Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 304: Seinfeld on The Deep Life

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

In a recent interview, held to promote his new Netflix movie, Jerry Seinfeld went on a remarkable 10-minute run in which he rattled off one insight after another about deep work, procrastination, and the quest to live an intentional life in a distracted world. In this episode, Cal extracts four key lessons from this segment of Jerry’s interview. He then takes listener questions and ends with a segment in which he apologizes to an internet personality whom he incorrectly associated with the dreaded “hustle culture.”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:  Seinfeld on The Deep Life [4:31]- Do I need to practice outside of work to improve my craft? [30:26]- Can I tackle learning goals sequentially? [38:44]- How do I get through “grinding” at work? [43:10]- How can I build my craft to grow my YouTube channel? [49:56]- Can Cal talk about being an assistant professor with young kids? [54:49] CASE STUDY: Using lifestyle-centric career planning to upgrade my job and life [1:00:09]CAL REACTS: James Scholz studies twelve hours a day [1:05:19]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/ youtube.com/watch?v=TXAvkqXD-Fcyoutube.com/c/jamesscholz Thanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deepblinkist.com/deepmybodytutor.comshopify.com/deepThanks 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, I'm a computer science professor and writer, and on this show, we deal with how to navigate the promises and perils of new technology. Typically, our advice falls into one of three categories. One, understanding how new technology works, how it affects us and what we should do about it. two, going deep into the unique challenges of digital era knowledge work, and three, how to cultivate a deep life as a bulwark against all these distractions and divergence. Now, I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I think we have something maybe a first for this show. For today's deep dive, I think we're actually going to hit on all three of those categories of advice that we typically do.

That's good. Usually we'll focus on one per episode. Like, yeah, we're going to talk about email and knowledge work. We're going to talk about AI. What's going on with new technology? Or we're going to talk about how to do lifestyle-centric planning for deep life. I think we're going to touch one way or the other on all three. So I am excited about that.

I'll tell you, it's hard to believe we're at the three-month mark, give or take a handful of days. To slow productivity, my book coming out. Time goes by fast. It's fast and slow somehow. I mean, in the one hand, it just feels like yesterday that I was writing this book, you know, over the summer. On the other hand, it feels like I have been talking about this show on podcast since, and I'm being conservative here, the late Reagan administration. So sort of fast and slow. But, you know, I'm excited.

We're kind of moving out of the phase of doing lots of active publicity, and now it's sort of word of mouth time. So I'm very happy with the book's launch. It's really the fastest sales launch I've ever had with a book. which I owe a lot to this great audience that we built up. You know, we're at 90 plus thousand copies in the U.S. I always think of 100,000 copies as a very important threshold for a book. Like hitting 100,000 has always been symbolic,

and I think we're basically there will be there soon, so I feel good about that. So now it's just spreading the word. You know, we'll keep talking about here on the show, but if you like the book, of course, tell people, tell people about it. In terms of writing, when do authors, like, hit their prime, Like in their 50s? Oh, God, I hope so.

I hope the answer is not in their 30s. I hope the answer is not when they're 21. That's when I got started. Maybe later on, when people look back at my career, they'll be like, the peak was how to win at college, 2005. And it was all downhill from there. It's all downhill from there for Cal. I don't know. Writers can just rock and roll pretty late because there's no physical things.

It's not like sports. In like theoretical physics. and mathematics and theoretical computer science, there is a sense that by 40 your brain slows down a little bit. But in writing, you don't have to have like the full 100% horsepower you need to solve equations and you gain more wisdom as you get older. I'm hoping that just knowing more things and having more reps will outweigh the fact that like a 40-year-old brain maybe doesn't have quite as much horsepower as a, you know, 35-year-old brain.

So I don't know. I'm optimistic. Did you see McPhee's article in The New Yorker a couple weeks ago? go. He's like 90-something years old, right? He is. He must be now like in his young 90s. Yeah. I think he'd mention that in the article. Yeah. He can still write. Yeah. McFeed's got it dialed in. Anyways, so it's exciting. The book is sort of out there. Now it's summertime, man, I'm disappearing this summer. I'm going to think. I'm going to write. We'll still podcast. Worry not. We'll still podcast. I might, there might be some of me podcasting from undisclosed,

heavily wooded locations, but the podcast will go on. But I am going to take a breather. Yeah. All right. So we got a good show. So we got this, the deep dive coming up. Just going to hit all three of the pillars that we talk about on the show. We got some good questions, including a cool case study in there. And then a final segment. I'm going to react to something.

It might be surprised by my reaction to something that has made a splash online. So stay tuned for that. But let's get started now with our deep dive. Last week, Jerry Seinfeld, as part of the promotional tour for his new Neffield. movie Frosted did an interview on the Honestly podcast with Barry Weiss. Now, they covered a lot of territory, but there was a remarkable 10-minute run that occurred roughly between the 16 and a half minute mark and the 25-minute mark, where Seinfeld peeled off multiple deep ideas that are very relevant to the types of things we talk about here on this podcast,

and in particular how to cultivate a deep-focused life in a distraction. world. So what I did here is I grabbed four of the most interesting quotes from Jerry during this period. I will read each of these quotes, and then I will respond to them, helping to identify the wisdom and the quote, and offering a few thoughts of my own. So we have our own sort of Seinfeldian Talmud session that we're doing today. I'm excited about this. Now, let's start the first lesson. Here's the setup. Barry asked Jerry if it's true. that he still writes with a legal pad and a ballpoint pin. This is something about a decade ago that Jerry Seinfeld noted in a New York Times interview and Barry is saying, is that still true?

All right. Here's Jerry's exact quote. It's nice. When you write comedy, an excuse this pretentious analogy, but it's a lot like poetry. You don't do a lot of writing. It's 90% thinking, 10% actual writing. But the feeling of a ballpoint pin on a thick yellow pad is very pleasant. It's like a warm bath to me. All right, I think there's a really important point lurking in here beyond just a specific tool that Jerry uses. It's his indifference to the details of the efficiency of his tools that we should really

care about because it gets to the difference between two different notions of productivity. On the one hand, we have what a lot of us are familiar with. It's what I call process productivity. On the other hand, you have what Jerry Seinfeld cares about, which is what we can call creative productivity. Now, process productivity is where you have a sequence of defined steps, and you want those steps to occur as quickly and low cost as possible. If I have an assembly line that makes pop tarts, see I'm doing a pop tarts reference here because of Jerry's new movie. If I have an assembly line that makes pop tarts, I want that line to go as quick as possible. And as low cost as possible.

So in process productivity, you care a lot about the tools. How exactly does this machine put icing on the pop tarts? If there's a faster way to do it, that's better. How exactly do we put the little icing twist on top of the main frosting? If we have a tool that does that faster or cheaper, that's better, right? That's often how we think when we're confronting productivity tools for us as individual knowledge workers. We think, like, well, what's this going to make faster? Is this going to connect my thoughts to other thoughts?

Is it going to seamlessly let me move between formats? Will it auto fill in or correct my typing? Can it even help me think on my behalf by showing me connections between thoughts? We want the tools to be faster and more featured as a way to get more productivity. That's process productivity. Jerry cares about creative productivity, which is how do I produce the best stuff over time? when it comes to create a productivity, the tools don't matter much. How fast I write, how many features I have in my writing software makes a negligible difference in the ultimate quality and quantity of what I write.

