Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 282: Slow Distractions

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

During the New Year season it is common to talk about how to be more productive. But what about the downtime between your major pursuits? In this episode, Cal argues for rewiring your brain to crave slow distractions over their faster (often digital) alternatives. The goal here is not to get more done but to transform your life into something slower and more meaningful.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Slow Distractions [2:25]- How do I work deeply as a stay-at-home parent? [29:12]- Isn’t it myopic not to let young children use smartphones? [36:44]- How do I succeed as a musician without social media? [38:09]- How do I make plans without social media? [48:37]- CALL: How to share ideas without allowing social media to take control [55:02]CAL REACTS: I’m a 33-year old woman without a job [1:05:55] Links:youtu.be/YQLVWficcwc?si=lOIBa23I_0-4sJl6Download a FREE chapter from my upcoming book, "Slow Productivity" HERE: https://www.calnewport.com/slow Thanks to our Sponsors: expressvpn.com/deepnotion.com/calshopify.com/deepgrammarly.com/podcastThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So if you're new to the show, I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a digital theorist who writes about the way technology impacts how we live, work, and relate to each other on the show. I give you concrete advice for taking action on the type of ideas. I write about if you want to watch video of what you are listening to today, just go to the deeplife.com slash listen. This is episode 282. Video of the full episode will be posted on the page for this episode within a day or so of at first airing. All right, so I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse.

Jesse, you might have noticed my voice is a little raw. I will say I have seven nieces and nephews on the one side of my family really all young preschool to young elementary age and it's cool from an uncle

perspective but when we when we all get together in the same house for the Christmas break it is essentially and I say this without exaggeration like the town from the movie Outbreak that was a good movie

I was like 20 years old. Yeah, that's basically getting this group together into winter. I took a test when I got home, and it just burst in the flames. So I don't know if that's good or bad, but every disease was there. Oh, well. Anyways, so my voice is a little gravely, but I'm going to try to persist as we have so much interesting stuff to get through. It's the new year. We have our New Year's resolutions hats on.

It's a great time for people to get some insults. for escaping the shallows and seeking the depths. And we want to be here for you. We don't take breaks. So let's get started right away. Get our sound effect panel fired up because it is time for our deep dive. All right. So in today's deep dive, I want to start by noting that this is the time of year, rather,

where there is a lot of discussion about how to be more productive, whether that be in our professional lives or in, terms of our leisure. Today I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about what we do with our time when we are not trying to be productive, when we are seeking distraction in that downtime in between more serious activities. When we're done with work and exercising and building that canoe out in the garage, what do we do?

Now, our temptation in such situations is to seek the most compelling possible distraction in the moment, something that almost always will be delivered to us through a screen. But the distractions that we fill this free time with actually do matter. Not in a sense of productivity or creativity, but in the sense of the overall quality of your life. So here's what I want to do in today's deep dive. I'm going to introduce the idea of slow distractions versus fast distractions. I'm then going to explain why slow distractions are a better one. way to spend your free time, then they're fast counterpart, and then I will talk about how to

specifically rewire your brain to prefer slow distractions. So let's start by trying to be clear about what do we mean by a slow versus fast distraction? A fast distraction, rather, it plays on our fundamental interest and attractions as a human being, but it just surfaces. It just surfs, rather, on the surfaces of these reactions, never really requiring you to load up your brain in its full capacity, never really requiring you to actually interrogate or interact with yourself or your world or your understanding of the world. I want to give you some examples here of fast distractions that just play with and surf on the

surface of our human instincts and then I'll contrast them to slow distractions that would play on those in a deeper way. So I'm going to, with great trepidation, do some illustration here. So for those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'm going to load up on the screen. You'll see two columns, fast and slow, so we can sort of illustrate what we're talking about. All right, so here's an example of a fast distraction. This is my, no, I would say world famous, Jesse, at this point. Illustration of the Twitter T.

Notice my sort of silent protest about X. I still draw the Twitter T. Twitter scrolling is a great example of a fast distraction because it plays on our human attraction to ideas and particular ideas that tend to support our group or tribe against perceived enemies. But when you're encountering these ideas on Twitter, they're cursory.

They're short. They're devoid of contact. So they don't really require you to load up or interrogate your understanding of any part of the world in any detail. They surf by on a shallow wave of emotions. So you get this simulacrum of being exposed to ideas and intellectual combat. But you don't actually have to do much cognition.

Now let's compare this. I'll draw along the other side here. Compare this to reading a polemical nonfiction book written by someone who knows what they're talking about. Expert illustration over here of a book. There we go. Right? Compare these two things. So when you're reading a book, and I'm saying polemical books,

hey, I'm making an argument. Here's my take on something. I'm an expert author, and I'm reading, I'm writing this book. This also plays on the same basic human instinct that Twitter draws upon. We're interested in ideas and ideas that support our group, perhaps, against others. But it's doing so in the book form in a slower way. We get into the book and the chapters, the ideas are being developed more slowly. Over time, we load up in our mind.

our mental structure on which our understanding those topics currently rest. We interrogate it. We update it. It's a slower, more deeper intellectual process. It's instigated by the same human interest, ideas, tribes,

but the intellectual engagement is much deeper. Let's do another example here so we can get better at this distinction. I'll erase my beautiful artwork from before. Here is another example of slow, I mean fast. Let's see here.

Jesse, tell me if I'm... Let me ask you, let me quiz you, Jesse. What am I drawing here? YouTube. There we go. YouTube logo. I should be a graphic designer. The key for people who are watching

can see you want to just messily fill things in. All right, there we go. YouTube. You know, I have nothing against YouTube as a repository for video. Video is a great form of content. But let's talk about YouTube. wandering, that very specific 21st century behavior where you just sort of wander to random YouTube

clip, to random YouTube clip, surfing the recommendations and auto plays that jump up. Now, this plays on our human interest in watching interesting things. Hey, something interesting is happening in my visual field. I want to attend to that. But again, too often in the service of algorithms, the videos you're going to end up being pushed towards, if you're just wandering on YouTube, are refining and simplifying and abstracting the observation of interesting things until it just purifies out, just those pure moments of reaction with all of the other surrounding context and content eliminated.

It's what leads you this sort of algorithmic pursuit to something like Mr. Beast, where in the end it's just boom, boom, boom, reaction producing thing, reaction producing thing. Here's a car. I'm giving this guy money. Boom, boom, boom, boom. stripping the purified, ooh, something interesting is happening,

stripping the purified version of that from any other surrounding information or context. Now compare this to the slower alternative. See how I'm going to draw this. Jesse, you'll see if you can tell what I'm drawing here. Here's going to give it away. A movie. A movie.

All right, there we go. No, I can do yellow. This is a great drawing. I'm a great drawler. Great artist. Compare it to watching a good movie. Again, this would be this slower alternative is playing on the same instinct. I like to watch interesting things.

