Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 274: The Deep Life Stack v2.0

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Based on extensive feedback from listeners and new research, Cal is ready to unveil his new and improved version of the Deep Life Stack, his foundational approach for transforming your life from shallow and distracted to deep and remarkable.  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: The Deep Life Stack 2.0 [4:40]  - Does prioritizing deep work grow your task list? [38:02] - Does deep work impede the development of soft skills? [41:04] - How do I shut down work without clean stopping points? [46:31] - CALL: Intrusive thoughts while doing deep work [52:29] - CALL: How does Cal organize his working memory.txt [57:49]  CASE STUDY: Using slow productivity to build a house [1:00:30]  CAL REACTS: Should you “burn the boats” to motivate ambitious action? [1:08:00]  Links:  amazon.com/Burn-Boats-Overboard-Unleash-Potential/dp/006308886X  Thanks to our Sponsors:  rhone.com/cal mintmobile.com/deep cozyearth.com ladderlife.com/deep  Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Kyle 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, we got to be on the ball today. We've got to be high energy today because as I told you before we recorded, I have this quixotic plan that when we finish recording, I'm going to go immediately to BevCode. down the street from the studios, the coffee store, and finish editing and submit an article that I owe. So every time you write, you have to be high energy?

I mean, I have to, yeah, I got to have energy. So I normally write first thing in the morning. We're recording at 3.30. I made good progress today writing, but it's close, and I really want to just finish it. So sometimes if I do an end-of-the-day writing session in a different location, I can summon back up another 60 minutes

because that's when I used to traditionally write my blog post, so I have a deep work ritual sense memory around writing at that time. So we'll see. But you know, I've said this before. I am going to go right after this recording and I failed. So it's a toss-up, whether we'll make it or not. Well, if you go there, you should be good to go, right? I think so.

It's just matter we got roll. We got to be high energy. I've got to feel coming out of this excited, intellectually engaged. Like you just did a cold plunge. Exactly. Exactly. You think, I think if we did more cold plunge content, you think we'd be more popular? We got them at Gonzaga so we can take the studio there.

Let's do it. For our guest appearance. I want to do an Andrew Huberman style, three and a half hour episode on brown fat. If you can't beat them, join them. I want to do a whole episode from a cold plunge. That's the challenge. That's what I was thinking. I'm Cal Newport, and this is deep question.

Stay deep. All right, see next week. You just hear me running to the hot shower. It'd be a lot quicker, a lot to the point. Podcasting from a cold. That'd probably be a popular podcast, podcast from a cold plunge. All right, enough nonsense. We do have a good show, a deep dive that's going to revisit a recently popularized topic

here on our show, some questions, some calls, some case studies, and a cool segment at the end. A little bit of house cleaning before we get going. So I just mentioned that we have some calls. You may have noticed that we have been returning to introducing voice calls to the Q and a portion of our episode. Some people are wondering, well, how do I record a voice call? Just go to the deeplife.com slash listen. And there are links at the top of that page for submitting text questions and a link for submitting a voice question. You can do it right from your web browser.

It is simple. Now that we're back to doing calls, we'll be happy to get some new and fresh call. So please check that out. Other piece of house cleaning. There is some drawing. God help us all. there will be some drawing in the deep dive today. So if you want to see what I'm narrating on the audio podcast, again, you go to the deeplife.com slash listen. This is episode 274. If you go to the page for that episode, you will see the videos at the bottom, including the full-length video of the show. So you can see my artwork. If you don't go to watch those videos, I want you just to imagine that my artwork is fantastic.

The fonts are really striking. I'm adding a subtle drop shadow. While I'm talking, I'm just sort of casually sketching peasant hands, like a young Picasso. That's what I want you to imagine. And if you are watching the visuals, don't talk to the people who don't. Stick figures with demented faces. It's reality. I love it, though.

Like, in my head, what's going on? And it's Picasso drawing to peasant's hands. And in reality, it's like a demented stick figure that's scaring children. The whole time you were saying that, I was thinking of Bob Ross. Like, exactly. Painting the like real happily. Okay. And like the soothing voice.

You can go to sleep to it. Here's the concept, Jesse. I'm in the cold plunge. Painting a picture that captures something about living more deeply. I think we've sold this. I think we've just upped our audience here by quite a few people. All right. So enough of that.

Let us load up our new sound effect engine because we are about to jump to the deep dive. So a lot of people right now feel controlled by their technology. When they're at work, it's just email, it's Slack, it's Zoom all day long, jumping from one thing to another. When they get home, they're distracted by just a different category of screens. It's social media. It's video games. It's streaming. These glowing rectangles are keeping your attention and making you feel as if there is no direction to your life,

making you feel low energy, making you feel out of shape and unengaged. So long-time listeners know that my general prescription for this problem is not to try to directly treat the symptoms. Don't just go in and say, here is my plan for using my phoneless. Don't just go in and say, here are my new rules for my email inbox, and I'm going to have an auto responder and batch my email checks, and that's going to fix it. You have to actually solve the root of the problem, which means you have to go in and overhaul systematically your life

into something that is so directed and intentional and compelling that the allure of these screens dissipates. So you say, I am not going to just load up this video game or scroll social media all evening because I have things I want to get to that are more important. I am not going to just sit here on email all day in the office because I'm working on something here that matters and that's getting in the way of it.

You overhaul your life to be, something deep and the allure of the shallows becomes a lot less intense. So I call this approach, as you know, the deep life. Earlier this year, I introduced a step-by-step plan for cultivating a deep life. I called it the deep life stack. Since then, I have been gathering extensive feedback from you, my listeners, and viewers. I have also been extensively experimenting with this new construction in my own life, and I have a major revision. It's what we can call the Deep Life Stack 2.0, my new and improved evidence-based approach

for how to cultivate a deep life, what you can use as your driving force to get away from a world lost in digital distractions and shallow. So here's the plan. Let me just quickly re-motivate. I'll start by quickly remodivating why this approach of life-changing is important. Second, I'll review what didn't work about the original Deep Life Stack. So what the feedback told me wasn't quite working. And then we'll get into the new Deep Life Stack 2.0. I'll give you your step-by-step instructions for how in a short period of time to make drastic changes to the depth experienced in your own day-to-day existence. All right, so that's our plan.

Let's start by motivating this approach. Why do we look at screens too much? Well, as I've said before, it's often because you are trying to fill. a hole. There is some sort of psychic pain that the screen is helping to cover over or obscure. So maybe when you're at home after work, there's something about your life you're unhappy about. You're saying I'm 30 now, I'm 40 now, I feel like I've lost direction, what's happening here, I don't like what I'm doing. I think I could be doing more, but I'm not. I feel out of shape. I feel unengaged. Or maybe some specifically hard, bad things happen to you.

and you're having a hard time moving past that. Maybe you just have a really dark view or understanding of the world at the time. Screens can be a really good palliative in this case, right? It's filling in. I don't want to deal with that psychic pain of these uncomfortable thoughts. So I have a video game. I have this Instagram feed I'm going through. I'm just TikToking again and again and again.

And there's emotions happening. There's chemicals moving. It's a digital form of what 100 years ago we would have dealt with with a lot of whiskey at an old-fashioned saloon. And then we're at work. There's something similar going on. I mean, knowledge work in particular. It was such a fast-moving field.