Think about writing in particular. This is something we've been doing professionally for a long time. We've had big publishing houses in the American context since, you know, the revolutionary period, right? This is something we've done for a long time. the tools by which writers now write are way more efficient than they've ever been before. Look, even in my own lifetime, when I was copy editing my first books, which I wrote in the early 2000s, they would FedEx you, a big printed manuscript with red colored pencils using to do all the corrections. You had to learn all the copy editing marks because you had all these efficient marks that indicate what you meant.

And you had to go through each of these things and respond to them with, a different color pencil. I mean, you would checkmark things, you would cross things out, you would make your own corrections and flag them into margins, and then you would have to go to the post office. I remember this so well, and put this big thing in a, I'd use like a priority mail giant envelope and mail it back to random house. And I hope it didn't get lost because there was no other copy of this, right? And now, of course, we use Microsoft Word and Track Changes.

It's faster. Hemingway would pound out each word of, his books or short stories on a Corona typewriter, now we can copy and paste in a word processor. It's better, right? It's more efficient. But Hemingway wrote a lot. And in fact, if we look at how much work authors produce, we don't see some major change, whereas the tools got better, authors produced more writing. As the tools got better, we don't see a change that authors produced better writing. Because ultimately, creative acts take a long time. It's much more about the actual thinking, the construction of the original idea, the original voice, and just

Jerry's case, the original joke. This is what really matters. This is something that is tool agnostic. It is just the very last mile of creation where you actually record that on something. And yeah, it's a little bit easier if that's Microsoft Word instead of a typewriter. And a typewriter is certainly easier than it would be writing this on a scroll. But it's the last mile of this long creative process. So it doesn't, in the long run, affect the quality of what I produce or how much I produce. Create a productivity is different than process productivity. If you are a knowledge worker, you're much closer to the creatives than you are to the processes. You're much closer to the Seinfelds and the Hemingways than you are to the

Pop-Tart factory. So there's a good lesson here. Do not get caught up in a process productivity mindset. Updated your tools as a knowledge worker can make your life less annoying on the margins, but is largely orthogonal to how much high-quality stuff you produce and how quality those things actually are. All right, lesson number two from the Seinfeld interview. Here's the setup. Barry Weiss asked Jerry, do you have a special place you like to write? So here's Jerry's exact quote in response. I do, but I could write right here, if you would all just leave me alone. Give me a flat surface and I'm good to go. This is the other thing I believe in. There is no writer's block. There's no writer's block. There's lazy. They're scared, but there's no writer's

block. Just sit down and realize you're mediocre and you're going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good. That's what writing is. I think we can generalize this to a lot of creative or cognitive pursuits. They're hard. Why are they hard? Well, we can get neurological about this if we want to. The human brain has evolved to do lots of things pretty well. and because we're evolved to do certain things, we don't feel a lot of strain or resistance to doing them. If I see an animal in the distance that I want to hunt and I'm hungry, I'm evolved to very accurately aim a spear. There's a lot of calculations and machinations that go on within our neural circuitry, but I can aim that spear, especially with some practice in a way that's really quite amazing

and have a good chance of hitting that animal. I don't feel resistance to it. It's something I'm doing that I'm evolved to do. abstract cognition, what we, some researchers call symbolic processing, where we're taking these mechanisms that are meant to encounter a concrete world and we turn them inward and say let's work on an internal abstract world. Let's deal with abstractions like writing and concepts and ideas and theories that we're then going to try to wrench into written words or computer code or a design for an ad campaign. We're not evolved to do this. We're again, we're wrenching mechanisms. meant for a much more embodied physical cognition, and we're reassigning them to this more abstract work. Our mind's not on board with this. And so we feel resistance. This is why if you sit down to write a report or an article or a novel, you really have a hard time getting started. So your mind's like, I don't know what this is. This is not throwing a spear. Now, it gets easier because once you get

going, what happens is you load up all the relevant cognitive context. Right now your brain is activating the networks that are relevant to what you're writing. It's inhibiting the network. works that aren't relevant to it anymore. You get into a cognitive groove and things rolls along much better. So what this tells us is don't expect it to be easy, but it will get easier as you go along. So just go do it. Stop thinking about the muse. Stop imagining that your cognitively demanding process, that it's just the mood was just right or your skills were just right or the circumstance was just right is going to come effortlessly. Don't obsess over Mahaly-Chixit-Mehi's theory of flow. Maybe you'll get some flow, probably not. It's

just hard. What you're doing at first isn't good. And the way things become good is you put them down and work and work and work on them. This is certainly my experience writing. It's in particular my experience when I work on a New Yorker piece just because the demands of the language is very high. There's no other way to go about those, but to just write and write and write and go back and fix and write and just trust over time, you will be able to build from your natural mediocriness and the something that might actually work. So I think Jerry is really on to something there. Now, this doesn't mean. Now, here's the subtlety of this. Look at what his very first two words of his answer.

I do. The question was, do you have a special place to write? And he said, I do. So this doesn't mean that location is something you should be indifferent to. It can help. Talk about this all the time on the show. If you have a location that you associate exclusively with a certain type of deep work, it will be easier to get into those deep work sessions.

Not easy. Easier. If you have a ritual you do consistently before. deep work sessions. It will make it easier to do that deep work, not easy, but easier. But you don't have to have that. And even with that, it's going to be hard. So I like his mindset of you should be willing to just find a flat surface and go or whatever your equivalent of a flat surface is for the creative endeavor that you are involved in. There's one thing I'm going to add to Jerry's wisdom here. Riders block is largely invented. I agree with that. Writing is hard. Feeling hard

shouldn't be a problem. There is, however, an interpretation of it that I think is useful. If you're really consistently having difficulties mustering motivation to work on a create a project, especially if it's a new or bold idea, sometimes this is your mind's way of telling you that your plan stinks, right? It's a concept we talk about often on the show is that procrastination in many cases is your mind correctly pointing out you don't really know what you're doing. our mind has a way of projected into the future simulating the plan for what you're about to do trying to get to the results of this plan so it can then evaluate those results and say if this is positive I'll give you motivation to do what we're about to do and if this is negative I won't right again this

goes back to the paleolithic I'm in the late ice age I'm hunting a mammoth I have this idea here's what I'm going to do I'm going to run and jump off this cliff onto the back of the mammoth and club it in the head with a rock until it dies. And you find yourself having a hard time actually pulling the trigger to run and jump. Well, it's because your brain has simulated this pretty effortlessly and said, oh, I probably will. A, break my legs as I fall off the cliff and then be stomped the death by a mammoth. That doesn't seem like a really good outcome. So let's withhold motivation. You're like, that's maybe not a good plan. And then someone else comes along and says, why don't we throw a spear from a distance? Your brain thinks about that. It's like, ooh, that'll probably work.

We won't get stomped. And I like meat. And you get motivation to do it. It's an adaptive. and it's an adaptive reaction. But when it comes to creative pursuits, it still comes to play. So you want to write a novel, and you've fallen in love with, like, you've got this, like, perfect setup where you're going to do your writing every morning with just to write tea, and you just love the accoutrements of the novelist lifestyle. But you don't really know anything about novel writing. You don't know, like, what does it take to break into the type of writing you're trying to do? Are you good at it? Have you been evaluated?

What's the process? Did you have an agent first? should you be working with an editor? You didn't really do any of that work. So your brain is unable to simulate with confidence a future that it trusts. So it's like, eh, I don't think so. Motivation with help. So that is the one distinction I'll give to Jerry's advice.

If you really have Block on a Creative Pursuit, make sure first you really understand how that pursuit works and you have a plan going forward that you have some faith can actually succeed. Then resistance beyond that point, you got to just find a flat surface and write. All right, let's see here. Lesson number three. Barry asked him, Jerry, about the importance of place, meaning where you live. All right, here's Jerry's response.

