Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 3: Origin of my Productivity Obsession, Analog Relationships, and Detaching from Digital Judgment | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader queries on the origin of my productivity obsession, how digital minimalists can form relationships in a distracted world, and how to care less about what people thing about you (hint: stop using social media).To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.comFull list of topics tackled in today’s episode: * Ideal length of deep work sessions. * Origin of my productivity obsession. * Making progress on projects in lockdown. * Dealing with jobs that don’t respect deep work. * My notebook habits. * Finding relationships as a digital minimalist. * How to study on a phone. * Building a blog audience. * Caring less about what people thing about you. * The origins of drive. * Cutting back on self-help. * Advice for my 20-year-old self. * Better organizing information. * Solidifying lockdown lessons.Thank you to listener Bit Holiday for the original theme music and transition sound effect (bitholiday.net). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Today we have a good show. When I was actually going through the recent batch of questions to pull out the ones I wanted to answer today, I was struck by the fact that a lot of them, I would say by far the majority, were really questions about the deep life. Now, I guess this is not surprising. I think the last few months have been a period where a lot of us are thinking about bigger picture questions,

but I did find that interesting. So it actually took me some work to pull out enough questions in all three categories to keep them balanced. I thought you would appreciate getting some insight into what I'm seeing. So among other topics today, and we do a lot, but among other topics today, we're going to get into the origin of my productivity obsession, how a digital minimalist millennial can form deep relationships when everyone else around here is constantly distracted by their devices and also how do we make the life lessons learn during the coronavirus pandemic something more permanent? So I think these are all exciting topics.

I look forward to diving into them. Now remember, these questions are solicited from my mailing list. So if you want to ask your own question, you need to make sure that you are signed up for my mailing list, you can do so at calnewport.com. All right, let's get started. It's time for work questions. M asks, how does one determine how long a deep work session should be?

I get this one a lot. My advice would be not to get too caught up in rules here. Different types of work are going to be conducive for different duration sessions. So some deep work is, incredibly draining. If you're trying to learn, for example, a very complicated skills, so you're doing deliberate practice. And in particular, if you're not used to really straining yourself to learn something hard, you might not be able to go more than 30 minutes without having to take a break. On the other hand, if you're brainstorming, you're brainstorming, and it's a topic that's really

interesting to you, you might easily be able to, let's say, wander for hours thinking about it. So don't get cut up in rules. Let your own attention be a guide. When you're working on something, do it without distraction. Remember, any context or network switching means a session is no longer a deep work session, so you want to do it without distraction. But once you make those commitments, let your own concentration be your guide. When you feel it, waver in a way that you cannot control. It's time to take a break or move on to something else.

Speaking of something else, the next question is from a minute. He asks, when did you realize that productivity was important to you and how challenging was the initial efforts to be more productive? Amit, that's a good question. I can give you an exact answer, college. So if we go back to, let's say, 19-year-old Cal Newport, we see something quite different. I had come out of high school, a public school in New Jersey, as basically one of these kids that was just pretty smart. You know, I got good grades.

I did very well on the SATs the first time I took. I ran a business, which was interesting. I played a lot of guitar and a band. I mean, I was sort of like a smart, relatively interesting kids, so I got into a good college. But I was a lazy student in high school. I did not like the discomfort of studying. I actually won an award that used to give out awards to students. This was actually during middle school, but they would give out the teachers joke awards to the students at the end of the year. And I won the homework in homeroom award, which I think tells you something about where my productivity mindset was. So that was me.

We're trying to catch up here to the 19-year-old me. I told you where the inflection point is going to happen. I go to Dartmouth College. I show up. I put my lazy, procrastinatory approaches to work on college level, Ivy League level, schoolwork, and it doesn't go as well. Turns out that's harder. It turns out the kids from the prep schools.

which seemed to be about half the kids who were there. I'd never really been around prep school kids, but a lot of these kids came from prep schools. They knew how to do that. They knew how to pull all-nighters and study at the last minute and get it done, but I had no real experience with schoolwork at this level. And so, you know, I struggled, not terribly, but just had sort of average freshman year grades, A's and B's, I think, for the most part.