Humans like to watch interesting things. But when you watch a two-hour movie, a good movie, what you're going to be brought into is a carefully constructed world with carefully constructed characters. Your mind completely loads up this context of the world and the characters. It begins doing some mere neurons. style mind reading, simulation of the minds, of the characters in the movies, you're put into a certain state of mind.

In this context, then when the things that generate a big reaction happen, this is a much more rewarding reaction because it's happening in a rich context. So it's changing your understanding of something of the world or how you perceive things. It's reaction built into a matrix of sort of deep human reality. same initial instinct draws us to both but the movie option gives you something slower I'll just do another example here

keep doing examples just as an excuse to draw awesome pictures for our viewers ooh I don't know how I'm going to draw this okay Jesse I'm going to have you guess man I don't even know how to draw this all right so what I'm going to draw here as an example of a fast distraction so this is clearly a phone right

yeah all right supposed to be like someone dancing. TikTok. TikTok. There we go. All right, TikTok scrolling. We just swipe up, swipe up, swipe up, swipe up on TikTok. I think among other things, this plays on our interest in being around other human beings.

TikTok is very human-oriented. There's a person right there in front of you. Almost always, it's people right there in front of you. So it plays on that interest. But again, it abstracts away the deeper, more interesting elements of being around other humans. It abstracts away all authentic connection. It simulates that feeling of having a connection with a person.

It simulates that feeling by having the people in the video do arresting things. So it's like, okay, this person is dancing demonstrably in a situation where someone wanted dance. Or it's someone talking, but it's like every facial expression. If you watch a TikTok monologue, every facial. Every facial expression is exaggerated, over the top. It's emotional. It's huge smiles. And it edits from one to the other,

so you never even have to have any interstertial facial facial configurations. Everything is arresting, pressing buttons. So it gives you the simulacrum. If I'm feeling things that I'm seeing a person, that's kind of what it's like to connect with someone. But it's not an actual connection. It's just giving us that simulation. Now, again, compare this to the alternative of, you know, actually,

I'll draw a picture here of two people. Being with someone, like spending time with someone, actually spending time with them, finding a connection, finding something after you've built up this connection over an hour or two, something funny that you're both laughing about. Now you have a real human connection. There's emotion involved,

but you have this rich cognitive context. You've built up in your mind a rich model of who this person is, what their life is like, how it relates to you. It's a slower thing to do. It's playing on the same instinct to want to be around people. But it gives you a completely different experience. All these examples involve screens.

I talk a lot about screens, obviously, as a digital theorist, but not all fast versus slow distractions are digital. So let's consider, for example, let me draw a picture here. All right. Just I'm going to give it away with this. What we got there? Dakotty? some sort of alcohol.

Yeah. So think about drinking alcohol and not in a social setting, which has its own sort of cultural history. But just like, hey, I'm cracking whatever this really weird looking green bottle with X is on it that I just drew here. I'm cracking. You know, it's at night. I'm going to, you know, at the end of a long day,

cracking the six pack. What is that simulating? What is that playing on? It's actually playing on our desire to be happy, to be in a good mood. You can simulate, I'm in a good mood about what's going on in my life. I'm in a good mood. I can simulate that with an alcohol-induced buzz.

So I'm short-circuiting this desire to sort of feel good about things, in this case, with a chemical. Now, actually compare this. What's the alternative here? What's the slower alternative? Actually working yourself up into the state of feeling good about things, not simulating it with a chemical, but actually, actually feeling good about things.

I mean, imagine you sort of put in the time, I drew a person with a flower here, but imagine you put in the time, you know, it's after work, you're proud of what you did that day. You called and checked in with, you know, a friend that was going through a hard time. And then you go for like a sunset walk through like a nearby nature trail and you're clearing your mind and having some gratitude for what's going on in the day and appreciating the changing of the seasons. This is much slower than breaking open the six-pack,

but the sense of, you know, I'm in a generally good mood that this generates is deeper and more lasting. So in almost all of these cases when we're talking about fast versus slow distractions, the fast distractions are just short-circuiting

the path to something we really care about and giving us a shallow simulation of it. As compared to slower distractions, where we are following a human instinct to where that human instinct actually expects us to go and putting in the work of actually satisfying that instinct slowly but steadily.

Now remember, we're talking about distractions here, so just to clarify, this is not leisure time in the sense of like a serious hobby, exercising, of taking up woodworking, this is not about work, this is just nothing what we're talking about here is about trying to master a new skill

or create a new, product in the world. It's like what you do in your downtime. But these slower distractions I want to argue are better. I'm going to give you three reasons why. One, they require full brain deep thinking. You actually have to get your whole brain involved in almost every one of these slow distraction examples. You're engaging with the book.

You're engaging with the film. You're engaging with the person. You're engaging with the world around you as you go on the walk in nature. Our mind likes to think. It likes to be engaged fully. thinking about something, be it our own thoughts or an invented world that we're exposing ourselves to. When we do not allow our mind to fully engage, when we just surf on the surface of emotions with, you know, it's TikTok or Twitter or just drinking the six-pack or whatever it is, most of our mind is not engaged in that. We're not loading up complicated structures of understanding.

We're not interrogating it. We're not giving something intense focus. we get anxious in that state. You know, they say idle hands is the devil's workshop. I think the idle mind is anxiety's playground. And so the fast distractions do not engage your mind in the type of stuff that it's expecting to do, and we get the rumination. We're all over the place.

We're flooding back and forth. The emotions hit us. We don't know what to do with them. We escape even deeper into the chemical numbing of the fast distractions. It's a bad loop. Second advantage of slow distractions. They leave a lasting positive residue. You come out of 30 minutes of Instagram or Twitter.

Nothing's left behind except for some emotional traces. You come out of 30 minutes of a book. You've actually loaded up your cognitive schema for understanding the relevant topics. You loaded that up in your mind. You interrogated it and updated it and then filed it back away again. You've left a piece. positive lasting change on your conception of yourself and the world. This feels good.

This feels useful. This feels like our time is actually being spent towards something that has some purpose, which again we value. That leads us to the third thing, which is heavily related, which is that slow distractions slow down the sensation of passing time. your days feel longer, they feel more idiosyncratic and unique, therefore your appreciation of the world around you goes up. You have a perception of your own life as richer and more full when more of your downtime is engaged in slower distractions than fast. Time spent in fast distractions doesn't really get stored away because again, we're leaving no lasting residue.

We're not using our full mind thinking. it's not novel. And so our perception of time just goes really fast. I don't know. I was at work and then I was sort of on my phone. Now I'm in bed. Or if you instead engage in slow distractions, your own perception of your own life is one of its interesting and unique and rich and slower.

So the actual character of your life improves when you spend more of your downtime in a slower fashion. So how do we rewerewerew? wire ourselves to prefer slow distractions over fast. It's an important question because, again, if you're used to fast distraction, it is highly appealing. It short-circuits the response that your brain is looking for with these fundamental desires. You need a two-part approach here.

