Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 303: The Problem with Grand Goals

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

The desire to cultivate a more intentional and remarkable existence – what we call “the deep life” – is universal. In today’s episode, Cal talks about one of the most common traps in this pursuit: hoping that the achievement of a singular grand goal will make all parts of your life better. Cal discusses the problems with the grand goal approach and argues why the more systematic lifestyle-centric mindset will not only produce better results, but end up leading to remarkable opportunities anyway. He then takes questions and calls from readers and reviews the five books he read in May.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: How to create a deep life [9:55]- Is it too late to start living deep at the age of 27? [31:29]- Is it possible to cultivate a deep life at a job that requires full attention? [36:05]- How come there are different Deep Life Stacks? [38:57]- How do I cultivate a deep life with small children? [46:40]- Do I need to “limit my missions” if I have a standard day job? [54:40]- CALL: Keeping focus after having children [58:28]CASE STUDY: Finding books to help cultivate a deep life [1:12:18]FINAL SEGMENT: The 5 Books Cal Read in May 2024 [1:22:47]Science and Human Values (J. Bronowski)The Hot Zone (Richard Preston)Extinction (Douglas Preston)When the Shooting Stops…the Cutting Begins (Ralph Rosenbaum and Robert Karen)The Great Partnership (Jonathan Sacks)Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/  Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestionszocdoc.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepnotion.com/calThanks 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. So if you're new to the show, I'm a computer science professor and writer. Here we like to talk about how to navigate the promises and perils of new technology while keeping your humanity intact. There's three specific topics we tend to cover within that general subject. First is understanding new technologies, how they impact us and what we should do about it. Second is how to thrive in the era of digital knowledge work. And third, we like to talk about cultivating the deep life as a bulwark against all of these distractions and divergence. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined, as always by my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, today's show, we're getting into that third topic, cultivating a deep life as a bulwark against diversions and distractions. As I've been thinking about this topic more as I'm working in the early stages on a book about the deep life. There's an idea that came up that I've been clarifying in my own thinking, and I'm going to get into that in today's deep dive, a sort of common trap that people fall into and trying to make their life more intentional. We've got some good questions, including a call and a case study, do some deep life questions, have a slow productivity corner in there. And then finally our final segment, we will do the books I read. in May. So stay tuned for that. Now, before we get into it, though, Jesse, I like to think about things I'm grateful for. And I'll tell you something I'm grateful for right now, which is summertime.

Yep. You know, for me, and I write about this on my book, Slow Productivity, I'm very seasonal. You know, different seasons of the years. I'm focused primarily on different things. Some seasons are more intense than others. I've designed my entire professional life around this idea that my summers can be a time where I really wind down administrative overhead and freneticism and busyness and really can get lost and kicking off deeper intellectual projects. Like, for example, working on a new book project or another sort of major intellectual endeavor. I didn't get a summer last year.

No, I know, of course, Jesse, people with normal jobs are saying boo-hoo. But for me, this matters. I didn't get my normal summer last year. I had this fellowship up at Dartmouth College, which I really enjoyed. But it meant I was another semester where I was teaching and prepping a new course. And then on top of that, I was doing a lot of events. You know, people were excited I was there. So it sort of felt like I was doing a publicity tour and a normal teaching semester, which is fine,

except for that's normally my time when I have my summer recharge. And I came out of last summer into a fall in which I was doing a lot of intense writing, especially technology writing, as well as I was designing this new distributed algorithms course at Georgetown, right into the winter spring, which I had publicity tour for slow productivity, which really is only this week that is winding down. I finally told my publicity team, no moss after this week. We got to stop scheduling interviews. I need to take a breather.

So I am now about to enter a real summer. It's been two years. I'm going to think a lot about my new book. I don't take it for granted, Jesse. I'm really looking forward to it. Because the summer before you were writing the book. I was writing the book. Yeah, which I don't mind.

That's fine. Like, I don't want to do nothing in the summer. I don't want, what I don't want in the summer is a crowded calendar. Yeah. That's the main thing. I typically run what I call my summer schedule in a normal summer, which is no meetings, calls, or other work-related things on my calendars Friday through Monday. So I want Monday and Friday to be blank. Those type of things, which do need to happen or require.

recording our podcast or doing interviews or what have you. I like to put those in the afternoons, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Deep work. I have long deep work sessions on Monday and Fridays and deep work sessions for the first half of the day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Like, that's my summer schedule. It's not doing nothing, but it's the sort of non-deep stuff now gets consolidated to these three half days. Those could be full, fine. because I know every other day, every morning I have deep work and that I have the sort of four-day

weekends of just sort of letting my mind to reset. So I really love my summer schedule. How long are the sessions usually on Fridays and Mondays? It just depends. I try if possible to go somewhere interesting. We talked about it last week. Yeah. Last week in the deep dive, we talked about adventure working. So if possible, like they maybe start writing at the coffee shopper at my house and then go to the woods somewhere, do a deep work session where I can have like a long hike and get out of

Dodge, take advantage of the fact that I have a lot of time, you know. So it's not like on a Monday or Friday where I have nothing scheduled that I, if I'm writing, for example, produce more words than like a writing session on a Wednesday morning. But I make much more cognitive process, progress, because I have time to think and come back and to reflect and then maybe write a little bit. And often those days I write less, but I make much more progress on like understanding the idea that I'm trying to express or coming up with a new strategy. So I can actually kick off that schedule. I mean, this week is, I'm close to having my first summer schedule week. I mean, Monday was Memorial Day. So, you know, yes, I had nothing scheduled, but also,

like, we were doing stuff all day with the kids. It was a vacation day. So I think next week is my first sort of peer. There's like two days fully off. I'm starting to clear the mornings. Anyways, I'm grateful is what I'm saying, Jesse. So when do you think you're going to write the book? I'm starting the summer. I'm starting this summer. Yeah. So I'm, I added extra time to the process here. So originally, not to get to insider baseball, but just sort of like originally, you know, I sold this book at the same time as slow productivity. So you have to sort of pencil in a schedule. And the schedule we, we penciled. was like this book would come out two years after slow productivity. So not next March, but the March after that. I began to realize that's probably too soon for a couple reasons.

Just from like a market perspective, for better or for worse, or careful what you wish for. The tale on publicity for books is pretty long, right? I mean, we're months out from slow productivity coming out, and I'm talking about it a lot. And so I want there to be breathing room between these books. And so I felt like two years is probably too close. Yeah. You know, that's probably too close. We took three years between email, a world without email and slow productivity. That felt better.

Like I want to be able to just inhabit slow productivity, talk about it, and not feel like it's, now I'm talking about a new book right away. And then on my personal perspective, it seemed a little close because of summers. I think when I think about writing or big intellectual projects, I think about how many of these summers. can I dedicate to it? And so if this book was going to come out two years after slow productivity, I would hand it in before summer 2025, which means this summer would be my only summer to work on it. And that's when I do my best work.

So we moved the due date to the fall of 2025, so I get two summers. To write the first draft? Right the first draft? You wrote the first draft of slow productivity in like six months, didn't you? Yeah, something like that. I think so. So you're going to take longer for this one.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to take longer. So I want to work on it this summer, but not from a page count perspective. Like I got to get through three chapters to be on pace. The summer is I want to crack the voice, crack the, like, rhythm of the book. Like, yeah, this is working now. Now I can put my head down and like start making progress.

So it'll be frustrating from a word count perspective because that's not my goal. My goal is I'll probably focus on one chapter, maybe. but probably just one chapter and like try to get that right and then once that's right like here's the voice here's the rhythm here's what makes this book work

then I can put my head down and start working on the other chapters and this book will probably be more concurrent with other things you know working a little bit on this doing a New Yorker thing doing an academic thing coming back to this

slow productivity like once I really got started I got started yeah you cranked that out I cranked yeah I mean I had thought about it for like three years ahead of time like we had really extensively covered the idea

Like I knew what I was doing on that by the time I was writing it. You knew that there was three principles? Oh, yes. I knew those principles. I knew them. I knew them well. You know, the original fourth principle ended up getting cut. So we have, what is it, do fewer things, principle one, work at a natural pace was

principle two, obsess over quality was principle three. the original principal four, which was drink heavily, that got cut. But that sort of is where I was. Is this why you have to go through the process? I thought you were going to really say something that a real principal got cut. I was like, I didn't even know about this. Hemingway drunk heavily.

