you say yes and no. You say, no, no, no, I know how this story ends. If I say yes to this, this, this, and this, that's going to put this many things on my schedule. I've seen that before because I have a pretty good sense of my time. That's going to be too crowded. I know I need to pull that way back. I need to stop doing this. No longer do these gigs.

Leave this position. Rechange this. It gives you this type of autonomy over how your time actually unfolds. So I like the way Brooks put it. Think like an artist, but work like an accountant. So when you're thinking, be creative, be deep. Be free. but when structuring your work,

be much more structured like an accountant. And you'll be able then to get more out of your time. If you do things like multi-scale planning, you have a quarterly, weekly, daily plan, time block plan, makes a big difference combined with full capture. When you're making a plan for your time as opposed to reacting, when you have sequentiality, when you have heuristics and quotas for how much when you say yes and how much work of each type you let on,

When you're able to see clearly how long things took and then go back and make decisions about what to do going forward, all of this actually frees up more creativity and more relaxation. It leads you to the possibility of a freer life. And if you really want to significantly simplify your life, there's really no better way to start on that path than to get control over everything so that like a surgeon, you can start incising and scapling off all sorts of different things that have the biggest footprints and make sure the things that remain get done at the highest level. that's an unexpected idea but it's one that has proven unexpectedly I think effective in thinking about living a deeper life think like an artist but work like an accountant so obviously there's a lot of more classic ideas

I talk a lot about on the show but I thought it would be cool again to go back and get the surprising ones that seem to hold the test of time so let's just summarize all three getting started is overrated treat your mind like a private garden think like an artist but work like an accountant. All of these are a decade old or more, but I think they hold up.

There you go, Jesse. That's old flame throwing cow in his blogging days, just throwing ideas out there. That book, that Brooks reference sounds pretty cool. Oh yeah, Mason Curry, the Daily Rituals. That book was a phenomenon. It was so cool. It was just, here's a lot of famous creative minds from history.

Here's how they work. and he just went through it. Everyone was writing about that at the time. I talked about it in digital minimalism. I think I cite some stuff from it in slow productivity as well. Yeah, Mason Curry, it was a cool idea for a book. It was actually a blog, like everything was back then. It was a blog that he turned into a book.

Really cool project. All right, so I want to move on and do some questions roughly on this general topic of sort of escaping the mediocre life and finding depth. Before we do, I want to mention real quick, a sponsor. that helps make this show possible. And that is our friends at Mosh. I got to tell you this. So, so, uh,

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Takes this insurance. Look, has appointments, boom. Here's a list. Let me read the reviews. Hey, people really like this one. that seems good. This one over here, they say, look, he does pretty good treatments,

but also has a tendency towards spontaneous cannibalism, so be careful about him, so maybe you don't go with him. All the information is right there. You avoid spontaneous cannibalism. You get the good doctor. You don't have to find out

they don't take your insurance. It just makes sense. And once you find the doc you want, you can book them immediately with just a few taps. No more waiting awkwardly on hold with a receptionist. So anyways, go ahead.

Sorry, I was thinking, Jesse, speaking of cannibalism, I'm sure Zoc Talk loves this. One of my kids was going on a field trip today. He does not get my sense of humor. Going on a field trip today to skyline caverns to caves. Okay. And I told him, because I thought this was good advice. So I said, look, if you notice something seems amiss, like your tour guy looks nervous, like he might be lost or like some of the lights are going off, your best bet is to start cannibalizing someone right away. So, like, you keep your nutrients up, you know, you can get to, like, probably the person.

You just get right to the cannibalizing right away before, you know, there's competition or whatever. And he thought about it for a second and was like, Dad, I think it's unlikely we're going to get lost in the cave. So I guess you could probably say the same about if you're worried about your doctor, being a cannibal. So I'll hope you avoid that. All right, forget cannibalism. Good doctors, take your insurance nearby reviews. ZockDoc, doc will get you there. Go to Zocdoc.com slash deep and download the ZockDoc app for free.

Then find a book a top-rated doctor today. That's ZOC, doc.com slash deep. Zock.com slash deep. All right, Jess, let's use some questions. That kind of got me reminded of a side rant that Mad Dog had last week about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey? Is Taylor Swift involved in a cannibal scandal with Taylor?

With the football player? There's just this big rant that he went on that was hilarious. And it kind of remind me the same. Speaking of Mad Dog, I was listening to Bill Simmons being interviewed on the Smartless podcast. They were talking about why he got in the podcasting. And he said his biggest influence was Mike and the Mad Dog. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. They were big. Yeah. They were real big. And he's, where's Bill Simmons' base? Is he busy into Connecticut? I mean, he was from Boston. Okay.

