Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 27: Inside My Planning Discipline, the Joys and Sorrows of Slack, and Finding Depth Among Shallow Friends | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about what’s on my weekly plan at the moment, the complicated impact of Slack, and pursuing depth among friends more interested in fun.I will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Is monthly planning necessary? (Bonus: A look at my current plans) [2:12] * Breaking up time blocks [10:03]* Debunking writer’s blocks [11:28]* Favoritism versus career capital [17:56]* When to stop studying [27:35]* Getting back up when struggling in your work [30:19]QUESTION ROULETTE [34:58]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* The productivity apps I use [42:49]* Do academics need good digital presences? [43:37]* Leaving social media when you can’t leave the house [45:13]* The mixed impact of the rise of Slack [50:53]BACKSTAGE PASS [57:41]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Finding a calling when you’re interesting in many things [1:01:57]* Sticking to the deep life when you’re friends are deeply into the fun life (Bonus: tales from my one day as a Dartmouth frat brother) [1:07:14]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. We have a good show. This batch of questions that I'll be drawing from today seems to have a lot of queries about career stuff. So that should be interesting. I will also play a little question roulette, and I will give you an update on the Deep Work HQ in the backstage. past segment. Of course, to submit your own questions, you need to sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com and look out for the semi-regular surveys I send out to that list to solicit new queries for this show. Before we get started, let's do a quick review of the week. So I'm looking here at

Apple iTunes Podcast Store and let's grab a recent five-star review. This one comes from Velvet Hammers, who writes, listing the Cald Report is like having my own productivity coach. With every episode, I feel challenged to reflect on or adopt a new behavior to improve my approach to work or life. This podcast has value on its own or to listen to in combination with his books, Deep Work and Digital Mineralism are the two books I have read. Well, Velvet Hammers, I appreciate that, just like I appreciate all reviews,

is that really helps people take that plunge into our weird idiosyncratic world of work technology and the deep life. We're also up to 398 ratings. So like an adometer turning over, I suspect or suppose I should say that going to 400 will be minimally fulfilling to watch. So there we go. We're close, guys. A few more ratings we hit 400.

All right, that's enough admin. We got a lot of questions. I don't want to cut us any shorter than we need to. So let's get rolling as always with some work. questions. Natalia asks, do you plan your month the same way as you plan your week? Well, Natalia, the answer is no and for the very good reason that I don't plan my months. The scale of planning I do in my productivity system is daily, where I deploy time block planning, weekly, where I have a weekly planning discipline where I look at the week of head, get a sense of what needs to be done,

perhaps some ongoing habits or heuristics, maybe some specific moving of some big rocks to specific days. And then above that scale, I go all the way up to quarterly or semester. Quarterly is like the business way of thinking about things. And semester is more like the academic way of thinking about things, but the same idea. The fall, maybe the winter, different than the spring, different than the summer, something like that. Now at that level, you're really talking about what are the big projects you want to complete. You're not getting down to when this happens, but look, I've got these deadlines coming up in a few months and this is what I want to hit during this quarter.

So actually, you know what, to try to make this clear, Natalia, I will actually load up now while I'm recording this. I'm clicking on my computer. Let me load up my weekly plan for the moment. All right. I am going to Google Drive. I keep mine in Google Drive. Let me look over here.

Weekly plan. I am double-clicking on a Google Drive document. I won't give you the gory details, but I want to give you Natalia a sense of the scale or scope of these different plans. All right, so I'm looking at the weekly plan. I'm recording this on the weekend. So I'm looking on the weekly plan

for the week that just finished. Now, I had a big deadline last week. that deadline was on Wednesday night. And I have a note in here, okay, right off the bat on my weekly plan, this is a week, Monday through Wednesday of this week is really all about that deadline. I have my meetings and classes, but beyond that, I need to do, and I'm paraphrasing my weekly plan here, just sort of the bare minimum task to keep my head above water. That's a quote.

So I'm not getting it down in the nitty-gritty details, like do these tasks. Here's what Tuesday is going to look at. I'll give myself an idea. okay these first three days it's like you know keep your head above water the crucial emails the things that have to get done how do i know what those are i would look at my task systems i'd look at my trollo boards look at my inbox and figure that out on the fly then my weekly plan says okay i'm going to then recover i'm quoting that on thursday and friday with a combination of catching up on the admin that i fell behind on so i'm thinking about like the tasks that may be piled up the incoming emails

that require more work that just the tasks that showed up up in my role as the director of graduate study. And then I mentioned two sort of big rocks administrative tasks. Like those need to get done somehow Thursday, Friday. I'll obfuscate here slightly, but like one of these tasks, which I'll unobuscate because it's not anything secret is, for example, we're working on the website for my time block planner that comes out in November. So we're working now on the website.

You know, I bought a domain for this. I have a nice slick looking website and I owed text to the web designer. Like the actual final per site, we have a mock up and I owed them like the precise text. I had to sit there and think that through and write that out. So I had that and one other thing I'm obfuscating. So I'm saying Thursday and Friday, catch up on the small stuff and make sure somehow these two larger things get done. And then I remind myself check calendar and to do list every day. what I was worried about is that I was not going to do a shutdown routine,

that I was not going to look at those trello boards, that I was not going to see what really does have to get done, that I wasn't going to do those things that are not very time consuming, but really critical. It could make the difference between a Monday and through Wednesday focused on my big deadline. The difference between that causing a lot of little fires that I have to put out when it's done versus I get through there relatively unscathed because I can just hit those spinning plates just enough

doing it to Thursday, Friday they haven't toppled yet. I have a reminder, time block plan every day. Even though I'm in deadline mode, still take control of your time. All right, that's a sample weekly plan to tell you. So I'm not saying I'm doing exactly this on Monday morning. I'm doing this on Thursday night. Sometimes my weekly plans do have that level of specificity

when I have a busy week and a crucial thing and I'm trying to thread that needle. But this is a good representative weekly plan. It's a good representative weekly plan because it's like, look, this is what's Monday through Wednesday. Here's our mindset. Here's what we're doing. Philosophically speaking, just try to keep your head above water on this and put all your energy here. And the Thursday Friday is all about catch up. Let's not get too ambitious with big deep work blocks because we'll be tired of that from Monday through Wednesday. But here's two relatively big administrative, big rocks that we want to make sure do get done because they're time sensitive and a few reminders about my system.

That's a classic weekly plan. All right. What about a quarterly plan? well, I can click through here. Now, I divide mine up. I'm looking here at my Google Drive core directory. I did a whole thing about rooted productivity, I think last week or the week before. I forgot what episode it was, but it's in the title of the episode. It might have been a habit tune-up from a couple weeks ago from a mini-episode,

but it's all about rooted productivity. My core directory is to root in my productivity system. I have a strategic plan for my career and a strategic plan for my life. outside of career my strategic plan for my career has my current quarterly plan so i'm loading up as a google doc nothing fancy so it's not i'm looking out here so i have two you know i have one for sort of my my writing media company uh and then one for uh my academic my academic life and actually so i'm ending up this is this is interesting I'm ending up roughly the summer quarterly plan that I kind of have taking me through September.