He wrote some good stuff. I had all this stuff about like famous drunk writers. Drink heavily. Yeah. All right. Anyways, enough nonsense. We got a long show. We got to get into it.

Let's get into our deep dive. All right, so here's a key question. Maybe the fundamental question for a lot of people these days, how do you create a deep life, a life that is lived on purpose, a life that the people who know you find to be in a quite literal sense remarkable. When we pursue this, and again, I think in the pandemic and post-pandemic period, More people are caring about this and explicitly pursuing this than we've seen in a long time. When you pursue this, there are some common traps. It's a grand thing to go after, and it's easy to get wrong.

Today, I want to talk about arguably the most common trap faced by people trying to cultivate a deep life. I'll explain the trap and why it doesn't work and then talk briefly about what works better. All right, so we've already defined the deep life. That's my term for something that has been around for a very long time, as we mentioned, a life that's intentional, a life that's lived on purpose, focused on the things you care about, reduces the things that you don't, a life that other people find remarkable. Now, when people get this idea that this is what they want to do, that they look around and say, what am I doing right now? This job I have is monotonous or nihilistic. I don't know why I live or I live. I'm on my phone all the time.

I'm sort of just distracted and diverted. I don't feel like I have control over my life, but I want to do something interesting with it. I only have one life. I want to do something interested with it. When people get this impulse, which I think is a fantastic impulse, they realize they're not quite sure how to do it. And they fall back on a common mistake, which I call the grand goal strategy. So the grand goal strategy says, if you want to make your life, more purposeful, come up with a really appealing grand goal to pursue with the idea that if you

accomplish that goal, your life will be better. So it really focuses your attention. There are a few different, there's a few different variations of the grand goal strategy that are common in terms of what it aims at. One has to do with the radical change in your life circumstance. So this variation of the grand goal strategy is let's move to the woods. Let's move to the island in the South Pacific, right? Let's rebuild my life around triathlon runnings, right? Some sort of like major change to your life.

Move to the big city is a common one. Move to the country is another common one. So it's often about setting, but not always. it can also be about just something about the circumstance of how you live your life. If I could be – here's another example of this. It's not setting-related. Financially speaking, we have the fire movement, the financial independence retire early movement that picked up in the 2010s. And it had this idea that if you're very aggressive about saving money and living cheaper, you can reach financial independence after about 10 years.

So maybe in your 30s, you don't have to work anymore. You can live cheaply and live off of the returns of, you know, investments. That's another example of a grand goal that's going to change everything. I don't have to work anymore. So a radical lifestyle change, common category. Another common category that the grand goal strategy applies to is the dream job. Hey, if I could follow my passion to the job I'm meant to do, you know, If I could just get the job as the television writer or the stand-up comedian or the college professor, right, or whatever it is.

But here's my passion, here's my dream job. If I could just make my job my dream job, then my life would be better. Common application of the grand goal strategy. Another is just achievement focus. This is very familiar to the sort of Ivy League milieu in which I sort of came up in. I'm actually going to my 20-year anniversary. Not anniversary. What do they call it?

Reunion. You're going? 20-year college reunion at Dartmouth College in a couple weeks. We have ours too. I'm not going. Yeah, we're going. I got on enough tough things like for lacrosse and stuff. Yeah, they're for lacrosse.

Yeah, I'm going to go to mine. But anyways, that crowd, right, there was this sort of pre-professionalism often of like, if you can just reach a certain level of achievement that will fix everything, right? So now you have like a focusing grand goal to go after. It's if you can get into the good law school and from the good law school get into the big firm and in the big firm get partner and from partner get equity partner, boom, life will be good. That's what, if you can just get there, life will get be good. You get in the medical school and you get the good residency and then you get the good attending position, then you get the good. It's this idea of like the achievement or if I can in banking make it up to this level, the MD level where I'm really pulling it in.

that's where it's going to happen. Or in academia, you know, if I could just get to like be a full, full professor, that's it. That's when the happiness will come. Right. So there's this sort of achievement version of the grand goal strategy where you focus on reaching a particular achievement. And finally, and this is the one that comes and goes, I think, most dramatically throughout the last 150 years or so, is this idea of, okay, if I can just fully commit to a singular ideology that can structure my existence and that. understanding of value in the world, then that's going to do it. Like a cause-based ideology that I can just give myself over to, maybe that is going to give me a life that feels like it's intentional.

So that's the grand goal approach. It's what most people do. Let's do something big. It makes sense, by the way, because A, you get reward right away with the grand goal approach because there is the rewards of aspiration, the thinking about this. I'm going after this. What's it going to be like when I move to the country or don't have to work anymore? Or, you know, I am lauded for my commitment to the cause or get that equity partner status, right? We get enjoyment almost right away just thinking about the big change.

Two, focus is simple. Focus is nice. I'm just orienting around this one thing. We like focus. There's kind of a pleasing clarity to it. And often the things pursued aren't bad things. Like, it's fine to look for a job that seems interesting. It's fine to achieve in your job, right, to sort of move up the ranks.

Like, that's fine. Having some sort of ideology that plays an important part in your life might be a big structuring part of your life. Like, none of this stuff is necessarily bad, too. So it's not as if, you know, in the back of your head, you're looking at these grand goals and saying, like, this really isn't good for me. They're fine. They're probably not bad for you. but it doesn't typically lead to people feeling like they have achieved a deep life. There's a few problems with this strategy.

One, the grand goal strategy limits our options. We're not very creative when it comes to thinking about sweeping goals to change our life. There's only so many ideas that tend to be out there and they're pretty common. It's moving to a radical place. It's here are the typical jobs people in my situation make and so take and, okay, I want to do really well in one of those jobs. When it comes to ideology, there's only usually a couple of them that are swirling around as being interesting. There's usually like one left wing one and one right wing one and maybe a couple others. There's not that many options.

So you're actually leaving a lot of options for the nuanced cultivation of interesting life. Get left on the table when you're looking for big grand swings you can take. So it reduces our imagination. It puts people into sort of narrow buckets of possibilities. Two, let's say you accomplish a grand goal, typically it only impacts a single area of your life. There's lots of different aspects that make up your subjective day-to-day experience and whether that is positive or negative. The grand goal is typically just focused on one piece of that life. So at best, they'll improve that piece of your life while leaving the other pieces of your life the same.

At worst, they actually make other pieces of your life much. worse. In the pursuit of a particular achievement, all of these other things that matter to you in life get squashed or pushed out of the way as you have to drive for the really long hours to sort of make the achievement happen. In the pursuit of the radical change to move to the country, you get cut off from other people, you get cut off from the sort of life of the mind and energy of the city that you used to like before. The schools are weird. You don't get along. At worst, this is what happens is by focusing on one thing, other things in your life. also get worse. Three, it bypasses other sort of less sexy but critical steps to taking control of your life because you can just fix it on. I'm just going after this thing. So one of the things we talk about a lot on this show is actually the importance of getting your act together, developing a sense of discipline, organizing your life and your time, right? This is really important for sustainable changes. The grand goal strategy has you just bypass this because it's just more exciting to think about the big change.

or the big goal you're going for, and you bypass these sort of more tactical skills that are probably necessary for sustainable change, which means, and this is sort of the final nail in the coffin of the grand goal strategy, most people don't succeed with it. Then where are you? I put all my eggs in this basket,

and then I lost the basket, and I have nothing left, the pursuer go after, so it's time to get out my phone or start playing the video games or get lost on Instagram. You know, you give up. if your only conceivable path towards the deep life is doing something major,

when you're unable to succeed with something major, what are you then left with? All right, so what works instead? Well, of course, I talk about on the show a lot, my vision for how to more sustainably and reliably cultivate a deep life. Let me just go through a couple of the big ideas here quickly. We talk about this a lot,

but let's go through the big ideas quickly. Step one, before you even come up with your big ideas and get the aspiration of thinking about living on Maui while living off of your investments and surfing all day, get organized, get discipline. That's actually the better place to start. Discipline is an identity, not a trait. It's something you see yourself as someone who can make progress towards important but non-urgent things even though you don't want to or it's hard.