Then he moved to Connecticut after his parents got divorced in high school. Okay. And now he's based in L.A. Oh, okay. Yeah. But he said what he liked about Mike and the Mad Dog was when they would veer from sports to talk about, like, culture issues. Yeah, they didn't have authors on stuff. Yeah.

Mad Dog still does. And that's where Bill Simmons, you know, really adopted this idea, which is his MO of bringing pop culture and intersecting that with sports. So it's not just pure sports. It's the pop culture stuff is just as important. So there you go. That dog. All right. First question is from Tanya.

I'm struggling to be social and confident. What can I do to speak more articulately and gain confidence and impress more people? Well, Tanya, it's a good question. And I can tell you a lot of this is practice. Right. The more you're around people in different situations, the more comfortable you get in those situations. The more you spend talking about things or explaining yourself or talking to people, the more comfortable and articulate you get in those types of conversations.

I mean, I talk pretty, you know, here on this podcast, but in part because I've been professionally speaking since I was in my young 20s, so I'm sort of used to it, the cadences of speaking, the pacing, the coming up in your head with what you're going to say next. It all just sort of comes with practice. So social stuff really can be practiced. You can start with very low-key social stuff early on, stuff that you're already pretty comfortable with. I know this person.

I don't mind hanging out with them. So we go to a restaurant or a bar together or go to movies together on a fairly regular basis. I'm just used to in a comfortable situation being out in the world with people and talking to them and interacting, but the stakes are low. Then you can build that up the bigger things. Okay, I'm going to go to bigger social events or parties at first, you know, small ones. Here's my friend that's their birthday party and you get more confident with that. So a lot of this is just practice. Now, one of the things I think that is often left out of this conversation is the role of anxiety.

Anxiety gets really intertwined with socializing in ways that I think it's hard for people who don't feel that same anxiety to understand. They don't understand how these really get mixed in together. You really can start to build up a sort of dread or anxiety around different situations. It's why one of the outcomes of pretty severe anxiety disorders would be, an agoraphobia where you don't leave your house anymore. It's because often those two things can go together. The same circuits that are related to sociality are often the same circuits that are short-circuiting when you're suffering from anxiety.

So if anxiety is a real issue here, Tanya, it's not just, oh, I'm out of practice, what do I do? It's I really feel physically dread and concern and panic when I'm in these situations. I would look towards ACT act, ACT-based techniques. they're very good for exactly this situation. So ACT, otherwise known as third wave psychotherapy, stands for acceptance commitment therapy. It's a very effective evidence-based type of psychotherapy that does really well with anxiety, social anxiety, panic-type anxiety around other people. It's really based upon separating feelings from your actual actions.

It really helps train you to represent. recognize the physical symptoms of something like anxiety and say, yes, but I'm still going to commit to do this thing that I think is valuable. And I can still do that even if this feeling comes and goes. It has you avoid labeling that feeling as this is really important. Something really bad is happening is really bad to be feeling this way. It breaks that loop of you labeling your feelings and just seeing them as feelings themselves. We talked about this a little bit in last week's episode. We read Marcus Aurelius's meditation. He had some actually stoic ideas that are connected to modern acceptance commitment therapy. But I just want to point that out there, Tanya, that there's a more serious training

you can do with the tools of act that are there and available. And so if the anxiety is really holding you back, that's not permanent. You have to think about that like knee pain. You had knee pain. The doctor's going to help you fix it, though it might take some PT in a little bit of time. Same thing here. Look into acceptance commitment therapy. There's some good books on it. I think it's the happiness trap is one of the famous sort of public facing books on ACT. That's a good entry place into it. Harris, Russ Harris, maybe. You can look that up, Jesse, see the happiness trap. But I just want to throw that out there because it can be frustrating if you're on the anxiety spectrum. I'm on that spectrum. It manifests for myself in interesting ways.

I have to do a lot of training on it. Depending if you're on that spectrum, it can be frustrating to just be around someone really social. It's like, what's the problem? Just like come to the thing. Like what could go on? And they don't realize that you're feeling immense dread. So there's a lot of things you can do there, Tanya, the train. Do the work. It is worth it.

Sociality is very important. Yeah, you got it right. It was Russ Harris. Russ Harris. Okay. The happiness trap. Yep. Yeah, it's a good book.

All right, what we got next? Next question is from Ben. In what ways can being ordinary be good in life? This was an interesting question. Ben, I had to think about it a little bit. It resonated a little. little bit because I think what you're getting at here is this interesting tradeoff when you're thinking about the deep life and how you want to shape it.