One or two courses I had to switch over to the non-recording option, which is basically you get a limited number of past fails. so you can throw on at the last minute when a course is not going that well. So this is going on, and at some point I have this revelation, I should probably take this more seriously. And I think probably the main motivation for that inspiration was seeing some of my first student loan payments. This was back in the early 2000s, where they would allow you to take on staggering amounts of student loan debt. I guess they still do, but back then they didn't even really, it seemed like by the end of my college

career, they were a little bit more wary about, are you sure that you want to take on this much debt? But back then, it was free money during that initial dot-com boom as the way they advertised it. So I think seeing those initial statements got me concerned, wow, I should probably take this a little bit more seriously. So what I did is I launched an experiment of self-improvement. I said, I am going to figure out how to study because I want to get better grades. this thing that the prep school kids are doing where they just stay up all night, I'm not good at that. So I got to figure this out. So for a whole semester, this would be the fall quarter of my sophomore year, I began to systematically experiment with different techniques for taking notes, studying for exams,

working on problem sets, and writing papers. Some of these techniques worked well, some of them didn't. Some of them were overkill. As a computer science major, who was also an art history minor, I thought that there could be a great conciliance there, and so I coded up a custom flashcard program to help me memorize the dates of the artwork. Turns out complete waste of time, you already have them written down, you might as well just flip through the cards.

There's no reason to put that information into a computer, but, you know, I experimented. Some things work, some things didn't. The results of these experimentation is that my grades got drastically better. And I mean really better. I got a four-row in every quarter starting my sophomore fall until my senior spring in which I got all A's except 1A minus that semester.

That was my first non-A grade after my freshman year was in my senior spring. Obviously, I did not become a lot smarter between my freshman and sophomore year. It was the more systematic study habit that made a big difference. So I was sold. I said, this is crazy. I'm doing significantly better at this cognitive task while spending a lot less time than most of my peers. I never did an all-nighter in college.

And I said, and it's because of my techniques. The productivity techniques made all the difference. So I became a bit of a zealot for the power of these techniques. And I thought, you know, I should write about this. And I signed my first book deal when I was 20. And they're for student books. And I think the rest, I guessed, is history from there. So that is how I got obsessed with productivity on it.

It was my student loan statements. Caroline asks, how do you make deep and meaningful progress on a work project that seems to be going nowhere, but you are expected to get done, especially during quarantine? Well, Caroline, I get where you're coming from. I have many projects I've had to push through during quarantine, many of them administrative in nature and not exactly what I would describe as a passionate pursuit. I'll give you a hint. One of these projects rhymes with Rudget and starts with a B. Yes, I had to build out the budget for our graduate program for next year,

which was an exceedingly tedious task that ended up me spending hours moving things in Excel spreadsheet. So I'm just saying I'm empathetic. A couple pieces of advice I want to give. To the extent possible, if you can realign the project, even if it's just a nudge

towards something that actually seems more efficacious. That makes a difference. I used to talk about this when I did student advice and would give toxicologists as technique, or I should say phenomenon, not technique called productive procrastination. Because I had this theory that when students procrastinate on schoolwork, it's often because they don't really have a good plan for how they're going to study. They just vaguely think that they're going to go to the library and get after it. And our brain has evolved to be very good at evaluating plants.

Humans can come up with plants and execute them. That's part of our species, real power and advantage. So how does that actually work from a neurological perspective? It means our brain needs to be able to generate plants but also assess them. If a plan seems good, like why don't we throw a spear at the mammoth from far away, you'll feel motivated to do it. if the plan feels like it's not so good, such as maybe I'll just charge the mammoth and take it out with my fist, your brain will say, let's not put motivation behind that particular plan, which you will experience as what we would call today procrastination.

So I used to tell students, if you're really procrastinating, it might be in part because your brain doesn't trust your plan. So have a better plan. If it doesn't trust it, what you're going to do is going to get you a good grade or it's going to take way too long, then it's not going to motivate you. but I always noticed that students that had really structured approaches to their studying had a lot less trouble with procrastination. So you can kind of tell right now I'm stuck on the student world after that recent question. But I think this phenomenon is real, productive procrastination. So if a project feels like it's not going to go anywhere,

or if a project's important but you don't really know how you're going to accomplish it, it's very hard to get motivation to do it. It's very hard to do make work. as any number of bureaucrats in certain situations have learned in their experience. Make work is very demotivating. So if you can realign or nudge this project towards something that you actually believe is useful and something you know how to do, you know you can accomplish that goal, you might find that the instinct of not wanting to do it, the drudgery of the procrastination will reduce.

Another piece of advice, don't be afraid of actually trying to take that project off your plate. I think a lot of people don't do nearly enough of this in the knowledge work context. Going to your team, going to your manager. I don't think this is worth our investment. Here's why. Let's not do this. Now, to make that particular trick works, you almost always have to then have the CODA, which is, and now let's do this thing instead. I think this project's going to get us more than what we're doing over here.

Over here, we're spinning our wheels. We don't really have this information. We're not quite sure what we're doing. This alternative. I think that might be the smarter project. Because again, if it's something that you believe it's useful and you know how to do it, this notion of procrastination or drudgery is going to significantly reduce. So if you can do that, that's great.