It's such the wild, wild west in terms of systems and processes that a lot of us just look up one day. And it's like we're the character in the Mike Judge movie office space where we don't really know exactly what it is we do. Other than it involves a lot of screens and forms and we're constantly moving around. And when that consultant says, what would you say you really do here, you don't really have a great answer. You strategize and synergized jumping on calls in between your email calendar appointments for the doodle meetings. Just busyness, pseudo productivity. And we don't know what else to do. So we just engage in that.

I don't know what else work is going to be. So at least I'm active. And so we just find ourselves on screens all day at work. We're filling in this case the psychic pain from I don't even really know what my job is. I'm worried about that. I don't build something I can point to. I don't write something I can point to. so I just need to be really busy

and anytime I'm not busy it's a problem. So screen, screen, screens. So solution is something deeper that gets at that psychic pain and gives us something to focus towards that is more motivating. Something that will prevent us from being on email all day

because it's already clear what it is you need to be doing and you want to get after it and jumping on another Zoom call is going to get in the way of it so you can say with confidence, no, this is what I'm doing. Judge me by my results.

So at home you're not zoning out on social media because they're more appealing and important things you are working on in your life and your quest to have depth and make a difference, and that would just be a waste, and it's not that interesting anymore to you. It's the psychological equivalent of in the world of health, where after having really bad eating habits and you change the way you eat and your exercise and your fitness, you look at an Oreo that might have before been impossibly appealing,

and then you look at it after that overhaul and say, this seems weird. It's chemicals and sugary, and I have no interest in it. we won't get to the same place with your screens. So you want to cultivate a deeper life. And again, this is this was a fundamental understanding for me, is that it was difficult for me to be a technology critic without being able to offer to people what it is that they could do instead

when they began to unplug themselves from the constant distraction. This took me a while to figure out that you can't just go to people and say, being on email and your phone all day is a problem, because if you take that away, there's nothing else there to replace it. full anxiety at work, what am I doing here? Full anxiety at home. I don't want to confront these ideas. That I can't actually talk about things like the hyperactive hive mind and addictive attention engineering.

The type of things I talk about in my New Yorker articles that I talk about in my techno-criticism talks, the type of things I talk about in my interviews and magazines on podcast. It's hard to just talk about those things without giving people the positive alternative that they should pursue instead. That's where the deep life came out of. And that's what we're talking about today. So I invented earlier in the year what we called the deep life stack, which was a step-by-step way to cultivate more depth in your life. And I think now that I've had some time to think about it, it has some problems. But let's start with what that original stack was. For those who are watching instead of just listening, I will draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my screen here.

Again, for those who are not watching but just listening, everything I'm doing here is beautiful. I'm drawing layers. These are the layers of the stack. I'm putting five of them on top of each other. Now, there's a couple different small variations of the stack we talked about earlier in the year, but they're all basically more or less in this shape. All right, I'm now going to write inside each of these layers. At the bottom, the first layer of the stack, the bottom layer, we had discipline.

This was somewhat controversial, but this is when I argued you actually have to start by injecting some regular discipline into your life because it changes your self-identity, as someone who can do hard things that are important, even if you don't want to. Then we had values. Nothing like drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting. Values was when you then next, moving up the stack from discipline,

is where you got clear on what was important to you in your life. Then you went to service, fixing in your life how you could serve other people who are around you are important to you. From there, then came organization, This is going to be a long word for a small box. You had to get control over what's happening in your life. Organize your obligations, organize your time.

If you're going to have any hope of actually really aiming your energy in a good direction. And then finally you had vision, which is where you get to the fun stuff. This is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more remarkable. It is when you get to this final stack and the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we like to romanticize, like changing your job or moving to a farm somewhere. in the country. There was a couple different variations of the stack, but they were all more or less something like this.

And the idea was you moved up this stack in order, starting with discipline, moving all the way up to vision. All right. So what was the problem with this? It's missing some things. So here's what I discovered. It's missing explicit mentions of some things that are foundationally important I learned from you,

my readers, and listeners, for cultivating depth, physical growth, growth. These were things that we used to talk about on this show when we had the old bucket-based paradigm for the deep life. Keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind engaged. This was not explicitly called out in this particular formulation. What about craft or learning to do things well? This idea of how do you learn to take on something difficult, deliberately practice it, and get better at it. This is key to almost any direction for depth but doesn't have its own place in this stack. There is also some pushback on a lack of ambition here that when we get to vision, we were talking about overhauling parts of your life.

But when people think about the deep life zoomed out, there's also this notion of some sort of larger scale legacy leaving type of initiatives. That's not a scale that was too big for this. And finally, and this was I thought something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack, is there's two different related initiatives that are mixed together in this particular. stack formulation. There's the initiative where you're getting your life together. Okay, if you don't have your life together and control of things, it's hard to do anything. Values driven or interesting. And there's the initiative of trying to do really cool things that mark a life as deep. In this stack, they're mixed together. Discipline, that's sort of getting your life together. Values is part of cultivating a vision of the depth. Organization is about getting your life together.

Vision is more about how to cultivate depth. And so the feedback I was getting from my own experimentation, is these are maybe two separate endeavors. Get your crap together. Okay, I'm done with that. Now we'll turn our attention to how do we aim this somewhere depth. So these are all things that came up when I was looking at the original Deep Life stack. So we're going to try to fix that with our new version 2.0. Maybe I'll even type that.

Let's see here. I'm going to actually write on the screen here. Oh, my. Jesse, I have no idea how notability works. Oh, I see. You know what I've been thrown by? By the way, this is not interesting, but I switched my note-taking software. To what?

Good notes, I think it's called. You switched it off of... Notability I was using to teach my lectures, and then it developed some bug where when it was projecting on the screen and I was typing into it, it would continually jump up and down where it was on the screen. So I like the program, but I had this weird bug in projections, so I had the switch. Huh. All right, here we go. I'm typing on the screen, the Deep Life Stacy. the Deep Life Stack version 2.0.

All right, so what are we going to do here to fix all of those mistakes, but we'll call them shortcomings that we were missing in the prior stack? And let me highlight this to show you how good I am. I highlighted the word the Deep Life Stack. It looks good. Yeah, that looks good as professional operation here. All right, so how are we going to update the Deep Life Stack, our systematic plan for escaping the shallows?

To take in mind those flaws we had with the original version, I'm going to break it into two stages. So in the first stage, I call it stage one, this, oh man, that's not you spell stage. Stage one is where you learn to become a capable human being. We're going to make this its own stage. So we're going to say become a capable human being. And we're going to isolate this.

Let's do this stage, do everything involved in this stage first, before we move on to what we'll call stage two, surprisingly enough, which is then cultivate depth. So we're not going to mix these together anymore. Let's get our act together. Let's become a capable human being or what Jocko Willick called in his book, The Code, Imminately Qualified Human. like that. Jocko talks about becoming an imminently qualified human. Well, we're going to talk about becoming an imminently capable human being. This is going to have its own collection of four stack layers. Once you're done with that, stage two, four more stack layers, cultivate depth on top of that foundation. All right. So this is the first place we're changing things. All right,

so let's actually draw our four stacks, our four stack layers over here for becoming a more capable human beings. So we're going to have four here and then four for cultivating depth. You do stage one first, then you do stage two. All right. So we're going to start as before with discipline. But now, again, this is coming from feedback. We are going to specify the three places where we're going to pursue discipline as the foundational layer of the Deep Life stack.