So I'm actually about to go through a really big planning process. Actually, next week, Natalia, I have to build out a new quarterly plan for the fall. But looking at my academic quarterly plan, it included and focused on pretty aggressively on the things that I submitted last week. There's a collection of three academic papers I was working on. That was a big focus of the summer. and it has a few notes about, okay, what am I going to shift into as I finish those into the fall? And I'll look at those notes when this upcoming week I make my quarterly plan for the fall. And this is going to talk about it's insider baseball here, but essentially what papers I'll be working on with what collaborators and towards what timeline.

So what publication deadlines am I working backwards from and therefore roughly what type of progress will I need to make. So that's a quarterly plan. You're writing these papers. You get to a weekly plan. This is happy Monday through Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday we're resting, but we have to make sure that we still get this deadline done, et cetera. All right, that's a long answer to a short question, but I think that was glad I got a chance there to Talia to actually clarify for people,

the various scales at which it's effective to do planning. And I think that daily, weekly, quarterly, I have found through experimentation with a lot of different options, that really seems to get the job done well. Okay, Lackland. asks, once work is time blocked, we actually said time box, but I would of course use the term time blocked, how do you break it into manageable chunks? So Lackland, time block should be a minimum of 30 minutes. If the things that you actually need to execute take less than 30 minutes, you should batch

them together and add them in a block label. So a block label. So a block label, is where you write in the upper right hand corner of the sheet on which you're doing time blocking, the upper right hand corner being the corner that is very unlikely that your fixes to your time block schedule will ever occlude. You can put a little label in your time block and then put the label up in the upper right corner and elaborate what's supposed to happen in that block. So you could have a 30 minute block or an hour long block label it admin or tasks. Put a number in it like a one with a circle. In the upper right corner of the page, put a one with a circle and and list out what are the tasks that you would actually do in that block.

If you actually try to make blocks that are less than 30 minutes, you're getting a little bit too precious there, right? You're trying to get way too, I don't know, precise with these blocks and your schedule's never going to work. So stick with half hour to hour long blocks, batch together the small things, elaborate on what they are using labels that you explicate up in the upper right hand corner of your time block page. June asks, do you get writers block?

If so, what do you do to jump yourself out of it? Well, June, I think I may have talked about this before, but I don't believe in writers' block. A lot of other professional writers don't either. They basically say the sensation that the amateur scribe labels writers' block is what the professional scribe labels writing. That's just the challenge of writing, is that you have a blank screen, and it's not just you have to put words down,

but you have to put down words that are very good because you're being paid money for it, or it's going to be edited, or it might be rejected if it's not good. And it's really hard, and you don't know what to put there, and you start putting things down there, and it's not very good,

and it feels like you're pulling teeth. Again, someone who's new to writing, like, oh, that's writer's block. I don't know what to do. And again, a professional says, that's what writing is. Just like if you're a professional athlete, you say, man, I got to have my, whatever, my muscle strong so I don't get pushed around on the court. And so I have to go lift weights.

That's my job. And it really, it strains. I don't know. I have a hard time lifted. The weight is heavy. You know, you don't say, well, I guess I have weightlifting block. You say, no, that's what lifting weights feels like. It's hard.

It's heavy. You have to lift the heavy thing. That's why you get benefit out of in the end. You have to do the hard work to get the benefit. of it. Now, what makes this tricky? What makes this tricky is that unlike the weightlifting scenario, or the weights are always heavy, and it's always hard to pick them up. When it comes to writing, it's not always heavy. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you've got the right idea, the right semantic networks within your brain are amplified to make just the right connections,

and it flows. You feel like the muse is speaking. Your pin is singing. You enter perhaps even a chick's at me high, flow state, and it feels great. And I don't know how many aspiring riders

have been ruined by flow states because here's the problem. You get that taste. And then you tell yourself, how that's what it should feel like. That's what it should feel like. If I really knew what I was writing, if I was really a good writer, that's what it should feel like all the time.

And it doesn't, so I guess I'm blocked. I don't know what to say. So it would be like, again, if we go back to our athletic analogy, if you're the athlete, like, man, it just hurts to lift these weights and it's just hard because they're heavy because that's what's going to make my muscles grow. But if occasionally you win in the gym and the weights were really light and you felt really good, you know, like you got a buzz as you lifted them and it just felt really good, you might be like, man, some days I have weightlifting block.

So I'll have to come back another day. I really like those days when I don't. So that's what makes writing hard June, is that sometimes it does flow. It's just that's not the standard state. More often than not, it's hard. But this is the point I want to emphasize that sense of friction or difficulty,

that sense of I don't know what to write so I have to strain to try to produce something, that is very productive. That strain itself is productive. That strain is actually creating growth and it's going to create output with value, just like that strain of this weight is heavy, is going to make that muscle stronger.

It's going to produce valuable output. So don't think about, I don't know what to say here, and I hate this, and I'm just staring at the screen, I don't know what to do. Don't take that as a problem, take that as a job, and say, hey, I'm willing to sit down here and still work on this, even though I feel bad about it, and other people aren't, and I feel good about that.

It means I'm a pro. It means I ship. It means I get things done. And you know what? It gets easier. does it get easier? And I mean, within the session, within that same session, you started blocked, if you stick with it, more things will flow. The ideas will get easier. Why is that? Because there's stuff happening in your brain. There's neural networks. Some of them are starting to be

suppressed or inhibited. Others are being amplified. Connections start to form. Now suddenly you're starting to think like, oh, this is an interesting angle. It just takes time. I mean, I spent a lot of time for my new book, the book coming out in March on email, a world without email, I spent a lot of time trying to understand neuroscience. I talked to neuroscientists. I wanted to understand context switching and what happens when you look at your inbox or try to write something and how does the brain actually focus and create things. And I can tell you, it's a messy, complicated process, and it's time consuming. It takes time. It's like a big boat moving in the water and it takes a long time to turn it. So you stick with things. Neurons shift. This is amplified. This is inhibited.

Focus intensifies. Reward centers get activated. The cogs start turning. The gears start meshing and stuff gets produced. So that's my answer. There's no writer's block. Just writing. Writing's often hard. Sometimes it's not. Love it when it's not, but that's rare. I can tell you, I've been doing this professionally since I was 20 years old. I signed my first contract. I mean, I did some articles for pay in my 20, when I was 20, and I signed with my agent at the age of 20. I've been doing this professionally since I was 20 years old.

And I can tell you, that's 95% of the time. So June, think about Chuck Close's quote, inspiration is for amateurs. This is what he was talking about. If you're waiting for a flow state, which is just a psychologically accurate term for a visit from the muse. You're rarely going to get anything done. And more importantly, you're never going to get better because you're never lifting that metaphorical weight.

You're never straining. You're never improving. You're never giving your brain a time to actually shift gears to turn that metaphorical boat in the water, which takes a long time to amplify the right networks and to suppress the other networks to inhibit what you don't need and get your focus going to get all that stuff happening. If you don't do that, you'll never produce good things. You'll never improve as a writer.

You'll never get the strength you need not to get pushed around in the court. So there is no writer's block. Writing is mainly hard. Sometimes it's not. It's cool when it's not, but that's not very often. But in seat, finger on keyboards, repeat. Michael asks, how do you deal with critiques of your work that it overlooks the role that favoritism plays in the workplace?