You need both of these parts to successfully rewire from fast towards slow. One, you need to surround yourself with opportunities for slowness, and two, you need to complicate your access. to the fast alternative. So to dive a little deeper there, surround yourself with opportunities for slowness. That means you have, for example, the books around that you're looking forward to read.

They're with you. You don't have to go find them. You've been reading reviews of movies. You have three or four movies that you've read about and you're very excited to watch. So it's there. You've prepared it. So you have the slow alternative there.

You have rituals like the evening walk, the transition from the work day to the day after work with reflection. You have rituals in place you get used to doing that require a certain type of slowness. You have to make access to the slow easy. At the same time, you want to make fast a little more difficult. A couple things that help here. Number one, probably above all else, is the phone for your method. When you are at home, your phone is plugged in and the set place in your house or apartment. That's where it stays. if you need to do a text message, make a call or look something up, you have to go to your phone. It is therefore not with you as a default companion throughout every activity you do at home.

Without that ability to just whip it out at the slightest hint of boredom, you get better at persisting with slower activities. You get more used to it. I might also recommend when it comes to YouTube. The A, treat it more like a library. So you go there when there's a specific thing you want to look up. and B, for things like this show, treat it like a cable channel. Yeah, there's a couple things.

I like to watch the Deep Questions episodes or whatever, Andrew Huberman episodes. Here's when I do it for this much time. And I treat it like this show is on TV at this time. And that's when I go and I treat it like a TV. In fact, maybe watch it on your smart TV. It's not something that's always available as just a default distraction.

It's a library and a cable service. Not a constant source of distraction. You might also try temporarily canceling most streaming services. All right, when I want TV time, I have to now go out and rent the movie off of, you know, iTunes. Or Amazon Prime. I have to go rent. I'm going to pay $3.95. So I've got to think, what do I really want to watch?

There is not just these quick options of things I can click on and just have shows. I can jump back and forth. I rented this and it's all I have the watch. again, all of this slowing down, complicating your access to fastness helps you get more used to and comfortable with the slow alternatives. All right, so that's where I want to leave this.

The productive stuff what you do with your time is important, but how you approach your life outside of those productive moments is also important. And to be really clear, this is not one of those tiresome pleas for, you have to be careful and how you engineer your downtime to make sure that you're more rested and creative and

productive in your productive time. This is not about servicing your productive time. I don't care what you do for the sake of this discussion with your productive time. Slow distractions is not about ringing more out of your life. It's about making the quality of your day-to-day life better, richer, and more human. So as you work on your productivity habits as new year, also think about your downtime habits and consider sifting and rewire your brain away from the fast and towards the slow. There you go, Jesse. Slow distractions.

I like the ritual of coffee shop reads. That's a good one. Yeah. So you mean like the weekend ritual where you bring a bunch of articles to the coffee shop? Yeah. Yeah. Do you do that sometimes? No, I kind of want to do it more.

You're probably playing golf. I was just thinking I wish they had a better place in my club to like a reading place. Yeah, why don't clubs have? A lot of them do. Like a library? Yeah, they're like a really nice, you know, locker room, respectively, for women or men to sit down. They don't, they're building one, but they don't have it yet. Well, there's a place in Boston near Beacon Hill that I never really joined.

I think we talked about it on the show before, but they had a private library, like a membership library called the anathium. And you would pay, I think it was expensive, but I was a student at the time. So it would have been cheap for me if I had done. I just didn't get my act together. And I could have walked to it from my apartment. It's like a private library. When I toured it, one of the big rooms they have is just like this big room with like all the newspapers, like from all over the country. Yeah.

It was just all these like older guys sitting there like reading their newspapers in the morning. I was like, that's cool. You have a place to go to read. There's bust statues of, you know, busts of literary figures on columns. And it was one of those two story libraries, you know, where there's like the second level, balcony level at the books. So that was cool. All right. So anyways, I want to get to some questions before we do.

I want to mention one of the, I'm going to talk about sponsors. I'm still learning, Jesse, about the sound effects. I keep forgetting. Let's talk first about Notion. So you probably know about Notion. It combines your note stocks and projects all together in one beautiful space. We use Notion here on the Deep Questions podcast. It is at the core of how we interact with our ad agency.

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So it makes it even more effective and useful to rely on Notion to organize the information that matters in your life or your business. You can ask these questions anywhere in Notion. So you can find exactly what you need without having to leave where the page you're on at the moment. You can also trust your data is secure because Notion AI is designed from the ground up to protect your information. No AI models are trained with your information. The data is encrypted.

The answers will never use information from pages you don't have access to. So it's safe, secure, and makes it easy to do meaningful work. So try a Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com slash Cal. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cow. Try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. That's Notion.com slash Cal. Excuse me.

That's what I talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. Oh, this is interesting. So have you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode? It says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your school, or your internet service provider. How can they even call it incognito? To really stop people from seeing the sites you visit, you need to do, use the VPNI, use, which is ExpressVPN. Yeah, so here's the thing.

When you access websites, even if you're using a secure protocol, which means the specific information you're submitting to the website is encrypted, everyone can see what websites you're talking to. It's in the packet header. If we're going to be geeky about this, your internet service provider can see it, your employer can see it. If you're on Wi-Fi, anyone nearby with a radio antenna can see the site you're talking to.

incognito mode does nothing to stop that. That's just about what's stored or not stored on your own computer, but still everyone else can see exactly, you know, what sites you're talking to. So how do you get around that? How do you get actual privacy using a VPN? So with a VPN, you package the site you really want to talk to an encrypted message and then send it to a VPN server. So everyone looking at your packets just knows you're talking to a VPN server.

They don't know who you want that VPN server. to talk to on your behalf. The VPN server then unencrypts the real packet you wanted to send, talks to the website or service you really want to talk to on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back to you. So if you really don't want your employer, your internet service provider, anyone around you with an antenna to know what sites and services you're using, you need a VPN. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. They have servers all around the world, so there's almost always going to be one near where you are. They have a lot of bandwidth,

so it's a very fast connection. Their software is easy to use. You turn it on with a click of a button and then just use your sites and services like normal. It all the VPN forwarding happens automatically in the background. So stop letting other people invade your online privacy protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash deep. Use my link at expressvpn.com slash deep

to get three extra months free. That's EXP. P-R-E-S-V-N-V-N-com slash deep to learn more. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? Sounds good. First question is from cubicle dog. As I stay-at-home parent of a young child,

I have the opportunity to get some work done, some deep work done in the afternoon when my child sleeps. But afternoons are when I'm usually groggy, despite I haven't gotten a good night's sleep, and so I fail to get much done. I'd love to be more productive during those valuable hours without resorting to caffeine. Thoughts.