This is something you get used to doing, starting small and pushing up, increasing the ambition of what you pursue. It changes your identity until you see yourself as a quote-unquote disciplined person prerequisite for any interesting sustainable change in your life. You've got to get organized. Have some notion of control of your obligations and time on different scale so that you can direct your limited resource towards stuff that's important to you in your life. You know, there's this pushback right now against thinking about time management and organization.

There's this pushback that says if you think about these topics, you're going to be some weird Frederick Winslow Taylor time optimizing, optimizing science bro, hack obsessed, noob, weirdo. Or it could be, you know, I want to have some structure to my time, so I can do cool things with it. And part of that structure might be reducing the amount of time I feel busy, de-optimizing, right? The right binary here is not optimization versus, you know,

some sort of chill, relaxed, like, aren't you intellectual and smart? It's not optimization versus chill. It's like control versus non-control. Non-control is not a great place, right? Non-control, you know, where it's like, yeah, I don't, my life is out of control. Things just sort of happen. That's not a great place. It's not a relaxed place.

It's a stressed place. You're busier than before, and you tend not to make traction on the stuff that really matter. So you don't want to become some sort of over-obsessed Frederick Winslow-Taylor, optimized nerd, but most people actually don't go there when they begin to embrace some notion of structure organization. So that's the first thing you have to do. Next, you've got to, instead of working forward towards grand goals, find a goal, work forward to that, everything will be fixed, work backwards from the detailed vision of your ideal lifestyle. Directly address what are all the elements of what I want a day of my life to look like

five years from now, 10 years and now. And let me directly reverse engineer these specific parts of my life. Now you're making progress towards specifically the things that matter as opposed to hoping that a big goal will have some sort of side effect unintentionally improve these things. You work backwards from a rich, featured vision of ideal lifestyle as opposed to looking forward towards just a singular grand goal. Now, here's the thing. If you're doing this, I want to have this sort of rhythm to my life.

this type of place. This is the role I want work to have in my life and the type of impact it has. My community, what do I want that to be in my life? How do I want to think about my health and how I'm spending my time outside of sort of work? And you have these sort of visions and you're trying to build towards this. And it's very systematic and it's very evidence-based. Given the opportunities and obstacles I have right now, how can I most make progress in the next six months? It's very systematic.

doing this seemingly incremental work towards the actual lifestyle you want, not only is it going to more reliably improve your life because you're just directly improving specific things you know resonate, cool opportunities will arise. But these are going to be much more bespoke and sustainable than what you come up with from scratch. If I just grab a 23-year-old and say, come up with how you're going to change your life.

Again, they have like five things they're going to choose. I'm going to, you know, we can financially independent, I'm going to be an influencer, I'm going to move to the woods, right? They have no, it's these like very common, not very creative options. But when you're instead really know what you're about,

what you're trying to get towards, systematically moving your life towards these things that matter to you, that's where the really cool bespoke grand goals emerge. Oh, I have an opportunity now to move here to do this work and it connects over here. And you begin to actually, you know what you're trying to achieve. More often than not,

when people are systematically pursuing the deep life by looking backwards from the lifestyles, they end up having these really cool radical opportunities emerge. And they're things that no one had ever thought about before. They're bespoke, they're specific to exactly what they care about. That's where the cool radical changes happen to make people say, remark, ooh, you've got an interesting life going on.

You don't start. with them. It's like you get rolling towards, I know what I'm about, I'm in control, I'm systematically improving my life piece by piece. If I'm married, I'm doing this with my partner as well. Then the really cool opportunities, that's when they emerge. You don't start there, they emerge. So in the end, you can end up doing pretty grand things, but it comes sort of naturally as you much more systematically get in touch with what you want and as you move towards it. All right. So be wary of the grand goal strategy. It's unlikely that a single goal, no matter how grand is going to make your life sustainably better, this more incremental systematic approach,

not only is it going to start delivering results more quickly and more effective results at that, it probably will lead to some pretty radical things, right? I never pursued a single grand vision, but as I've systematically worked backwards from my evolving picture of ideal lifestyle, we've ended up in some pretty remarkable places. I mean, it's like where we are right now, Jesse, we're in this, like, cool HQ. in the small town, you know, above the restaurant, down the street from the bookstore, where I know the owners and the coffee shop where I spend sort of half of every morning. And in the summers we spend in New England and I get to write books.

And it's all really cool. And there's some really remarkable things that in my life right now. I didn't sit down when I was 22 and sketched that all out. But I did have an evolving understanding of my ideal lifestyle that my wife and I were always, okay, how do we move towards this and the current season of life we're in? And as we did that over time, we ended up in some pretty cool places. Yeah. So there you go.

Be wary of grand goals. It's interesting, I kind of wrote about this 10 years ago in a very narrow way and so good they can't ignore you. But specifically about the grand goal of following your passion and why that specific grand goal doesn't work the way you think it's going to work. So I didn't really realize then I was on to sort of a broader observation of skepticism surrounding grandness. All right, so we got some good questions coming up, but before we get there first, let's hear from a sponsor. This podcast is sponsored by Better Help, right? So we're talking here about trying to cultivate a deep life. It's hard to build a life that is intentional and meaningful if you're really struggling with your own mind.

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All right, let's see some questions. First question's from Ahmed. I had some setbacks in my early 20s. Now I've regret for those wasted years. Do you believe it's too late for me to start living a deep life at the age of 27? I think Ahmed read the hidden fourth principle of slow productivity. Drink heavily. He really lived the fourth principle and now.

It is college years. Now has regrets. Jesse, we're old now because you probably have the same reaction I do. He's like, I was too late at the age of 27. We're like, you're just getting started, man. I mean, that's like, that's like the starting line. So, no, of course not. Of course not.

And I would not think about your years and your early 20s as wasted, right? You learned, you grew, you lived, you sort of figured out what you're about and what you're not about. You got things out of your system. You had experiences. Okay, this is not making me happy. Or I got caught in some grand goal to, you know, follow my passion to be like a professional dog slutter and it didn't work out. that's not wasted. That's you learning and developing as a human, learning about yourself, developing your sense of self at a time where you have the flexibility to do that without much consequences. That's a great use of your 20s. Not everyone was so sort of bow tie and blazer locked in as I was in my 20s. Like that's one way to do it, but let's be honest, most people don't do it that way. All right. Now, one of the ideas I'm having around the deep life, and I'm working on like an annotated outline for a book about this. Like one of the ideas is, is a chapter I'm tentatively calling grow. And a big idea from that chapter is your conception

of the deep life, that is the ideal lifestyle that you're working backwards from, changes through the different seasons of your life. It might be one thing in your 20s, a different thing in your 30s, a different thing in your first half of your 40s, a second thing in the second half of your 40s, your 50s are going to look different than your 40s. This is going to grow and change with different seasons of your life. Probably the vision that is the least important in terms of like your long-term experience of life is the vision you have in your 20s. So I don't mind that, you know, you weren't thinking about that in your 20s.

Now is the time to think about it. Think about this period, like age 27 to like, let's say 32 is like the next season of your life. You've learned. You've grown. Now it's time to get serious. Let's build that lifestyle vision. Where do you want to be in the first half of your 30s?

what does your day look like, not just work but all parts of your life. What are the obstacles and opportunities for moving closer to that vision? And let's start getting systematic about it. It's a perfect time to start. So I'm excited for you, Ahmed. You're ready to start getting after that lifestyle vision. So put that together and get rolling. What were you like in your 20s?

Are you locked in or were you ammending it? I was a little of both. I went to grad school, then I was figuring out where I wanted to live, and then I settled on D.C. Started coaching kind of like, you know, piecing together stuff that I wanted to do for a long term. So that's how I ended up in D.C. Grad school stretches out that period. Like a lot of people, I was in grad school in my 20s, too. Like, Ahmed is not behind the eight ball here.

So, like, if you're doing graduate education, you're kind of just extending your college experience. Like, you're thinking about your studies. And it's really not until you're done with education often that you're like, okay, now what am I trying to do here? I knew I wanted to move somewhere where I could establish my life. Yeah. Man, our 20s. Well, I was in grad school, but like the situation in MIT was you are here, it's like you're at a NFL training camp. You're here to become a professor.