Some people get ahead not because they are so good they can't be ignored, but because they are a son of a wealthy client who can't be ignored. Michael, that's a good question. and I get asked this a lot in live events or in interviews, so I talk about it a lot, but I haven't yet had a chance to discuss it on the podcast. So I appreciate having this opportunity. So what I often tell people is that when you're trying to understand

advancements in a particular career field, there are two different scales that are relevant. There's the system scale and the individual scale. Now, when you look at the system scale, you see the realities of how people advance is very messy. There's a lot of ambiguity in there. There is a lot of luck in there, and there's a lot of unfairness in there. So it might be the case, as Michael points out, that this person gets ahead,

not because they were better than everyone else, but because their dad owns the company. Or it might be the case that this person is no better of a writer than I am. It doesn't work any harder than I am, but just happen to hit a topic just right, and you know, Michelle Obama retweeted it or Reese Witherspoon picked it up for her book club or whatever it is and now their career is really taken off and it's just luck. That person vans with luck. Sometimes it's really ambiguous. You know, you try to understand how do people get ahead in this field? Why did that person get ahead and this person didn't?

And you sit there and you really think about it and it can be sometimes just very difficult to figure it out. There's just too many subtle or implicit factors, too many systemic forces at play and pulling apart that puzzle. turns out to be Gordian in its complexity. And sometimes it's just natural skill type stuff. I mean, look at Roshmaninov's fingers. I don't have Roshmananov's fingers. I'm not going to be able to hit the same chords that he could hit on the piano no matter how good I try to be.

So when you look at the scale of the system, how people advance is it's a very messy story and sometimes a very frustrating one. But then the question is, what should I do as an individual if I want to maximize career satisfaction? And there, of course, my advice is be very wary of the passion hypothesis, which tells you that the key to career satisfaction is matching the content of your work to a preexisting pre-inclination. And instead deploy career capital theory, which says you're probably best off trying to build up

rare and valuable skills, then use those skills as leverage to move your work towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. It's just the most consistent. strategy we have for producing career satisfaction, at least if your dad doesn't own the company. And so I think both of these scales can exist at the same time. You can look at the scale of the whole system in which your career operates and say, man, that's messy and confusing and sometimes arbitrary and a lot of times frustrating. Then you can look at the individual scale and see, but what should I do if I want more satisfaction? And even with all of that messiness being true, it's almost always better.

Almost always your best strategy still is going to be try to build up career capital and then have the courage to invest it. Get good at things and then take those skills out for a spin, they move towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. Now, in my book, So Good They Can Ignore You, I gave a caveat. So I talk about, you know, what are the exceptions? What are the circumstances in which just simply acquiring career capital is not going to be enough for satisfaction

that you should consider shifting your job or perhaps shifting your career field altogether. And I gave several of these exceptions. And one of them was if it becomes clear to you that even if you acquire career capital, you're not going to have a lot of good opportunities to invest it, that it's not going to grant you more autonomy over your career and give you the ability to do this shift

towards what resonates away from what doesn't. If you're saying, I'm not going to get that opportunity. That's a huge red flag and a very big reason why you might want to shift the job. And if this is endemic to the whole career field, then leave the career field. So, Michael, that's one place where actually I think the individual and the system scale actually can intersect. If the degree of favoritism or other types of arbitrariness to advancement in the field is such that even with career capital, you're not going to have much autonomy, you're not going to get. gain much say of your career, that other people are going to keep shooting way past you,

and then you should change the job, you should change the career. Now, I do talk about this topic a lot, as I mentioned in interviews or in live events, but there is a fair follow-up critique of why don't you talk more about the system scale within the book so good they can't ignore you. And so there I have an official answer and what I would call probably the real answer. So the official answer, I talked about this back in episode 15. Back in episode 15 where I talked about common critiques of my work, I gave this whole exposition on the role of caveats in advice writing. And basically I explained that like a lot of professional advice writers,

my general philosophy is not to put caveats in, not to say, okay, but here's the cases where this advice might not apply. okay, here are the cases where, you know, the advice might not work as well as you think. If you're in this type of job, for example, this might not work as well. Or if, you know, there's this particular obstacle that you have, then this might not work. I don't put a lot of caveats like that in my book. And a lot of famous, if you think back to sort of famous or canonical advice guys, there's not a lot of caveats either.

Now, I think this, as I talked about in episode 15, this can strike the individual as an issue because in the in the one-on-one social context it would be really unusual or weird not to copy out the advice you were giving someone if you could see obviously like look in your circumstance what I'm saying here is not quite going to work you would have to you would have to change this right you don't have the flexibility to wake up early because whatever you have to you your your kid goes to a school that's far away and you're already waking up early to get them ready for school so you can't work in the morning, so I'm not going to tell you to get up early to work as advice. I need to caveat it to your situation. And if I didn't do that, if I gave you advice that did not exactly

apply to your situation or ignored specific obstacles you have in your situation, it would be seen as this is weirdly dehumanizing and rude. But in the context of writing advice to a really big audience, you know, often these caveats aren't given because this is a highly artificial interaction. And my general philosophy is that the reader is very smart. And what they want to know is like, what's your big point here? What's the, I want to know like the swing you're taking. But I will, of course, adapt this to my own life. Right.

And if I have some obstacles where this won't work, I know that. Okay, great. So I won't apply it. Or if I'm going to have to modify it because I have to wake up early to get my kid to school, but maybe I could still whatever, do a shift right after that. But before my day starts, I'm, you know, I'll do that. So again, I think there's just this conflict. I talked about in episode 15.

there's this conflict between like normal person interaction and the highly artificial environment of writing, you know, advice for hundreds of thousands of people, where in the former, if you don't have caveats, it's like weird. It's almost like you're sociopathic. Whereas in the latter, if you try to put in all the caveats, then it really, it annoys the reader actually and bogs down the writing and say, I don't need you to tell me, you know, that this doesn't apply because of the situation. I know that. Now, I don't know. That might not actually be a good philosophy, but I do know a lot of advice writers share it to try to keep their, their, the pros lean and the momentum going. But I could ask this a lot because I think it, it strikes

people's ear as weird exactly because it is so different than how sort of normal conscientious human beings actually interact with each other. Now, I said that was the official answer. The real answer, like why don't I talk more about the system scale? We talked about my advice in that book so good they can't ignore you. The real answer is probably, the fact that I was 28 when I wrote it. And I was going through a big career transition. And basically, I just wanted to know, like, what tends to make a difference? What tends to lead people to be towards satisfaction? And I'd been hearing again and again, follow your passion. I wanted to see if that was right. And I couldn't find a lot of evidence for it. I studied a lot of

other people. And career capital theory seemed to be a more consistent framework. It did a better job of more accurately fitting the data as it were at the time. And so I wrote a book about it. it. So it's just, you know, it's 28 trying to figure out how to have career satisfaction. So that probably played a role as well. But anyways, Michael, I'm glad for that. I'm glad for that question for two reasons. One, because I could talk about, I think, this important distinction between system and individual and also where those worlds intersect and where a career change might be necessary. I think it was also nice to have an excuse to go back and reprise my discussion of caveats and advice writing from episode 15 because I get asked about that a lot. And I just think

it's interesting. The world of advice writing is a really weird, interesting world, and so I always enjoy excuses to geek out on it. Speaking of advice, let's do a classic academic advice question here. And I will deliver this answer with no caveats. Furnius asks, how do I know if I'm doing enough studying? Well, Fernius, the answer I give to that question in my book, How to Become a Straight A Student, is that you can recall from scratch without looking at your notes all the material you need to know for the exam. And not just regurgitate it, but you can actually teach it as if you were teaching a class. So if you're going over a proof that captures like a discrete mathematics technique,

you can do that proof from scratch on a white piece of paper and narrate as you go. This is why you do this step, here's what's happening here. so that you actually understand it. If you're preparing for an art history test, you can actually, on the major prompts, you know, the major prompts about the development of, you know, whatever, prospective art forms in the Medici school in the 16th century, Italy, or something like this,

whatever it is, right, that you can actually give a lecture as if lecturing a class. I used to talk to students about this, and I would say, if you can get to a place where you can actually talk out loud, without people thinking you're crazy, you should actually do it. Say it out loud.