So, Jesse, it's not going to seem apparent at first, but this is going to end up being our stealth, slow productivity corner question of the day. This is the one question of each episode where the answer will have something to do with my upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which comes out March 5th. Go to Cald-Newport.com slash Slow to download a free excerpt from that book. All right. So at first, this question seems to be unrelated to this. slow productivity, but I'm going to drive it there by the end of my answer.

All right, so I'm going to start by doing my sort of pendantic semantic policing here. I think you're probably using the word deep work incorrectly. So again, deep work is very narrow. It refers to professional activities that are cognitively demanding, and it refers to approaching those activities without context switching. So instead of switching back and forth between that activity and other things like email and Slack, I'll give it my full attention.

By giving cognitive demanding professional tasks, your full attention, you're able to accomplish it faster and a higher level of quality than to approach it with divided attention. Now, I'm assuming because you use the terminology stay-at-home parent, you're not also working a job. So it's not like you're trying to balance an unrelated knowledge work job with deep work requirements with being at home and caring for a child. So probably what I'm assuming you're referring to is just important work. You have things that need to get done.

And when you get to the afternoon, what seems like the right time to sort of get things done and make a real push through your task list, you find that you're tired, which, by the way, I'm not surprised by young children are incredibly tiring. So what can we do about that?

Let me start with a couple practical suggestions, and then I'm going to give you a slow answer. as well. Find more ways to get things done in the morning when your energy is higher, even though your kid is around. So especially with first kids, there's this idea that, look, they need to be constantly entertained, direct one-on-one engagement with a parent. But that's not really the case.

By the time you have two or three kids like I do, your standards there really start to go down. There's probably certain types of things and certain times in the morning when you can get that done. Oh, okay. So we have breakfast. and after breakfast, he or she watches some bluey, and that's when I, you know, check up on email.

Or that's when I build the, you know, the grocery list or whatever it is. So there's ways you can integrate more work. I call people when we go for a stroller walk in the afternoon. I bring, I do some planning at the library during storing time. So if you get a little bit more creative about finding times and get things done during the morning when your energy is higher, to get a lot more done. You need to put aside the guilt that somehow the kid needs constant one-on-one attention. You might want to automate the afternoon work you do to make it less of a

motivational push. All right, here's something kind of simple. I can do. It's kind of automated. I can preferably something you can do while listening to a podcast or something else that's desirable. And so you push into that afternoon nap space, something or chores that like you really can just sort of do listening to something else. It doesn't require a lot of concentration. So you don't leave the more complicated stuff for the afternoon. And finally, arrange for more time off. There's this idea sometimes, especially with stay-at-home parents,

if you have a partner who's working outside the home, that what you're doing is somehow easier, and therefore you have to always be doing that. It's always you who should be watching the kid. But actually, it's an incredibly hard job to watch the watch. a kid, and it's usually emotionally a lot more demanding than going to an office. And so a lot of successful setups say, okay, I want at least two half days a week that's entirely timed to myself. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. It could be, you know,

when the kid naps in the afternoon on Thursdays or some sort of child care option, usually you arrange with your partner. Hey, you work from home sometimes and not. Start work later on Fridays. You watch the kid, I'll pick it up at 11, or on Sundays, I get the day, that's your day with the kid, and I spend three or four hours on that day doing something else. So try to have multiple long stretches of time just to yourself built into your week. Now, you don't always have to just work at that time, also do stuff for yourself during that time as well.

But I don't think stay-at-home parents give themselves enough time not being a parent. and you need that. I mean, think about someone who goes to an office, half of their waking hours is not in the office and not working. Compare that to a parent all of their time is with the kid. So it really matters that you put that time in there. All right now for my slow productivity answer, whatever it is you're calling deep work,

be okay doing less of it. Like you're doing, this happens often. You have a kid. Like, I have a kid, but I still have to do all these other things. It's like, no, the kid is now like the major thing. It's items one through three on your list of five that you're doing. So you should commiserately reduce other things that you can and be okay with that. I'm going to do less things for a while.

I'm not going to do this club anymore. The side hustle, side product idea, let's give that a year off. I need more time. This is hard what I'm doing. I don't need to necessarily fill the afternoon with whatever it is you're calling deep work. what if that's when you exercised and took a nap or just read? I mean, it is, again, for whatever reason, we don't count taking care of a kid as much as we should in terms of how hard it is. So if someone, again, let me use an analogy to other types of work.

If I had an office job I went to from 9 to 5 and I was like, okay, here's a problem. I'm at the office and I have this job. And then there's this completely unrelated job and I'm trying to like spend a few hours on that the afternoon while I'm at the office. But my job is so hard when I'm trying to do the second job at the same time, I find it to be hard. They say, stop doing a second job, right? I mean, you already have a job. But when that first job is taking care of a kid, sometimes we're like, come on.

I mean, I'm just at home. I'm not in an office. Like, I should be doing all these other things. So this is my slow productivity answer. Principle one of slow productivity is do fewer things. Just have less things on your plate. And I think that that might go farther than almost any other piece of practical advice that I just gave. All right, Jesse.

So that is our slow productivity corner. All right, what do we got next? Next questions from Matt. Isn't no smartphones for young children a bit myopic? For example, I've been using grammarly to make my writing significantly easier and eliminate all human errors. Isn't being proficient with these tools helpful? I don't see why young children shouldn't learn to use these tools effectively

early in their lives when their young brains can figure them out quickly. Matt, let me tell you how long it takes someone. to learn how to proficiently use a smartphone or a tablet. Approximately, and this is give or take 10%, 17 seconds. They do not need to practice having a smartphone at a young age so that they will be comfortable with a smartphone when they're a little bit older. These consumer-facing products are some of the lowest friction,

easy-to-use design projects in the history of such products, exposing your 11-year-old to Grammarly is not a good enough reason for that 11-year-old to have a smartphone. So again, wait until post-puberty, wait till 16 or older before you give unrestricted access to Internet to a young person. A smartphone is typically unrestricted access to the Internet. They'll be fine. They'll pick this all up incredibly quickly. Don't use that as a concern. I do like Gramerly, though.

it's a good product, but your 11-year-old doesn't need to use it. All right, who do we got next? Next question's from Fab. I'm a Peruvian musician looking to grow my audience while also employing the elements of digital minimalism, reclaiming my focus, doing deep work, and living a social media free life from my top priorities. The only advice I've received so far regarding making progress in audience building is to post on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Is this true?

Fab, it's a common question. but here is an alternative approach. So step one, focus on being so good you can't be ignored. So just being an excellent musician who's writing good music that's doing something new, do something that's unabashedly good. If you don't have that, no matter how much social media you use,

there's only so far you can go. Now let's say you have that. Well, here's an alternative that just posting on TikTok a lot. ask this question, how would a musician, it was really good at music and what they did, 12 years ago, how would they get their start? Because as early as 12 years ago, ubiquitous social media use was not assumed.