If you can't, you're stuck with this thing like me with my budget. It has to get done. You don't want to do it. You're not very good at doing it, but it has to get done. Then it's time to actually put your grinding hat on. And what does that mean? Organize your efforts. Make sure you have a plan.

your brain trust that you know what you're doing. If you don't understand some steps, go out there and get that information. So take away that particular rationale for procrastination. You don't know what you're doing. And then day by day, piece by piece, you do the grinding. An hour today, two hours next day, an hour today. And over time, at least find some pride in the fact that progress is accumulating. Sometimes there's just parts of your life in which grinding happens. And so you're just going to have to get after that. The next question is from E. and let's see what he asked. The company I work for does not value deep work at all.

Ah, Philistines. We had an open-door policy before COVID, and now we're expected to be 100% available by Instant Messenger during the workday. Well, E, I think, first of all, send them a copy of my most recent New Yorker article, which not only gets into the origins or remote work, but gets into what makes remote work hard and talks about what we need to do,

to make remote work actually work. Again, I'll give you the spoiler here. Structuring your efforts in the office, having more clarity, having more processes is essential if you're going to be able to effectively work in an distributed environment. So send them that article, send them a copy of deep work. If that doesn't work, immediately quit.

No, I'm joking. Don't do that. I think you should because if you don't listen to me, then what type of company is this? But let's say, okay, you're not going to immediately quit. Your best bet might then be to try the deep-to-shallow work ratio tip from deep work. Quick reminder, you go to whoever supervises you, you say this is what deep work is, this is what shallow work is. Both of these things are important for our success.

Given my particular role, what ratio of deep-to-shallow work hours each week you think is optimal? What ratio do you think would produce the most value for the company? different positions will have different answers to that question. Once they actually agree to a ratio, you say, great, let me go measure and you can come back and say, wow, I'm way short of that ratio because let's say the messenger culture, I've really no time when I can ever be more than like five or ten minutes away from Messenger. Like, what should we do about this? How do we hit the mark we think is going to create the most value for the company? You would be surprised by the amount of workplace reforms that this exercise can generate, even in organizations where you would swear that they will never give an inch. on workplace culture. The deep to shallow work ratio actually can unlock a lot of those ossified

work habits. And the key to the work to shallow work ratio approach, that is positive. How do we maximize the value I produce is a question that a manager can get behind. When you instead say, hey, manager, let me tell you the things I don't like that you're doing. You bother me too much on email. You schedule too many meetings. You're not running this company well. What are you going to do about it? That doesn't go very far. You come in and say, hey, I'm trying to be more valuable. Now they're on your side.

Big changes can happen. So if they don't listen to my article, they don't listen to my book. If you're not willing to quit for some reason, then try the deep, the shallow work ratio. All right. Final work question, Paul asks, how do I choose a valuable skill to pursue so I can accumulate career capital? Paul, this is the question. I mean, this is the big question about. actually trying to advance in your career to build a career in which you have autonomy,

where you have a sense of mastery, where you can then use these skills as leverage to push your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. As you know, because you've used the term career capital, this is the thesis of my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore you. Building up skills that are rare and valuable is the key to almost everything good and satisfying and meaningful in a career. So you're asking the right question. The answer? It's really, really hard, be willing to work really hard at it. Finding the right skill to put effort into in a lot of knowledge work context is way more difficult than it should be, but it is. So, you know, I've mentioned this before, but Scott Young and I have this course top performer, which is all

about that. How to identify skills that are valuable, then apply deliberate practice to get really good at them really fast. And we ended up after we learned this from the pilot, spending a lot of time in the course talking about exactly that question. How do you actually identify the skill that's valuable because it is so non-trivial? One piece of advice I'll give you from that, from that research we did. Take people in your field whose current setup professionally resonates with you. So the goal, they represent sort of what I want in my career. Then figure out how did they do it? particular, what were the key things they did that allowed them to advance to this position where they are? If it's someone that's in your own company and you can take them out for coffee, do that if they ever allow us to do that again.

Are we allowed to do that? I can't keep up. Coffee, but 6.5 feet, but if it's tea, then maybe it should be 7 feet. And if the sun's out, maybe 4. I don't know. I can't keep up with it. But whenever we're allowed to get coffee again, take them out for coffee if you know them and talk to them about their career. A little caveat, don't ask people for advice. I've learned this as a professional advice writer. Most people are very bad at giving advice. It's really difficult to actually distill your experience on the fly into the actual correct

actual steps. Just talk to them about what they actually did. What was their career trajectory? How did they get from A to B? How did they get from B to C? And then like a journalist, pull out of their experience what you think the key things were that helped them advance to where they are today, the place that resonates. From there, you should be able to extract the skills that were valuable.