There's one way you can go, of course, is towards exceptionalness. I want to do something exceptional. I want to be noted for it. I want to do something noteworthy. You have some fame for this thing that I'm doing that's important. That's one particular path for the deep life. The other path for the deep life is I want to build a life around my values, you know, start with discipline, figure out my values, organize my stuff, sacrifice and be a leader on behalf of

others, and then find areas of my life to be remarkable. And you could sort of have this quiet, deep life, where you really matter to a lot of people, and you find and extract out of life, a lot of joy and appreciation of stuff that's fantastic or great or remarkable, all without having to be, I am an exceptional X and people recognize it. You have sort of two paths towards depth here. There's kind of pros and cons of each, especially when we look at that exceptionality path. right, because there's good there. We shouldn't turn down the good. Why do people want to try to be great at things?

Well, first of all, you do gain more autonomy, right? You do something really well. There's more demand for it. You often gain more financial reward and or more control over how you live your life. There's several things I do at a pretty high level, and I do have a lot of flexibility in my life. We get a mess around in this playhouse, deep work HQ. You know, I go away in the summers. I have very high control over my schedule.

I don't worry about money, really. That's not really an issue. So there's a great autonomy that comes from doing some things really well. Also, it feels good to be respected in the moment. We're wired for that. This is the whole tribal leadership thing.

We tell ourselves it doesn't matter, but there is ego. And you do feel, if something goes really well, you'll feel good about that for a while. There's a reason why people chase it. That is the stimulus that is perverted when we see workaholism, right? So with an addiction,

there's usually some sort of very power stimulus that becomes the driver for the addiction, the feeling of intoxication, right? Workaholism is really that feeling of, wow, I did this thing well, and people recognize that, and my boss rewarded me. That's a very strong stimulus. That's why you can build a whole addiction around it. On the flip side, though, it can be very stressful and anxiety producing to try to do something exceptionally well.

It's hard to do. And it puts you into bigger, more stressful circumstances you have to navigate. You get more people, perhaps, who, like, want your time. then you have nearly enough time to actually give and you have to start saying no to people and people think that you're being, you know, snobby or elitist. High-stake things are just anxiety producing. You have to figure, is this worth anxiety? Is this one not?

Things can fall apart. It's hard to do things at a high level. So there's negatives that come with it. I mean, I constantly have to make these decisions. There's things I, you know, television things I've turned down, for example, that may be in isolation. You say, that's cool. Like, I know that show. That would be really cool to go on.

And it's like I can't do all of these things. And if I did, it's going to overwhelm me with time constraints and anxiety. You have to be careful about how I make my path. So it's tricky. So I think it's a really good question, Ben. If you're going the route of, let me just be exceptional, you can build depth around that. And there are some real positives you're going to get, but there's also negatives. And I say that because I think that then when you get the scale between the quiet remarkability approach versus the acceptance.

notable famous remarkability approach. When you put the cons with the pros on this ladder, the scales become about balanced. And so you really, if you're going the quiet remarkability approach, a life that, you know, it's Lorelei Gilmore and the Gilmore girls, not famous outside of Stars Hollow, not like exceptional at anything. But in that world, you know, is really well known and has built this really interesting life

and people really know her and appreciate her and she's involved in people's lives and is having a positive impact on that town. But she's not famous outside of that small little town. That's quiet remarkability. Not so bad of a path. And again, I don't want to say the other path, this sort of exceptional remarkability is bad.

I'm just saying when you have the pros and the cons, it's no longer like, well, this is clearly better if you have the skill, you know, you have the whatever. I can shoot a really good jump shot. I could go that way. If you have the possibility to go that way, it's not bad. But it's also not a no-brainer. And if you don't see an obvious way to get to the exceptional remarkability,

you shouldn't feel bad about it because, again, these things balance out. Steph Curry versus Laurelite Gilmore, that old famous comparison, like there's, I don't know, there's plus and minuses to both. So neither should be dismissive of the other. That's a weird comparison. I might be the first person in history to make that particular comparison. Probably. I mean, I can't imagine it's come up in the locker room.

the NBA finals. Stuff, man, this is your it's your Lorelei moment, buddy. This is it. You got to just get out there. I want you to man up and Lorelei this, all right? I mean, you got a, your dribbling should be like the fast speech cadence

of Lorelei Gilmore, confusing people with as you move back and forth verbally through various things. And this is the Kirk of your town, but you need to get the ball to Luke. There's probably some basketball strategy metaphor. The end of that speech would be like, hold on one second.

Someone's hand me a piece of paper and, oh, yeah, I'm fired. And then the coach just walks out. That's how that story ends. Like, yeah, that makes sense. And they was fired. All right, nonsense. Stop the nonsense. Let's move on.

What do we got next? All right. Next question is from Samantha. How important are having friends in life? If it is important, how would you recommend an introvert go about finding some? Also, can you provide some advice on moving on from certain friendships that could be holding someone back. So it's a good compliment to Tanya's questions about being more social and confident.