And that's going to be body, mind, mind. heart. So as before, what does it mean discipline? We're going to have you select some keystone habits, habits you return to every single day, habits that you track whether or not you actually accomplish them. They should not be trivial, but they should also be tractable. Unlike before, I'm going to tell you specifically what the three categories are. You should have three habits, and they should follow these three categories. Body, you need a fitness habit. Something about making your body more healthy. This could be exercise.

This could be involving food and drink. The second category is mind. This is going to be making your mind sharper. You have an instrument here, but you have to train it how to think. So we need to lay down a foundational habit, probably built around reading. It's going to be our best bet here, where this becomes a regular part of your life that you're tracking. And then heart, by this, I mean other people.

There's something you're doing on a regular basis. And it could just be calling or texting or emailing a different friend or family member every single day. It could be checking in with your partner or your kids every day and having a conversation with them. Body, mind, heart, keystone habit for each. As we iterate through the stack, you can make those challenges harder and harder. So if you're just getting started with this, your body habit might be pretty simple. It's this 20-minute walk that you do to a coffee store and back each morning, followed by 20 push-ups. It might be simple, but you're doing it every day.

As we iterate over time, that's going to get more and more potentially aggressive in its ambition. It could eventually end up a really rigorous workout routine, for example. All right, we go from here now straight up to control. This is what we used to call organization. Same idea. Control your time. Control your obligations. I want to do this right away.

Lay down this foundation of discipline. I'm practicing doing things that are important to me that aren't urgent. The very next thing you do, let's get control of our obligations. Let's get control of our time. This is where you're going to deploy things like my multi-scale planning methodology. It's where you're going to deploy things such as full capture, David Allen-style full capture. Every obligation is written down in a trusted system, not just in your head, your time block planning your days. Those are based on weekly plans, which are based on quarterly plans.

No open loops, nothing you're just keeping track of in your head. You have a plan for your time. you have your obligations captured, you have a plan for executing the obligations that need to be done. There's a big part about becoming a capable human. I only have so much energy and time to deploy each day. I want to do so with intention. So I'm moving this right up front in the Deep Life stack.

Right after you've got to taste of discipline, you're getting your crap together. On top of this, I'm then going to put craft, just learning how to do something really well. This, again, is going to be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the deep life is going to be quality. You learning how to do something really well and or you learning how to really appreciate someone else doing something really well, but an embrace of craftsmanship and quality. So craft is where you're going to begin practicing

two things, one, getting better. And you could jump right in with a work-related skill here as you go through this stack. Let me choose a skill that I am going to deliberately and systematically improve on, but maybe it's going to be a hobby. You know, I think some of the the more bro-oriented, really big podcasters that are out there have gotten some flack because they all seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly anachronistic or arbitrary hobbies such as bow hunting. Why is Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink and all these people bow hunting? And it seems so random.

But you know what? There's a logic behind that, which is learning to do something really well, teaches you what it takes to do things really well. you can then translate that to other things to come up that are more important. In other words, even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow, but systematically building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need mentally speaking to say,

okay, now when there's something else I want to learn to help transform my career, there's something else I want to learn to make a big impact over here, you know what that feels like and what that takes. So when it comes to this craft stack, when you first get there, you're going to learn a skill. It could be a hobby, it could be professional. I also want you to appreciate

other people who do skilled work because that helps motivate you to get better. I write about this a lot of my book coming out in March, slow productivity. This idea of being exposed to people doing really good work makes you want to do really good work. So as part of your first time through this craft layer, I am going to recommend that you build up an appreciation

of some sort of craft. So I'll put two arrows here. Get better and then we'll say appreciate better. All right. So then our final building block we're going to put for the first stage simplification. Final step to get ready to cultivate depth. We've got to clear out the dead weight. So this is where you go through.

Now that you have some discipline, you're in control of your time. You have an appreciation and trust and craft as to wave forward. Now you can say let's start slashing some of these obligations. Let's change the way, you know, what we're doing at work. And I'm going to put all my chips onto this over here and no longer get involved in this. Or I'm going to simplify or shift laterally to something that's more focused or is more accountable. It is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your technological life. It's the first time you can step back and say, okay, I'm starting to get my feet under me.

Why am I on TikTok all the time? Why am I on Instagram? What tools do I really need here? Maybe I should do some digital minimalism. Work backwards from what's important to me. use those to select values. You can start simplifying out your habits. Like the single most important techno simplification small step you could take at the step

would be let's do phone foyer method. When I'm at home, the phone's plugged in. If I need to look something up, I can go to the phone and look at it. It's not with me when I'm in front of the TV. It's not with me what I'm trying to read. It's not with me at the table and I'm trying to eat dinner. I do not have the option of just looking at that. So you can begin to simplify these parts of your life as well.

All of this sets the stage for stage two, which is now let's start cultivating depth on top of this foundation. So we're going to have four boxes over here as well. This is where the fun stuff happens. This is where the stuff that catches people's attention happens. You do the first stage, people are going to say, yeah, you got your act together. Yeah, they got their act together. Stage two is where people say, wow, this person is interesting. All right, so I'm going to put as the...

Let me draw arrows, by the way, so we see the order here. Beautifully drawn arrows. Bob Ross does happy trees. I do crappy arrows. All right, so first stack layer over here in stage two. Now we get to the values. You figure out your code, what you're all about. You figure out the rituals that connect you on a regular basis to these things you care about.

This is where if you're religious or interested in being religious is you really lean into that. It's where you really recognize that faith traditions actually depend on action for you to gain insight. You can't just figure out in advance. Is this religion right? You do the religion and say, how does it make me feel? All that happens here. Now, this feels really late, but again, I'm convinced that when you come to these higher order decisions in your life from a foundation of capability, it's more meaningful and it's more effective.

So I push this later. People often say, let's just start with this. But if you have no foundation in a code or rituals or a faith-based tradition, it's hard to start there. You're throwing darts out of. You don't even know what you're capable of or have the capacity to follow in a disciplined way, what's required to actually gain insight. So let's become capable first. Now we're getting to the bigger stuff.

So values now comes next. This is followed by service. You need to be a leader. You need to serve other people. Community. Without it, you're nothing. Now you're ready to actually be a leader. Before you weren't capable enough, you could kind of be a leader, but you're going to drop the ball,

and people weren't going to have a big effect on people. You weren't going to move the needle. Now you're an exceptionally capable person. Let's put that to work. Serve other people. Non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of other people that are important to you. Family, friends, community, larger, civic society at large. move up these layers as far as you want.

Make this a key one thing, a tier one thing now that you're starting to work at in your life. Then we get transformation. The crazy thing is of all of these stacks, this is what the one place most people think when they think about cultivating a deeper life is this one stack. Transformations where you make the big values-based changes. You get a clear vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like, and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle. Preferably there's some element of remorse.

markability in these visions. It's where you change your job. It's where you move to the countryside. It's where you become the surf instructor in Tolfino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It's where the big kind of cool stuff happens. But look at how many layers. How many layers we had to go through.

I even have a laser pointer I can show you, right? Ooh, all the way up, all the way up before we moved to Vancouver Island, before we quit our job. Because you're not ready for that yet. When you're not capable, if you try to make a big change, God knows what's going to happen. And if you are capable, but you're not have a sense of your values, if you're not sacrificing behalf of other people, filling that deeply social leadership itch that all humans have, then your transformation is going to be shallow. It's going to be selfish. It's not until this point that you're finally ready for that. And then we can add the final thing, which is legacy.