So what mechanisms, just 12 years ago, what mechanisms would a musician use to get noticed or to try to grow an audience? Because here's the thing, those mechanisms are still there. They didn't disappear in the last 10 years. I think what the story being told by musicians and artists and creatives about social media is that there's this shortcut that it's possible. It's like a lottery ticket, creative lottery ticket.

It's possible if you're posting your stuff online due to algorithmically amplified virality, you can find an audience very quickly and you can sort of jump to being a well-known creative in a very short amount of time. it's possible, right? It's also possible that you're going to get the power ball. You know, actually, my dad played the power ball last week, the $700 million jackpot, got four numbers. Not an order, but four numbers, which is $100 payoff. Pretty close.

So then I looked up the odds. So how much harder is it to get that versus winning the power ball? It was 100 million times harder. So it looked close, but it wasn't. Did you program a software thing like you did for the Drayal simulation? I did not program a software thing. I looked up the odds. Did I show you the email someone sent me about the Dradle simulator?

No. He sent me a blog post of another computer scientist who had the exact same issue I had. And instead of, he didn't just simulate Draydle. He built a formal model of Dradle as a game so that you could actually analytically calculate what is the expected number of rounds for a Draydle game to finish. Now, he looked starting with a larger initial pot. It was either 10 or 15 pieces. We looked at six.

And he found that the expected number of rounds before you finish was 649. So he had the exact same conclusion. This computer scientist had the exact same conclusion. Dradle is a terrible game. And if you play it, you should play it with very small pots and very aggressive betting or you'll be there forever. But what do we talk about? music? Oh, music. Okay. So Fab. A, don't play Draydle. B, don't be too excited if you get four

numbers in the power ball out of order because that's actually much easier than getting, you know, the jackpot. And three, this lottery ticket vision that social media gives to creatives, I think is actually pretty damaging because it distracts them from the actual path that have been around for decades and were still the only path to success music as early as 12 years ago. It distracts you from those paths. And typically what those paths are, is you're really good at music. You're performing that music in real venues, honing your ability to actually play in front of a crowd

and not just in front of a webcam that's being broadcast the TikTok. You're then our showcases. There's formal ways that, okay, let me show what I'm doing once I'm at a certain level to executives from music companies who are desperate to find good musicians. They are not going to turn down any opportunity to find good musicians. musicians. If they like what they see, it's still a long process. I actually write about this in slow productivity. I have a whole long chapter about the story of Jewel, the musician Jewel,

because she wrote a detailed memoir and then also did a few really detailed interviews. And I pulled from it that really recreate her slow path to becoming an incredibly successful musician. And then you learn from her memoir, she's touring all the time. Small venues. a car instead of a van to save money. There's a period of time early on in her career where she made a deal with a group called Earth Jam that would do environmentally themed concerts at high schools. And she would perform with them in the afternoon

so she could use their van to get to her non-high school performances in the evening. It was slow. And it built and she got better. And then her career took off from there. The key point in the jewel story, and this again, I do this more detail and slow productivity, but the key point in the jewel story

is that she wanted it to be slow. So the key turning point in the jewel story, which Fab, I hope, will give you some peace of mind here. When thinking about a slower approach, is that when she was discovered at the interchange coffee house down in San Diego, when she was discovered

because she was doing something really too good to be ignored, a record label put a million dollars on the table. And this is kind of the equivalent of now my YouTube videos get caught, Justin Bieber style and catch on some wave and then suddenly I'm going on a Saturday Night Live. Put a million dollars on the table.

And she was like, okay, you know, this seems kind of nerve-wracking. So she went to the library, got a book out about how the record industry works. And she's like, wait a second. If I take this million-dollar deal, it's a loan against royalties. They're going to want me to make this money back

soon. They're going to have to make a big push, and if I don't have a huge hit right out of the park, I'm being dropped from this label. But she's like, also, I've only ever really performed at this coffee house. I'm not, I don't know if I'm there yet. She turned down the million dollars. She said, don't, don't worry about the advance. Let's just do a deal that has a pretty good, like a back end. If things do do well, I'll make a lot of money, but I'm going to cost you very little. And she spent years on the label, costing the very little, learning how to be a really good performing musician. And then things finally took off, and that back-in deal made her a lot more than that million dollars. I tell that story because her path was slow, but the slowness was a feature

not a bug. She got the attention of labels by being too good to be ignored, in this case, playing these epic concerts in this coffee house in San Diego, and then spent years. just performing, learning. So one of the things that had to happen, for example, not to give too much away from my book, but, you know, whatever first hits was, you were meant for me,

but when that was first release, it did not do too well. And in part because her initial recording of that was done soon after she signed her record deal, and she did it at Neil Young's ranch out in California with a lot of Neil Young's band, and she was nervous. And it showed.

A year or so later, she went back and re-recorded it, interestingly with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was her friend from San Diego playing bass on it, re-recorded it after like practicing, getting better at performing, more confident. And that new version is what took off. So anyways, I think for creative social media

is a lottery ticket. And even if that ticket does pay off, it may not be what you think it is. Maybe more of a curse than a blessing. I don't know if Justin Bieber was better off being discovered by YouTube instead to have it a jewel-like rise where that same sort

precocious singing was discovered in Canada at showcases and then there's a two or three-year period where he really found his voice. It is a cautionary tale. So anyways, there's ways to get the scars of creative that have been around forever

and did not go away in the last 12 years. I think those slower ways are better. So the idea that if I'm on social media, algorithmic lightning will strike, I don't even know if you want that. So I don't know. I feel alone preaching that message these days, Jesse, but that's my whole career, you know.

Yeah. Slow and steady. You're promoting a book without social media? Yeah, slow and steady. I've never had something just explode and take off. I've never had virality. But I just try to produce really good things and keep talking about them, and the stuff that's good, it lasts.

And over time, it builds my reputation. Not everything works, some things do. It just seems like a better way to do it. Yeah, and you're also writing all the time. I write all the time. I write all the time. I try to write the best possible things. Every hit book I've ever had took years to become a hit.

But I think that's probably healthier. I mean, if I look at a book like Deep Work, that's probably, I mean, I think about it now. If I look at like the Amazon, that book sold a lot of copies, $1.5 million or whatever it is. And nowadays, it's right up there. If you look at the rankings, it's right at the top of productivity. It's usually with David Allen, essentialism,

and four-hour work week. we often kind of compete for it. But I never had Tim's experience. I never had Tim's experience. For our work, we took off. You know, it just took off. Now, in the end, actually, our sales aren't that different. And right now, like, they're both in sort of an equal area of impact, probably, on the culture.