It's hugely essential, cataclysmically relevant and potent to your psychophysical well-being and productiveness. The importance of place to me, the analogy, is the tuning fork. You have a rhythm, a frequency, a vibration as a human being. when you're in the place that your frequency vibration matches the frequency vibration of the place, then you're comfortable. Now, this fits perfectly with the notion of lifestyle-centric planning

that we talk about all the time on the show. Now, if you're new to the show, you should listen to last week's episode. I get into the dangers of just assuming that a singular grand goal is going to make your life suddenly meaningful and intentional. We often tell ourselves this fairy tale, accomplish some singular grand goal,

and your whole life will be good. the much more consistent way at building a life that you find meaningful and intentional is to actually figure out what are all of the elements of such a life and then systematically,

creatively and flexibly work towards those properties using all of the resources that you have available to you. It's not as sexy as just, I've got this grand idea that impresses my roommate when I tell them

and if I succeed, all is going to be good, but you're also much more likely to make progress. One of the key things when we talk about lifestyle-centric planning is where you live. I don't mean specifically necessarily, like this neighborhood or this city, but the type of place you live. I always talk about that. When you vision your ideal lifestyle

that you're going to now work towards, part of this vision has to be what is the place like where you live? Are you walking out of the cabin onto the Sundaple pond where you're going to sit quietly with your coffee and watch like Thoreau at Walden, the ice melt as you get your thoughts going for the day, or is it going to be a sort of high energy you're in a city? You know, you're on your way, the see a reading of an experimental play, that people are interesting, artistic types of all sorts of diverse, interesting backgrounds. What catches your attention? Seinfeld here is emphasizing why that's important. I always talk about resonance when we do lifestyle-centric planning, work backwards from what resonates.

He uses a tuning fork analogy. What do tuning forks do? They resonate. So he said, yeah, this is really important. The right type of place for you creates a resonance. it's a rhythm, you're comfortable. The wrong type of place it doesn't work. So the type of place you are matters.

So again, if you follow the grand goal, the grand goal theory, this is the type of thing that you might neglect. The grand goal theory might say, okay, whatever, I want the highest possible achievement in the field I'm in. I want to find a job that's my passion, or something like this, right? Or I want to finally succeed in, you know, selling a novel and being a novelist, right? You're just focusing on one thing. But if you're focusing on one thing, all the other attributes of your life get pulled around randomly.

So in pursuing that goal, hey, I got into banking out of school because it was the hardest job. And if I can become a managing director and make a million five a year, then I'm going to be happy. You're following that goal with singular focus. You don't realize I hate cities. This is not resonating with me. I'm miserable. It makes me anxious. You weren't thinking about the whole lifestyle.

You were thinking about just one thing. So I think of the whole lifestyle location should be a big part of it. Jerry emphasizes that. And in case you're wondering, for Jerry, it's New York, the rhythms of New York. I mean, he's being nice about L.A., which is where he was to record this interview, but clearly his time in L.A. filming Seinfeld, he learned that's not his place. The rhythms of New York. That's the place, the type of place he needs to be.

All right, we've got a fourth and final lesson here. The setup is Barry is discussing with Jerry, the meaning of life, the importance Jerry plays It's on craft. They sort of deep things, right? All right. So Jerry has a cool quote here. It's all beautiful. He's referring here to life.

But I really, but not really, until we do something with it. Make something, do something. The hard is the good. I think I was about eight. And I remember where I was, the exact street. And I was on my bike, just peddling. And I remember it hitting me that there was a lot going on. And I just wanted to do something really hard.

So I love this idea. should resonate with people who have read my book so good they can't ignore you, or have read my new book, slow productivity, and a particular principle three obsess over quality. I love this idea that the heart is good. It's in the pursuing of something hard and making progress in that pursuit that we do gain a lot of our meaning as humans.

Now, we know this from psychology. If we look at self-determination theory, Ryan and Decky, for example, or they look at what are the elements you need for motivation and thriving psychologically? one of the big ones there was mastery. Mastering something, I'm doing something. Well, humans really like that.

And again, I'm going to use a lot of these sort of paleolithic, evolutionary biology, just so tales, but some of them are so obvious that we can just sort of stipulate that they're true. Clearly, it's important for our species. That mastery felt good.

By getting better at hard things is what allowed us to, what we call, biologists would call refine our extended phenotype. In other words, extend what it is we are able to do in the world beyond just with what physically we have on our body with how we're

born, not just our arms and our legs, but we can master throwing spears. That extends our phenotype. We can master art. That extends our phenotype. We can master language. We can master strategy. All of this, this extended phenotype, this ability to gain and master new skills throughout life

is very important to human survival and it feels really good. Now here's a key lesson, right? I mean, this is a podcast about navigating the promises and perils of technology in pursuit of a deeper life. Technology plays a big role in thwarting the Seinfeldian

vision of the hard is good. Technology wants to trick you, especially modern consumer-facing internet mobile technologies, wants to trick you into thinking your online activities that these are hard, that you're accrual of these sort of fake followers online and the retweets means that you're a leader.

This was a hard to do. It's not really. That your progress in the video game, that you have a higher ranking among the Wizards and World of Warcraft, Command Duty, you know, whatever, means that you've built up skill that gives you respect among your fellow tribe members, but these aren't real people and these skills are easy to learn.

The games are set up so that you'll make progress on these skills regularly. It's made up so you always feel better like you just got a glorified participation. trophy. Now you're even better at shooting digital Nazis on your TV screen in the basement. The digital wants you to think that your angry rantings on social media versus your perceived political or ideological enemies is somehow moving the arc of progress forward, that it matters, that you're part of the change. What they don't realize is that you're actually on the set of the Truman Show. You're yelling in an empty warehouse and your sound that's being bottled and monetized to help a small number of stockholders of these social media companies.

you're not changing the world, you're changing the number of zeros on someone like Mark Zuckerberg's annual worth. All right. So technology survives in part by subverting this instinct towards mastery. Don't let it. Seek real mastery. Not the low friction digital kind, but real mastery. There's unambiguous stakes and reward where it's hard to make progress, but you know for sure you did. This is a really important part of living a deep life.

in a technological world. All right, so let's pull together all four of these lessons from this 10-minute run in this Barry Weiss interview of Jerry Seinfeld. All right, if I was going to summarize this sort of scripture

of Jerry Seinfeld here, work hard over time on something you care about. Don't worry about your tools too much, but just put in the work day after day. Live in a location that resonates with you, but don't get caught up

about having the perfect immediate surroundings just to get started each day, put in the hours, the heart is good. All right, Jerry, I know you didn't mean the sort of write an oral self-help manifesto, but you are on to something, my friend, and I appreciated your lessons. All right, so we can move on now with our questions. Before we do, however, let's hear a word from some of our sponsors. I want to talk first about our friends at Element, L-M-N-T. Now, you know Element as the drink mix that gives you those electrolyte levels you need to recover from a hard day, a workout from your real dehydration, no sugar, no artificial nonsense, just what you need gives it to you, Pierre.

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what tech will use for that. It will be Shopify. All we need to figure out is what to sell details. But, once we figure that out, of course we'll be using Shopify to sell whatever it is we sell. All right, here's the good news. You can sign up now for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep.

The key to get that discount is to type that all in lowercase letters, Shopify.com slash deep. Go to Shopify.com slash deep right now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. That's Shopify.com slash deep. All right, let's move on now to some questions. All right, Jesse, who's our first question today? All right, first questions from Giacomo. Can I take advantage of projects at work to improve my craft or is dedicated outside practice time necessary?