Now you know what to work on. There's other ways to do this too, but I think there's a journalist method. Start from the example, figure out how they got there, extract the skills from the story, then focus on those skills. Like 80% of the cases, that works really well. I don't know where I got 80%, by the way, is that that is a non-scientific number. I just said that. All right, well, enough of that.

Let's move on to technology questions. Don asks, what programs or applications do you use to take notes or capture information? Well, a lot. Don, I'm a notebook guy, both physically and digitally. They're some of my favorite possessions. So I'll just run down the list. I use Evernote. Evernote is where I organize ideas for the most part, book ideas, blog post ideas, ideas about my writing business, ideas about academic papers or academic research topics. I might want to pursue. I have so much information I generate. It goes into Evernote. I use Google Drive to create documents.

So if I'm capturing a particular, let's say, plan, like here's my summer research plan, the papers I want to write, how I want to break that down, how I want to organize those efforts. I'll use Google Drive shared documents. I have a moleskin. I've always used moleskins.

I've used them since 2004. Usually for capturing big ideas. about living a deeper life. So I always have a moleskin with me to capture those ideas. I review that about once a month. I also use a particular type of spiral-bound grid notebook when I'm working on research, I think for sure, so solving theoretical computer science problems, or sometimes when I'm not writing down an idea, an idea about how to live a deeper life would go on my moleskin. But let's say I'm trying to map out a new business strategy or work out a plan for one of those ideas. I'll use these grid notebooks as well. The ones I like, it's called Marumon. M-A-R-U-M-A-N. They're from Japan. You can order

them on Amazon. Beautiful paper. Really good paper. A little bit creamy, not too creamy. Takes to ink very well, especially if you're using, let's say like I like a Unibol micro with a 0.5 millimeter roller tip. It's a really fine tip. The grids are not too dark, but you can see them. I love those notebooks. They're beautiful. I buy them in stacks. of five to ten and I have them everywhere. All right. So that's where I am with notebooks. McKenzie Ann has the next question.

How do unplugged and unaddicted millennials form deep relationships when those around them, including previous generations, are still plugged in and addicted? So if you're a digital minimalist, how do you meet people when no one else around you is? McKinsey Ann, that's a good question. My biggest piece of advice is join things to do things in the real world. Join things that require you to actually go to physical places and do physical things with other people. Get out of the digital world. Get into the physical world.

Skilled endeavors tend to, for whatever reason, foster deeper relationships, whether this be friendship or romantic. So develop skills. These could be professional skills. you're a writer, you could have a writer's group. If you're a beer brewer, you can meet with other beer brewers. It could be hobbies or athletic skills, biking, having a biking group. You row, you get together with a rowing group. Skilled endeavors tend to have, I think, a more of a coherence than if it's a sort of anyone can join type of endeavor. That's how I think people used to

meet people. That's how I think people can continue to meet people, do things in the real world when possible with skills. All right, Ms. Lay asks, how can I study from my phone when I can't afford a laptop or PC? I'm assuming this might have something to do with the massively increased dependence temporarily on distance or online learning.

Well, my advice is to get the information off of your phone and onto physical paper and then study off the paper. This is how, we used to do it. When I went to college, I didn't have a laptop. I had a kind of cumbersome desktop TV, or not TV, computer on my desk in my dorm room, but that was about it. So I spent a lot of time with books. I couldn't keep all those books with me. So notebooks were everything. You would copy information in the notebooks in your own writing, copied on the note cards with something you're

trying to memorize. And then the advantage is these notebooks are really portable. And so you can bring them with you anywhere. So you can study anywhere. Go anywhere you can find some piece or quiet and you have the information with you. You get a double whammy here. A, just recording things in your own words, that transference of information from the passive consumption to active recreation, that alone is going to help you build a framework for understanding. And then you have it in a form that is easy to study. Doesn't require batteries. You don't have to share it with anyone else. You can take it anywhere that you can find silence. So Ms. Lay, that would be my advice. Alex asks, how can I make my blog or writing stand out and become popular?