So it was kind of a focused grad school. They're like, this is what you're here for. This is the lofty goal. if you fall short of this goal not great so we were very focused on like developing this very narrow set of skills which a lot of people drop out

yeah I mean it's not they don't call it dropping out but yeah they don't get their PhD don't get their masters yeah there's a lot of that or they'll get it but then go to you know industry which again people get wrong

people think about oh the best thing to do would be to go to like Google and get a lot of money but not in that environment. Google hires hundreds of people every year. You're going to have to program if you go there. No, no, no. Ten-year track professorship. That was the vision.

So I had an unusually locked in 20s. All right, what do we got next? Next question is from Joe. I've consumed most of your content, which includes reading some of the comments on your YouTube videos. I see a bunch of comments of people talking about how to create a deep life while at work. For example, a truck driver comments, that it's difficult to do anything but listen to music while driving as everything else is distraction.

Is this related? Interesting question, Joe. I think this probably is coming down to a definition issue. So you seem to be relating or conflating the deep life with, I guess, like the structured consumption of information, the sort of exposure to books and big ideas and not spend as much time with just narrow distractions, which could be a part of it. But let's expand our terminology here so we can deal with this issue better, right? The deep life is a life that's intentional, lived on purpose, the type that it sort of seems remarkable to you and people around you.

There's a lot of aspects to the deep life, including your work. And what in the deep life, you have all the different things you're doing. You hopefully are moving towards your ideal lifestyle vision as opposed to moving away it or being sort of unrelated to it. work can play a lot of different roles in that, right? So, you know, there's jobs, for example, that, yes, are very attention demanding. So maybe truck driving is like that if you need to be focused on what you're doing, clearly, if you're like an emergency room doctor is going to be like that, like I'm focused on what I'm doing for the work. And that's fine, right?

That could be very much a part of your ideal lifestyle vision. This job helps give us the right flexibility about where we live. I support my family on this job. It's like it's important work I do well, right? I'm building towards owning my own sort of company here, which is going to help us then do X, Y, and Z. Like the, there's no specific type of job that you need for the deep life. There's no specific experience of work that you have to have to achieve the deep life.

What you need is intention and working from a clear lifestyle vision. So yes, there's this other aspect of the deep life where we talk about, people are, yeah, I'm reading interesting books and I'm being exposed to interesting sort of podcasts and ideas. I think that's also a key part of it as well. But that can be a separate part of it. And maybe that's not what you're doing during your job, but you have like a really nice library or reading nook you built at your house. And when you're not out there driving the truck or what have you, you have like systematic reading time, whatever. There's lots of ways to think about it. So let's expand, let's expand our definition of like what goes into

the deep life, many, many different types of jobs. are part of building towards whatever lifestyle vision you might have fix as being ideal. All right, who do we have next? Next question is from Arjean. I watch your video on how to reinvent your life in four months where you talk about the deep life stack 1.0. Then shortly after I watched another video that talked about the deep life stack 2.0. What are the differences? The value of 1.

So they'd go from 1.0 to 2.0, the difference is 1. No, okay, here's what's going on. I've been, you know, we talk about the Deep Life on the show a lot. You know, I coined the term, God, it might have been in the very first episode of the show. We'd have to go back and check. But in the summer of 2020, four years ago. I've been experimenting of those times with different ways of thinking about, you know, how do you actually pursue this goal, including lots of analogies like stacks or like hardware versus software.

Let's put aside for the second those specific analogies and touch space with the broader program here. The broader program here is that I got this sense from my listeners and from my readers that this is a very important question. The pandemic really put this question to the forefront of a lot of people. They felt like they weren't controlling their lives. They were just sort of bouncing around. Like, what am I doing here? I want to be in control of what my life is like. I want to be remarkable.

Look at this life I've designed that's like really cool. focus on what I care about, minimizes what I don't, right? So it became clear during the pandemic that lots of people were grappling with this issue. Now, what's my approach to it, right? I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theologian. I'm not like a social psychologist who studies happiness. So what is my approach here? Well, my approach to this topic is we focus a lot on the what, but what sort of things does a life well live have in it. We don't focus enough on the how, the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of actually engineering or re-engineering what your day-to-day existence is like. We sort of take that for granted and focus on like, here's what you need in it. And it's

important that you have, you know, whatever, like community or that you have this or that. We list these different attributes or we get inspired by these stories of, my God, like, look at David Goggins, just grinding after it. But we don't often get into the nuts and bolts mechanics of like, okay, but how do I get from here to something that's different? How do I get from the current life I have right now to a vision of the life that feels much better? So everything I do about this topic is sort of centered on like, let's get into the nuts and bolts. That's why I play with very specific analogies. So try to put structure around the behaviors and the strategies and the frameworks you need to actually get to make change.

So those stacks were something I was experimenting with. There's other things I experimented with as well. where I am now is I'm sort of working on an annotated outline for a book on this sort of focus on the how instead of the what when it comes to engineering a more intentional life. I've sort of simplified it more. I've moved the way from having two kind of cutesy of analogies. You know, like I kind of trust the reader. Like, let me give you the ideas. And here's kind of like the sequence, but I don't need to use metaphors to computational structures, etc.

So, like, in my current form, I kind of have this breaking down into five parts. You sort of have to go through these five parts in order. I don't say it's a stack anymore. It's like these are the things that kind of matter for doing this. I start with, and again, this is – I'm working on this. So don't lock this in either. But starting with preparation. So this idea of before you get too caught up into the fun part of thinking through

what your life could be like, get organized, get disciplined. Right. You know, again, we often look past this or sort of like my elite brethren are used to being disciplined and organized and they think it's unnecessary. But people really, you need to start here. Okay, two, get in your vision. This is like my big idea. We just talked about the deep dive. Working forward to a singular grand goal is unlikely to sustainably change your life for the better.

Working backwards from a broad and detailed ideal lifestyle vision, that's going to make changes. that are going to directly impact the stuff you care about. Like, that's what's going to allow your life six months from now to be better than it was six months before. All right. Implementation is like, so how do you actually do this? How do you make progress towards a lifestyle vision? It's not trivial. You got to deal with rituals.

You got to deal with projects, one-time projects that you pursue. You have to deal with changes. Let me change where I live. Let me change the nature of my job. how do you do rituals, projects, and changes? How do you navigate those properly? Well, you know, you can't just take wild swings at it. You have to do evidence-based planning.

You have to sort of slowly build up to things. There's a creativity to this to try to find. Well, if I do this, it can affect three different parts of my vision in a positive way. There's a real art to the actual mechanical. Like, here's what I'm now doing to make progress towards the vision. It's not so simple. So we've got to get into that, thinking about. rituals, projects, and changes, and the subtle art of pursuing those. Then comes amplification.

This is this idea that we talked about, again, during the deep dive, that once you're systematically moving towards your lifestyle vision, opportunities for the remarkable will arise. And they will not be things you could have predicted in advance. And they will be bespoke to your current situation and the current things you care about. This is where things get interesting. How do you seek out those opportunities? How do you vet them? How do you pull the trigger on them? this is where the really cool stuff happens, but it happens kind of late in the progress. And then finally, growth,

this is this idea that you need to keep maturing your vision of the ideal, what your ideal lifestyle is. This will mature over time, but you need to fuel this maturing process. You getting older will help, but you also have to systematically try to just mature your understanding of the world. Like when we talk about building a vision of the idea, lifestyle. I talk a lot about seeing what resonates with you. Well, you can mature over time,

even your mechanisms for resonance, like the sophistication with which you detect things that appeal to or not, or what's important or not, and we get philosophy here, and we get theology here. We get, you know, hard-won wisdom here. So there's this whole sort of process of growth over time is just sort of becoming a more mature person, a more value-driven person. You get better at that. So you don't have to be there full-form when you start this process. that's how I think about it now. We could put this, we could call this a stack,

but I don't bother with that anymore. So again, the summarize you prepare, then you build your vision, then you implement with care, you look for opportunities to amplify and you grow over time. This seems to be more of what,

putting aside the specific things you end up pursuing, this really gets to the how of how to pursue that in a way that's sustainable. So, I don't know, that's where I am now. That could change. Maybe I'll go back to being like super cutesy analogies again,

depends what mood I am as I'm as I'm writing my book. Maybe I'll have like a pyramid that's on a circle. So you have to have the pyramid of values that rotates on the wheels of lifestyle. And then on top of that, you have the flavor of remarkability. And then as you combine these into a matrix, that gives you a probability that you put into a machine learning model that then spits out a graphical representation of your spirit animal. that might be where I end up instead. We'll see. Simplifying.