Mine never had a six-month period up front where it just, like, exploded. But that's better. I mean, Tim will tell you, it's rough. It was rough, like, have his thing explode. It, like, turned his world upside down. People would show up at his house. he was all over the place these deals came around to do TV shows

that he now regrets because he was like this was a huge time sink and nothing came of it and I lost the rights to things I was working on slower in this case was probably better you know so you don't always want things to explode you want it the last and that can be different

all right let's do one more question what do we got next question is from deep mountains I banned social media but now I feel left out and forgotten since I now barely have an online existence, people tend to make plans and don't include me. And when I do send somebody a message to a range of meetup, my energy gets sapped waiting for their replies.

Most of my friends communicate through social media, so my old way of communicating gets lost. How can I still live a meaningful social life with this quandary? So what do you think, I don't know if it's a he or she. I'll say he. What do you think he means by his friends, make plans mainly using social media.

What tool is he talking about? Because he separates out messaging, which he does do. Well, you can message on Instagram. I think a lot of people do that, especially young people. So like using Instagram instead of like I message or WhatsApp? Yeah.

Using the communication within those apps. I know that like with our guys, I coach like in high school, they use instant Instagram messaging a lot. Okay. And this, is this different than it? Is DM Twitter? That's DM.

Or it's Instagram DM as well. DMing is direct messaging. That's Instagram. Right. Okay. So it's like a main way. It's why like a lot of people. And I could see like, you know, parties and stuff like that being announced there,

especially on Facebook. Like they, people would invite people more our age, but I bet you people use a lot Facebook to make plans and send invitations. and stuff like that. So Instagram does this. TikTok is not a social network, right? So it's not TikTok. There you're seeing stuff the algorithm shows.

But Facebook, Instagram, maybe Twitter, or probably not as much anymore. Like Instagram. Okay. So I think my thought here is, okay, perfectly fine use for social media. I mean, if your friends are using a messaging feature of, let's say, Instagram to meet up,

then use the messaging feature on Instagram the meetup. Just don't use Instagram in other ways. Just put up gates about how you want to use it. Like this shouldn't be too hard. Yeah, same with Facebook. I mean, if he's a little bit older and a lot of invitations to be sent through Facebook, just go on there a couple times a week

and see if there's any invitations to go look at. Yeah, so go on Facebook, look at invitations. Instagram, go on there and look at your DMs. Don't post things. Don't really follow anyone except for your friends, I suppose. they're posting something. Don't make Instagram on your phone a default place to go if you're bored. Seek out slow distractions instead of fast like we talked about in the show.

But to use Instagram as sort of an inefficient version of WhatsApp, fine. So I'm glad you asked this question because we want to be, when we're thinking about our engagement with the digital, we want to be very intentional, right? I really try to steer away from more generic. generic prescriptions. This is evil. This is good.

Never do this. Always do that. If you read digital minimalism, for example, my book, digital minimalism, I don't go in and say, here's the bad services, here's the good. I don't go in and say, let me talk about, you know, how bad of a guy Mark Zuckerberg is. You don't want to support his company. I said, figure out what you want to do.

Figure out the right tools to do that. Use those tools to do that. And anything else those tools try to get you to do, say, I'm not interested. Just take control over. how you use your digital life. So there's a chapter in digital minimalism. If you get that book, there's a chapter called Join the Attention Resistance that gets to exactly what I think you need to think about here.

And it's about how do you use the advantageous parts of these giant attention economy platforms without being trapped by the other parts that you're not interested in and that are poised to perhaps capture your attention and make your life worse. And to do that is almost like an act of resistance. To come into your Instagram, and it's not on your phone, it's on your computer. It's come into Instagram, but you haven't followed anybody.

So there's just like these weird discover stuff that the algorithm chose you could care less about. And you jump in, look at the DMs, and jump out. To do like I talk about in that book, to use a plug-in. So you can go into Facebook to see Facebook groups where people are posting about parties, but there's no news feed. That's the attention resistance. You see, I'm keeping control of my attention. and you're not going to take control of my attention

by luring me in with these specific really useful features. I can use those useful features without having to become a pawn in your attention economy scheme. It's like we talk about with YouTube as well. YouTube is a great library. YouTube is a great cable channel. It's a dangerous form of wandering distraction.

So people come in and use plugins, for example, that get rid of, and this is an example from that chapter, get rid of the recommendations. It turns YouTube into like a search engine. I know I like deep questions, and I know the new episodes come out Monday. So on Monday, I go and I type into the top Deep Questions or Cal Newport,

and I click on the latest episode and I watch it. It's like turned on the TV and watch a certain show. But there's nothing being recommended on the side. That's it. If I want to do something else, I'll look it up. Oh, I want to know how to fix something. I search for that thing, and I get the video I watch it. I'm done.

It's a great library. Another example of the attention resistance. So if your friends are using the communication tools built into social media apps, use those tools, but only use those tools. And by doing so, you're sort of giving a metaphorical middle finger to the owners of those companies anyways, which itself is kind of fun. I learned something. Communication tools. I know journalists talk about it a lot. Journalists find this useful because people, a lot of very online people that you might need to get a quote from for an article or whatever, that's how they contact them.

Twitter DM. It's like it's something I don't have. I think it's been fine, but I think there's a lot of that going on in journalism. DMing people, social media accounts to try to contact them. Kind of makes me glad I don't have Twitter. Think about all the DMs we would get.

I mean, we already get so many emails. Can you imagine if people have the illusion of like, I could just like directly yell at you about things. All right, let's do a call. Do we have a call load up? Yes, we do. Here we go. Today, it's Logan here. I am a Kiwi currently living in the US working as a financial consultant.

I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level and feel that I could now generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I share my content with an audience? How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain control over what they create while not handing over the reins for these things and my audience to a large social media company. Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership into some other thing. Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work and practice. Cheers for all the hard work.

All right. Kiwi, that's New Zealand? I think so. All right. Excellent. International audience. I like So what type of art was he saying? He said visual. Yeah. Visual. Some sort of digital visual art. Yeah. So once again, I don't know that particular world well, but like in my answer to Fab, I believe it was, to Peruvian musician.

I'll give a similar answer here, which is, okay, 12 years ago, how did that? artists in this general space, how do they get noticed and spread? Go see if you can do that. Like, that's step one, right? And so it's probably you're doing something really original, and then, you know, maybe it starts in a local gallery. Maybe it starts in someone else's sort of showcase that they do. That's a starting place.

Building a digital home is another good idea. Build a website. You can have a digital home with a website where people can come and, and see your art, right? And then be okay with not trying to play the algorithmic amplification lottery. Be okay with I'm working on this art. I'm finding like a slower way of developing this and spread to an audience. I have a digital home to point people tours.