Well, Alex, I get asked that question a lot as a professional writer. I have two quick pieces of advice. One, you have to become a non-amateur writer. You don't need to be Anne Lamont to have an audience. But if your writing comes across as amateur, people sense that. And it's actually much harder to form a following or people who are going to stick at you. So how do you become a non-amateur writer? In my experience, it's not enough to just do a lot of writing. The thing, more than anything else, that accelerates writing skill, is writing for editing. So doing writing where someone on the other end is going to edit it, perhaps it's a case where if they don't like it, they're going to reject it. This is how I got started in writing. I worked my way up to become a

columnist at the student newspaper. I worked my way up at the Dartmouth humor magazine. Shout out to the Jackal Lantern from a contributing writer to an editor by the time I got, I was editor-in-chief by the time I got to my junior year. When I was trying to sharpen my advice writing, I began to pitch online magazines. It had very low bars, but there was a bar. See, had to have an idea good enough and written good enough that they would publish it. And then I worked my way up. When I was in graduate school, there was a much better online magazine called Flack Magazine, sort of like a hipster, a Gen X-type magazine that no longer exist, but they had higher editorial standards. These guys knew what they were doing. And so that became my training ground. When I was trying to then advance from an advice writer to

a general idea book writer, Flack Magazine became my training ground because it was hard to get your pieces accepted. You know, they were pretty demanding. editing editors. And so I would try out new techniques. I would try out new writing styles and formats. And that really pushed me. So to become non-amature writer, find a way to write for other people where it's going to be edited or maybe rejected that will make you better fast. Two, I think in the blogging world, it helps to have a point of view that some people are going to find quite engaging or aspirational and preferably a point of view that's not for everybody. That tends to attract an audience because the people for whom your point of view resonates,

not only they want to hear about it because they find it aspirational, but they're going to enjoy you being an avatar of their own interest and helping to defend this thing that they like against other ideas. So we see this in the rise, for example, of the minimalism blogging community. This happened starting around 2008 into the early 2010s. They had this particular lifestyle they were preaching. And it was not for everybody, but it's quite aspirational. You see this more recently in the fire, financial independence retire early community.

They have a pretty ambitious aspirational approach to life, and they defend it unapologetically. It grows a crowd. So that'd be my advice. Don't worry about pleasing everybody. Don't worry about caveating everything, so no one will be upset. Have a point of view you you believe in. That's aspirational. It's going to make people feel better about themselves in their lives.

It's not for everybody. be their avatar, you know, have something to say. That will be your best bet for actually gathering a tribe that's going to care about it, care about what you have to say and be a really good source of support. All right, it's time for questions about the deep life. Ken asks, what habits can I implement daily to become the type of person who cares less about what others think about me? I was doing well on my anti-rant streak.

I think I've been pretty calm and collected, but you may have accidentally pushed me into rant territory because my advice to you is very simple. Get the hell off social media. I'm telling you, it is warping the brains of millions. Now, here's my source that I think, read this, I mean, Ken, you should read this, everyone should read this. Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's a very important, subtle work of philosophy of technology. Postman was a

studied under McLuhan. McLuhan, of course, innovated the medium is the message idea, which is a deep idea that requires a lot of unpacking, but Postman makes it more accessible. And basically Postman's point is the dominant forms of media to which you are exposed can actually change the way that you process the world. It can change the way you think. It can change the way that your brain actually operates. And I think what social media has done in recent years has really warped the way people understand the world. I think the power of these positive approval indicators likes and not likes. You say the right thing and you get love. You say the wrong thing and you get attacked. It hits these dopamine buttons that really makes you hyper aware.

What does everyone say about me? Oh, I really don't want to say the wrong thing because who knows what's going to come down on me. It really changes the way you perceive the world and your fear of judgment. There's a lot of other negative effects that social media has on the way your brain functions. The list is very long. I don't want to get into all of it right now. But can your problem that you report about caring too much about what other people think of you? That is one of the real issues if you marinate your brain in the world of social media too long. literally changes the way that you perceive the world. So that habit will get you there.

Okay, so you might say, but, Cal, there are reasons why I need social media. I've heard all the reasons. They fall into two big categories. Informational. All right. Hey, there's certain information I can only get on social media. So I try not to date these podcasts too much with current events, but when I'm recording this podcast is right into the third week of protest marches

surrounding George Floyd and social media has been, among other things, a source of information about when, let's say, a particular protest march is going to happen. Right. So that's a reason. Another reason in support for social media is inspiration. I think this is legitimate. I used to undervalue this. I think I should value it more.

You know, for some people who are going through a particular transnational, that's difficult. Finding other people who are doing the same thing or have succeeded in it can be a very important source of inspiration if, let's say you're a guy trying to get your act together and you want to be in better shape for your family. Going to Jocko Willink's Twitter link, what's he doing on that Twitter feed? Every day he takes a picture of his watch at 4.30 a.m., which is when he gets up to exercise. I think for a lot of people, that can actually be the nudge they need to get up and do their own work. So I get inspirational purposes as well.