All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Marie. How do my husband and I design a deep life with four children at or under the age of kindergarten? Four children at kindergarten age or below. All right, Jesse. This brings me back again to the loss principle for slow productivity. Drink heavily.

That's your solution right there. This is an absolutely critical time. to be thinking about the deep life, but this question is also critical because it really, again, helps us clarify what the deep life really can mean. So I'm assuming the tension in your question is that the vision of the deep life matches some the things we talked about where there's all of these aspects of your life in which you're sort of doing interesting, very intentional things, and you're in very good shape and reading all these books and your job is in this interesting way, and you're connected.

and you have these interesting hobbies, and you're like, how is this possible with four kids at kindergarten or below? And, of course, like, that stuff isn't. That's a fire alarm type of situation. That's an all-hands-on-deck situation. But let's just back up a little bit. What really do we mean by the deep life?

Well, intentional lived on purpose. So you can apply, you're in a hard, interesting, wonderful, but difficult period of family life. You can absolutely and should absolutely be living on purpose during this period. It's just what your purpose is, the intention, like, what's our intentional vision for what these years should be like is going to look very different than how a 27-year-old will answer that question. It's going to look very different than how, like, a 47-year-old whose

kids are older is going to answer that question. Right now, it's going to be focused a lot on, okay, we want to develop these, like, little things into, like, reasonable humans. We want to do this without sort of being completely exhausted. We want to be able to, find joy in this young age the kids will never be at again. We want to be able to have space to find joy in that to avoid like complete stress. You get really clear about like what do we want this sort of young kid period to look like and then you work backwards from that vision. And then that could lead, that intention can lead to lots of interesting things. It might be little things in terms of just how you're thinking about like activities for the

kids or how you're bound the the the format of child care what you're doing with what type of preschool the kids are going to like these things you begin to get intentional about the match division you have now this could lead to even larger changes like we're going to change something about our work setups here right it's it's a absolutely like fantastic application of the deep life methodology that you can imagine the role of work during this period of life is going to be very different than it was and what it's going to be six years from now. There may be like a holding pattern thing we want to do here. I'm going to reduce to this.

You're going to do this. Yeah, we're not like getting ahead, but we want to make sure we keep these jobs. But this is going to allow us to then have much more intentional about how we deal with where the kids are and when we pick them up or how this happens, right? This is the time you have to be intentional. And when you're intentional here, you have to see the full picture, all of the aspects of your life you care about. This is a dangerous period. Like, what happens sometimes during these kid period is that when people are not intentional about the full vision of, like, what is our ideal lifestyle through this season of our life? But they don't, they ignore that.

They focus then sort of randomly on other things. Like, well, what matters to me is just like, I want to advance my career as fast as possible. And then, like, your partner says the same thing. And then everyone is just resentful of each other and stressed all the time. It's not working out well. Right. You just focus on, like, one random thing. or one person is focusing on something about the kids,

the other person is focused on something else, and you're not on the same page, and it's not working out. Like, this is the time you have to be on the same page and say, what does this five-year period? And I would say this period ends once all of your kids basically are in elementary school. That's the next period.

I remember this period, well, I'm in the next period now. What do we want to do in this period? Like, what do we want this to be like? All parts of your life really matters. It might change the communities you get involved in. It changes, maybe it changes something more drastically. Like now it is time, this is the time we're going to move. We want to be closer to family.

We want to move to a place where we can be more deeply enmeshed these communities that matter because we're going to need the support. We want to live cheaper so we don't have to be working so much because we have four kids and they're young and they're similar ages. And that's just going to require a lot of time. So let's reconceive our conception, not around particular career trajectories, but around a full lifestyle trajectory that's more interesting. This is also a good time to think ahead. where do we want to be in the next days, like when all of our kids are in elementary school, so that we could be making the moves right now with that in mind as well. We only get caught off guard when we get there.

My wife and I thought a lot about this, A, like how we wanted life to be when our three kids were young, but also we really early on, I mean, I remember these discussions, were really clearly articulating the properties of the family lifestyle we wanted during the elementary school age that we're in now and all of our kids are sort of of that age. You know, my oldest is starting middle school next year, sixth grade. But I came from New Jersey where we had junior high that starts in seventh grade, so I don't really count sixth grade as non-elementary school. But they're all, they're all, it's a completely different phase.

But you know what? This thinking we did, and I remember doing this thinking when the third kid hadn't even been born yet. And the other two were like an infant and like a kid just starting preschool. I remember like where we were doing this thinking, really checking in on this. Not how, not specifically. like here's specifically what we'll be doing in 2024. But just thinking about where we wanted to be, like made a big difference and it shaped a lot of decisions.

And I really, we're like reaping that benefit now. Like we've been working backwards from that, not working forwards towards a ground goal, not working forwards from like all that matters is like this happens in my career. So this is like the critical time to be thinking about the deep life. But you just have to be super expansive and flexible about what that means. It's intention. It's not any particular mix of things. So yeah, do this planning, do it often.

This is what's going to make the difference between the sort of sustainable, tight, sort of wonderful family life going forward and one where it's stressful and resentful and random. Like you have to be thinking through what our lifestyle wants to be like, not this is what I'm doing and sort of the other stuff is a burden or an obstacle that I'm sort of annoyed to exist. That's a good question. Four kids out or under kindergarten. That's tough. So do you do a lot of post analysis after they're out of elementary school? Well, we just keep thinking about the next. Okay.

Yeah. It's like what do we want to, what's working, not working now? Where do we want to be in the next, like the next phase? And they're each different. And then we have to revise a lot because you learn things like you don't, you don't know that, oh, this is what this is really going to be like. But the key is, and this is like a key part of the deep life methodology in general, lifestyle focus. Like the properties of life is what you're focusing on.

not specific, like, where I want to be is this position and this job, or like, we have to live in this place. When you're thinking about properties of lifestyle, you get flexibility and options. There's a lot of different ways we could get there. And then these, as I talked about, these interesting opportunities for the remarkable come up. You're like, oh, I never even knew that opportunity existed, but you know what? If we did that, we could get these three things working pretty well, and you could do this. And there's a flexibility to it. Yeah. And then this is how you're able to sort of construct these bespoke intentional lives.

All right. Oh, it looks like our next question. Is this our slow productivity corner? It is. Let's get that music. As longtime listeners know, we try to have one question per episode that's related to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment without burnout. You can find out wherever books are sold or at calnewport.com slash slow. So, all right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week? This question is from Sean. In slow productivity, you discuss limit your missions.

If I only have a single day job, do I have exactly one mission? And the advice is just for super hustlers out there? It's a good question, right? So in the principle, do fewer things. I talk about you need to reduce to accomplish this. you often have to reduce what you're working on at various levels of abstraction. So if you just come to like your day and it's like I want to do fewer things today, that might be impossible because you have a lot of things that need to be done, right?

Because maybe you have many projects you're working on. And each of the projects has a lot of things they need you to do. So you have to also limit your projects so you don't have too many things being generated that have to be done. But it might be hard to limit your projects if you have a lot of bigger missions or initiatives you're working on, each of which have to generate projects. You can't limit projects, so you have to move up even higher and limit the missions or initiatives you're working on. So you have to sort of limit from the top to have this reduction carry through all the way to what you're actually doing on the day to day where it makes a difference. So that's what limit your missions means.

A single day job can have multiple missions, right? All this is is just major initiatives that you're pursuing. Like this is something I'm pursuing and trying to do well and want to be known for. In some day jobs, it's really clear. Like, this is just what you're doing. You're in sales. You're trying to move sales numbers. That's all that matters.

But a lot of jobs, there's a lot of opportunities to take on multiple big initiatives. Maybe some are internal-facing reform in your organization. This is like a product strategy. This is like a technology strategy. Limit those. Right? This is what I'm doing in this job, if at all possible. Like, this is the thing I'm really working on.