Well, Jacamo, that's an interesting question. And it gets to, I think, a key point. I don't really want to say confusion, but it's a little bit of a confusion that people have around practicing skills. So your idea that you want to practice skills make sense. I've been talking about this for a long time, that if you have a knowledge, work, job, and you really want to build up the career capital that's going to give you leverage over the day-to-day reality if you're working life, you have to identify what is it that I do that is most valuable, unambiguously valuable to my organization or the market, and you have to practice and improve that skill systematically. That's how you get options.

That's how you're going to ultimately craft a job you feel passionate about. So, Jacamo is asking, when and how do I practice these skills? So here's the confusion I want to bring up. When we think about practice, what are the types of fields we typically think about? We think about musicians. We think about chess players. We think about athletes, right? We think about the endeavors where we actually explicitly talk about practice.

We explicitly schedule times for practice. My son plays baseball. He has baseball practices. he goes to. Here's the confusion. Those are really the exception, not the norm, when it comes to how you build skills. This idea that you can have these abstract isolated practice sessions, where I'm going to go, for example, to a baseball field and take grounders and work in the cage in this isolated,

abstract way so that later when I'm playing baseball, I'll be better. Or I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to lift weights because it's going to make me faster when I'm on the football field. The sort of isolated abstract practice separate from the actual endeavor in which you want to apply it, that is the exception not the rule. So yes, we do that in sports. We do that in music. We do that for things like chess.

But for most endeavors, especially complicated cognitive endeavors, like almost any skill you'd be improving in knowledge work. For most endeavors, you're better off having the actual work itself be your practice. instead of saying, let me do something different and hope that the skills I pick up in this abstract practice carry over to my specific work. Let your work itself be the practice. We actually do this.

And by we, I'm referring here to the online course that I have with Scott Young called Top Performer, which we open up once or twice a year. This is a course in which it's based on my book, so good they can't ignore you. we help you do exactly this, deliberately practice your job to get better at it, so you can take control. And we're very specific. We've done this course since 2014, so we've been doing this course for a while. We've learned to be very specific that to practice, the key is to get an active project that your boss knows you're doing, that you're being held accountable, that

matters, the outcome matters, that is designed very carefully to stretch your skills beyond where you're currently comfortable. Let the actual work itself be your practice session. That's going to be your best bet, especially with professional training. Now, this is in part just because the stakes are higher, like you actually care about this. I have to do this. It's part of my job. I said I'm going to do this. There's consequences if I don't.

But it also has to do with the actual mechanisms. You're practicing specifically the thing you want to be better at as opposed to hoping that related skills carry over. Right. So, like, we hear this sometimes from people. Here's a common example I hear. Should I do meditation or, like, play a game like chess? so that I get more comfortable with sustained concentration when I'm doing my work. And to that, my answer is always, the better way to practice concentrating on your work

is to practice concentrating on your work. To actually sit there with a stopwatch, schedule out the time. We're going to do 20 minutes at a time until we're comfortable. Then we're going to do 30 minutes. If my attention wanders, I'm going to stop the clock and I'm going to start over. Like it's better to actually practice specifically what it feels like to concentrate on specifically what you do for your work, feeling the specific distractions that are unique to your workplace, the Slack channels, the email, than it is to do something unrelated and hope concentration skills carry over. This carries over for lots of other skills. You want to be a better computer programmer.

Don't do Suduko. Give yourself harder computer programming challenges that makes you harder at it. You want to be a better writer. Don't do crossword puzzles. give yourself increasingly challenging writing assignments for work and really push yourself to meet the bar. So almost always that's going to be the right thing to do. Use your work itself to practice. The key is when finding a work project to double as practice, the key is typically two things.

Stakes slash accountability. Like it needs to matter. Someone's going to see this work. If it's bad, it's going to be a problem. My boss is waiting for it. Like you want stakes or accountability. And two, design the project, this is the hard part, but you have to design it to require you to stretch your current abilities

beyond where you're currently comfortable to succeed. This is why this is hard, is that it's easy to go too little or too far. It's easy to have a project that doesn't really stretch your ability, so you're not getting much practice from that, or to be way too ambitious. Right. So if you're the computer programmer way too easy,

it's like, yeah, I'll write the library calls, for the UI, and it's something you've done all the time. You can just do this automatically. You're not getting any better. But on the other hand, if you say, yeah, I'll go through and I'll rework all the algorithms in a dynamic programming paradigm so that we can, you know, cut down our asymptotic efficiency here by a linear factor, and you don't really know much about dynamic programming, that you're going to be in trouble. So you've got to kind of find that sweet spot of like this is like something I know how to

do, but I'm pushing it to a higher level. I've written the first drafts of the client. reports, but then someone has edited it. Now I'm going to say, let me write the full draft, right? So you're pushing yourself, not too little, not too far. So yes, use your activities to get better. You don't need abstract training when it comes to complex cognitive activities like your job. I'm sorry to believe we're a decade out from So Good They Can't Ignore you. I have a hard time. That was like my first real hardcover idea book, 2012. So it's been more than a decade. That book's important because it was my first hardcover idea book.

it was, it came out right when I started as a professor right before I had my first kid. So like that's such a turning point. That kicked off an era that I feel like just ended with, just recently with getting full professional. I'm out of promotions, right? So I started my professorship there. I'm like out of promotions. My oldest kid's going to middle school next year, like leaving elementary school. Like there's all these things sort of symbolic.

my writing is at a different level and I don't know it's interesting there's some sort of period here that's ending all right who do we got next a fan just sent a a hard copy um right picture of our old so good they can't ignore you like a really worn cover i saw that yeah i've seen a few of these i wonder if this has to do with the inks or something so all right so for people who don't know so good they can't ignore i don't have a copy in here to show you i think my copy looks okay out there. Yeah. But it's a, it's like a red, orange, like a very dominant color, uh, cover. I've seen, uh, a lot of covers, people bringing them to get signed and a fan sent it to us as well. Yeah. Yeah. Super faded. Um, when I was up at Dartmouth, someone brought me a copy to sign that was like,

you could barely read it. It was like bleat. Now, he told me he had left it in the back of his car. So I got a lot of sun. But I think there's something about the inks in that cover that, that, that it can fade, something about it. So if you have an unfaded so good they can't ignore your cover, I guess that's extra rare. Nice. I suppose. Yeah.

All right. Next question is from Sharma. I'm a developer, software developer, but I also want to become better writer and reader. Working on both simultaneously would do too much with my current job. Should I focus on reading first? All right. That's a good question.

Okay. I think that's fine. I think that's fine. All right. So here's the, let me, can I make this more general. The,

the issue here is, let's get beyond the specific things that Sharma's trying to get better at. She has a few things she wants to get better at. And it feels like pursuing them all at the same time would be too much. And what I'm saying is, that's fine, don't pursue them at the same time.

There's a principle in here that sort of suffuses my new book, slow productivity, which is this idea of slow but, steady. What you want to avoid is sort of disengagement with your work, disengagement with trying to work on something important. You want to avoid sort of long periods of full disengagement. But you also want to avoid overload. Overload is like one of the central villains on my book. It causes a lot of problems. All right. So yeah, do one thing at a time. because here's the thing.

It's all about timescale. For the next six months, you might feel like, oh, man, I'm only working on, in this case, reading but not my writing, and I really want to be good at my writing, and I wish I was just better at all of them. Fast forward to six years. Spend some time on your reading. Spend some time on your writing.