And that's where you begin thinking about what's the impact I want to leave on the world, even after I'm God. on, this sort of bigger picture-orienting mission for your life. This is so big, I would say you could probably go all the way through the stack and stop at transformation the first time through. And you might go through this stack a few times, iterating, tweaking, and improving each of these layers before you really get into legacy. You don't have to get there right away. In fact, you probably aren't ready to get there right away because you haven't done all

this other cool stuff yet. So how do all these pieces come together? Well, you actually move through this stack and get it. give yourself one to three weeks for each of these layers to get that part of your life going and making sure it's going well. And you move your way through the stack. You could end the transformation if you want it first. Legacy can come later.

Then live with this for six months to a year. Then come back and iterate. All right, let's go back through the stack. How are things going with discipline? I want to upcharge this. I want more aggressive physical discipline. I want to do better with my relationships. What's going with control?

Well, it was going well, but I left finances out of there. I want to fix that up. So you iterate six months to a year. You iterate through, go through each layer, give it time to improve what's happening there. You iterate every six to 12 months and improve on each of these layers again and again. Each time you make it through to transformation, maybe you're thinking about a different thing you want to transform in your life. After you've done this five years in a row, you may have had several major transformations. You've also tightened up all these other things, and now your life is really humming.

And now the idea that you're just going to go to a cubicle and check email all day and then be on TikTok all evening might seem laughable. and maybe you're ready to even really jump into this legacy stack at this point and start to have some really exciting long-term visions about what you're going to leave in the world. So this is the Deep Life Stack 2.0, stage 1, become a more capable human, stage 2, cultivate death, then iterate and repeat, iterate and repeat. As mentioned, it seems very far away at first from the proximate concerns of I'm distracted by my screens, but if you don't have a shining destination to aim towards, that's more interesting than the glow coming off those pieces of glass,

those pieces of glass are going to win. And so we have to talk about our lives if we're going to talk about our technology. So this is Deep Life Stack version 2.0. Let me know how it goes with you. You can submit a question or case study or question at the deeplife.com slash listen, or you can send us an email at Jesse at CaliF. Newport.com if you want to tell us about it. I'm working with this new version of

stack right now in my life. I want to hear about how it goes with you as well. Let's all get deeper together. We got to get like a graphic artist, Jesse. That's the You got it down, though. It's from your professor stuff. I do write. I use a tablet to teach.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I like this is geeky, but it's a control layer of the stack. I really like writing on my Remarkable much more than on an iPad. Because Remarkable was one of the big things they engineered was friction.

So you get friction. iPad's very slippery. There is a way, I think, to project your remarkable onto a screen. But I like having colors and the other types of things. That laser pointer was cool. Oh, the other note-taking program I'm using now,

the laser pointer leaves a trail for a couple seconds. It's like if you circle something, it like stays circled for a couple seconds and then it kind of fades out. Future is now, Jesse. Officially arrived. All right, so we've got a bunch of questions, calls, and case studies about all this type of deep life, deep work type issues. Before we get there, though, let us hear from a couple sponsors that makes the show possible.

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Jesse, you think we should start a Cal's favorite things? Yeah. I think it's popular as Oprah's. Yeah. Problem is I'm so like crumudgeonly and don't really buy a lot of stuff. So it would be like a list of 25 books and like cozy our sheets and a pin. Oh, and the seltzer water you get us for the studio. And the remarkable.

The remarkable. And the cherry flavored pollen spring seltzer water. Jesse keeps our frid stocked with a very particular type of seltzer water. So that would be, I think it would be as popular as Oprah's. Oh, man. Anyways. So here's my gift for you, this holiday season. If you go to cozyearth.com and enter the code Cal, you can now save up to 40%.

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This pin over here is pretty neat. I got these shoelace caps so if you have a hard time getting your shoelace through the hole on your shoes use this shoelace cap they're easy to put on yeah and also cozy your sheets

that'll be my favorite thanks all right let's enough of that let's do some questions who do we have first all right first questions from Alan I'm always excited to see how you guys how you answer these questions because I'm always sure but this one I'm excited about it.

Interesting. It seems like prioritizing deep work means that to-do list can only increase as time passes because deep work can never be completed faster than shall work. If you agree that this is true, how should we respond to this reality? I think we have a couple of questions like this this week, that when we're thinking about deep work as part of our vision of the deep life, it comes to mean some pretty weird things for people. It becomes this amorphous, extra demanding, almost like selfish commitment that's in addition to all of your other normal work.

It comes through that way. So you hear a question like this. It's like, well, if I'm doing deep work, then that's taking away time for all these shallow tasks people need me to do that those will pile up. Here's the thing about deep work. It's not an extra thing you add on your plate. It is an approach to how you execute the things that are already on your plate. If you have a non-entry-level job and knowledge work, there are some things that are cognitively demanding, like writing a report or analyzing data or coming up with a new marketing campaign. There's some things you do that are not so cognitively demanding.

It's, you know, answering emails or filling out forms. What's the right way to do the cognitively demanding stuff? The deep work hypothesis says you should give it your full attention. So you're working on something cognitively demanding. Give it your full attention. And you'll be able to do it faster and better than if you, Instead, interleave your cognitively demanding task with the shallower task. If you keep going back and forth, it slows everything down.

So to say I'm committed to deep work, it doesn't mean I am now adding to my job these extra activities I call deep work. It just says I'm going to be much more aware of how I tackle my work. I'll do the shallow stuff all together, deep work all together. It'll all take less time. So your to-do list will get smaller if you contact shift less and better segregate different types of cognitive demands in your daily schedule. All right.

So deep work is not some extra thing you're adding to your normal life. It's a way of taking what you're already doing in your working life and doing it more efficiently and doing it better. And the deep work really becomes a boogeyman for people sometimes. Yeah. It's like, you know, I'd love to do deep work, but I have to feed my children or something. You know, like people are like, uh, it's this thing. I think people see it as like some rich.

where you put on a hood and like your kids are crying hungry at home because you're around the fire in the woods with your hood like chanting, making chance about whatever, Hemingways, writing strategies. I mean, it's weird. It represents for a lot of people, a lot of stuff that I think it's kind of boring. I mean, it's don't switch your attention back and forth when working on the hard stuff. You'll do it faster and it'll be better. Yeah. It's a better way to do the hard stuff than to switch it back and forth. All right.

Well, we got, I think the next question is similar. So let's handle that one. Yep. Next question is from Eric. I want to ascend to a management position in order to have more complex challenges and responsibilities. I've been told that I need to work on my soft skills. Are deep work principles potentially harmful to collaborate the soft skills needed to get to the next level and that they encourage a monk-like individualistic approach to work? Well, as I point out clearly in the book, Deep Work, I say, okay, principle one of deep work, when you're working, you now have, you now have. have to make a long pilgrimage to a monastery or a monastic-like location. It needs to be not unlike Luke Skywalker, that island he goes to in whatever that Star Wars movie is, where they filmed it on Skellig Island and Ireland. So you're on some deserted island where you need to go and you need to be wearing a robe.