Recall the information from scratch without notes as a lecture in a class. If you can do that, you know the material. You do not have to go back and look at it again. If you can't do that, you don't know the material yet. You still need to study it. This is called active recall. It's different than what most students do. What most students do is passive recall.

They look at their notes. They look at their textbook again and again and again until they feel as if they've done enough penance. They no longer feel guilty that they have done enough studying and then they hope things go well. A terrible way to do it. Active, active, active. So again, it's good news, bad news. The good news is if you can active recall something you know it, you don't have to go back.

It's crystal clear. This can reduce the amount of time you have to study. The bad news is it's really hard. Active recall is really hard to do. It's much easier to just read your notes or look at highlighted sections of your textbook. But that feeling of difficulty, that's actually your brain making new connection. that's actually you learning. Just like I talked about in my answer to June earlier in this episode,

that feeling of difficulty when you're trying to active recall is metaphorically congruent to that feeling of strain on the athlete's muscles as they lift weights. If you're not feeling to strain, you're not going to get much stronger. So that's the answer, Fernius. When you can teach it, you know it. All right, let's finish up our work questions here with a weighty query.

Struggler says the following. How can I overcome the feeling that it's too late to excel in my field? Is this feeling even worth overcoming should I consider switching fields or something else? He then elaborates, I'm a struggling fourth year bottom tier PhD student in theoretical computer science. I don't have imposter syndrome. If you saw my publication record, you would agree that I'm at the bottom. I feel too dumb to complete my PhD program and to get good at anything.

Even if I succeed, I doubt it was worth it. Pursuing my quote-unquote real interest is irresponsible and I wouldn't even know what to do. I know it's never too late to do X, but it sure doesn't seem that way right now. So, Struggler, based on the extended elaboration you provided me that I didn't read all of here, I think we can face the reality that, yes, you're not doing great in your PhD program. Yes, you're in your fourth year. Yes, you are not going to become an MIT professor. Google is not going to hire you away with a seven-figure salary as some sort of AI superstar or something like this. you are struggling, I can tell you are struggling in your program.

You're not excelling in your program. And you're right. There is no way where you are in your program to somehow turn this around the next year and, you know, be a superstar. So what next? Well, to give you a solution, I think we need to shift your mindset. Here's the problem I see, Struggler. You're thinking about milestones. You're thinking about professional milestones as the primary.

source of satisfaction. That if you could get a certain job or reach a certain level of aptitude in a field, it's once you get to that milestone, that will become the source of satisfaction. So if you can't get to that milestone, you don't see any easy way to get to it, how to become the MIT professor. We don't see an easy way to get to that certain level of excelling in the near future. you've kind of been punting it a little bit in your PhD work, which is easy to do. The Struggler, this is easy to do.

It is a very weird job. It's a job in which you have no supervision, a job when you have minimal structure. It is a very weird, unusual job, and it's not at all unusual. And I really got to emphasize this. This is not at all unusual to go through a PhD program in computer science and say, this is not for me. That's all fine. But again, I think you're focusing on the milestones. If I could get to this level of skill, if I could get to this job, a sufficiently prestigious job, then I would be happy.

That's when the satisfaction would come. We got to shift that mindset. So that's not where it comes from. It comes from how you approach your work tomorrow. It's from how you approach your work the next day. It's about are you a craftsman? I mean, are you setting out in a disciplined manner, control your time, control your objectives, suppress the noise, amplify the signal, get good at something valuable.

You're working every day towards that. You've got your arm around what you need to do. That when someone asks you to do something that gets done, and they know when it's going to get done, and it doesn't fall through the cracks, and you have some sort of system in place, and you're organized, and that you really have your eye on,

these are the skills I think are important. I think this is a worthy craft. I'm going to work on mastering this craft because humans are meant to be craftsmen, they're meant to be craftsmen, they're meant to take something complex and master it, and then use that skill to produce a physical manifestation in the world that makes the world better for them, for their family, for their tribe, for the society as a whole.

And you've got to tap into that mindset of discipline and crap. That gives you satisfaction. It'll get you better at things. And yes, if you have that, you will for sure eventually excel at things. And because of that, you will get more and more options and perhaps more and more interesting jobs. But I can tell you that those milestones aren't going to have much of an impact in the moment on your subjective affect.

It's the commitment to discipline, the commitment to craft, in a professional context that provides satisfactions, not what the commitment to craft or the commitment to discipline yields. I mean, there is some satisfaction. There's some pride if you become an MIT professor. There's some pride. And pride is not something that I want to dismiss. It's not deep satisfaction.

Plenty and miserable MIT professors. Satisfaction comes from the discipline. Satisfaction comes from a dedicated. to craft. So this is the type of answer I would give you, struggle is let's get rid of that mindset. Stop thinking about if I have a PhD or not, if I have this job or not,

if I'm at this level of skill or not. None of that stuff is going to answer your question. You've got to look in the mirror. This is where you're going to find the answer to this question of what should I do. And so this is what I'm going to prescribe here. Discipline craft. So we start to get our professional life in order here.

First thing first, it can't be a mess. Can't be a mess. So you need some notion of a capture, configure control style productivity system. The things you need to do get captured. They don't fall through the cracks. You configure. You actually think about this. You organize this.

You understand what's on your plate and how it needs to get done. You plan at various scales, et cetera. And then control. You control your time. You time block plan. You weekly plan. You quarter plan. Right.

You get control of the mess. Things don't get dropped. You confront the productivity of dragon. You go into the cave. it's not a mess. You organize it. You might not like what you find right now, but you organize it. Then two, you say,

how do I hone my craft every day? And you start to build out that discipline. And you find pride in that discipline. Your year four in your PhD, I want you to write a dissertation that you're very proud of. That does something interesting, that does something hard that pushes you past where you're comfortable, that leads to a really good publication.

And now every day is about that. Where's your deep work happening? What's your rituals around your deep work? Do you have too much on your plate? Clear that other stuff on your plate. Are you giving your mind the rest it needs? Are you eating well? Are you exercising?

Are you treating your mind like a muscle that you need to hone because you're in a cognitive athletic type situation? You need to do that. Are you on your phone all the time? You got to stop that. Are you addicted to the news? You got to stop that. You're eating crap.

You got to stop that. Discipline craft. Discipline craft. and start fighting towards this goal. And I'm going to tell you just your job and where you are, fourth year PhD student, no, don't stop now. Write a really good dissertation. Where you are now in your program, that's going to be a higher expected return.