Hold me to it. I'm trying to get this product line. big. I'm trying to overhaul the way we do digital marketing plans, whatever it is. Try to keep that simplified. That will generate fewer total projects, which means there's fewer total tasks that you have to work on. Your days can give you more breathing room, and then you can focus on doing that work really, really well. Now, of course, the double-edged sort of limiting your missions is you actually have to deliver. You're basically saying, this is what I'm doing, but hold me to it. The appeal of having many missions is you can be like, you can be like,

Like, I'm really busy. I'm doing a lot of things. I just seem in a pseudo-productive sense is like I'm a useful person here. You lose that comfort of freneticism standing in for actual value production. When you say, no, no, look, this is what I do. I want to focus on this. Hold me to it, but I want to focus on this. That's the double-edged sword.

You are going to be accountable. But on the other hand, it gives you breathing room. And when you have breathing room, I don't have the administrative overhead of 20 tasks at the same time. You can actually get work done at a high-level quality and do so in a way that's much more sustainable. much less frenetic and stressful. Yeah, so good question. It doesn't matter. Knowledge work is so flexible, like day job, non-day job, entrepreneurial, big organization.

We can get overloaded in all of those situations. And in all those situations, limiting missions can really matter. All right, that's our slow productivity corner. All right. Do we have a call today, Jesse? We do have a call. Excellent. Let's hear this.

Here we go. Hi, Cal. My name is Christina, and I work in finance. I took five years off to have children. to keep them at home. And I'm just now back at work full time this year. I've noticed that my ability to focus has really taken a hit since having young children. I don't do any social media or anything like that, but I really am struggling with keeping focused for long periods of time, not just on complex concepts, but also on those little detail things that you have to keep

track of, you know, whether it's like data validation, things like that that are just really hard to concentrate on. So any tips would be very much appreciated. I really would like to get very, very good at my job and make up for some of that lost time. Thanks so much. Well, Christina, this is hard. Hi, Kat. This is hard. It is a common problem. we had an interview about this a professor from Brown

who worked on psychology and work Yale forgot her last name right now anyways we had this really interesting interview and Christina this reminds me of what you're talking about here because I had this question I said you know I asked her I said you know I get a I don't know if it's pushback but just like frustration

especially from listeners who are moms who are frustrated about the idea of deep work. And, well, you know, how, who's taking care of the kids while this person's doing deep work? And I was like, I don't understand this. Like deep work, this is like a very abstract thing, very like sort of computer science, systemic way of non-emotional way of thinking about this.

When working on knowledge work, you can do it with uninterrupted focus or with context switching. And if you're context switching, your brain doesn't work as well. And you don't produce good stuff. And it takes longer. So we should, in knowledge work in general, recognize that uninterruptive focus is important and try to protect that, et cetera. I don't understand what could you be upset about, this, this abstract concept of focus produces

more than uninterrupted focus. I'm not saying, not make any prescriptions of like how much of this you should have or how you should find this, whatever. And the guest, the psychologist from Brown, she was like, yeah, but there's a, the frustration is, like, especially if like you're a mom, but in this context, is like you just have a much harder time finding unbroken focus. Even if it's not, you have the, you can literally block off the time, you're thinking about the kids. You're thinking about the school. You're thinking about, and whether this is like cultural or whether this is, you know, just it's genetic. It's in our species

who knows. But it's like if you have a much harder time, just putting your focus on something, and it's frustrating. It's frustrating that you can't focus as much and the focus really matters. and now people that you're probably smarter than and more capable than are going to be moving ahead, just because they just don't care as much. The men don't, it's just not grabbing their attention as much. And it's frustrated, that's why they're frustrated. It's not a fundamental, it's not a mistake in the idea, just the abstract idea of how cognitive processes unfold, this idea that context switching produces less capacity than focus. It's a, it's a frustration about particular group of people that are like, I can't do that as much.

and yet no one is acknowledging enough that like this is different, this is hard. Which is all to say, Christina, like what you're going through is very common. Something I've learned. You have young kids at home, yeah, it's harder to focus. That's probably evolution. It's probably a good thing for the history of our species that you're, I mean, it's bad for you, but probably a good thing for our history of our species that I just having a hard time focused on data analysis right now because, you know, human kids are hard to keep alive.

It grabs our attention. Okay. So, I mean, that's validating, but it's not solving your problem. But I just wanted to start with that because it took me a long time. Again, with my approach to the world, which is very non-emotional, very private, talking about abstractions and this is the way things unfold can hit up against other ways and other things going on in the world. All right. So what can you do about this? First, you can go easier on yourself.

It's just, you know, look, I'm a different person. I have young kids and I really care about and I have to keep them alive. That is a very hard job. I'm not talking physically. I'm talking cognitively. So you can just kind of, there's a sort of going easier on yourself here of like, yeah, this is a different me than it was pre-kids and just being okay with that. It's not 29-year-old me where I could just go at eight hours a day concentrating on spreadsheets. Like, I can't do that anymore.

And it's for good reason. So it's not a bad thing. It's just a new reality. You know, it's like when the baseball pitcher, women are going to love this analogy, Jesse, when the baseball pitcher gets older in their career and they can't throw 95 miles per hour anymore, and it's like Trevor Williams for the nationals, you change the way you pitch. It's like, okay, so I can't do that anymore. But I've been doing this for a long time.

I'm kind of like I'm more mature and I'm wiser. So now I'm going to, I'm going to throw good, you know, 89 fastball is going to play up because I've got my, my splitter is really working. Yeah. I've learned, by the way, like what women who are frustrated about men, what they really love is to have this explained in terms of analogies to Trevor Williams. Somebody else made an analogy about it earlier, too, for the love of the game with Kevin Costner, he's on the mound. Clear the mechanism. Is that that movie? It was either you talking about or somebody else within like the last

Clear the mechanism. For love the game. I think that's for Love the Game. Yeah. Clear the mechanism. Clear the mechanism, Christina. All right. So yeah,

you're different than you were before. And we all are. Like, here's an interesting, like, I'm different than I was before. It's weird. You know,

I'm super generalizing, but as like a dad of young boys, all my kids are boys. Like, for me, the like real change and sort of my ability to just lock into work, actually came when they got a little bit older, like closer to elementary school age, because the boys needed this sort of dad

time all the time. Like, they needed specifically dad time as part of their development as humans. That was a huge sap on cognitive energy that would have otherwise, you know, gone into work. So, again, like, babies were more survival mode for me. Like, how do I just, like, help keep these alive and, like, keep my wife from going crazy? Like, young boys, it's like, ooh, they need this. Why am I at work? So different people get these different things at different times, but families can change.

who you are and how you actually approach the energy of your work. So I think that's good. So what we have to do is like what I'm trying to do is what you have to do is the knowledge work equivalent of the older picture learning to use obfuscation and deception to keep his ERA low. And there's a term for this, and I wrote a whole book about it, slow productivity. Right? Slow productivity is my way of thinking about how do you still produce stuff that moves the needle and matters when you can't just get after it and just be locked in busy and out work everyone out energy, everyone out, focus everyone. That's kind of what that book is about. I've talked about it. Like my three boys getting to this age where they needed all my time and that sort of shift in my understanding of the world. Like that was a big inspiration for working on the ideas became slow productivity. I needed it for myself, right? that was partially why I worked on that book. And so what are these ideas in slow productivity? Well, okay, we need to work on fewer things at the same time.

This doesn't mean accomplish fewer things, but acknowledging we already have a lot of things on our heads. We need to minimize administrative overhead. We need to minimize multitasking and context switching. So let's be more sequential. Let me do this, do this really well. Now I'm going to work on this. Let me work on this well.

There's a lot of things on my plate. Let me divide between the small number of things I'm actively working on and the things I'm waiting to work on. And the things I'm waiting to work on, I'm not entertaining. administrative overhead on emails and meetings I'm not doing on these things yet they're here you can see their status you can see it marching down the line and when it gets to active then I'll work on it we need to work on fewer things we need to work out a more natural pace be much more realistic about how long things are actually going to take and be okay with that be okay with the idea that

you know I might not be super phonetic on Tuesday but at the end of this quarter I can point to I did these three things and these three things really matter that brings us to the third principle which is what all of us sort of family-addled knowledge workers have to super embrace is obsess over quality. We are going to earn flexibility. We're going to earn freedom from frenetic accessibility. We're going to gain autonomy by getting really good at the things that matter. I'm specializing on this. Hold me to it.