But here's the thing. You can get informational advantages of social media. You can get the inspirational advantage of social media without having to marinate your brain in the cogitation warping aspects of social media. How do you do it? Set up a dummy account. Set up an account for these platforms

that you do not ever post things on. No one knows. it's you. There's no performance. Made up dummy account. You can use that account now to follow sources of information about things that you care about. You can use it to follow sources of inspiration. And then treat that thing like you would treat a TV show you really like. I go on, you know, it's on three times a week during this time, you know, 30 minutes at 8 o'clock. And during those appointment, you go on with this account where you are not visible to the world. No one's looking at you. No one's judging you. No one's giving you likes. No one's giving you thumbs down. No one's

ratioing you. I don't know what ratio means, but I've heard it. It's a Twitter thing. I don't get it, but it seems to be something that I guess matters. So no one's doing whatever this ratio. No one's throwing ratios towards your avatar. Do I have that right? ratios towards your avatar? I don't know how that works. But you can still get any of it. information, you can still get the inspiration, but you can avoid the brain warping that comes when you are on social media all the time, engaging with it all the time. You show me a single person during, let's say, the three months of lockdown who came away from that saying, you know what made me feel better about myself during that period? You know what really got me through that period?

Yelling at people on Twitter. You know, that's what got me doing. No, what got through it is connecting to my friends, to my family's, FaceTiming with. my family, going out and actually helping to distribute the meals at the public school down the street. It's the actual connection that matters. All right. So that's my, that's my ramp. You know, some people do very fine with social media. It doesn't change their brain very much. They don't have much effect on them. That's fine. But if it is, there is a cure. Step away. Use dummy accounts to get the information or inspiration that you need. Treat it like appointment viewing. Do it for a half hour three times a week. And move on with the rest of actually developing.

a deep life that you actually care about. So Ken, I blame you for getting me ranting, but I do think it's important for people to hear. You can do that. You can do that. You can still be inspired. You can still know about things, but your life is going to be a lot better. Read Neil Postman. It's brilliant. Media can change the way your brain works. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram does not change your brain in a direction that I think most people would say makes their life better. All right, rant over. Ross, maybe you can bring us down here. What's your question?

Why do you think some people are so driven while most people are not? Do you think it's an acquired trait or that some people are just born with it? Ross, it's a huge question and I'm surprised we don't talk about it more. Almost every example you find of impactful, meaningful, or exceptional achievement all comes down to a relentless drive. to keep training, to keep getting better, to get over the hardships. I mean, this X-factor seems to be the thing we should most be trying to understand and inculcate where we can. So how do people get this X-factor? We don't really know.

We don't really know. Is there a genetic piece to it? There might be some. So Dave Epstein in his book, The Sports Gene, he talks some. There's some research about what's called trainability. when it comes to various physical pursuits where some people, they are just very well suited to taking training directions and just executing. All right, coach, what?

10 miles? I'm on it. And they'll just do it. You know, there may be some genetic piece of that. It's a huge advantage if you have that. Because if you have that trainability inclination and then you can be connected to good coaching, you can get so good at things so fast. So maybe there's some genetic component to that.

I've noticed in my own, I've trained to be elite levels in writing. I've trained to be in elite levels in academic research. I've seen a lot of environmental factors that play a big role. Two things that seem to be important is one, actually having confidence that you know how people accomplish a thing that you're trying to accomplish. There's a reason why a lot of professional athletes have kids that are professional athletes, at a much disproportionately higher rate. Now, you might say, well, some of that might just be genes.

I mean, if you're seven foot tall, your kids are more likely to be tall, and that might help you be in the NBA or something like this. But it's not just that. If you read any of the classic sports biographies, like Mike Piazza's memoir is a great one, or hear interviews from current young sports hotshots like Bryce Harper, what do you learn? The fact that their parent really understood that world made a bit of. big difference. And their parents, like, here's what you need to do. Here's how it works. It's this

much training. It takes this long. If you have confidence, I know how to do this and how someone gets good, just like we talked about in that earlier question about productive procrastination, you're much less likely to procrastinate. You're much more likely to do the training. Also, I learned when researching so good they can't ignore you, my book about career advice, that being exposed early on just the right way that makes you really feel that a particular direction is what you really want to do, that makes a huge difference. That's all environmental exposure. I don't believe that our genetic code evolves fast enough for you to have a gene for the particular professional pursuits that exist in the 21st century modern world. I think that's exposure. Again, a lot of professional musicians,

for example, have professional musician parents. So they're kind of experience. to this real early, like, that's what I really want to do. So, in other words, I think environment plays a big role. If you're exposed to something early and really feel like you want to do it, that can make a big difference. If you are around experts and they make you confident that you know how people actually accomplish this, it's much more easy to stick with the work. Those things matter as well, but it's still a pretty big mystery.