But more importantly, it gives you the runway to actually get disciplined into your professional life, actually feel what it feels like to hone craft, have that craft produce something you're proud of. Now you're set. Now here's the thing. No matter what you do with that, no matter where you go from this next, wherever you are two years from now with that PhD in hand, you are going to have satisfaction, not because of the specific thing you do,

not because of the specific level of skill you'll be at there, but because you have discipline, you have craft, and that's the key to satisfaction for a lot of people in their professional lives, and I think for you. So that's my recommendation. Let's get you off the mat. You're not proud of the last four years. You're going to be very proud of the next year,

and that's how it's going to happen. Clean up the mess from a productivity standpoint. So you have your arms around everything. You control your time. configuring your tasks, you know what's going on, you're facing a productivity dragon, and then start doing the satisfying and rewarding but difficult work of daily honing your craft,

aim it right now towards producing really good dissertation, but then apply that to whatever you do going forward. I'm telling you, this is what humans are meant to do. It's what we're meant to do. Make our intentions manifest concretely in the world, to quote Matthew Crawford, to do that with ever-increasing skill. That is satisfaction.

everything else is in the details. All right? So I want you to chin up there, struggle. I think you can turn things around. And just because you're not going to be an MIT professor next year, it doesn't mean that you're not going to be very satisfied with yourself next year and en route to an incredibly fulfilling professional life.

So I appreciate that question because it gave me a chance to talk about that more generally. I think a lot of people, especially young people, put too much emphasis on milestones. They think milestones are the sources of satisfaction. And they fall into this. sacrifice culture. I'll just kind of like sacrifice to be miserable. If I can hit that milestone, then I'll be happy. It doesn't work that way. You have to craft a life that makes you

happy every day. And I want to even use the word happy because happy I think of as a particular positive affect, a life that makes you feel proud and satisfied and fully human every day. And craft and discipline, at least in a professional context, that's my prescription. All right, let's play some question roulette. This is where I select a question at random that I have never seen before and try to answer it on the fly with no preparation. All right. So today's question roulette query comes from John, who asked the following. I deleted everything off my phone except calls and text messages, but I still find myself

checking for new messages all day. What is the next step to beat the addiction? John, work without your phone. So put your phone somewhere else. If you're working from home, use the phone foyer method where you keep it plugged into the charger by your front door in your kitchen. You can go there if you need to check. Go there if you need to answer a call. But you can't do it as a quick knee-jerk default activity as you're sitting there at the computer.

If you use a Mac, turn off the messaging software on the Mac that takes those SMS or I messages and puts them onto your computer. De-couple your computer from those messages. So you have to go to your phone to do it. That friction will make a big difference because it's not only a pain to get up and go to another part of your house to check your phone, but it makes it really clear what you're doing to your own mind. Oh, man, I'm getting up and going to the foyer again. I just did it five minutes ago. I just did it five minutes before that.

That's a problem, right? And your mind doesn't want to go through that. It's embarrassed, so it checks it less. Now, something like this may seem drastic. In general, John, what I've found is that drastic measures when put in place for some of these technological addictions takes about two to three weeks to basically minimize that addiction down to something that no longer even requires drastic measures. If you really do work without your phone, because it's in a different room or you use software like screen time to try to prevent you from

doing certain activities, I mean, as an aside, and as an aside, Apple, I'm not happy what they did there. People say, hey, screen time is great because now Apple is giving you the tools you need to control your phone, They only let you do some things or some behaviors they don't let you control, but as soon as they added screen time, they stopped allowing third-parting apps like freedom come in and do stronger filtering. So I like the mindset, but I don't like the way they did it. But whatever. So my point being here, John, is that you do something drastic so that it's impossible to check these messages are very difficult or embarrassing to do so. After two or three weeks, you will no longer have to do those drastic measures because you will lose the taste for it. I'm often surprised how quickly people lose digital addictions.

All right. So good luck, John, but no middle ground here. Those messages should have nothing to do with your work. All right. Speaking of technology like phones, let's do some technology questions. Jakub asks, what apps do you use for productivity? Well, I don't use any apps. So nothing on my phone or tablet or anything like that.

There are some web services I use, as I've talked about before. I use both Trello and Workflowee to help manage my tasks. So that's where I do the sort of configure work of my capture, configure control, productivity philosophy. I use the Google Calendar as my main electronic calendar, in part because I like it and in part because Georgetown, my employer, uses Google as their internal tools. I use Gmail for my email. And that's about it.

Other than that, I have a lot of analog tools, a lot of notebooks. All right. Chris asks, as an academic, how do you create a deeper online presence of your lab group's work besides peer-reviewed publication? Indeed, should you spend time cultivating this or let the work speak for itself? Chris, in my experience in most fields, you should primarily let the work speak for itself. I mean, you should have a good web presence for your group that makes it easy to. to understand who is in the group and what they published and what they work on. For a lot of logistical reasons, that's useful.

There's going to be a lot of instances in which people outside of your group will need that type of information. So making that very easy for them to find is useful. It also helps in student recruitment efforts. But beyond that, I think it's diminishing returns, this idea that if you're really careful with your research group's website and get the description just right and make it look fancy that that's going to give you bigger returns in terms of the impact of prestigious or group. I just don't find that to be true in most academic fields.

Publications and their citations really do speak for themselves. So that's where I'd focused most of my energy, which is all to say, I do not like this trend that a lot of research groups or even departments feel like, well, we should be on Twitter. Just because it feels like O'Carrant or people should, it'll help people know what we're working about or something like that. Hey, if you're a famous academic, you have a famous group, maybe people do care, but if you're not, they don't. And it's wasting cycles that maybe should go into publishing better papers, which again, that ultimately is what's going to make most of the difference.

So don't be embarrassed by your web presence, but also don't be embarrassed about how much time you're spending on that presence either. Olivia asked, do you have any advice on how to deal with the fear of leaving social media, especially when struggling with isolation due to chronic illness? Olivia elaborates that there's a chronic illness that makes it difficult for her to go outside. And so online socialization is a crucial lifeline for her. So Olivia, my advice would be to shift your attention from social media to the social internet. And I think this is an important distinction.

For long time internet boosters and observers like myself, The social internet is like a miraculous innovation. The ability for anyone in the world to plug into this network on a shared set of open protocols to connect or communicate with people, share files, or express themselves. It really is a Gutenberg scale technological innovation. Then we have social media, which is a completely different type of idea, which is this idea that very, very large companies say, We like the promise of social internet.

We think that's cool, but we're going to build our own private internet within our own walls. It's going to be our own servers that we own. And we're going to have like a really nice experience that makes it very easy, not just for you to do the social internet style connections, but to be entertained for you to have information that pushes emotional buttons that makes it a highly effective experience. And by the way, we're going to watch every single thing you do and gather lots of data you and do whatever we can to try to keep you using these things more and more. And we might also accidentally bring down the democracy. But you know, the interface is easy.

And it feels nice when you do the pull down scroll. It's kind of like a slot machine to see if you have any updates in your Twitter feed. Social media is what I'm trying to say is highly artificial. It takes what was great about the social internet and it sort of bastardizes it. It tries to consolidate it under sort of monopolistic, dystopian corporate. centralized control. So I'm saying shift from social media to the social internet. Connect with people through email or instant messenger services or SMS or old fashioned phone calls or Zoom calls. Produce websites, consume podcast. Use the internet as a way to find interesting people who share your interest and allow the underlying technological protocols to make it easy

for you to communicate with them and coordinate with them to work on interesting things. to pursue projects, to build things together, that just have fun. But just get away, get away from this Forrester, the Machine Stops-style dystopian world where the social internet has been reduced to you sit there looking at your Twitter feed, or you just sit there, numbly consuming Instagram messages. And you get the simulacrum of interaction with just a couple emojis. Or maybe you join a pile on with someone, or you give someone a thumbs up a little bitmap graphic in response to a picture they posted. It's a poor simulacrum of real interaction.