I do this really well. So we have to break our relationship to our jobs out of the grips of pseudoprifice. productivity, which just says activities what matter. I can see you doing a bunch of stuff that I know that at the very least you're not, not productive. We want to escape that and be measured instead on outcomes over time, really valuable stuff that other people can't do. When you're seeing, and again, you're not new to the job.

You were in this job before you took time off, right? You're more mature. You understand what matters, what does it matters. You're not sort of, you know, just young and energetic anymore. You can begin to carve out what we're all trying to do. I do this thing really well. I do it better than these people. I deliver.

I can do that by working on fewer things at the same time, more natural pace. All of this matters. Slow productivity is, if anything, a game plan for parents to rebuild their relevance, be a useful pitcher, even when they can't do the young man or young woman's game anymore, of just throwing a lot of suit or productivity at it. So there's like a lot of things we're talking about here, Christina, But I think it's a good discussion. So one, we have the validation of the frustration, mothers in general in knowledge work, that frustration of, I can't do the focus I used to be able to do.

And, you know, like the new dads can and that's frustrating. We're not talking about that's frustrating. Two, so, yeah, we are different. Families, other types of things can change us. It's not bad. It's just this is, we're now a different person. How do we still build a good game? And that brings us number three, slow productivity.

You got to figure out how to shift. ourselves and how other people see us from activity-based notions of productivity to outcome-based notions of productivity. If your field makes that impossible, if your employer makes that impossible, that's just not the way they operate, but you know what you want. You have this vision of like what working life, this slow productive version of working life. It's not a bad motivation to look for changes.

So how do I shift over to a change that does make that happen? this part of finance, not here, but here. My own thing are here. Or the lawyer, I know a lawyer who did this, really good at the type of law she does. Saying, I'm not interested in the partner track. So I'm going to leave the partner track. And now I can actually control my hours. And so instead of trying to bill a maximum number of hours, I'm going to bill 35 hours.

Okay. Yes, I've lost the like, I'm on my track to be an equity partner. But I make a lot per hour. and we moved over here to the mountains where it's much cheaper because this work can be done remotely. And this works out really well. I'm doing really hard and super skilled work. It's very valuable to my clients. I'm just doing half as much as I would have to do to be on the partner track.

But I'm not thinking about maximizing like salary. I'm thinking about having a good salary for those hours. It's a great salary for those hours. And we can live like kings over here. Right. So there's, once you know what you're trying to do, I'm a different person, I need a slow productivity as opposed to a pseudo productivity approach to my work. There's a huge number of options there where you can still be doing stuff that matters, supporting your family, being engaged, but these other parts of your vision of the ideal

lifestyle can also be preserved. So this is like a good approach to these questions as opposed to just drastic changes. Jobs are bad. I don't want to work anymore. Or I shouldn't have to change anything from what I was when I was 26 or whatever. So like whatever, I'm just going to grind it out and we're going to make this happen. We have like subtlety here. We understand the problem.

We're working towards a broader vision of the ideal lifestyle. We have a sense of what craft can be post kids, the slower productivity notion of craft and say, can I get that in my job? And if not, what's the closest thing to preserve as much of my career capital as possible where I can get that? I mean, all of this is about clarity and specificity and what's going on, why it's going on, what we want, how we can change it, how we can get there. The more clear and systematic we are, the better decisions we make, the better changes we make. We avoid the drastic grand gestures. We avoid the regrets of making the big change.

that didn't really fix things. So, Christina, there's a lot packed into this simple question. I think it was good to unfold, but I think the main point is, and again, I can't emphasize this enough for the women in your life try to analogize all their problems to, like, obscure baseball things. That is always a winner, Jesse. It was Yale-Shon Braun. Yale-Shaunbrun.

Oh, I like that interview. What episode was that? I found, I was surged a while ago. It was a while ago. Yeah. That was a cool episode. Because if I remember correctly, she's a Brown professor, psychologist who studies psychology and work. Yeah.

And among other things, the psychology of gender and work. And it was fascinating interview. All right. We got a case study. Case studies are where people send in, like a report on how things are going with applying the type of advice we talk here about this show to their own life. We like these. Please send them in. How do they do that, Jesse?

just go to the question submission form and one of the options is case study. Yeah, go to the deeplife.com slash listen. And then at top you can click on the survey link and then send these in. There's an option for case studies. Especially because I can just email me. Or email Jesse at calnewport.com. Especially deep life stuff because I'm thinking about a book on this. Send in those case studies about you systematically cultivating a deep life.

I love those. All right. Today's case study comes from Mark. It has a hidden question inside of it. So it's a case study plus bonus question. Mark says, firstly, thanks for all your work that you have put into your books and podcast. I discovered you very late at the end of 2023 and have implemented a lot of your ideas into my life since then, including the digital declutter on route to embracing digital minimalism, time block planning, deep work, intentional living, reading as default entertainment. this has improved my life immensely both in and out of work.

Since your work has had such an impact on my life outside of work, I'm always excited by the deep life segments on the podcast and learning more about it. On that note, do you have any book recommendations aside from your own that would complement cultivating a deep life outside of work? So far from past recommendations, I have two books, Walden and Designing Your Life. I'd love to hear more. You'd consider good reading before you release a Deep Life book in the future. is a good one. I increasingly think about Thoreau and Walden as like the original person in early modernity grappling with this question of how do I design my life, not within an existing structure of meaning, but having feeling like you had to come up with that from scratch and systematically experiment with what do I want to do with my life. Thoreau and Walden is sort of patient zero for that type of thinking. Here's the thing.

looking for books that are about the how to build a deep life like specifically about a deep life I will only get you so far I mean my book when I eventually write it of course will be must reading but really what you should be focusing on much more than that mark is books that give you intimations of what your own deep life should include right what you're looking for is resonance I am reading about this person I'm reading about this thing it's not a book about specifically how to make your life better. It's a book about someone's life, and it resonates. You want to write that down.

Then you watch this documentary. Something about that resonates. You write that down. You come across an article in a magazine. Why is this resonating? You write that down. An Instagram picture. Why is this particular Instagram story capture my attention?

You write that down. Have one notebook that you're writing all this down, and you're trying to capture these intimations of what's important to you. And then eventually you can take these observations of all these things that resonated and extract more general properties. oh, the things that resonate tend to be like slower living outdoors or craft or like energy and the freneticism of like the city and the tales of like people, you know, living in brownstones in New York and going to the club, whatever it is, right? You begin to extract the general properties from these specific examples of things that resonate. That's how you begin to craft your ideal lifestyle vision.

So I would care more about that mark than reading specifically about how to think about your life or how to change your life. All right. So read broadly, look for what resonates, write it down, and then extract properties. And it can be surprising. Like I've mentioned before, like for myself, there's like some Hawaii stuff that's resonated. Laird Hamilton's house and Malibu and sort of how he lives out there and how his day's structure while he's sort of waiting for the big waves to come. that resonated with me not because I want to live on a

pineapple plantation in Malibu or not because I want to surf big waves or not because I want to even live in Hawaii but there's like deeper things in that about seasonality deep to shallow work ratio the work to other parts of life

variation and like intensity followed by times with like intense focus and things that aren't work there's subtler properties that resonate right why did I come across that watching the documentary

a combination of there's a Laird Hamilton documentary which is great I recommend it and the Susan Casey book The Wave which is like half of that book is a biography of Laird Hamilton and the other half is about the science

of big waves. Fantastic book I recommend it. But anyways, I don't know why that resonated at the time but I just made a note of that and then over time I extracted oh there's some general properties in here that are important to me

so that's what I'd care about more, Mark, is finding things that resonate then care more about that than finding a specific instruction about shaping your life. Just wait for my Deep Life book, and that'll solve that for you. In the meantime, figure out what that vision involves.

All right, we're coming up to our final segment. We're going to talk about the books I read, but first, hear from another sponsor. I want to talk in particular about Notion, a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It's a workspace designed, not just for making progress,

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notion is for you. You can manage your work and your workflow. So try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com slash Cal, but do that in all lowercase letters. That's notion.com slash cow and start turning your ideas into action. When you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So make sure you go to notion.com slash cow. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. Look, using the internet without ExpressVPN is like having a first aid kit, but not keeping it stocked up.

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but only when you go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's get that. our final segment. Because this is our first episode in June, as I try to do at the beginning of each month, is I want to review the five books I read in the month preceding. So I want to go over the five books I read in May 2024. The first book I read was Science and Human Values by Jay Bernalski. Jay Brunowski, who wrote, I believe he's most known for The Ascent of Man.