And I'm glad you asked it because we should know more about it. What makes people have drive and others don't? That's it. I mean, that's it. man, that is the whole question in almost every pursuit. Someone who claims their name is meatpacking asked a question, what's the best way to stop reading self-help blogs like yours

and just get on with hard, deep work? I'm offended, meatpacking. Why would you ever stop reading my blog? It's the key to everything. More concretely, I guess, I would say earlier, I gave the advice that you should treat sources of inspiration and information online. like a TV show that's on at set times, on set days, and do your reading then.

So, you know, 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock on Thursdays, my must see TV as I read Cal's blog. You know, do it that way. You can get the information without it becoming a crutch or something that takes over your whole life. Winnie asks, what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self? You know, I wrote an essay about this in 2008, as I was just finishing. my PhD, I wrote an essay about what advice I would have given in 2004 to the 22-year-old me that was just starting at MIT, just starting as a doctoral candidate. And what I said in that essay is, man, I wish I had thought when I first started grad school to spend more time actually trying

to figure out what is the output that's going to matter when I'm done with this. What's the type of thing that's really going to matter in the job market? when I'm done with this program and then work backwards to figure out how to do more of that, even if it was harder than the things I wanted to do. I didn't really do that. I wrote papers about things that are interesting and I think in some cases I probably didn't challenge myself as much as I could have. If I had to do my doctoral program over, I would have been more careful about selecting problems and moved away from problems that were just like kind of interesting and tractable, the problems that the field definitely really cared about.

And I would have worked harder at mastering those problems, which in a theory field just means I would have read more papers, spent more time trying to understand existing techniques, worked more in what other people were already working on. I learned this lesson, and by the time I was a professor, I began to actually do that more. Just to give you a quick aside, how did I figure that out? Well, I wrote this another essay.

I forgot exactly where I was in my career. this might have been early in my career as a professor. And I wrote this essay about how I went out and did a research project to try to understand how to get tenure in my field. And what I did, my methodology is I went and I found students that came from the same research group. So they had been trained the exact same, where there was a markable difference in their progression as a academic. So one of them would get tenure early, did well, and maybe some of them would be. someone else that didn't get tenure or it took them a long time or they had some struggle. So it was like

a controlled experiment. They had the same training. One did well. One struggled to get tenure. And then I look for many quantifiable variables about their careers. I recorded them and I went looking. It was an observational study retrospective. And I went back and actually tried to say what really seemed to be the variable that made the difference that really separates the ease with tenure crowd from the struggle with 10-year crowd. And what I discovered is it wasn't raw number of publications. It wasn't quality of the venue in the publications. They all published in good venues. The main variable was number of citations on their five most cited papers. That really separated the group. So when I did that study, early in my career as a professor, I realized, ah, you have to

write things on topics that people really care about, that they're already working on. You've got to make progress on problems that people have already shown they care about. That's what's important. That's much harder than what I had done as a grad student where I tended to invent problems. That was a smart guy. I would invent problems, come up with clever solutions. People thought they were very clever, but it wasn't generating at first, at least tons of citation. So, you know, I changed my whole tune since then I focused on I really want to work on hard problems that other people are working on not just my own problems I did end up getting 10 year early I did end up racking up a bunch of citations so that advice was good I wish my 22 year old self had that advice and I could have had

that advice if I had done what I said in that essay which was actually asked a question of what really matters here not what is it that I want to matter so that's my my advice there is it's meta advice. Whatever type of field it is, whatever it is you care about, be careful that you're not falling into the trap of inventing in your mind a list of what you think matters that is something that you want to be true. These type of things would be hard to do, but not too hard. Instead, go out there and get the hard truth. What actually is true? What actually matters in my field? And then work backwards and confront the reality of what would actually be required to do this. It's scary at first.

It's going to make your life harder. The work is going to be harder. But that's really what unlocks real results. And so that's my advice there. Kenya asks, how can I better absorb and organize all the information about things I want to learn? Kenya, one thing I do, I write book reports. Not for any publication. No one ever sees them.

And they're not always about books. Sometimes it's about a topic on which I'm reading a lot of books or listening to interviews about reading articles about, but I find the exercise of forcing myself to write down in my own words, my understanding of a topic. And then when I read more about it, come back and revise that understanding really helps me absorb and structure and internalize information. And I do this all the time. I mean, I have a whole folder full of these word documents. And some of it's very esoteric. I mean, I have a big word document about American political philosophy. I did something similar as I watched critical theory

become such a powerful and eventually even type of bullying force within academia I said I got to understand this. I went on a long project years ago where I read a lot about critical theory. I read the famous papers. I read critiques of it. It's very complicated, the terminology,