It's a poor simulacrum of real engagement. It's a poor simulacrum of all the value that the weird, democratized, powerful, and expressive social internet used to offer. So that's what I would say is figure out how can you find people, connect with people, coordinate with people to work on interesting things, express yourself and have fun. without having to use one of these four or five massive exploitative dystopian services. And it's absolutely possible. There's a lot of people like me who do that. Now, this is not to say that those social media tools should be completely shunned.

I mean, I talk about this in my book, Digital Minimalism, where I have a whole chapter on what I call the attention resistance, which is people that do surgical strikes on the social media platforms to get out values or connections that they need, but then get back out again before they can, hook them into some sort of addictive spiral. So, for example, there might be a group that's really important to you that meets using Facebook groups.

Sure, fine. But don't use it on your phone. Just have it on your laptop. Use a plug-in like News Feed Eradicator so that when you log on, all you see is post from those people you care about on the group you care about. Or even better, move them off that group to something on your own. Move them on to like a Slack channel or something that you set up. get a text chain going

have a weekly standing Zoom meeting most of what I'm trying to argue here is embrace the internet use the tools of the internet it is possible to use the tools of the internet to produce a lot of social and expressive value in your life without having

to essentially mortgage your identity over to one of these monopolistic conglomerates as I mentioned hey if you need to do surgical strikes get in there and get this Facebook group post or let me get in there to meet someone interesting that I can then move out if you're to another platform.

That's fine, but do it like a resistance fighter. Do it on your computer. Don't do it on your phone. Use plugins, have rules, have a hard password. Do everything you can to make sure you don't get caught. It's absolutely possible. Olivia, I actually think you're going to find your digital-fueled interactions. That aspect of your life is going to get richer

when you leave the Faustian comforts of the major social media platforms. Let's fit in one more technology question. Tim asks, what's your opinion on the move from email to chat apps such as Slack in the workplace? Well, Tim, it's a complicated question. So Slack or those similar type tools solve one problem, but amplify another. So I think the problem that Slack solves in a lot of office environments is that it helps minimize that really uncomfortable anxiety-producing feeling of messages piling up. You have this inbox.

Every moment there's all these messages piling up and you have to get through all those messages. Each one of these messages is an obligation. Sent to you by someone else that you now have to fulfill. It's just incredibly stressful that while you're working on one thing, more piling up and you obsessively just have to keep going back to your inbox, you start checking email at night and in the morning on the weekends because you're trying to keep up and it's a sisyphine and it's very difficult and it's an incredible source of anxiety. So when you shift to a synchronous tool, like a chat-based channel like you get with Slack,

you do mitigate a lot of that issue. Because if you're not there, if I'm not on the channel for you to talk to you, I don't really have a way of just piling up messages for you. Right. So there's this comfort. I think this is a good benefit. There's this comfort in when I am not communicating, nothing's piling up. Right?

That our ethic here is you talk to me synchronously. something. And so if no one's talking to me, then there's no new obligations accruing. They have to actually grab me. And maybe I won't make myself available until I'm ready to talk. And therefore, I take back control. All right. So I think that's the positive. And guess what a lot of people like about Slack, kind of philosophically speaking. I'm sort of putting aside here parenthetically, there's a lot of technical advantages people like in terms of transcripts and being able to search and be able to have a record of interactions that various stakeholders can look at. There's some technical benefits that are very important for certain organizations.

Here's the negative side, however, moving to a synchronous-only interaction scheme in the office, is that if you do not have good workflows in place, if like many knowledge work organizations, the way you run things is just grab me when you need me, I'll grab you when I need you, and we'll just rock and roll, ad hoc unstructured messaging or communication. If that is how most work is actually arranged in your office, then the pressure when you go all synchronous is you better be available synchronously all the time. And you can't really escape that need

because, again, if you run an office this way or ad hoc unstructured communication is how all work is identified, assigned, reviewed, and executed, you do need everyone online all the time. Right? I can't wait an hour for you to come online, if I can't make progress on my project, I have to sit here and wait for you, it's going to be a problem. If unstructured ad hoc messaging is crucial to how all work happens, then when people

are not available for that communication, work slows down. It's why it doesn't work to simply say, okay, we shifted to Slack so that people won't be stressed out about their email inboxes and just, hey, if you feel overwhelmed by Slack, just check it less. It doesn't work that way because if you check at less, you screw everyone. Because that's the only way you've set up for work to actually get done. And then what you end up with is a context switch, a context switching hell in which every three to four minutes, you have to check on the Slack channel. And every time you do that, you trigger a network context switch.

And then you come back to the work and it collides with the shift back. And then you're constantly in a state of reduced cognitive capacity. So that's this weird pro and con of Slack. It solved a really big problem while at the same time making the other problem of the email era, which was the context switching caused by constant inbox checking, and it amplified that it made it even worse. And then guess why people have a confused relationship with Slack? They say, well, I don't want to go back to my inbox. That's so stressful. But it's like, why do I feel like I can't work

or get anything done anymore? That's because you're checking Slack all the time. And you check Slack, the data bears this out. A Slack organization has more communication checks per hour by far than an email organization. Because when it's synchronous only, and I can't just shoot it off to get off my plate, I just want you to be there because I want to get it off my plate, and you better be there. And that pressure, that pressure is real. So what's the solution? Well, it's not a tool that's going to solve the problem.

It's going to be structural. And this is a huge theme in my book coming out in March, a world without email, which obviously will talk a lot more about in the new year. But it's a big theme of that book. we are very immature in the way that we approach knowledge work right now. This notion of just let's rock and roll. You grab me electronically when you need me. I'll grab you when I need you.

We'll just figure it out on the fly ad hoc unstructured communication back and forth all day, be it in Slack, be in an inbox, incredibly immature way to actually coordinate human brains towards producing valuable information. So what do you have to do instead? I wrote a whole book about this, but essentially what you're going to have to do,

is you actually have to have those processes figured out. And this is not a technological issue. This is a organizational issue. What is the work we do here? How do we do it? What's the best way to do it? How much work should you be doing? How do we figure out what's on your plate? What are the processes that gets you the information, gets that information out of there? Let's actually take this business we're doing of producing value with our brains, write down what we're actually doing and optimize it. Now, when you're doing that, digital communication tools can then be deployed and they'll play a really big role. And Slack can be very useful. Email can be very useful, but these tools have to be deployed on behalf of a organizational setup that has processes that are optimized. So that's a much bigger

issue to unpack there. But that's basically my thought on Slack. If you feel like you have a confused relationship, that's why. It's solved a huge problem of email. It made another problem of email much worse. We cannot get to the underlying issue with tech. The underlying issue requires a new way thinking about how do we organize knowledge work. Before we allow this heavy topic to weigh us down too much, let's quickly change gears here and check in on what I am up to in my quest to build a deep life in the segment we call Backstage Pass. So two big pieces of news from the still new Deep Work HQ.

In my studio, I now have video equipment. I have a reasonable camera with a reasonable lens set up through a capture card to come right into my computer. I have some studio lights that I'm not very good at setting up yet. I brought some furniture over from my study so that I can make the backdrop reasonable. So the pieces are coming in place here for me to do both video recording and live stream video.