Come back, spend a year on your reading, spend another year on your writing. Fast forward six years, like, oh, wait, I'm good at both of these things. This is the thing about accomplishment, about skill building, about endeavors. They aggregate. And over time, you, aggregate more and more things. I can do more things than I could before. I know more things than I did

before. I produce more things than I have before. And overtime and aggregates, right? So think about all this on a larger time scale and you can be easier on yourself in the shorter time scale. Back in the day, I used to write about this when I was just dealing with students. I had this phrase for this, the paradox of the relaxed road scholar. This is, of course, a much more compressed time frame example, but even among college students, there is this phenomenon where if you would look at the resumes of national or international scholarship winners, they seemed sort of impossibly full. And I know about this because my very first book, How to Win at College, the whole premise of that book is that I interviewed international and national scholarship winners.

I interviewed Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars and Goldberg Scholars and a few others, and they were the source of the wisdom for how to win at college, right? So I really got to know these resumes. Students would often be intimidated. They'd read the resume of a road scholar and said they did this and they did this and they did that. I couldn't imagine doing all three of those things. But if you talk to the actual road scholars, they'd like, well, I didn't do them at once. I did this.

And then I did that. And then I did this other thing. And then when we zoom out and look back, we say, oh, my God, you did all these things. I get this in my own life, right? Because I have this book out about slow productivity. And sometimes interviewers will say, well, wait a second. But you do this and you do that. and you do this, that feels like it would be very busy.

How can you fulfill your first principle of the book to do fewer things if, like, you're writing books and you're doing this and you're doing that? And it seems like you would be very busy. What I often say is, yeah, but I don't do those things at the same time. I'm very seasonal, right? If I'm writing a book, I'm not doing other things. If I'm working on a lot of academic ideas, I'm not doing other things. If I'm promoting a book, I'm not writing a book or working on academic ideas.

Everything has its season. I feel like I work out a pretty slow. pace in the moment, but when you fast forward out and said, what happens between, as we just talked about, so good they can't ignore you in 2012 and slow productivity in 2024, a lot happened. But I didn't do all of that stuff at the same time. So there's a power here to slow but steady, relentless but reasonable. That pacing over time is incredibly powerful. It's like compound interest with money. It's boring this month, but you fast forward to 10 years and you have a lot more money in your account. It's the same thing. Slowly but steady, relentlessly but reasonably. You keep

making progress on things. You don't have long down periods, but you also don't overload yourself. That's kind of the sweet spot, I think, for where things really, things really stack up. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from JJ. What are your tips for the grind part of studying, like getting through massive amounts of practice problems and flashcards? It feels more like slogging than flowing. I fall behind even if I take one or two days off. Well, we got, first of all, a correction to make here. Be very careful in how you think about flow. And this was something I got into with my interview with Andrew Huberman. And I think this particular discussion sort of made the rounds because I think it's an important one, is that I think

we overgeneralize or overapply flow as a desirable goal. All right. So let's be, you know, we can set a little bit of context here. What do we mean by flow? Flow is a specific psychological state. The name was coined and the phenomenon was primarily studied by the late psychologist, Mihaili Chiksenkmihai. And the idea about flow is when you're in this state, you lose track of time, you get lost in what you're doing. It feels almost effortless. So it's really important.

And he wrote a cool book about flow and when we get it and when we don't get it. And it's a very real state. and it's a very nice state. Here's the problem about flow. It's hard to get into, and there's a lot of things we do that are cognitively important that will not generate flow

and we can't expect him to generate flow. So I think there was this overgeneralization. Not Mahaley was not saying this, but there's been this overgeneralization of this concept where people feel as if this is the goal of all cognitive work to get into flow. It is very nice,

but there's a lot of stuff you can't get into flow. So what is one of the distinct cognitive activities that is resistant to flow, deliberate practice. So deliberate practice, now this is named for also now the late performance psychologist Anders Erickson. Deliberate practice is our best understanding about how people get better at complicated task, be them physical or cognitive. It requires you to have a clear target, the stretch yourself pass where you're comfortable,

to have clear feedback to make sure that you're directing your actions in sort of like the correct way. This is how you stretch, be it a muscle memory or an actual cognitive concept, how you stretch and get smarter, how you get better at a particular physical activity. Anders Erickson was very clear about this. You knew Mahaley. And, you know, I had the privilege of actually talking with both of them, too, before they passed. So I sort of talked to both of them about this as well. Anders was very clear. Deliberate practice is different than flow. In fact, deliberate practice is the opposite of flow in the sense of you don't lose track of time when you're deliberately practicing. You feel every minute. It's really hard. You're stretching yourself past

where you're comfortable. That's a really hard thing to do, and it requires sustained, intentional concentration on what you're doing. It's often not pleasant. You don't get lost in it. It turns out like a better way to understand the distinction between deliberate practice and flow is to think about preparation and performance, because they often fall along those lines. In my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, for example, I spent time, and I tell the story in the book sitting there with a professional guitar player named Jordan watching him practice. And it was almost excruciating. He was so focused on speeding up the speed of the lick that he would forget to breathe. And then he would have these sudden intakes of breath, the sharp gas, because

his body was thinking we need oxygen, because that's how focused he was on trying to get the speed faster on what he's doing. That's deliberate practice. He's not lost in what he's doing there. Every minute is requiring intentional focus. But when that same guitar player got on stage to play, and he played at our wedding, and that same guitar player would get on stage to play and perform what he had practiced these hard-won skills, then he could get lost in what he's doing. Then he could get into a state of flow. So deliberate practice is different than flow. All right, so here's the bad news, JJ. Learning new things, like you're doing, as you talk about here, studying from flashcards, that's deliver practice world.

that's you trying to rinse your brain into a new understanding of something it didn't understand before. You are not going to get lost in a flow state learning flashcards. All right. What can we do about this? Well, here's how I used to approach this type of work, and this is relevant beyond academic work as well, for anything that's sort of deliberate and tedious at the same time, right? So a couple things that matter. One, you need to control your time as a student, right?

This is how I'm going to study for this test. used to recommend that you would, in the beginning of your semester, find all your major exams, put them on your calendar, and then mark on your calendar way in advance when you were going to create your study plan for that exam. And I would say do this three weeks in advance. And when you get to that day, you would see it on your calendar. And you're laying out the whole thing, putting that time on your calendar. I have three weeks to prepare for this exam. I'm not waiting and tell, hey, what's due tomorrow. Oh, my God, I have an exam tomorrow. Let me try to learn all this stuff. You're giving yourself time to spread this out. When you spread this out, you can be very

strategic about the deliberate practice demanding grind behaviors like memorizing things from flashcards. You can make those sessions short. You can make them intense. Let me get in 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there. I'm going to spread this out over a week or two so that it's much more reasonable than trying to sit down and do it all at once where your brain's probably going to cry uncle at some point and you're going to have to give up. I also then recommend for the actual activity of learning things from flashcards that make sure that you're doing successive refinement. Now, all these ideas I'm talking about are actually in my book How to Become a Straight A Student, but I'll just

give you the cliff notes here. The successive refinement is very simple, but it makes a big difference. What you want to do, if you're going through a stack of flashcards, create two piles. Got it right, got it wrong. Then when you do your next pass, just use the pile that you got wrong.