Friends, as I mentioned there, are critically important. And for a friendship to be real, it has to involve non-trivial sacrifice of time and attention. Otherwise, your brain doesn't treat it as real. So just texting someone all the time doesn't count. Commenting on their social media doesn't count. Being active in a WhatsApp channel with them also does not count. As far as your brain is concerned, they're not a friend until you're going places and doing things with them, doing things you might not otherwise want to do,

but you're doing it because they're your friend. That's when your brain begins to take the relationship seriously. So this should be a regular part of your weekly planning, especially if you're trying to build up friendships as something that's more important, that a regular part of your weekly planning should be, what am I doing this week to strengthen or develop friendships? You have to be pretty systematic about it, especially if you're sort of getting back in the saddle, so to speak. So fortunately, I can point.

you towards the resource here. There was a segment we did a few episodes back on this notion of the friendship recession, this idea that Americans in particular have less friends than ever before. The segment where I had my friend Jamie Kielsen come on and talk about what he went through to gain a new group of friends in his 40s as a male where this is kind of difficult. So we got into the weeds in that episode about specific things you can do to actually find and cultivate friends. So I won't repeat that all, but I will say find that segment on the friendship recession.

That was a final segment on a relatively recent episode. Maybe Jamie you can look or Jesse. Jesse knows whenever Jamie's on, I begin just furiously messing up their names. Because, and as Jesse has pointed out, is maybe it's because Joe Rogan's podcast producer is named Jamie. So it's just in the collective conscience of like Jamie is what you call the other person on a microphone when you're podcasting. So it doesn't take much to tip me into that. He'll look that up. But anyways, I think...

It was 266. 266. Take control of your technology habits. Right. Episode 266, deeplife.com slash listen. You'll find that. And then the video for it's there as well. So look at that discussion with Jamie, because I think this is critically important,

especially if you do not have a robust group of friends. Think about that like getting in shape. It's going to require a lot of work on a regular basis with some tried and true tactics, but it is absolutely, absolutely worth doing. All right, Jesse. See, I almost said Jamie there. I'm telling you, it's like very difficult once you start thinking about that. Jesse, what is our next question?

All right, next question is from Evelyn. I had been a high school teacher for over a decade and then moved into a non-classroom role still in education. Now, a couple of years in, I can confidently say it makes me miserable. The work environment suffers from all the symptoms you describe about knowledge work and from lack of management. Ultimately, I decided to return back to the classroom, taking a pay cut,

but I wanted to radically shift, radically shift how I approached a job. I'm curious if you have any advice for re-approaching this type of work in a way that guards against burnout and prioritizes craft, deep work, and slow productivity. Well, Evelyn, first of all, I like your intention here. You're trying to actually craft your life to match the vision, your vision of your ideal lifestyle.

Let me briefly mention the pay cut piece as well because I think this is something that often leads people astray. People often do a style of budgeting with their income where they just think about any reduction in that income is having stuff taken away from them. When you're doing Lifestyle Center Career Planning, you've got to go the other way and you have to do zero-based budgeting,

which is implicitly what Evelyn is doing here. What are the things that are important for us to live our life in the way we want to live at how much of those costs. Good, that's how much money we need. And so if this pay cut for Evelyn still keeps them able to, you know, we can live or we want to live and do these things and not have undue stress, then they're golden. The money becomes just one of the other tools you have to craft your ideal lifestyle. It doesn't become the primary metric by which you measure the success of your lifestyle. So this is a critical point to make for those who are cultivating a deep life.

Money has to become a tool. It can no longer become the object. And this opens up this type of flexibility. Evelyn did not like her job. And so this job might be better for me. Oh, I'm going to have to lose some money. Who cares? I don't see it is losing money.

I see what is the configuration of my life in this new job. Do we have enough money to afford what we need? Yes. What else matters about this job? And you can just see the money as one part among others. That's a nice little tidbit hidden in this bigger question. All right. Let's get into the details, though.

Evelyn is saying now I'm returning to the classroom. how do I keep this deep? How do I keep slow productivity at play here? How do I avoid burnout in the classroom? I have a few things to recommend just based off the many teachers I've spoken with over the years and my own experience as an academic teacher myself. First of all, organization systems really matter when fighting off burnout. Multi-scale planning control over your time matters.

If you are semester weekly, then daily time block planning, you're making use of the full 40 hours you have every week. And when you're making use of the full 40 hours, you can avoid the pile-ups. You can avoid the, oh, my God, I got to work late tonight because I have to prepare for parent-teacher conferences and get all these tests graded. And all this has to happen by tomorrow.

That's the scheduled deadline collision, long work-hour days is a real source of fuel for burnout. Multiscale planning helps you avoid that. Because now you see, oh, I'm going to start working on the parent-teacher conferencing a week early and this Tuesday, this block, I'm going to finish it, and the test prep can start this day. You see the time you have and you can move the proverbial chess pieces around there much easier.