So I'm not quite sure exactly what to do with that. I think I'll probably start with some. filmed clips of particular questions from the podcast. So look out for that. There are some live stream events coming up, I think, surrounding the launch of the Time Block Planner in November. I'm going to do probably for pre-orders. I'm going to do some sort of live stream event.

So more on that as well. But basically, I want there to be more video to go along with my audio. And maybe some of the stuff I'll just actually record to camera, just me, ideas on things. I'm not quite sure what's going to happen, but there will be more video at some point this fall. So you can, you know, sort of actually see the consternation on my face or the frustration on my face is ideal with various questions or give various advice. But I think that should be interesting. The other big news is I had 11, 11 boxes full of books made it over here. Some movers bring them over with some furniture this weekend to the Deep Work HQ.

Basically, but the entire research library. So we have several libraries in our house. But I have one in my study that's a lot of the books I actually use or cite often when I'm writing articles, blog post, or book chapters. So I'm bringing that whole library over here because that whole bookshelf is getting filled with kids' books for homeschooling. Sort of a traumatic experience. But I'm moving all the books over here, so that's exciting. As I mentioned, the Deepak HQ is really about the podcast studio, the podcast advertisements, which are almost ready. We're just signing the contracts now. They pay for this office or they will pay for this office.

But it does have a large common space. And I am trying to build a deep workspace there in which no email is allowed. And I did actually bring a bunch of furniture over. I set up the room earlier this weekend. It didn't feel right. I had a desk on the wall and an armchair and another desk where I was going to put a TV. It just, I don't have a great sense for this. It didn't feel right.

So I'm going back to the drawling. board. Now I'm thinking I want to put a library table into center. You know, like where you would see in the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, like a somewhat skinny table with two chairs on either sides and those lights in the middle that shine straight down, maybe with the green glass on them and you pulled a little thing like we used to study at in college. I might put that in the middle of the room and then put on one wall black whiteboards

where I can work with white marker to work on proofs. and then against the adjacent wall. My bookshelf is full of books. I don't know. And I could put an armchair over by the window. Still trying to figure that out. But I do really like this idea of experimenting with a space that's just for writing, reading, improving,

and that no email is allowed. So I will keep you posted on that progress. It's all really slow because I really hate moving. I hate setting up rooms. I hate setting up studios. I just don't have a lot of time and it always feels endless to me like you can spend hours and not be done.

And it's very frustrating for someone like me who doesn't have a lot of free time. So this is all going slowly, but we're getting there. So pretty soon you'll be able to see my face a lot more for better for worse. It's probably for worse. And I'll hopefully have a space in which

when I have time to deep work, I will be able to make the most out of it. All right. That's the news for now from our product. activity themed lake will be gone where everyone works deeper than average. Let's move on, as always, to questions about the deep life. Vickis asks, when you are fascinated by a lot of things in life and when you do averagely good in many fields, how could you then choose your calling or your purpose in life?

Well, Vickas, I have two book recommendations for you. So first, self-servingly, I will recommend my own book, a 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which we've been talking about in various preceding questions in this episode. I do think you should read this book because it's going to push back on this idea that what you're trying to do is figuring out what your calling is. It pushes back on this idea that we are pre-wired for a particular professional pursuit. And that career satisfaction comes from when we match what we do to this pre-wired inclination. An idea that we often summarize with the helpful phrase, follow your passion. This is basically nonsense.

It sometimes happens, but for most people, career satisfaction is something that is cultivated over time. It is built on a foundation of rare and valuable skills. Those skills are then used as leverage, to move your work towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. And if you are careful in how you do this, you can craft a very passionate relationship with your career. It's not just about some magical match between what you do and some pre-existing inclination. Anyways, that book gets into it.

That's all that book is about. So it's going to change the way, at least give you a new way of thinking about career satisfaction, hopefully get you away from this mythological notion that you're just one career switch away from instant happiness. Now the second book I will recommend is Range by David Epstein. And Range really hits at this idea of polymass. And in particular, this notion of getting pretty good at a lot of different things and then allowing those things to mix and match and perhaps unexpected ways to open up

really meaningful or high impact work. So it's a manifesto of sorts that, argues for this is a completely legitimate path that you don't have to just choose one thing and specialize your whole life in it that trying a few things doing a few things as you say and look at your question here averagely good can actually add up to something exceptional and it's a really cool book about how that happens and it has a lot of examples you will also see this idea echoed in so good they can't ignore you where i talk about the auction market for career capital all of those terms sound needlessly technical and they are

but it basically is a technical gloss on some of the ideas that Epstein much better elaborates in his book range. That's where I talk about how by building up career capital, that's my terminology for rare and valuable skills, by building up career capital in multiple loosely related or unrelated fields, you might then be able to get a lot of impact by combining them in a unique configuration. So I give a case study in this chapter of my really, good childhood friend Mike Jackson, who applied this theory and built a really, really cool career that I write about an environmental focused venture capital. He mastered a few different things and then their combination was really unique. It was in the man. Then it had a lot of

value. And so I write about my friend Mike Jackson in that case study and he still gets emails to this day occasionally from people who say are you the Mike Jackson from that chapter so good they can't ignore you so I thought that's funny actually just as an aside his name is actually Michael Jackson I think I did abbreviate it to Mike Jackson in the book so as to disambiguate him from the the late pop star Michael Jackson in retrospect probably not necessary probably where would not be a lot of people who would otherwise have read that chapter and said,

huh, two things I didn't know. Cal hangs out or hung out quite a bit as a child with the artist who recorded Thriller in the 1980s, and that artist was in the Venture Capital. Didn't know. Interesting. Probably wouldn't have been a problem, but I think I did.

Very purposefully, I'm saying it was some embarrassment. I think I very purposefully abbreviated his name to Mike. So as to prevent people from thinking that as a child, I hung out with the pop star Michael Jackson while he made venture capital investments into environmental firms. All right, but Vickers, I love your energy. I love what you're doing. Read so good they can ignore you.

Read range. I think you're going to absolutely love what you find in there. it's going to give you a lot of ideas how to go forward on your quest towards a fulfilling professional life. Evan asks, how do I stay confident in the deep life? Just four months into my career in finance, I realized there has to be more to this life than this, constant drinking and fun events. I felt my life lacked meaning. Over the past year, I have worked to live a deep life. If I am pursuing professional licenses to advance my career, I've become an avid reader. I like to write my ideas for myself and for a blog.

But as a 23-year-old and in a work culture of fun, I am often questioning if this is the right path. As I see my college friends and coworkers all living the life I chose to leave behind. Well, Evan, first of all, let me say I personally empathize with your situation. You know, I was in the situation, to some degree, a similar situation, my sophomore year of college. I was an odd college student. I was, I don't know, old beyond my years or something like this. I was just impatient. I was impatient to get out in the world and do things of impact.

And I had a very transactional relationship with college. I was trying to learn things and build up skills that would allow me to do impactful things in the world. Now, I was at Dartmouth, and Dartmouth has a very famous fraternity culture. So the writer for the National Lampoon, who wrote Animal House, was a Dartmouth guy. And so it was adopted. He had written a story for the Lampoon, I guess in the 70s, called something like the Night of Many Fires that was, about his fraternity at Dartmouth. And I don't remember any of these Greek names anymore,

so I forgot which one it was. And that got turned into the movie. And Dartmouth has a big fraternity culture for a really good reason. It's in the middle of freaking nowhere. You're literally in the woods. So it's like Survivor Man with Art History Lectures. I mean, not quite that. But anyways, there's not a ton to do is what I mean.