And you need to be there minimum, and I just want to be realistic here, minimum 135 days. And during that time, you may not speak or communicate with the outside world. You can drink warm water and breadcrust as all of your attention is focused on just summoning, summoning from the spiritual depths, the Excel spreadsheet that you're trying to write. So yes, I mean, if you're going to do deep work, we're talking about hundreds of days living on Skellig Island, eating only bread crust, because that's what the principles demand. Now, clearly I'm being very, very, very sarcastic, because, again, deep work is about how do you handle cognitive task? when working on those tasks, give them your full focus,

don't contact switch back and forth. Now, I think this is actually relevant here because there's a flip side to it, that if you're giving work, let me categorize my work into different types of cognitive category, so I can tackle work, each type of work with the right type of environment or approach,

it goes the other way as well. So the flip side of, okay, when I'm working on this complicated Excel spreadsheet, I'm just going to focus just on that without context switching. The flip side is, okay, but then when it comes time to talk to people in the office, let me give that my full attention and just focus on the soft skills and doing that really well.

Let me consolidate all of the sort of walking around and talking to people and planning so that I'm not doing that in a harried way in between other hard things or I'm just trying to clear my inbox. I can actually give the attention necessary to come sit down with people and look them in their eye. So when you give each type of task its own time, and therefore you can treat each type of task

in the way that it best needs to. be treated. You do everything better. So not just deep work stuff gets done better, but the soft skill stuff can get done better as well. And the logistical stuff, it's less mistakes and it goes faster. Okay, this is the time I'm doing logistical stuff. Now it's all I'm doing. I'm in that context. And I can go quicker and I can build some systems and I can realize I don't need to do this. I mean, everything is better when it's done in its own context and not all mixed together. And that's really what's being pushed for in deep work is that cognitive stuff

needs to be isolated from the other stuff. And you need to do that because it's the stuff that ultimately is going to matter in your career more to almost anything else because if you're not producing something valuable, then where is your value for the organization? So have a equivalent to the deep work mindset for your soft skills is what I would ultimately advise here.

I actually talk to someone I know, let me be very specific here, who did this recently. This exact situation, Eric, I forgot the name of the person asked the question. Eric, someone I know was telling me about this the other day where they got this specific feedback. They're very good at the skills, the cognitively demand skills they do.

Their soft skills were lacking. You've got to be better connected to the people in the office, 30-man office. So he got systematic about it. And I don't remember all the details, but I believe he was doing something like, he was working remotely most days and I was like actually I'm going to come into the office three days a week

and every time I come into the office these people this is a checklist and this is the way I would handle it to I'm very introverted I'm going to talk to each of these three people I'm going to have a conversation with them and yeah it's a checklist

I'm coming into the office these days and during this time I'm going to go talk to people but it's day after day week after week those soft skills are getting better those relationships are getting better so by giving each type of task its own isolated context where you can tackle that task with exactly what that task needs to be done well.

You can get better at all the different parts of your jobs. Not just your deep work gets better, but your soft skills get better. Your logistical work gets done faster. You find more efficiencies. So no, deep work will not keep you from your soft skills. Treat it with the same respect that you treat the cognitive work. I think you'll do better. I could probably use some soft skills help.

Professors are not known for soft skills because we have no feedback function. Well, you talk to the students all the time. That's true, but we don't have to be good at that. I mean, we don't have a feedback function, right? So if you're in like a normal job and acted in the way, let's say, 50% of professors act in a faculty meeting, the boss would be like, my God, you're fired. This is a crazy way to behave as like a grown adult. But you have tenure, you're a professor, there's no feedback function, right?

You're not being hired. So there's no one to fire you. So people just get weirder and weirder. professors get strange let's put that way not all of them i think i'm a pretty normal guy but we get strange let's be honest all right let's keep rolling here all right next question is from josh how do i deal with having to stop working on something that is still in progress and not a clean checkpoint and not at a clean checkpoint in my job i work on longer term less well-defined larger tasks which means that on many days i find at the end of the day when i'm still very much in the middle of

solving a particular problem, I'm stuck and don't know what to do. Josh, I feel your pain on this because I was in that same spot earlier in my career. The same spot where I found myself with essentially endless cognitively demanding work to do that had no clean shutdown points and the evenings were difficult. The particular spot where this happened for me, and I remember this clearly is when I was working on my doctoral dissertation at MIT. It's a very large sort of mathematical project. And I made the, in retrospect, maybe not so smart decision that when it came to my doctoral dissertation, I was going to do all new work.

So typically in computer science, if you're a doctoral student, you're publishing a lot of papers and I was. And when your dissertation comes around, you're taking, you know, these five papers in which I explored this theme. I'm going to build my thesis around it. I didn't do that. I said, I already wrote those papers. I want to do something new. So my doctoral dissertation was all new mathematics I was doing from scratch because I thought it would be boring just. to go back and stitch together papers I already did.

So it was happening again and again. I would get to the end of the day. I'd be in the middle of a proof. Like the big thing for me is, I'm not getting this proof to work. Really hard to shut down there. Because imagine the train of thought. I don't have this proof working. What if I never get this proof to work?

If this proof doesn't work, this whole approach for this chapter, my thesis will fall apart. If I don't have that chapter, I'm not going to be able to submit this thesis. I'm not going to get my degree. You could see how the do right down the line. So I was like, man, I need some way of quieting my brain when I'm ready to stop working for the day. There was very rarely when I finish a nice proof at 5 o'clock. That is when I invented my shutdown ritual. The shutdown ritual we talk about all the time on this show, the shutdown ritual that is encoded into my time block planner,

the shutdown ritual that I talked about in my book, Deep Work. I invented it for exactly this issue. So there's two aspects to a shutdown ritual. one, I think, is the more common thing we talk about, and it's going to be less relevant for you, Josh, but that's the thing where you just close open loops. This is, was there stuff that came up today that I need to write down or put on my calendar? Is there like an urgent email I need the answer? It's the making sure there's not something that you're just keeping track of only in your mind.

You get that all into a system. It's where you check on your plan for the next day. Like, okay, everything is good. I'm not missing something. But the other aspect of my shutdown ritual, which was very big for me then, but I don't talk about as much now. was reflecting on the work in progress, putting a cap on it for the day. Okay, here's where I am. Here's where I'm stuck.

Here is two things I'm going to try tomorrow that might get me unstuck. Doing that work, which could take anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes. And when I shut down the work, it's not that I had solved it, but I had built from scratch a hasty checkpoint. This isn't working. But let me write down. I remember so clearly writing down, here. Here's why this is not working. You know, the summation has a Zeno's paradox issue.

Here are two things I might look at tomorrow. Go read the proof from such and such paper. They did something similar. Maybe there's something there that could help me or see if there's, you know, talk to so-and-so about if there's like a simple concentration bound I could put here instead. Like you write down a couple things you could do. You can't do them right now. They're take an hour or so, but you're writing them.

This is what I'm going to do next. That's all you need to get a clean checkpoint. And your brain says, okay, we know where we are, we have a plan, we'll get back to that plan tomorrow. It's just as good starting that plan in the morning as it is doing it right now, and it will release that ongoing work. In fact, it's not even a bad thing to do this. I mean, it's not, okay, I'm dealing with a bad situation.