So you have to care more about organizational productivity. Second, tailor your curriculum more to minimize negative impact. And my curriculum here, I don't mean the content. I mean the way in which you deliver and assess material. Do we have the students do quizzes every single day? Do they bring things home and I check them? and then they go back and they work on them. Anything involved in how you actually deliver the content,

so the logistical curriculum, look at this, among other things, through the lens of what's going to make my life easier. And what you do here, what you do here is you keep the floor being, well, first of all, what's going to work well for the students, but within the realm of the equivalence class of many different ways that you could actually implement the details of your class,

if you lean towards the things they're going to make your life, life easier versus harder, there is no difference to the students or the parents, they don't know, but for your life it can make a difference. This is a real endemic issue with junior professors. They come into planning their class and really don't want to think about easiness for themselves, what's going to be tractable or not. It's like, no, no, no, it all has to be about what I deed you I think is best. And so we're going to do these interactive exams every single day and then they're going to

comment on the class blog and I'm going to come in and comment on their comments. and then we'll have a scribe, and the scribe is going to take notes each week on the comments, on the comments, and then the scribe is going to give it to me to review so we can post it, but I'm going to do a video wrap where I'm going to give the best highlights there,

but I've got to film each one on a different high point from a different U.S. state because there's a metaphor there. And you have all these ideas. I just got to do the best ideas, and your life is incredibly difficult. Actually, the students would get the same pedagogical effect if it was, we have these problems that's posted on the board when you come in

and you do each of these reaction problems for the first 10 minutes, and there's an hour every day on Friday where you go through them and use check-check-check-plus grading because you don't want to get into the weeds. And it solves the problem, but it's much easier for you. I learned this the hard way as a teaching assistant in MIT. Oh, my God, the details of how I run this class makes a huge difference on my life,

and the students could care less. They don't know the difference between this or this or that. But for me, it can make a big difference. So I think teachers don't do that enough. they don't consider the impact on their own time and schedule enough. But if anything, it is negligent as a teacher to design things that overwhelms you because your time and attention, you only have a limited supply, and it's sort of part of your responsibility to make better use of that.

So care about how you tailor the logistics of your curriculum. Communication systems matter, especially with parents. One of my kids has a teacher, for example, that runs parent office hours, which is such a good idea. these two hours on this day, you can always just call me. Any question about your kid or what's going on, just call me. I'll tell you about it. You know how much back and forth email that solves?

The parents don't care. They just want clarity. Oh, my God, I worry about this thing with my kid. What do I do about it? Oh, Tuesday. Great. I'll call them then. Parents just want clarity.

But by having that good system, this teacher has this context switching footprint has been reduced. And then finally, I've heard this from a lot of teachers, especially at like the secondary level, be very wary about the extras. Be very wary, especially at first to say yes to things that you don't necessarily have to. Hey, will you help run this thing at the school or do this extra initiative

or be the assistant advisor for this new club? Just be really wary about that. Like those things have a huge cost and you want to be really wary about making those costs. You might even at first, you're like, I'm not really taking on new things for the whole first year. I'm getting the lay of the land here.

And then I'm going to choose something I really want to put my energy into extra. Okay, the theater production. And that's kind of my thing. And I don't do other things. And I'm not particularly apologetic about it. And the people who ask me and I say no, just move on to the next person to ask right away. I'm not trying to become, I don't know, the teacher rep to the union or the principal.

I'm just trying to do my job. Don't be apologetic about it. All of those ideas, by the way, can adjust to many different knowledge worker jobs. Being organized, tailoring how you design the work you do to minimize the footprint, being careful about your communication systems and being wary about taking on extras. I think that applies to almost any knowledge worker job and can really help reduced overload.

If I'm going to summarize these ideas, I'd use the term slow productivity like my new book coming out of March. This is a slow productivity mindset. All right, let's do one more quick question here. Yes.ie. All right. Next question is from Samir. I like the idea of a deep life

and I've replaced passive internet use with activities that I really care about, such as mathematics, botany, and playing guitar. My problem is that I discovered these hobbies, and he's actually in med school, his medical pursuit through YouTube. I follow Andrew Humoran and other math channels. Is it okay to still use YouTube to get innovative ideas? Always a good chance to review my thoughts on YouTube because it's a complicated platform. Video and independent produced video, I do strongly believe, is the future of independent. content for whatever reason video has a stronger hold over the human psyche than either audio or text.

And yet it can also be a source of major distraction because of recommendation rabbit holes. So my advice is always, YouTube is fine if you use it in the right ways. And I say you should use it like a television and a library. What I mean about that, when I see use it like a television, I mean, there's particular shows you like that you might turn on on the TV to watch. Seinfeld's on tonight I want to watch it. That's fine to use YouTube that way. Andrew Huberman could be your Seinfeld. I like Andrew Huberman.