And anyways, 20th century philosopher of technology, more than anything else, who was one of the well-known thinkers and critics on technology and how it impacts society, how it's shaped human civilization over the years. So really respected thinker in that social aspects of technology space. This is one of his well-known, a shorter book, dense book, science and human values. interesting. This was really written, I believe this was like mid-20th century. And he's really talking about what was then a very central tension between science and the humanities. And was sort of getting at the value science broad and trying to address some of these concerns of thinking of these two things as being either very separate or one being able to replace the other. So some of it's very of the times, but also there's some really deep ideas in there. So it's interesting book. Then I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. The Hot Zone, this is a nonfiction book, huge bestseller written by Richard Preston, about a strain and airborne strain of Ebola that got loose

in a primate holding facility in suburban Virginia, Rest in Virginia. So not far from where we are right now. Classic example of narrative nonfiction. Preston wrote this first for the New Yorker and then developed it into a full book. Classic example of narrative nonfiction. So it goes back and forth between the history of Ebola, like sort of when the first times it emerged and just sort of like destroyed people with the narrative of what was happening in Reston, Virginia. It's kind of a cool book.

I mean, so basically like what makes it scary is it was spreading through the air. There's a very, very dangerous virus, right? I mean, it makes COVID seem like a skin to knee. Like this is, we're talking, at least where they were measuring in Africa, like 70, 90% fatality rate. And it was spreading through the air. Fortunately, and I'm like, this is not a spoiler because, you know, most of the Eastern Seaboard didn't die of Ebola in the 1990s. So you kind of know the ending. It wasn't really well adapted for humans.

But anyways, it gets through. It's a cool book. And it gets through the characters, classic narrative nonfiction writing. Richard Preston's great. It used to live, actually, until recently, near where I grew up in New Jersey, had this cool big farm that he owned, and Hopewell, New Jersey, had some cool land, but he moved up the Maine more recently. All right, anyway, it's a great book.

If you haven't read it, classic example of narrative nonfiction. Then I read, because I was on a Preston, I guess I was on a Preston streak, Richard's brother, Douglas Preston, I read his new novel, Extinction. We went for like a long weekend to sort of like an off-season beach resort. And I wanted like a summary fun book. And so I read this book, Extinction. I don't know. I don't want to spoil too much of it.

Like, okay, I'm not going to spoil it. It's kind of high concept. There's this sort of ice age Jurassic Park, right? So they've de-extincted not dinosaurs for 65 million years ago, but sort of ice age animals from 30,000 years ago, like woolly mammoths, right? These type of animals, and there's this sort of isolated park and Colorado in this sort of valley that's hard to get in and out of where they've de-extincted these animals. Grizzly murders start happening, and it soon unfolds sort of like shocking reality

that they were doing more than just de-extincting animals, you know, harmless animals. Stuff ensues. Kind of a cool book. It's kind of dark at the end, too. It was fun. So Douglas Preston, Douglas Preston's an interesting guy. Interesting guy also writes for the New Yorker,

like his brother Richard, occasionally, also writes thriller novels. It's like the main thing he does, most of them with his co-author Lincoln Child, but also solo novels like Extinction, does also write some nonfiction. He's done a bunch of adventuring, like the lost city of the monkey gods.

He almost died, like getting these parasite infected, going to explore this lost city in the Amazon. Really interesting guy. Douglas Preston's story that's interesting to me is that he got a job out of school with the National History Museum. So it's called the big one in New York, the big block, big national, where they have the dinosaurs and stuff like that. Yeah. I don't know if it's called American Museum of Natural History. I'll look it up.

Yeah, American Museum of Natural History, which is like this huge complex funded in the 19th century. tree. It's like a full, like multiple city blocks or whatever. And he was working there and he wrote a book called Dinosaurs in the Attic. It was the American Museum of National History. He wrote this book about a nonfiction book about this. It's this cool, weird place where, you know, there's all this stuff from 200 years ago stored in nooks and crannies. And he was writing this book, I think for, I don't know who's writing for, maybe Simon Schuster, maybe it was for St. Martin's. Anyway, it says, his editor, Lincoln Child. like came with him to see the museum and said,

you know what, we should write a thriller that takes place in this museum. It's like such a crazy, cool setting. So him and his editor for his nonfiction book wrote the relic, which is like this fantastic thriller about a sort of monster loose in the American Museum of Natural History. And they became a writing duo and started writing all of these thrillers together,

these Lincoln Child thrillers. And then both Lincoln and Douglas write their own books at the same time. And anyways, I think he's a cool guy. He lived a cool life. Extinction was kind of a cool book. It was interesting. All right. Then I read,

When the shooting stops, dot, dot, dot, the cutting begins. So I am a, as you know, a sucker for these books about specific people in the movie industry

where they talk about their career and all the movies they worked on. This is yet another book written by an editor. This is the second book I think I've read

this year about a film editor and this is Ralph Rosenblum, had a real distinguished career, did some really famous stuff with Cindy Lumet, and then did a bunch of Woody Allen stuff, including Annie Hall. And so this is really interesting. He's an older generation.

I mean, you know, he was really working in like the 60s. He was working in the 70s. And again, it's cool to learn about the art of editing. It's interesting to hear these stories. His story on Annie Hall in particular is really interesting because that movie was filmed to be something

completely different. The original name of Annie Hall was A. Hedonia. And it was all of these different. It was supposed to be sort of inside the mind of the Woody Allen character and just showing all these different aspects of his life and all the different stuff going through his mind. And it was supposed to be like this sort of psychological realism. The Annie Hall relationship was like one of multiple plot lines that was going to, this movie was weaving together to show the complex psychological life of this

this main character and in the editing they rebuilt it to be about Woody Allen's relationship with Diane Keaton and it won best picture so that was probably the coolest story in the book to hear about that so if you love the sort of

if you're a movie cinephile type this was a great one final book I read in May 2024 the great partnership by Jonathan Sacks I referenced this in a recent episode you know I really like

Jonathan Sacks writing this is about the values of science and the values of religion, and it takes a sort of historical theological look at it. There's this big distinction between what he calls the values of Athens and the values of Jerusalem. It's like two completely different ways of processing the world and thinking about things, and he basically makes the argument that they're very complimentary and you need both. He thinks this is interesting points in it, right? Keep in mind, this book was written in the first decade of the 2000.

So this was, or maybe like 2012, but it was a response to the new atheist, right? It was a response to Dawkins and Hitchens, etc., who were, he sets them up as trying to have the mindset of Jerusalem take over the mindset of Athens. They're like at odds, and the new atheists were saying that the Athens mindset, the sort of left brain scientific mindset, that's what works. And this other thing is mythological and fiction and doesn't work. And in the book, he's trying to show like they got that wrong. These are like two separate ways of seeing the world. But he argues the reason why we mix this up is because starting with Pauling Christianity going forward, you had these Greek ideals, the sort of Athens left brain way of thinking was increasingly

actually integrated into theological thinking. And for a while, Christianity tried to combine these two and that didn't work well. And that's what made them seem like they were somehow intention. Anyways, it's classic sacks where he somehow takes really complicated topics, like the history of Western philosophy, the development of the Abrahamic faiths, and he can just talk clearly and simply about him. Like, oh, I get it. They're there. These mixed together. Real skill to do that type of intellectual, intellectual survey with narrative momentum in a way that's very accessible to a non-specialist audience.

He was the best at it. So I actually learned a lot. And again, I used this sort of Athens-Juruselum analogy in a deep dive a few weeks ago. So I already got some value out of it. So I enjoyed that book. Real quick note. In the show notes, we have Bram's Notion directory link of all the books that you've read. Oh, yeah.

Speaking of Notion, our sponsor. Okay, so Bram is the name of the listener, right? Yep. All right. So a listener is created, he's keeping track of all these books from the books I read segment, and he's using Notion to build up this sort of flexible data-driven view of what I've read. So, right, so links in the show notes. Yep, it's in all the show notes. Perfect. All right. So you can always find that link in the show notes to keep up with the books

I've read through many months' paths. So Bram, thank you for that. All right, Jesse, I think that's all the time we have. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions or case studies are called in with their calls. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that

afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.