It's a bad situation that I'm not at a clean checkpoint, and I have to invent this hasty checkpoint. I wish it didn't have to happen, but it did. That's actually not the situation. It's beneficial to have these hastily created checkpoints. A lot of writers do this. We joked about Hemingway earlier. but this is something that Hemingway himself actually did

is he liked to be in the middle of he was in a role writing kind of in the middle of a paragraph, even in the middle of a sentence and shut off, so that the next day he would be picking up in the middle of something where there was some momentum that was already going. He could just read up to that point and get going. Much easier place to start than at the start of a new chapter.

So if anything, what you're going to get by stopping in the middle of ongoing work is a fresh legs or fresh arm the next morning. So you're going to be able to continue working on that with a fresh brain instead of trying to drag it through and perhaps some unconscious processing. You've clarified the problem what you're going to work on. You're not thinking about it because you have a clear shutdown routine, but your brain might in the background.

And you get there the next morning, you're like, man, actually, this works pretty well. So see this as a feature, not a bug. Do a clean shutdown routine every day. Work is done when the shutdown routine has been completed. If your mind bothers you, say, I'm not going to get into your rumination. We're not going to think about work because we did the routine. I'll see you in the morning.

That routine should close open loops, but also create temporary checkpoints were needed. Here's where I'm stuck. Here's what I'm going to work on the next day. Let your mind take a breather. You'll hit the ground running the next day. Josh, it saved me. So much anxiety that it turned off. Made the rest of my ill-fated decision to write a dissertation from scratch a little bit less onerous.

I was also writing a book at this time. Don't get me started. the shutdown ritual really helped. So add that component to it, Josh, and I think you'll find it's going to make a big difference. All right, let's see. We have some calls, right? Yeah.

All right, I'm excited about calls. All right, here we go. Hey, Cal. An issue that I often have during periods of deep work or attempted deep work is dealing with intrusive thoughts about, you know, other things that it could be doing with my time. So I might be reading an academic paper, and, you know, these thoughts keep popping in my head,

like, oh, I should be working. out or I should be practicing piano and it just feels that I'm always, you know, thinking about the next task or something else that I should be doing. So I don't know if part of the problem is that I haven't, you know, properly prioritized my activities during the day, but, you know, I would describe it almost as phomo for all my given tasks and activities in a day. So just curious what, you know, your thoughts are and, you know, if this is something that's common for people trying to engage in deep work. Thank you. Well, I'm glad you bring this up because I think it's a common issue that we don't

talk about enough. We talk about, here's the mechanisms you use to plan your day, but we don't necessarily talk about, well, how do you figure out the plan for your day? That's almost always a given, right? Like, yeah, you know what to do. It's just a matter of sort of marshalling your activity better. It's actually really hard, especially when you're new to it, especially if you're a student or you're new to the working world. It's an endless array of things. that you're trying to pull from both in work and both in life outside of your work. And this idea of productivity, FOMO, if I can coin a term, is a real one. So there's two different parts to my answer here.

One is just clarity, right? So I have a time block plan for my day. That gives you clarity. You thought about the plan, you made the plan. Now your mind says it's not my job to do any more planning. My job for the rest of the day is to execute this plan. So clarity really helps. It's why I'm a big proponent of time block planners.

It's why I have college students do this, where they schedule out all the schoolwork they're going to do in a regular basis. I don't want you planning any more than you have to. 10 minutes in the morning should be enough. That's fine. Here's my plan. And then all you're focusing on is following the plan the best you can, fixing it if you need to. So when you're writing the paper, you're reading the paper, like in your example, you're doing so because that's what the current block says on your schedule. doesn't say workout.

Work out is later or it's not on this day. Now, if you couple time block planning with weekly planning, and if you couple the weekly planning with quarterly or semester planning, then you're going to get even more confidence in your clarity because you're looking at multiple timescales. Because your weekly plan is where you figured out, here's when I'm going to work out this week, so that when you get the Tuesday, and it's Tuesday at 3.30,

and you're writing your paper, there's no reason for you to say, should I be working out right now? Because you already know you're working out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when you're doing it, that's a part of your weekly plan. And when you have the bigger picture, FOMO, like should I be working on a different research topic, why am I even reading these papers? Your quarterly plan kicks in.

Says, no, that's what I'm doing this season. We're trying to learn this area of machine learning and see if we can write a paper, and we'll check in at the end of the season. So clarity at multiple scales gives you confidence in the moment of the thing I'm doing is as reasonable a thing as there is to do. I don't need to be thinking about it again right now. The second thing I want to throw in here is grace.

grace for yourself. You say, yeah, I'm building a reasonable plan. I want to execute it. Maybe it's the best. Maybe it's not. Sometimes it's better than others. Sometimes it's a dead end. It's okay.

I don't have to be a scheduling genius. I'm not, you know, pushing 10 in an air traffic control center somewhere where if I make a mistake, a 747 is going to crash into the Golden Gate Bridge. You're building a schedule for a college student. You're building one week's schedule for. a 40-year career you're going to have in the world of work. So you do your best with multi-scale planning. Some days are going to go better than others. Some plans will work better than others.

You'll get better at it through experience and just give yourself some grace. The binary flip here that matters is reactive, proactive, disorganized, intentional. That's the binary flip you should be proud of. I'm marshaling my energy. I'm not letting it dissipate randomly or on other people's agendas. I have a plan at different scales. I do my best to execute it.

Sometimes it better than others. The plans will get better as I go along. And now I've done my shutdown routine, and I'm going to have a margarita get out of my face. You know, you just can relax a little bit about it. So clarity plus grace and just trust over time, you'll be fine. You'll do better at this. Just by having a plan at all,

you're doing much better than 98% of the other people around you. You're going to get that cumulative. It's like having, you know, aggregate compounding interest over time. That advantage is going to build and build and build 20 years in your career, you're just going to have control over everything, where other people are still bouncing around, frenetically, from thing to thing and mad at everyone, everything's not fair. You're just going to be like, I control my life. You know, you're going to have compounding interest of that intentional aim of your energy, even if it's not always super accurate, is better

than random dissipation. So it's a good question. I'm glad you asked it. Clarity plus grace, you'll be fine. All right. We have another call? We have another call. Two call show. Yep, two calls. Here we go. Hi, Cal. I'm Brett. I'm an adjunct instructor at a private university in the southeastern United States and a long-time acolyte of your approach to productivity. I'm hoping you can answer this question with the speed of herbes. You mentioned the workingmemory.com text file you use for impromptu ideas while concentrating another work. The question, do you clear out everything in this file every day and start new the next day, or is the a semi-permanent collection of those ideas.

Good question. Also, good Greek reference. Jesse, I don't know if our new listeners know about this. No. I mean, this is like a deep poll back when I used to do the call-in show once a week. I don't know how to describe it other than the callers back when we did a lot of calls decided that the more superfluous references to Greek mythology, the better. So this is like a poll from the past. I really do appreciate that.

no sense to people listening now, but that's okay. That's between us and the old timers. Also a really good question. If I'm able to do a full shutdown, which is my goal almost every day, some days I don't get there, part of my shutdown routines clearing my workingmemory.t. So I am a huge believer of the working text.

DotT file. Just have a blank, unformatted text file on your desktop that you add to things throughout your day. No matter what you're doing, is where you offload stuff out of your brain temporarily because you can only store so many things. You're on a call that's where you're taking notes.

You're going through your inbox. It's where you're writing the things over here, like the dates that you go to your calendar and then you can see if those dates are free. You're creating a task list for a task block. You do it right there. You're copying text that you're going to paste into something else. You copy it into the working memory.