It's very high-quality content. It's interesting. It's better than anything I watch on cable. He posts the video on, I don't know when he does it, but let's just say for the sake of example, on Monday. So to load up the YouTube app on your TV on Monday night and say, I'm going to watch Huberman or I'm going to watch them as I eat lunch on Tuesdays. It's an absolutely fine use of YouTube. It's like a television where you have very niche channels that have shows on that you really like. Use it like a library is also fine.

I have this hobby now, botany, like you mentioned, and I want to look up how to take care of a particular type of orchid. Look up a video of that on YouTube. It could be a fantastic way to learn how to do it. Visual is better than text. There's a lot of great how-to stuff on YouTube. Use it like a library. What you don't want to do is use it as a default source of distraction.

So you don't want to use it as, I'm bored. Let me go to YouTube to be entertained. That's where the danger is. You just start following these weird videos until eventually it's like someone in a weird costume opening a box as they fall into a fountain that gets full of money from Mr. Beast or something. I don't know. Things get weird.

When you go down to just maximizing engagement rabbit hole. So use it to watch particular things you like. Maybe you like my show. You like Huberman's show. Great. Think of it like you're watching a show on CNN or NBC. It's just an internet deliver channel. Fine.

Looking up stuff. How do I do this? How to do that? Use YouTube. Fine. Just don't use it as a default source of distraction. that's not so hard if it's on your TV, if you're using the app on your TV,

because there you're just searching for a particular thing. The recommendations, what's next is not as, that UI is not as powerful on TV. If you use it on your computer to look something up, just get one of those common plugins that can wipe the recommendations off the side. So you can look something up in the search bar, click on something to watch,

and that's all you see. You don't see those rabbit hole recommendations. Do that. And YouTube can actually be a plus to your life and not a negative. It's this weird thing that could go either way, depending on how you use it. TV and a library.

All right. Well, we got a final segment we want to get to. I want to read some of my own readers' reactions to my ideas. First, however, I want to mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. That is our friends at Hinson Shaving. Hinson makes this beautiful precision-milled aluminum razor. Hinson's other business, the other thing they do is, they make precise parts for the aerospace industry.

So they have these mills that can exactly mill metal to exactly precise precision. So you get this beautiful piece of precisely milled aluminum. And because it's so precise, you can put a 50 cent, 10 cent, whatever these costs are cheap, a little safety blade in there. Screw it in. And it has just the width of a human hair edge of the blade extend beyond the edge of the razor body, which gives you a very stable platform to shave. There's no diving board effects with Nix.

and cuts and you get a very smooth shave from a cheap blade using this beautifully manufactured razor. That's a true story. I don't want to speak ill of other competitors. I won't use particular names, Jesse, but this is true. I was traveling recently. I had disposable with me. I don't even know if it was a disposable.

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Basically. It wasn't, but might as well have been. Yeah. Nicked me. I'm not going to have that with the Hinson because it's precisely milled so you have no diving board effect, no nicks. Anyways, I love really well-made technology that's durable and you can just use it forever and it's just a much more, I don't know, reasonable way to engage with tools.

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Hemsworth becoming Thor style, personal trainer. But you can get that same benefit, but using the efficiencies of the internet to do it more affordable. It's just a fantastic idea. My body tour has been around forever. It's been going like gangbusters because it just works. I've got a coach. They help me and I can afford it. So I'm big believer.

You're trying to turn around your health, trying to turn around your health and fitness. Don't just go out doing things randomly. Sign up for My Body Tudor. When you do mention deep questions, and they will give you $50 off your first month. You just say, hey, I heard about this on Cal's podcast, and Adam and his team over there will give you $50 off.

Just go to my bodytutor.com. That's My Body Tudor, T-U-T-O-T-O-T-O-T-E. dot com and mention deep questions to get $50 off. All right. We're on our way now to the final segment. I want to try something kind of new. I call it Reader's React. I'm going to load up on my screen here.

A recent essay I wrote for my newsletter, but you can sign up for at calnewport.com. You can also read all my essays at calnewport.com. Just click on the essays link. So on September 29th, I published a short essay called On Tire Pressure and Productivity. It was based off of a small but important event or encounter that I had with my car. So earlier that day, I had these low tire pressure warning lights on in my car.

And I knew my tires weren't flap because, you know, I checked them out. It was probably a cold snap. You know, you lose pressure somehow. The air compresses. I don't know how that works. But, you know, this happens as the fall goes on. Your pressure drops down. You get that indicator light on.

And it stresses me out because, you know, when I see that low pressure indicator, I now start imagining every time I turn that the car is, you know, slipping and sliding and that I'm losing whatever traction on the road. So I don't like it. And I was late. I was going to see a movie. I went to see the creator, actually. AI dystopian movie. I have thoughts. Mixed review.