Again, what did I get right? What did I get wrong? So you're successively reducing, you're refining the things you're looking at to only be the things that up to this point you've still gotten wrong. It's a very efficient way to go through flashcards because it ensures that the things you know get a minimum of time. I saw it once. I knew it. I don't want to look at it again. The things you're having the most trouble with, you're going to be seen again and again and again. It's a much more efficient allocation of your deliberate practice concentration than going through the whole stack again and again. I was an art history minor, little known fact about me. That's a lot of memorization. Artists names, dates of work. You had to memorize that for just hundreds and hundreds of paintings. And this is how I would do.

it. All right. So our general point here, deliberate practice is different than flow. So you want to be structured and organized. You want to schedule this time in advance. You want to keep the time reasonable. And then more specifically, you want to do successive refinement during these sort of grind flashcard sessions. So they don't, they don't become too overburdensome. All right, what do we got next? All right. Next question is from Denny. I have a fledgling YouTube channel in the real estate area. You talk a lot about building your craft. I specifically want to build my craft making YouTube videos. How should I do that? Well, look, here's my first question. Be sure you really do want to do that.

YouTube is an interesting beast. It's different, I would say, it's different than other even social media products, right? So if you have a business and you're thinking, look, I want to have a social media presence. I have a presence on Instagram. It kind of helps. I can have this audience and it's like people subscribe to it and they can see the things I'm doing. And maybe it helps us get a couple more customers. or these videos we're doing about like what's happening with the house prices might get sold. YouTube is even more brutal than that, right? Because you can have as a as a real estate, I guess you're probably like a real estate agent or something.

You can have like an Instagram account that the people who follow it, they're coming to follow it. They sort of know you. People are used to this. There's an interpersonal aspect to social media. I live in the same town. I was looking for houses in this town and I found this. There's more of this regionalization, this social localization. You can have like a nice size audience that's actually like maybe a reasonable audience and some good stuff might come out of it.

YouTube is way more winner take all. We don't have that same habit of there's someone like in my town that has a YouTube channel. I'm going to go subscribe and watch their videos in the way that like with social media we might. So then what happens with YouTube? It's algorithmic driven curation, which means your videos will be watched by approximately nobody. unless you can have all of the pieces that have to be in place to play well with the audience and algorithm. And then an audience can build. But it's unclear even what that audience will be even if you want them.

It's a very complicated world. So here's what you would have to do. First of all, let's talk about the actual content itself. It has to be super compelling because it has to be something that makes someone say, I'm going to sit here and keep watching this video. If they don't do that, the algorithm is going to say goodbye. It doesn't matter what you do. Right. So it has to be very compelling, which means either you have to promise something really big up front and really deliver it or the content itself has to be really unique and deep and something that you're well suited to deliver. The delivery itself has to be just right. You have sort of like two options for YouTube delivery. Either you have to do the YouTube editing style like you would see personified in a Mr. Beast video where it's cut every 10 to 12 seconds so that like it moves, moves, moves, moves, moves. And the viewer is never has that moment of boredom in which,

to leave it or you have to be a professional talker, right? So you can do what like Andrew Huberman does or I do, but we're professional talkers, right? And we're coming from a place of authority. I've been, you know, the public I writing for a long time. I've sold millions of books. I, you know, I can

speak for a long period of time. You're either a professional talker or you have to do that YouTube editing, right? These are all just table stakes. Then you got to get all the details right. You know, like one of the things we have a YouTube guy who does our thumbnails and does our headlines. I've gotten a little bit more involved in the headline,

because I was like, I want to make these a little bit more accurate, a little bit less YouTubey. That these little tweaks, that's 10,000 views gone right away. Like, these little things matter a huge amount. And if any of these things aren't done right,

like nothing works. So I don't want to scare you away from this. I just don't want you to waste your time. Like, if you have a play here, I have a super unique, super compelling thing to do. I can make these videos super compelling,

but like an audience feels like they have to keep watching. and I'm willing to do all the right work with the thumbnails and the headlines that this could grow. But then even then you have to say, is the audience that it's going to grow going to be useful for what I'm doing? This is different than other social media where you can build a more localized, regionalized audience. I think it gets more directly to, hey, I want people in this town to encounter me. And we're giving the housing report for this neighborhood. Like that can work on Instagram. It's not going to work as well on YouTube.

I don't know. Jesse, you've been seeing the other end of this. It might be a little bit too pessimistic or... No, I agree with you. Yeah, it's pretty brutal. Yeah. Yeah. I think for us, what we like is there's a segment of audience that I want this to get to

that I don't think we're reaching with the audio. It's like we have a very specific reason. There's a sort of a younger band of an audience that we can get to with YouTube. And then we have the secondary reason that I do think video is going to be critical for shows like this in the future. I don't think through YouTube necessarily, but video delivery is going to be critical. And so we want to make sure we're. good at it. So sort of like when the time comes, like, oh, here's this network, this app,

this video network, whatever, however this unfolds, we want to make sure that we're good at it. But if I just had a small business and I really wanted to be online, I would look at other social media before YouTube. All right. Who do we got next? We have our corner, slow productivity corner. Here we go. Let's hear some music. So Daniel has to say, you have mentioned something to the effect that after getting tenure and after your kids were in school, it became more relevant to think about setting a sustainable pace for your work. I am just starting as an assistant professorship at an R1 institution and have a 16-month-year-old. Can you comment on the mindset you applied to productivity as an assistant professor and how it relates to and differs from the slow productivity mindset?

All right, good question. For those who don't know, the Slow Productivity Corner is the one question per episode that we think is directly connected to my new book, Slow Productivity, which you should check out if you haven't seen it. All right. So what Daniel's referring to, so he's a, Let me decode everything briefly for the audience. Assistant Professorship at R1 Institution. In the U.S. system, R1 institution means it's the Carnegie Ranking, but it basically means categorization, but it means you're a research institution. So it's a professorship.

If you have a professorship at an R1 university, you're expected to produce a lot of research. Research will be the foundation on which 10-year decisions will be made. Assistance professorship is the first level of professorship in the American system. So when you start as a professor, you're an assistant professor. Typically, associate professor is the promotion you get along with tenure. And then later there's full professorship. Okay. And I've talked about how like this stage of my life, I'm in the third stage as a professor.

There's my assistant professor stage. There's my post-tenyear associate professor stage. And now I've just entered the full professor stage. As Daniel pointed out, when I was an assistant professor, I had a lot of young kids was sort of the, what was going on, right? Because my, I think there's babies around for like all of my assistant professorship. I became an assistant professor in 2012 that fall. My first kid was born. My second kid was born in 2014. And then I got tenure in 2016. So I always had someone within two years of birth. All right. So here's the things I did differently in that period, Daniel, as compared to

now or other times. One, I was certainly very careful about time block planning and fixed schedule productivity, meaning these are the hours I have to work. I have to make the most of them, right? Because the child care schedule made anything else impossible. We're working with a nanny at that period. So there's a lot of like, hey, you've got to be home at this time. This is when the nanny has to go home, right?

Like you can't be working at this time because the nanny. won't be there yet and your wife has to go early here. And so the schedule was everything. I had to make the most of those hours. So this was I was really big on time block planning, like really thinking through what do I want to do with each day to get the most out of it. The other thing I did during the young kid early 10 year period is I simplified. I was like, okay, professional goal one, two, and three papers published in good venues

that get a lot of citations. That's everything for 10 year. right confidential letter writers from the field evaluating your research productivity that's what i focused on to the exclusion of almost everything else i wasn't launching a lot of other endeavors a lot of other ideas i wasn't starting initiatives on campus like the type of things i'm involved in now with digital ethics and starting new programs none of that super focused uh this is why i had strict quotas on academic service only this many program committees and this many peer reviews will I do per semester because I had the focus on research above all else.