Go to this well-designed website. You can see or buy my art. You can join my mailing list for updates if you want to know when new pieces are coming out or for sale. and build a following slowly. That is a durable following you're going to build. It's also, I think, a beneficial feedback loop. You have to interact more with people,

convince people to let you in their galleries, convince people to buy your work one by one. That feedback loop improves your work. Okay, maybe this is not really original enough, so I need to do something different here. You don't get any of that feedback if you're just posting on Instagram. and hoping that like a celebrity influencer

repost one of your things and then all these people are interested in your work. So like how do people do this 12 years ago like do that with a good website and mailing list and be ready for that to be a slow process? Again, and I left this out in the fab answer but the other piece here is the slowness of the process motivates you more

because you have to work harder and harder to try to move this thing along. When you're just posting stuff on Instagram, you get caught up in what I call checklist productivity, where you feel like the key to a big accomplishment is just following some script that other people don't have access to. In other words, the scarcity that means most people don't succeed is in the information, not in the actual execution.

And so you could end up in a checklist productivity mode where what you really care about is, am I posting on a regular schedule? Do I have good tags and hashtags for the algorithm to hit? Am I spending enough time following other artists and replying so they'll follow me? You get caught up because that's so much easier. checklist productivity. Anyone can do it. That's so much easier than saying,

how do I make this better? This local gallery in New Zealand, you know, they didn't want to show this. Why? How could I make it better so they would? Let me be around more artists. Let me meet more artists. Let me join or start an artist collective

where we're helping to critiquing each other's work. The slower approach forces you to focus on quality. It lights that fire to keep pushing in a way that when you're just playing the algorithmic amplification lottery, You're like, I don't know. What really matters is some clever trick I do in my headline construction. That's going to please the algorithm.

And all that's energy that could be going towards making your stuff better. All right. So that's our questions for today's episode. His art kind of got me thinking about, did you read that article in the New Yorker about the Invader? Invader. Who puts all the art murals and like he's based in Paris, but he goes all over the world and puts the art murals. Without people knowing. They don't know who he is technically.

The author said if you dig deep, you could find out who he is. So it's like a- You have to read the article. You'll probably like it. It's like a Banksy-type situation, but not as. It's like stealth cool. Yeah. Like that guy doesn't care about his own social media account. I'll read that, the Invader.

Invader article. I actually do think he probably has a big Instagram account. Yeah, it probably does. He probably does. Let's be honest. By the way, New Yorker subscribers, I have two new articles. articles of mine have gone up in the last two or three weeks. Yeah.

So yeah, definitely go check it out. If you haven't the New Yorker in a while. Two of them were on the homepage the other day because they had a new one and then they brought up an old one for the resolutions. Then a couple weeks before that, another one. So there's a lot of Cal Newport right now. So go to the New Yorker, look for my Cal Newport page. You'll see some of the new stuff, the new stuff I wrote. The online version.

The online version. Yeah. Or the app. Yeah. You can find it easily in the app as well. All right. we got a Cal React segment coming up next where I react to something that's spreading on the internet. But first, let's talk about a couple more sponsors.

Sound effect. In particular, let's start by talking about our friends at Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage, the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Shopify is there to help you grow. So what's nice about Shopify, we're talking about online shopping? Sure, all in one e-commerce platform, industry leading conversion of interested buyers. You're talking about in-person? Sure. In-person POS system. Whatever you're selling, wherever you're selling Shopify has you covered.

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also want to talk about our friends at Grammally earlier in this episode. We're unsolicited and unrelated to Gramerly being our sponsor. One of our readers wrote in and talked about how much he enjoyed using Grammarly. That is a real testimonial from one of our readers, listeners, I should say. I'm not surprised that our listeners appreciate Grammally because as we talk about on the show, writing is critical. If you write clearly, you'll be taken more seriously.

you'll be more persuasive. You will think more clearly. And when it comes to writing, Gramerly is there to support you from start to finish. For over 10 years, Gramerly has been powered by AI technology that you can trust to help you access, that you can access in all the places where you write.

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It'll help you get unstuck. It's even better now at polishing your writing. You can say, for example, improve this paragraph, shorten this paragraph, and you can see it tighten up your writing. can even help you get through your emails quicker, have Grammally pointed towards your email apps, and it can summarize your emails, and even provide suggested replies, so you don't have to write that whole reply from scratch.

Other things they can do now, let's say you have a big presentation coming up, Gramerly can create a personalized outline, so you have something to start with with a thing about your presentation, and so on. So Gramerly is there to help you not just get your grammar right, not just get your tone right, not just help you be more concise, but now to help you even brainstorm and think and sharpen your writing.

So writing is critical. Grammarly will help you do that writing better. So start being more productive at work and go to Gramerly.com slash podcast to download Gramerly for free today. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y. Dot com slash podcast. And that's our sponsors. All right. So over our third and final segment, like to take something that's going around the internet and react to it.

Today I want to react to a YouTube video that some of our listeners were sending in because it's going around the internet right now. I'm looking at it now. It has over 1.5 million views. And so I thought we would take a look. For those who are watching instead of just listening, I have it loaded up on the screen here in the corner with a close captioning. So the title of this YouTube video is, I'm a 33-year-old woman with no life, my advice to young women. So we have a young woman talking straight to camera. Here I'll read the close caption of the beginning.

I want to give you some advice on how to deal with this and cope with no sense of direction. But for now, I kind of want to just tell you my story of how I got here, and it's not long, and it's not that sad. All right, so then we get a story from this person talking straight to camera about why she is now 33 years old and feels like she has no life. So let me summarize. I took some notes here. Let me summarize the story that she tells. Coming out of college, she was interested in digital media. Got a good internship in digital media.

But then when she applied for what she described as fun media department jobs, she didn't get them. They kept saying, no, you don't have enough experience. And so not able to get those jobs she desired, she fell back and said, I'll just do retail. So I fell back for retail jobs. Some time passed, an opportunity came up for her to get a, quote, good project manager job. So this is a job with benefits, normal salary. I think this was out west. But then after a little while, she got fired and has no jobs.

as she says it was so devastating. It's back like she was when she was looking for her original jobs after her internship. She's having a hard time finding a solid job. She did some contract work for about eight months. But now she says, it feels like no one wants to hire me. No one wants anything to do with me because she, they feel like she doesn't have the right experience. It seems like her new plan based on what she says in this video is to make content for YouTube and hope maybe that works out. All right, so there's a couple things I want to talk about here.

First of all, I want to say this is a useful type of video to exist. I think having people actually talk about the realities of their engagement with the world of work is really useful because we don't really get a clear picture, especially young people. They don't get a really clear picture about how this works. You have sort of abstract books maybe. And then you have this, the typical YouTube TikTok presentation of work. It's usually a lot of people who make a living on YouTube and TikTok kind of talk about how they make a living on YouTube and TikTok.

And maybe you get exposed to some sort of celebrity workers, you know, famous writers and artists and sports stars, this type of thing. That's kind of it. So we don't really get exposed to a lot of the reality of how the world of work works and what to expect and how hard it can be and how emotionally hard it can be. And so to see that and have someone just say it straight to camera, no holds bar I think is really important.