But a story for another day. By the way, I was going to a movie in the middle of the day because I told my wife, I write about AI sometimes. So I have to go see this movie because it's about AI. I don't know if you bought it or not. But you do that normally, like, preaddle time to see movies like throughout the month, right? I try to, yeah.

I mean, usually at home, it's more rare for me to actually, usually for me to go see a movie at a theater during the day. Usually December I'll do that. So after the semester ends, but while my kids are still in school. And then in May, I'll do that as well. When the semester ends,

but like my kids are still in school, I'll always pick a day at the end of each semester. I'll go buy a book and then go see a movie. But I digress. The point of the story is, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to do this. And I got out my tire pump, and I pumped up the tires. And one of them was pretty low. Dry off to see the movie and the indicator light goes off.

And I noticed, like, I felt this really non-trivial sense of accomplishment. This thing was broken, and I did something physical, and this thing here went away. And it's better. And I felt good. And I told that story to emphasize a fact that we forget, but I think it's important, that we are wired. to get non-trivial satisfaction out of setting a plan for something, doing physical activity, making our intentions manifest concretely in the world,

to quote Matthew Crawford, and to then see the result, we get satisfaction out of that. This is known, right? This is the planning execution loop in the human psychology. We know about this. It's probably part of the drive that humans have to be more innovative. A lot of animals don't have this drive. a cat as perfectly happy as I always say to lay in the sun until hunger makes it get up to go get some food.

But humans get antsy because we get that high out of, you know what? I'm going to change this rock into a hand axe, and I can use that hand axe to actually cure this caribou hide. Why would we bother doing that? What's the drive is we feel good when we do that. So we do have this drive towards actual accomplishment. So I was talking about slow productivity in this post a little bit and saying, you know, it's complicated. productivity is complicated. So I'm going to read here briefly.

Let's go back here. Okay. I've been thinking a lot recently about how both the promises and perils of productivity. It's easy to dismiss interest in this topic as pure artifice propped up by an exploitative hustle culture orchestrated by the logics of late-stage capitalism. Such sentiments, of course, are not entirely unwarranted as there are subtle but urgent truth buried within these general analytical broadsides. But my experience with my tire pressure complicates the discussion.

Our brains find deep satisfaction in seeing a problem, devising a plan, and witnessing its successful completion. We're wired, in other words, to enjoy getting things done, to flee this impulse is to alienate ourselves from our basic nature. So where does this leave us? The right question regarding productivity is not whether it's good or bad, as it's both a reflection of our humanity and a target for exploitation. The better query is how we can more fully reclaim it.

All right. Let's see what the readers thought. There's a couple comments down here. All right. So Carl, in the comment I have up on the screen here, quotes where I said were wired, in other words, to get things done. And he said, I also am addicted to functioning and getting things done. But while I don't believe in the need to flee this impulse, I'm not so sure that this is our basic nature. Perhaps we're only hypnotized into believing this.

I think there's a similar sentiment below. Close that. sign up. I'm already signed up for this email. There's a response here from Adrian to Carl that says, we have a tendency to rationalize anything we do and usually do it subconsciously. And the claim that this would be our basic nature may very well be one such attempt. I've got revolt here. Brian says, you raise a good point about what is basic to our nature.

I would argue, however, that Cal would likely respond in two ways, just based on his podcast. First, the notion of doing things is certainly drawn from a much richer, philosophical account of agency, one that can be found in the work of the philosopher, motorcycle mechanic Matt Crawford. Oh, Brian knows me well. I just quoted Matt Crawford. Doing things puts us into a relationship with the world, not our own making, and that we should submit to as what's-ness.

You skip here a little bit. Second, there's the question posed by Joseph Piper in his book, Leisure at the basis of culture, and the question is this. What will we do when all else is done? What happens when there's nothing left to do? Then what? Certainly Aristotle's notion of completion plays a significant role in Cal's response. All right, so what do we get here?

We have two readers who write off the bat are suspicious of the idea that we have a sort of instinctual wiring to find satisfaction in accomplishment. And then we had a third reader come in and say, I don't know. I think this point actually has some merit. It's complicated, but the whole discussion of agency and purpose requires or involves somehow actually doing things. And this is a bigger discussion. All right. That's interesting. I think it's interesting, the skepticism, because I do include.

counter it quite a bit. And so here's the real question. What is the actual thing that's being constructed from discourse? It's one or two things here. Is it the idea that there's something natural in an attraction to productivity? Is that just entirely artifice? Or is it the idea that productivity is completely non-natural and that anything that productivity is artifice? There's two ideas here that the drive to do things is entirely constructed by discourses and is fake.