You definitely see this in my general audience book writing. So I had a book come out in 2012 right before my first kid was born. That whole assistant professor period, four or five years, I published one book, the deep work. So there was this year, the first two years of my first kid's life, I did zero writing altogether because I was like, I've got to take care of this kid and I got to publish papers. and then I slowly wrote one book during that period. And that's it. So I deeply simplified during that period.

Post-tenyear, as my kids got a little bit older, this sort of began to get some breathing room. I wasn't on the treadmill of like if I don't get this many papers, I'm not going to get tenure. And things do change, Daniel. But I think that's a good way to think about it. Be very careful about your time. Here's the hours I have to work. I want to make the most of them. Be very protective about your time, what you agree to do.

keep first things first, which is publishing papers that matter. Low profile, just publishing is what matters. Keep your life simple. Just when you're working, make that what you're working on as much as possible. Be very effective, efficient with your time during work. And if you do that, then it works out. But I'm not working. I'm not working.

And I'm, you know, taking care of kids and all the other stuff that comes to that period. It can work out. But you've got to focus. You got to simplify. You got to take care of your time as carefully as possible. I'll tell you when it's all going to go down the drain is when that kid, well, 16-month-old, yeah, once they start going to preschool, because then you're going to be sick half the year. But that's a, you'll see that soon enough, Daniel. Learn how to work when you have a cold.

All right, let's do a quick case study here. This comes from M. M says, professionally, I use your ideas to plan my next career move within my organization. In the foreign service, we rotate assignments every two to three years, and I had a feeling a bit. burnt, oh, I had been feeling a bit burnt out with my current position and not motivated to start looking for my next job. Using your lifestyle-centric planning, I set criteria for the type of positions I would target. I wanted to move back to D.C. and avoid positions involving emergency or after-hours duties. I had accepted that this could be a career detour and not great

for my promotion, but to my surprise, I found many intriguing positions that matched my criteria. Last month, I happily accepted an offer at the State Department's Diplomatic Training Institute. I'll be leading a medium-sized team. So it'll still be a substantive role, but it offers an element of seasonality, flexibility, and hopefully no after-hours emergency. All right. So we get a good example there of lifestyle-centric planning. We talked about this last week in last week's deep dive. You're not going to build a deep, meaningful, intentional life just by pursuing a singular grand goal that will fix all your problems.

You've got to figure out directly what are all of the elements of the elements of the lifestyle I want and then flexibly think about all of your options for taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding obstacles to move closer to that vision. It's not as sexy as saying I have this big goal that will fix everything, but by looking directly and identifying directly, these are the parts of my life and what I want them to be like. You come across really interesting solutions that make your day-to-day existence more meaningful and intentional. So that is a great example. All right, we got a cool final segment coming up, but first, briefly I want to hear, share a word from another one of our sponsors.

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Other people I know use it to try to quickly get the lay of the land of interesting topic areas. Hey, let me listen to or read the Blinks for five related books. You do that. You're going to know the main vocabularies and thinkers. So anyways, if you're a big reader and all listeners of this podcast should be, Blinkist is like the sidekick that you need. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. You go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial

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and his company, My Body Tutor, I think this is such a fantastic idea. Let's say you want to get more healthy. The hard part is not necessarily the information. You want to eat better. You want to exercise. The hard part is consistency, making the right decisions, doing the work again and again. This is where My Body Tudor enters the scene. It's a 100% online coaching program.

So what happens here is you are assigned a coach that works directly with you to figure out what you're going to do with nutrition and what you're going to do with exercise and then, and here's the key, you check in virtually with this coach every day. That accountability is what gives you the consistency. It also gives you customization. Oh, I'm going on vacation. What should I do? I worry about not having my normal food or access to the gym. Your coach is like, let's make a plan for this. Let's work together to figure out how to adjust things for exactly your circumstance. So you customize your approach to the good health while having a coach to keep you accountable. This is where the consistency comes from.

And because it's 100% online, you get that consistency without the grand expense of having a chef and a trainer come to your house every day like you're a Marvel superhero in training. So My Body Tudor is the simple, effective, smart way to get healthy. If you're thinking I want to be healthier than I am, this is the way you do it. You go to MyBodytutor.com. That's T-U-T-O-R, MyBodytutor.com. When you sign up, tell them that deep questions sent you and they will give you $50 off your first month. All right, let's move on to our final segment. All right, well, this bring us now to our final segment where I typically like to react to something I have encountered over the Internet in the past week.

Now, this week, instead of reacting to a specific article or a specific clip, I'm going to react to a particular Internet figure. And spoiler alert, there is going to be an apology for me. at the end of this reaction. All right, so who's to figure I want to talk about? The YouTuber James Scholls, S-C-H-O-L-Z. Now, let me give you a little bit of background on how my path has intersected with that of James Soles. Since I, Schultz, since I talk a lot about productivity,

typically in the context of trying to push back against digital distraction, but I talk about productivity. I have a bookout that has productivity in the title. I'm often asked in interviews about hustle culture and the dangers of hustle culture. So this seems to be this big concern is that everyone is subscribed to hustle culture, and this is a bad thing. Now, I often got a little bit confused about this, right? Because what would happen is someone would read something like Oliver Berkman's fantastic book, 4,000 weeks, which is about life being short. There's only so much you can get done, and it's really good, meaningful, pragmatic, philosophical reflections.

But they'll read something like 4,000 weeks, and they'll say, finally, a book that's pushing back against hustle culture and this idea that you can get everything done and you should do more, finally. And I would always be confused because I said, look, I've been a professional book writer for the last 20 years. Where are these books that are saying something different? What are the best-selling productivity books, quote-unquote, of the 2010s? It's essentialism about doing fewer things. It's a deep work about doing fewer things. It's one thing, right, about doing fewer things. It's Oliver's book itself, 4,000 weeks.

Go back to the 2000s. You get Tim Ferriss. How do we stop working so much? How do we work less? How do we have more vacations? We get David Allen's getting things done, which is not about getting more things done, but trying to survive the onslaught of work so that at least you can find some piece. It's the opposite of a call to get things done.

So I would always say, I don't know what does hustle culture. is where it is that we're so afraid of. So then people will say, well, it's online. It's like, okay, I don't know the online world as much. I don't use social media. I'm not a big person. I don't spend a lot of time on YouTube. My podcast, if you're watching it now, is produced, put on YouTube, but I don't spend

a lot of time on YouTube. It's like, okay, maybe there's this hustle culture out there online, and that's what people are talking about. And this is where I first heard the example of James Scholes, because in the first year of the pandemic, what James did. famously was basically every day for a year would record himself, live stream himself, studying. Not for 20 minutes, not for an hour, but often 10, 11, 12 hours at a time. He's just sitting there in his apartment studying, usually Pomodoro style, 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, or hour on 10 minutes off.

He'd do a little bit of narration to breaks, but it's mainly just him, just studying. People would tune in and they would study with them, and you can still see all these videos on the James Schultz, his original YouTube channel. And so I was like, okay, yeah, maybe that's our good example of hustle culture, like the guy that, like, studies for 12 hours at a time. Because look, I wrote some books about how to study when I was young, and the right way to study is the opposite of studying for 12 hours at a time. That's just going to burn you out.

I was like, maybe that's hustle culture. I just sort of used James as a canonical example of, like, yeah, online there's this hustle culture thing, but those of us who are writing books about it, we're thinking about this more expansively. I wasn't the only one to make those connections. I'm going to read a couple of quotes here from an article from 2022 about James. I won't link to the article because I don't like the non-famous writers. I don't like to throw under the bus.