It's the most useful, most commonly used digital tool in my life in terms of my professional life, and it's a blank text file. But yes, you should clear it down to empty. This is an extension of your brain. It is not a storage system. It's not a planning system. You should have a separate place to keep track of obligations,

your priority obligation list. You should have a calendar for appointments. You should have planning documents for plans. Planners, daily planners for daily plans. It's not part of your permanent storage systems. Think of it as like sand that's going to get shaken fresh at the end of every day. And Monica can use that when she's in deep work sessions too. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have thoughts during deep work sessions, you're like, oh, what about this? What about that? It's a great use for it. Drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. And then once you're done with your deep work session and shutting it down, you can process, hey, what did I write down during the session. Yeah. It's a fantastic tool. All right. Let's do a case study. We've been doing these more recently, or we've been doing these more recently. Case study is where one of you, my listeners, sends in a story of how they've been using this advice and their specific details of their own.

life. This case study comes from Logan. Logan says, my wife and I moved from suburbs, the suburbs of the Denver metro area, to build a house on my parents' land in the foothills in a relatively rural environment. We did this to have a deeper life and focus on raising our children in a slow and outdoor environment. There's a lot of interesting deep life-related trade-offs that went into making that choice, but the actual interesting case study to me relates to slow productivity. In order to reduce cost and be able to afford the house build without a mortgage, we reduced the contractor's scope to stop at texture drywall with us doing painting, final electric, final plumbing, flooring, door install, cabinet's kitchen, all the trim ourselves.

An avid listener of your show, I decided last minute to take a slow productivity approach. That is, for the month of April, I am taking two hours off of work every day and have drastically reduced my other hobbies and commitments. This has enabled me to get about four. four hours of construction done each day with my wife helping for two to three of that. Granted, we are only halfway through April as I write this, but I'm shocked and pleased that how much progress we have been able to make with this approach and how little exhaustion or burnout I have felt. Consider me a slow productivity convert.

One thing at a time, no individual day is incredibly important, and let the results stack up. I love this because it is an example that is relevant to the world of work that's coming from the world outside of work, the world of housework. This is a very common experience among people who do big projects outside of their professional life. Man, it was so fulfilling that just works slowly but steadily on this thing. And I really love the way that Logan described this. No day is important, but every day adds up.

So it's not, there's no stress in this particular Wednesday. I'm spending three hours working on trim. You could be sick and not do trim for three hours on that Wednesday. Nothing bad happens. But you have enough of those Wednesdays and all the trim gets done and you have this concrete accomplishment. That is what we are wired to appreciate as humans. The slow, sustainable aggregation of effort towards well-done high-quality results that we're proud of. Now fast forward to the typical computer knowledge work job.

It's the opposite. All day long, frenetic back-and-forth activity. We've taken all these different projects that we interleave with each other, and we're just trying to keep the plate spinning by answering this email and sitting off this, just in turn, you can respond to this and jumping on Zoom over here and back and forth. And it's just as frenetic. I can't even tell you all the things I'm working on. I'm barely working on it.

Work has been devolved to like emails back and forth where sometimes some, you know, decisions get made in a meeting and some drastic writing. It is the opposite of the slow but sustainable work. It's not slow. It's very fast. It's not clearly defined. We have multiple things that we have unspecified roles on that are coming in and out of our scope of activity. And it's not sustainable. If I'm sick and I have these.

10 projects I'm emailing all day. It's a real big issue. Everything grinds to a halt. So it's a constant source of this sort of background anxiety. So Logan working on his house is the epitome of slow productivity. My idea, this is the idea of my book, Slow Productivity that comes out in March, is we need to port this over to work. The world of our jobs, the world of knowledge work.

This is what work should be slowly but steadily on wildly important stuff. It's like this is what we're wired to do. It's how you can maximize the value produced for yourself and for the world. we're so far from that right now and we shouldn't be. So I really appreciate that case study, Logan. Slow productivity is the future. I'm really excited for my book to come out too because I want to talk a lot more about it. I want all these details to be out there so we can go big on slow productivity.

All right, we have a final segment coming up where I want to react to something I read about that I thought was quite interesting. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. From billion dollar ad budgets and arena naming rights to tens of thousands of retail. locations, big wireless providers spend big to appear like they're your only option. How do they afford it all? That big bill you get every month. Mint Mobile has a different idea. Instead of brick and mortar overhead, Mint Mobile is online only.

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That's L-A-D-D-R-Live-E-R-Live-Laterlife.com slash deep. Ladderlife.com slash deep. All right, let's get to our final segment here. This is where I react to something that came across on the Internet or my email inbox. In particular, I want to talk about a book. It's a book that came out in February, but it's proven popular. The author has done a lot of interviews, so people have been sending me clips of this author.

A very interesting story, very interesting book. I want to talk about some of the ideas in the book and give you maybe my own take on these same themes, which is a little bit different than where he comes down. So I'll load the book here up on the screen for those who are watching at home. the book is called Burn the Boats. Toss Plan B overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential. It's written by Matt Higgins, who has a really cool story. Let me read you a little bit from the book jacket. In this gripping Rags to Rich's Instant Classic,

Matt Higgins provides the blueprint he used to go from a desperate 16-year-old high school dropout, caring for a sick mother in Queens, New York, to a shark on shark tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School. told with raw emotion and radical transparency. Higgins writes the definitive tome on the oldest life hack in history. Burn the boats from Sun Tzu to Julius Caesar,

the ancient Israelites to Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky. There's a bold and highly effective tactics seen throughout history when leaders want to motivate their troops for success. They destroy all opportunities for retreat and fully commit to the mission. They burn their boats.

It's wind. or perish and the clarity of sheer desperation propels them to victory. Skipping ahead here, the book jacket says, burn the boats is the manifesto for anyone looking to level up their life while navigating risk. Each chapter includes clear, actionable advice that readers can immediately start applying to their own lives.

This book will give you the courage to confidently go all in on your life's true purpose. So Matt is a very impressive guy and has a very cool story. He really came out of a hard situation to a lot of success, and he used this idea, and he's been telling this idea a lot, and has been getting a lot of play. So I wanted to talk about this

because a very similar concept came up as a major theme when I was working on my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So Good They Can't Ignore You was a book that was looking at career advice. And so the idea that I was engaging with from the world of career advice

in So Good They Can Ignore You. One of the big ideas I was engaging with, is what I called courage culture. And at the time, so it's the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s when I was working on this, courage culture had a really big footprint

in the career advice space. And the theory behind courage culture was straightforward. It said the most important thing in terms of transforming your work into something that you're passionate about is having the courage to go after that thing you love.

So courage culture, prioritizes courage as the key issue. So look, I'm going to draw a picture here. And again, my apologies for people who are actually seeing this. But in courage culture, I'll draw this rough picture. What it's saying is, okay, the path. All right, so I'm drawing a squiggly line here. At the end of the squiggly line is a person smiling.

Jesse will tell you for the listeners, expertly drawn, holding their hands in the air triumphantly. and what is the obstacle here is you have this obstacle up front, this big, the Judah's like a red squiggle, and it's fear. So this great illustration on the screen. So Courage culture said here's the issue is if you can overcome that fear, which is built and there's all sorts of sources of it, parental expectation, conformity to society, you can overcome that fear, you have a pretty easy path to being very happy.