And then there's something else that says, no, no, it's there's something real to this. It just can get us out of control if we're not careful about it. So we kind of have these two, the readers are pointing out we have these two different alternative interpretations. I'm still leaning towards the first. And the reason why is because this idea that, no, I think the critical theory approach and the sort of classical like new school early 20th century critical theory approach that says, says any drive towards productivity is really just part of a sort of superstructure meant to help reinforce exploitative logics of capitalism. That's a really new idea.

And a lot of ideas that came through this sort of brainiac post-Marxism, brainiac extension of Marxism, a lot of these ideas are very smart and intricate, and a lot of them don't work. Whereas this other notion, man, there's some satisfaction and doing something hard, seeing it done. this has been with the human experience for a really long time. And it's been with the human experience well before we had sort of the modern industrialized capitalism. I mean, we see it, God, in the book of Genesis. We see it in the way farmers think about things.

We see it in the transcendentalist, right, in the 19th century and rural Concord. I mean, this idea really seems to pervade the whole human experience. So I lean towards there's probably something there. Also, I think the evolutionary story is strong. I mean, humans do need a drive towards having their complex ideas made manifest concretely in the world. Otherwise, we don't take advantage of our brain. We build all sorts of things and invent all sorts of things. Something has to drive that.

Other animals don't do that. Whales have big brains, but they don't build complex mechanisms. So there's got to be some sort of drive there. So there is an interesting evolutionary story there as well. And it just matches our experience. I don't know. I don't know that I've been tricked into thinking the tire pressure. indicator going off was good.

It just feels that way. Why is it on campouts? Okay, here's another piece of evidence. Getting the fire to work. Why is that like the most satisfying thing you can ever do in your life? Is it because like that's going to help Exxon mobile or something? No, because it's like this primitive, we made fire where there wasn't fire before. We're wired for it.

That doesn't let us off the hook, though, of course. So if I'm right about this, it does not let us off the hook because we have many examples of base human instincts that in the modern world get completely corrupted. Like we don't doubt that hunger is real. That's not an artifice of cultural construction. We get hungry because our body needs food. That can also be exploited and make us very unhealthy to help benefit other people. Same thing can happen, of course, with this drive for, I like the fire to be started.

Hey, I made the fire happen. Yay. An employer can completely exploit that to try to create a culture that gets you working double the time. Your salary really says you should have to work. And say it's your passion. You should just do it. There's all sorts of opportunities here for exploitation. But we don't need the drive to accomplishment to be entirely artifice for us to be wary of and point out the exploitation of an instinct.

I think if anything, recognizing that there's a deep human instinct here makes us more wary about how we think about work in production. Knowing that we're playing with a fundamental human instinct means we're playing with fire. You can do much more damage with fundamental human instincts than you can with stuff you have to construct from scratch. Why do you think the attention economy is delivered through our phones is so successful? Well, in part because boredom is an incredibly strong instinct. We don't like it. And the promise of we can get rid of boredom right away is in part why META is worth $800 billion in its market cap. That's really valuable.

So I think these comments are great. There is a cool debate here. And I'm still falling on one side of this debate, but I like that my readers are also sticking up for the other side of the debate. This is the type of conversations we should be having about productivity. What are the instincts that play here? What is construction? What is biological? How is the biological being exploited?

I think the more complex view of this we have, the better. We've ignored this too long. We've simplified productivity too long. So I'll keep writing and talking about it. I hope you and my readers and listeners keep arguing about it. And we have an ongoing good debate. I always say, Jesse, I've got the smartest readers on the internet. Yeah, baby.

I love the comments on my blog. We've got a little world here. It's not huge. We don't got the trolls. We don't got the weirdos. We don't got the S posters. It's people that have been with me for a long time. We got the smartest commenters on the internet over here at Calnewport.com.

That was cool how you responded to their comments. Well, I recognize these names, too. They comment a lot. Yeah. So it's cool. So I'm glad to be able to throw that in there. Hey, if you just listen to this podcast, you want to be a part of that discussion, Calnewport.com, you can sign up to get these essays sent to your inbox.

What a lot of people do, like these commenters here, here's what I've learned. They wait until they get the essay in their inbox and then they click over to the website to see the comments. And I know this because when we switched email providers a couple years ago, the format of the messages changed. And it had the title of the essay at the top. But in the old email provider, that title was linked to the blog post. And in the new one, it was not automatically linked. And I heard it from a lot of readers because I said, no, no, no, I love the comments. So after I read your essays in my inbox,

I want to go to your website to see what people are saying. Where's the link? Where's the link? So we had to change it and figure out how to change the templates that the title was linked. And by the way, how we change the template, quote unquote, is I just do it manually because it was that important. People wanted to see the comment.

So you can sign up there at caldupor.com and become a part of this conversation. All right, well, that's all the time we have. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. and until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go.

If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction

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