Oh, this is how the world of work can work for most people, and it's really hard. And if you're feeling emotionally drained by your difficulty in the world of work, instead of feeling like you're an outlier, you watch a video like this, you say, yeah, this is, I'm not alone. Work is hard. We just don't hear those stories. the stories don't get amplified.

Second, however, I think this video is a good reason to revisit some ideas for my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you. I think in addition to being a useful window into the reality of the world of work, this video also gives a window into the reality of how a lot of people, she's a young millennial, but Jin Z probably feels the same way, but especially millennials just when we were raised, it gives a window into some of the issues with how we think about work. So the model that comes out of this video, at least this was my impression, was a model of work in which you figured out what you want to do, digital media, whatever it is, and then you wait to get chosen to do it. So then someone chooses you,

okay, I will let you come and do this for my company. They choose you to do it. So it's like getting in the college, right? Getting accepted in the graduate school. and then you're good. I got chosen. I put out my applications and someone said, I choose you. You get to come into this world now and be a digital media, whatever.

And if that doesn't happen, then you're kind of lost. So you figure out what you want to do. You put yourself out there, hey, can I come do this for you? And either they say yes and you're happy or they say no. And then, you know, you really can end up in a hard situation. What's the alternative model to think about this? Well, it's the model from my book so good. can ignore you, which is based on career capital.

It says the whole job industry, the whole job market, it's all about what do you have to offer specifically that's valuable. And the collection of your rare and valuable skills, your skills that are rare and valuable to the market in general is what we call career capital. The more of it you have, the more opportunities and leverage you have. And therefore, the whole game, especially right out of college, is building career capital as quickly as possible. It changes the way you think about things,

because especially when you're young, you're not focused on what do I want my job to do for me. All right, I found this job has all the things I want. I hope they select me. And instead turns it around and say, what can I offer to the jobs? Well, not much yet because I'm new. So let me get my foot in the door somewhere and aggressively build up rare and valuable skills. This is the only way I have to take control over my career is to be good at things that people need. Now I can start to dictate.

I want this position instead of that. I don't want to do this work, but I want to do that work. I want to be remote. I'm taking the summers off. I want to make a lot of money. I want to live in the city. You get more and more autonomy and control of your career, the more valuable you're making yourself.

And when you have this mindset, it changes the way you approach your day-to-day jobs because you approach the jobs from the standpoint of, you know, a musician who's trying to get to the first chair in the symphony. Practice. How do I get better? What are I not good at? How do I get better at that thing?

Now, especially when you're young, you don't have as much going on. You have the time and energy to actually do this career capital development. When you don't have this mindset, when you have the mindset of, I want to get chosen for the job that's meant for me, it can lead to a lot of these type of traps. And there's a lot of, I think, bad luck and unfortunate circumstances that happened in the story as well. But there was also, I think, some mindset, unforced errors, right? So for example, when she didn't get chosen for the kind of dream digital media job that her internship had prepared her for, what did she say her only other option was, was just to go back to retail. As opposed to say, well, I have a college degree and these other types of things.

There's got to be somewhere I can get in my foot in the door and start building up the skills really fast to then take more control. Oh, it's going to take five years of building up skills to take control. So I don't need to be in the digital media department of this place. I just need to get in somewhere and start building up skills. I can move my way over there, right? So when you get rid of the, if it's not my dream job, then why bother I should just sort of go back and work at retail. That's maybe an unforced error you wouldn't make if there is career capital thinking. It also just affects how you approach your work.

When you think about accumulating skills versus just do I like this job? Yeah, I like this job, but maybe not. When you're just thinking about the job and if it's what you want, you're not building up aggressively your value to the organization. It's you're vulnerable. And then when the downsizing happens, you know, you might be closer to the chopping block because they don't point to you and say, well,

she does this for us that no one else does. She's invaluable over here or there. Of course, she's not going to be the one we let go. So there's a mindset change that can help. Now, of course, the whole problem with all of this is it's not the difficulty of doing this. is not evenly distributed.

For some people, a career capital mindset is going to come much easier. There are many more opportunities to do it just because of who they are or the opportunities or connections they have. It's not a fairly distributed system, but it still seems to be the way the job market works, even if it works differently for different people. So we shouldn't let our frustration with this system is not fair hide the reality of how the system works, which is a market. market.

Skill is what matters. Building skill is the way to think about it. So, anyways, that's my whole book so good that can't ignore you. It's an incredibly non-romantic book. It's really not the way probably to write a book that a lot of people are going to get excited about

and pass on to their friends because it's not telling you these stories about, man, my life's going to be so awesome if I just follow my passion. It's incredibly analytical. It's incredibly like economic, build rare and valuable skills. Work might not even be that fun

for the first five years. It shouldn't be that fun for the first five years. Your training. Your work will be cool after 10 years when you've gotten really good at something and have some leverage. It's not a romantic book. It's not a quick fix book. But it's now been 12 years since that book came out.

And it holds. I think its ideas hold. The main thing has happened with that book between the current generation and the generation that I'm in when I wrote that book. So what's changed in the 10 years is that when I wrote that book, it was aimed at millennials. So I'm an old millennial. The person has videos, she's 33's, you know,

youngest side of millennial. Whereas if you're in college now or 23 or 24, you're Gen Z. Millennials were largely raised with this idea of like follow your passion, find your passion, match it to your work. And this book was pushing back against that. I think Jin Z was raised in a different way. Gen Z does not, I don't think they see the world through the same follow your passion. Everything will work out. There's more of a cynicism and a different type of naivete in Gen Z.

I don't quite have my arms around how Gen Z thinks about the workplace. It's not this peer follow your passion mindset. That's a millennial thing. There is more of the self as economic entity. I think they grew up with monetized social media and everyone posting. So they see themselves as brands and time is something to be monetized or not. I mean, it's a whole different way of thinking about things. So the world, the thing I push back against is so good they can't ignore.

You might not be as resident for Gen Z. But I think the solution is still the solution. see the world of work as a market. Skills are what you bring to the table. The more you bring to the table, the more you get to come away with. So the game is, especially in your 20s and early 30s, building up those skills as quickly as possible. And then the game switches in your mid-30s onwards to having to courage to take those skills out for a spin and shape your work the way you want it and not just follow the existing trajectories.

Anyways, I haven't had a chance to talk about careers recently, so I thought that video was a good opportunity. The link is in the show notes. It's a great video. I think it's emotionally very raw and inspiring in certain humanistic ways. Worth a watch, and I'm glad that that was posted. Also, glad to have an excuse to talk about career capital. No one's favorite topic to hear about. All right, Jesse, let me save whatever voice I have left.

Why don't we wrap up today's episode right there? Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week, probably with an interview episode. One, I think you're going to like, so definitely check it out. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast,

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