So we have to build up courage to find happiness. I pushed back on this as I went out there and I studied people who were very passionate about their careers. And I studied their actual lives, not just what they said. And what I saw was a different picture. So the path that they took, if you're looking at the screen now, you'll see this, the path they took was uphill. So now my picture, it's a pretty arduous uphill path. So it's like going up a mountain. And so what is a, what is stopping them here?

So what's in the way of this uphill path is an expertly drawn brain. Oh, God, I'm getting creative here, Josie. An expertly drawn brain that is seen, oh man, changing color. This is getting, I'm really impressed by my drawing, is seen as drawn by these orange dots, the hardness of this path. and saying, okay, I'm going to preserve energy. Pretty good, right, Jesse? Yeah, it's great. All right.

So if you look at these two different interpretations, you get two different ways to go forward. So courage culture says the first picture is what's happening. So you've got to just get really inspired. So you can have this moment of courage and overcome your fear. And once you leap over to the other side, you have this easy path. There's waiting there all along.

It's going to get you the happiness. This other approach, which I said was more realistic, is the reason why you're hesitating to get going is that often it is really, really hard to get the success with something really cool. And your brain recognizes that, and it sees how hard it is. And it says, hey, buddy, I like the guy at the top of the mountain with their hands in the air, but you're not ready to do this. You don't really understand how to hike this long.

You don't know how your compass works. You don't have enough water. I checked your boots. They're pretty bad. You haven't checked the weather. Do you have a jacket? And so your brain says, we're not. not going to engage on this long-term plan until I'm more confident that you know what the

hell you're doing. Now, last week on the show, we got into the neuroscience of this. This actual process is called episodic future thinking or EFT. It is your brain actually trying to project into the future and understanding of what's going to happen based on your experience and expertise that you already have stored in your hippocampus and seeing what it projects. And if it likes what it projects, then it's going to give you motivation. and if it doesn't, it's going to withhold it.

So if when your brain, the centers that are working on the EFT, the episodic future thinking are looking at what you understand and your plans and your past experiences and says you don't know how to get up that proverbial mouth and you're not going to get motivation. So my approach, which is not about getting the courage to just go for it, it's filling up that hippocampus

with enough evidence-based expertise and understanding of what you want to do that your brain, when it projects in the future, says, yeah, I see how this is going to happen. That's cool. We're going to get up that mountain. That guy's hands in the air. That's going to be us.

That ties to our values. Let's get after it. And you're not at war with your brain. You're co-opting your brain to get on your side. I think we over-emphasized this idea of part of ourselves being afraid, and we're trying to overcome that. I think we've given that too much power. And we have not given in our culture enough power to how a,

effective EFT really is at helping us make decisions about what to do in the future. And when we switch our attention from the courage culture to the episodic future thinking approach, it really changes the way we strategize to go after something cool. We don't burn the boats. We say how quickly can we learn enough about this, make enough little bets, get enough expertise, talk to people who know what they're doing, how quickly can we convince our our brain that this is something we can do? There's still a little courage after that that might be required.

if what you want to do is quite different than what's expected, people are correct to point out as they did when I was researching my book that, you know, it could be hard. Don't leave your law job. Don't leave your tenure-track position. Don't become an artist when you should become a doctor. You know, that is hard, but not nearly as hard as we think. When your mind is on board with a plan, it leads to something that's true to its values. It takes a little courage to tell your parent, I'm not going to med school.

But it's not as much as you think. if your brain is really on board with the alternative that you're going to do. So the idea that you're going to burn your boat so you have no plan B, that that's going to motivate you. Motivation doesn't get you up the hill.

Equipment does, skill, does, training does. So you should not be looking to get rid of plan B's. You should be looking instead to build better plan A's. A little bit of courage might still be involved, but it's not going to be that hard if you've gotten your mind on your side. So see your mind not as an arbitrary obstacle,

but as your ally, it is really good at saying, hey, do we have a good plan for what we're doing? That's why humans are so successful as a species. It's why we can invent things and build the pyramids and everything else we've done. Trust a human brain. Don't avoid plan B, right, a better plan A. That's what I have seen to be successful.

I don't know if you remember that rhetoric from like the 90s and 2000s, Jesse, but man, it was everywhere. You see it a lot in sports too Yeah, I just have the courage to go for it Yeah Yeah Well, it's okay

Can I I'm gonna bring up an old man rant This nothing makes me seem older than this And I've said it before on the show But I'm gonna bring it up again Cars 3 The Pixar movie Cars 3

Because the whole plot line of Cars 3 centers on the fact That the one car The anthropomorphic car Who's helping Whatever his name is Lightning McQueen. Lightning McQueen.

Train for his return. So Lightning McQueen's an old-style stock car. And now they have these new sort of computer design cars. They're just faster. It's better technology. And he's going to train, like I want to train to like overcome these technologically more superior cars. The whole plot line is the person training, you know, Lightning was someone she always

wanted, I don't know how you gender a car, but whatever. It's a she in the show. She had always wanted to be a race car driver, but didn't have the courage to do it because, you know, I guess she was a girl car. I don't know how this. I don't know how car gender works. So that was kind of the plot line.

Like, okay, that's, you know, that's interesting, right? There's this interesting dynamic of like this is something she always wanted to do, but couldn't. And now she's helping this other person do it. The way the movie ends is they're on the racetrack and they're super computer design cars. Lightning McQueen, by the way, was like, was one of the top stock car race there's like top of the heap before this new technology came in. So like whole life training to do this. And at the very end, the trainer gets to courage to say,

I'm just going to get on the track. I don't care what people tell me. I'm going to race. And she beats all the high tech cars. No training. No, like how did her old technology overcome it? No. So it was the courage culture personified that the only thing that was holding you back

from beating these like super precision cars that have been trained this really well, was just having the courage to compete for it. And they're completely missing the part where you actually have to become good, good at the thing. So it was like courage culture personified was the trainer from Cars 3 beating the high-tech hypercars

because she had to courage to actually get on the track. Like what message are we teaching? What message are we teaching kids? It's like rookie of the year, you know? Like the secret, you could be pitching in the major leagues. It's if you broke your arm in a weird way,

then that's it. And then you're going to throw 100-mile-power basketball. It's like, where's the training? So I'll tell you, I mean, I stood up and gave that room full of kids in that theater near full. I'll like, let me tell you about deliberate practice. You know how many hours it took on average for a chess grandmaster to get there? It's not just about overcoming fear. You have to learn, like, how to be the world's best race car.

Like, most people can't be. And if you want to be, your whole life has to be dedicated to it. And while you're at it, let me tell you about Dr. No and Fleming's like, Miss Plot. Yes. And let me tell you about the torture channel in Dr. No. All right, kids, I've got a problem with that as well. So they stake this broad to the volcanic rocks, so the crabs would eat her.

But crabs don't eat people. You see what I'm saying? I'm not welcome back in that theater again. That's the moral of that story. I'm not welcome back in that theater, nor have my applications to join the writing staff at Pixar been responded to or approved. I want like dark gritty movies where they train really hard. And in the end, just like you really, you gave it your best, but like, you don't have the right V-O-2 Max for the sport. And that's kind of the ending of it.

Oh, my goodness. All right. Enough of this nonsense. All right. Thank you, everyone for listening to watching this week's episode. We'll be back next week with another show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here.

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