even just the etymology of what the different theories are, the ontologies of how different things fit, how critical race theory fits into critical legal theory, which fits into critical theory, which itself is a sort of odd combination of French postmodernism, but also this sort of new, etc, etc. I just wanted to understand it. I have a very long word document where I tried to work it out. So Kenya, that's my advice. If you want to learn things, read a lot of stuff, talk to people about it, but until you write down in your own words, your understanding, and then go back and try to revise that

understanding as you learn more, until you do that, you're probably not going to understand it very well. if you do, you're going to understand it in a way that you're not going to forget. So I think it's like a superpower. If you can do this on a regular basis, keep your own book reports on ideas, topics, philosophies, whatever that interests you. You're understanding what you understand, what you have the draw on in your life when trying to understand the world or what's happening around you is going to be really enriched. I highly recommend it. All right, final question, Dedi asks, how do we keep from forgetting the lessons of slowing down

as a result of being constrained in our spaces during the pandemic lockdown? Well, DD, I think this is a crucial question. I have a series of blog posts on my site about what I call the Deep Reset, which is my word for this impulse that a lot of people are having, the impulse that a lot of people are having to come out of the experience of the lockdown

and make real changes to their life. They want to reset their life to be something deeper. Now, all of these questions were submitted before the more recent events, the protests that are happening, the outrageous surrounding George Floyd. I think those recent events have only, of course, amplified people's sense

that I just don't want to go back to the status quo. I want my own life, my own engagement with the world to be deeper. I want it to be more meaningful. I've been writing about that on my blog. I'm working on a video series to get some ideas about how do you actually, what can you actually do to reset your life to be more deeper and more meaningful. I think, D.D., it is absolutely the right thing to be thinking about. It is difficult, but now is the time to do it.

A couple pieces of advice I can give just based off of my, experience when I was working on digital minimalism, readers of that book, no, I ran an experiment with 1,600 people where I had them basically kind of simulate a lockdown, not in the social sense, but the technological sense. So they took a whole month and really drastically cut back their use of technology with the idea of completely reforming their relationship with their technology. So that little case study could give us some lessons about this much bigger type of reset we're talking about, which is resetting the very structure of our life, not just our engagement with technology. But a big thing I learned from that experiment is that working backwards from the

positive vision is much more sustainable than instead trying to conquer the negative. So if you just focus on, here are aspects of my life I don't like. And so I want to get rid of these things because I don't like them. it's actually kind of hard to make sustainable change. If you instead say, here are things that I think are very important that I would like to orient my life around. These are self-evidently valuable pursuits. Changes that you make that are pointing you towards something that you find very valuable are much more sticky. You're much more likely to actually have those changes persist.

So you want to focus on how do I get to the positive, more so than how do I eliminate? eliminate the negative. So how do you figure out the positive? Another thing I learned from that small scale to clutter experiment is reflection experimentation is important. You spend this time while you're still partially locked down thinking, reflecting. Go for walks, think through. Why am I feeling this way?

What does this mean? What's the underlying value here? Interrogate your own life. Interrogate your own structures within your head for how you organize your experiences, your values, your roadmap for how your life is supposed to unfold. You cannot really understand these structures until you interrogate them. That takes introspection. This introspection takes time.

You got to do it. You got to put in those hours. You can also experiment. Let me try. What if I do this in my life? What if I stop doing this instead, replace it with this activity? What if I begin volunteering here? What if I get my fitness back in the shape?

What if I actually start seriously doing deep reading? because you know what? Deep reading gives you a deep mind in a way that social media is going to warp your mind. And deep reading is going to give you the type of deep mind that's going to be able to actually take an information, process it, come in with real insights, and therefore use those insights as to foundation for real change in the things you care about. Experiment what works, what does it, what resonates, what does it. And then make concrete changes. So by the time you've left the lockdown things seem more normal, you want to have done the stuff. reflection, you have done some experimentations, you want to have put in place some concrete changes, specific things in your life, things that you can track in a notebook, did I do this today or not?

Or here is my plan in a notebook for how I want to accomplish this goal. I need to do this, this week, this that week. Have those changes in place so that as you go back to the real life, your life has already has been transformed. You're not just implicitly or ambiguously hoping that somehow your life will be different or the slowness you learn to appreciate or the the awareness you grew of issues in this country will stick around. You're not just hoping. You've made a life in which it does. And it's supported by the positive vision of what you want your life to be.

You found that vision through introspection and experimentation. The concrete change put it into place. Now your life actually is changed. So that I think is at the core of the deep reset, which is more important now than I think it was even when I first started writing about it. So I hope you find that useful. But I'm telling you that's the way to make substantial change in your own. life. All right. So that's all the time we have for today. Remember, if you want to submit your own questions, you need to be on my mailing list. I solicit these questions on a semi-regular basis

from my mailing list. You can sign up at calnewport.com. Until next time, stay deep.