But let me just read some quotes from this article about James. It talks about watching a lot of James and then getting disillusioned. So the article says, yet another part of me felt disappointed that this had become my measurement of time well spent, ceaseless hours in a brightly lit room staring at a screen whilst listening to YouTube videos, boredom, begin to feel like the culmination of many things that had been brewing in my mind about productivity, the hustle, and what it all meant. This article goes on to say lots of nice things about Oliver Berkman. Let me see. I have a couple other quotes I want to read from towards the end.

Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want. We can become an all-conquering person, never again succumbing to the limitedness. limitedness that time imposes upon you, but this is simply not right. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control. Berkman writes. Later, this author says, having everything under control is the glisting of the productivity diamond. We're constantly attempting to master time to channel ourselves into a position of dominance and control over unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure and no longer so vulnerable to events. Protection from vulnerability is a luring but impossible state. So, James,

James Schultz represents this hustle culture that has an unobtainable belief of what's possible through productivity. Okay. Here's the thing. I recently went down more of a rabbit hole on James. I listened to some interviews with him. I listened to him talk about himself and why he did these videos. And I no longer think it is correct to make him the patron saint of hustle culture. I don't think that's what he's doing at all.

Let's look back to this discussion of hustle culture again from this article. What are the properties they point out about hustle culture? It's about the impression you can get everything you want. You can be all conquering. You'll never succumb to the limitlessness of time that you can have everything under control. You can master your times. You can channel yourself to a position of dominance. Where is that in the quiet video of James Schultz just sitting there studying all day long?

Where is he talking about you can get everything done? Where is he talking about you can have full control over your life? Where is he saying you can get into a position of dominance and I will show you how? He barely talks. He just sits there and he quietly studies. So what is really going on with James Schultz? Well, as becomes clear, if you're listening to some interviews with him, he is not promoting to people that what he is doing. This extreme is somehow something that everyone else should be doing, that people should be studying for 12 hours.

Trust me, I wrote books about studying. You don't have enough stuff to study for 12 hours. I don't know what he was studying for 12 hours. That was not the goal of these videos. They had two purposes, one small, one big. The small purpose was to be live. This was early pandemic. Many places were in quarantine lockdowns, right?

So people were stuck at home. And in particular, students were stuck at home learning online. So he was offering this idea that whenever it was you happen to be studying, you could go. And this live stream was probably going on. and you wouldn't feel alone. It's not a video that someone recorded before of studying. He would be studying when you needed the study. Other people would be watching him.

You could see how many people were watching them. It was creating a sense of digital community. So why was he studying 12 hours to make sure he covered as much of the day as possible? So as many people as possible who were going to study for an hour that day would have a chance of being able to intersect with this ongoing live stream. I think that was the small reason, right? Not you should study 12 hours, but to make sure whatever hour you do study, there's a good chance my live stream will be going on. The bigger version here, though, is I think this is an exemplar of something we've seen in other areas of, well, we could call it the sort of monastic prototype, where there's an issue that's afflicting a population. And the monastic, right, the monastic of this example, goes in a very public and showy way, does the opposite to an extreme.

not because the monastic thinks that the whole population should have an aesthetic lifestyle and move to the caves and meditate under the tree all day, but to make the point clear that what they are doing is hurting them and there's power in the opposite, right? So the monastic removes themselves from everyday life and does things to an extreme so those who are still in everyday life can find and draw inspiration. I think this is another big part of what James Schultz is doing. Again, he's talking to other young people.

He was young when he did this. He was aiming these videos largely at students. They were finding their lives overcome with distraction, procrastination. They were stuck at home. They were on their phones all the time. And it was a dark and bleak sort of soul-sapping existence. I saw this among my own students at Georgetown. It's that first year the pandemic wound on, is that you could see the light going out of their eyes.

They were just stuck at home. And so he went hard the other way. I'm not going to look at my phone. I'm going to use retro equipment. He had these old-fashioned computers, retro equipment. and I'm just going to sit here and concentrate for hours all day long. And in doing so, I'm going to sort of make the point that there's power in the opposite of what you're doing. That there's power in the opposite of staring at a screen and being lost in an algorithmic rabbit hole.

It was a monastic behavior. We see this play out a lot in the Internet age. The Internet age has made this type of monastic behavior, this inspiring monastic behavior, more common. Another example, Internet age example, David Gagins. David Gagins is a character that for those who don't understand what he's responding to, he's mystifying. Gagins has this very hard upbringing, really hard troubled childhood, grows up a little bit, out of shape, right, going nowhere, and gets his act together eventually becomes a Navy SEAL, right? Getting after it, Navy SEAL. It leaves Navy SEALs and starts doing in a sort of documented online sort of way.

just extreme feats of endurance athletics. Extreme feet, ultra marathons, running every day. He got the record for most pull-ups in a 24-hour period, these type of things. He started making these videos, and then this would spread. He began becoming a guest on a lot of podcasts that had sort of male audiences, where he was just saying, you know, hey, get hard, be disciplined, just do it. You got to get out there, just do hard work. He's puzzling to a lot of people. Like, this guy's crazy.

Like, he is a little bit crazy. I mean, just, like, obsessive, doing the physical activity all day long to, like, the point of almost nothing else. His knees have been completely destroyed. Like, his body is probably falling apart. Like, what's the point of this? We're not going to, no one's going to go and do this. I'm not going to run 100 miles, like, twice a week. I'm not going to, you know, do a thousand pull-ups.

I'm not going to just run around and curse and say, get hard. Like, I have a family, do other sorts of things. But that was not the port of Goggins. He was monastic. He was responding to there was a subset of sort of American Western. male culture that was feeling unengaged, was feeling un efficacious, was feeling sort of out of shape and useless. They were drinking too much. They were out of eating too bad food.

They weren't being good fathers. They weren't being good husbands. They were sort of lacking discipline. And so seeing this extreme monastic, aesthetic example of discipline was inspiring for that subset of guys. It confused everyone else. But for them, they didn't go off and do the same elite endurance athletic events, but they got in better shape. got their finances under control, they became better fathers, they cared more about their kids and their family, they stopped drinking, right? It really turned a lot of lives around.

So when you do this sort of extreme example of something that's in reaction to a problem, it really helps other people leave the problem. That's all I think is going on with James Schultz. It's just for a younger audience. So I think I was wrong, and I think others are wrong to label him as a paragon of hustle culture is really the opposite. He is actually a prophet or saint or monastic in the digital era. From the young generation, speaking to the young generation, don't be lost in your phones all day. There be dragons. And I'm going to sit outside to cave for hours at a time so you learn how to resist it.

So that's an apology of James Schultz. He's a much more rich, interesting cultural character than I think we made him out to be. So I'm still searching. I'm still searching for the core of hustle culture. I need another example now. again, it really does feel like almost everyone I talk to, even people who are really in this world of productivity, they want to be organized, but typically because they don't like the stress of being disorganized. They're often worried about doing too many things. They want to be good at what they do, you know, but where the group out there that's really pushing, I have the hack that's going to allow you to conquer everything in the world. That group, wherever they are, it needs to be louder because I'm not running into them a lot. And I think that's a good thing.

thing. But anyways, James, I think what you did was cool and interesting and as much performance art as it was anything else. And so, you know, my hat actually now is tipped to you. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you like today's episodes about Jerry Seinfeld's advice for living a deeper life, I think you'll like last week's episode, episode 303, where I talk about the danger of... of trying to use grand goals to find depth. Spoiler alert, it doesn't work.

Take Jerry's advice instead. Check it out. I think you'll enjoy it. 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've got to sign up for my newsletter at caldewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.