You're not near any cities. and so it has a very an old fraternity and sorority culture. Anyways. So I did the fraternity bidding process, and I was, I don't what I should call it, accepted or something, at a fraternity with my friends. And, you know, I went to the first meeting,

or whatever you call them, in the basement. And they were doing the whole normal fraternity thing. Like, right, fraternities have these like rituals of initiation. And it was like, all right, whatever, you know, scum, you're going to blah, blah, blah, and have to wear the fraternity hazing type, mild hazing type stuff. And I walked out and then come back. And it was because, look, I'm like you, man. I was an odd duck. I was like, I don't know.

I literally thought, I don't want to waste my time. Like, I want to go do things. I want to, I have things I need to do. need to, you know, I wanted to go to a place like MIT, so I had to have my act together studying, and I was writing books. So, you know, I signed my first book deal at Dartmouth, and I was the editor of the humor magazine. Ironically, the same humor magazine where the National Lampoon writer came from that wrote the original stories that became Animal House, I just had a lot going on. It's like, I don't want to waste my time having an upperclassmen

yell at me. And I literally felt like, if I had the drink a lot, I'm going to lose half the next day. hung over and you know it could be working so it's all to say Evan I wasn't a fun I wasn't a fun guy in college this is not this is not this is not coming off well but I empathized right I just I had my own thing going on I was working on craft it was disciplined it was just a different thing and I don't mean this by the way to be an indictment actually I think the fraternity surerty culture at Dartmouth I don't mean to be an indictment of that it turned out these I had it would not have been a major imposition, and I think the camaraderie would have been good,

and I think it was very beneficial to my friends. And they all crushed it academically. It's not like this fear I had of, it was going to be like Animal House, and you would never study again, was wrong, right? I mean, so I was reacting to a, I was reacting to an exaggeration, but it just tells you something about a mindset I had at that time

that seems similar to yours. You want to go deep. And the people you work with, with a year round don't as causing a conflict. So I empathize. So what do I think you should do? And I think you should go deeper. You should go deeper. I think if you have the inclination at that young age, which is fantastic to craft a deep life, that's what you should do. You got to go in on that, go deep on that. Now what does that mean? Well, let's talk about the work aspect first.

I talked earlier. Like this was an answer to an earlier question. I said, here's what you got to do. You want satisfaction in your work life? Discipline and craft. You get your act together from a productivity perspective. You know, you're the most organized CalNuportian Capture Configure Control style productivity guru at that financial firm.

You're known for it. you know what you're doing you face a productivity dragon you time block your time boom do that look for craft you're already doing this i'm just saying keep doing this what's really valuable here let me do it these fancy derivatives and that's where the money is and they're really complicated i'm going to be up working on that and i'm going to figure that out i'm going to master it and i'm going to be useful right so yeah get after in your work with discipline and craft in your intellectual life i like that you have a reading habit what's one up that Let's want up that reading habit.

You're at a young age. This is a good time to develop political, philosophical, and ethical stances. Like, where do you stand in those arenas of the civically engaged, intellectually engaged, fully actualized human? You got to know where you stand. You've got to get there by reading. When you're exposed to an idea in the realm of politics, philosophy or ethics that, resonates, you read the very best things written about it. And then you do the Socratic thing. Let me get the best alternative. You read about that too. Let me get the best critique.

I'm going to read that too. And you have a dialectical clash from which your roots are going to grow deeper. Your understanding intellectual confidence is going to grow deeper. You need to start doing this. Political issues, philosophical issues, and ethical issues. Build a deep intellectual foundation. So take your mind, I'm sure you have a lot of horsepower because these financial jobs are hard to get. Take that mind. Spend more of your free time doing that. Building this sort of

intellectual firmament on which you can actually build your life. Why do I think that's important for you to do right now? Because you're in the career capital building phase we've talked about throughout this episode. You're not that far away from having enough career capital to actually be able to do some damage. And once you have a say,

I'm telling you, if you're disciplined and focused on craft in the financial industry, you're going to have some career capital. You're also going to have, by the way, some literal capital, too. And you're going to say, how I'm going to invest this? What do I want to shape with my life? What do I want to move towards? What do I want to move away from? You want at that point to have a deep intellectual engagement with political, philosophical,

and ethical issues because that's the firmament on which you're going to be able to actually build really remarkable decisions and continually move your life in a deep way. So now is the time to do that. And that should you still hang out? So you still have fun with your friends? Yes. Because also you're 23 and it's awesome. Also because if I drink three beers, I am going to feel it until noon and you can drink 13

and be at spin class at 9 because you're 23. And so also have fun. I get that. I still had fun at Dartmouth, even though I was not in a fraternity. But you're not going to be happy if that's your whole thing. Evan, I don't know you, but I know you. You want that depth. You want impact.

You want intellectual engagement. You want to set the foundation in your 20s to do things in the 30s that's going to shake up the world and gather some attention. So yeah, I mean, have fun. Friends are friends. And you want to be involved with your coworkers. You want to be involved in that life. But maybe it's not every night.

And maybe you're not there until last call. And maybe you, as you get more involved in these deeper intellectual issues, you also cultivate an additional set of acquaintances who are themselves more deep, who are themselves more committed to the deep life. writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, academics, whoever, people who are into this, people who are thinking about this, people who want to put their brain to use to as much use as possible, not just to let me just do this job successfully. Start spending more time with them.

Do deep pursuits. Go see interesting artists. Go to interesting plays. If you're in New York, I don't know if you are, I'm just guessing if you're in finance. If you're in New York, the Met, the Met, open, the moma's open, you can be there. Learn some art history. I mean, this is all just examples, right?

I mean, don't take this too literally. But I just think of a base just on this question, I just recognize myself at a similar age. And I think you don't try to run away from your inclination towards depth. You embrace and you go deeper. Discipline and craft in your work. Dialectical conflicts with alternatives and critiques with political. ethical, philosophical ideas, build that firm and be around deep people, have deep experiences,

and still have fun. This is the time to do it. Do that now because, again, I'm telling you, Evan, you are going to, if you do all this, you are going to have enough financial and metaphorical career capital to really do some damage not too long from now. And you want to make sure that you put that power to good use. So I'm glad you asked it. I'm glad you gave me a chance to tell embarrassing stories about my dorkiness.

my dorkiness in college. Hey, by the way, let me vindicate that. For a little while there in college, I was also a pretty good rower. So does that balance it out at all? Or is that, that's not helping. Yeah, it's not helping. Shoot.

I don't know. I wrote a column for the newspaper. Is that, that doesn't help. I, I had a lot of research fellowships. Is that? That doesn't help.

All right. That was a dork. But we get it. We're on the same. you're worried about going deep. I say, screw that, go deeper. Which I think is good advice for all of us. So why don't we wrap up this show right here?

So thank you everyone who contributed their questions. If you want to contribute your own questions, you can do so by joining my mailing list at calutport.com. I'm looking out for my semi-regular question gathering surveys. Please rate and review. It really helps to show. I'll be back mid next week with a habit tune up mini episode. And as always, stay deep.