Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 315: The Surprising Myth of Doing Less

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

In this classic episode, Cal talks about the surprising myth of doing less. Cal then answers questions about discipline and solving complicated problems. Cal concludes the episode with a review of the books he read back in April 2022. 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: The Surprising Math of Doing Less [3:33]- How do I improve my discipline?  [20:01]- How do you break down a complicated problem? [31:04] - CALL: Has Cal read “Stolen Focus”? [34:07]The Books I Read in April 2022 [40:28]LISTENER CALL: Playbook for writing in The New Yorker [1:05:30]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/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?Thanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deepindeed.com/deepshopify.com/deepfactormeals.com/deep50Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work, H.Q, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, another mystery. Last week, our mics fell off without at the same time. Just they both fell off their stands. This week, the mystery is there is a plant. This is true.

plant has showed up in our office that I didn't bring here. Jesse didn't bring it here. We don't know where this plant came from. But there is a plant in a very nice pot. Someone added it might have been the cleaning crew. Could have been Jesse Skeleton. It could have been Jesse Skeleton, you know, with all of his new fame from being featured in El Pas in Spain. He's an international superstar.

Maybe the Zoe, the super could, I don't know. But anyways, we have a mysterious plant. Last week, we assumed that it was sabotaged from Lexford Mint's team that made our micro- microphones fall off. So we're like 50% convinced that this is the plant was set by Lex's team as well, but it has a hidden microphone in it. So we think that's that's going on. So if you find Lex's podcast is sort of scooping us on everything we talk about as the plant. Speaking of Lex, did you listen to his eight hour podcast that he put out the other day with like Elon and. Yeah. Yeah, it's long. It's eight hours. Yeah, it's on YouTube too. Oh, man. It's got like four different people.

That's like a whole audio book. Yeah. All right. Maybe I will. That guy's got stamina. All right. So what we're going to do this week is the same as last week. This is the second week that Jesse and I are both on the road, so to speak. And so we are again going to play a classic episode from the early days of the podcast, one of our favorite episodes that most of you are new enough listeners you've never heard before. Next week we will be back with a normal live episode. We thought about just like putting this episode on and not saying it was a classic episode, but I'm sure that would guarantee that in that episode we would begin making super time. references. Yeah, like things from 2020. I was looking at some of the notes and one of them you talked about a Soto Harper trade. Oh my God. Of course. So we try to play this off.

We try to play this off. It's just like a new episode. And it's just 20 minutes on, yeah, Soto being traded to the Padres. A lot of references of like named hurricanes from that season. What was big in 2022? What was happening in 2022? I don't even remember. God, who knows?

Talk about the Phillies making a World Series run. So we're not going to try to trick you. It is a classic episode. But actually, one of my favorite episodes was such a cool topic. This is episode 194. We're going to replay here that was titled The Surprising Math of Doing Less. This originally aired in May of 2022. It's a really cool concept about a really cool example about what became.

You're really going to see. the seeds in this deep dive discussion, some of the ideas that came into my book later, two years later, and slow productivity in the first principle about doing less. So you're going to see some cool seeds of those slow productivity ideas showing up in this episode. Okay, so I think you'll enjoy it. It's episode 194 from May 2022,

The Surprising Math of Doing Less. So we're talking about me doing less as a writer. So the deep dive I wanted to do today was on the topic of the surprising math. of doing less. Because when you hear something like I was just talking about, my dream schedule as a writer, the thing that probably hits the attention of the listener first is like, well,

that doesn't seem like you're doing that much stuff. That doesn't seem like it's that much work. My argument, and this is something I've been thinking through, especially as I've been developing my thoughts around my philosophy of slow productivity, is that we do too much, and we do too much for no good reason, because if we are careful in thinking about the mathematics of value production, doing less is often the optimal strategy.

That's what I want to argue. Doing less can be the optimal strategy. Now, we need some context, like what type of thing do we talk about? What type of work are we talking about? So to be clear, I'm talking about here, let's say you're in a job where you create things of value. That is what you do for your job. So I don't know if it's computer code or if it's articles or consulting reports or artwork, whatever.

But if you're in a job where ultimately you create something that did not exist before, be it digital, be it physical. And that thing has value that wasn't there before. So you're constructing value by creating things, which is a lot of people and a lot of people who listen to this podcast. If you're in that context, I want to argue a scheduling approach that reduces the amount of things on your plate will actually increase the total amount of value you produce over time. If anything, we can actually trace a curve. We can try to capture these dynamics with a curve. What I think about is what I sometimes call the productivity versus load curve. But imagine for a second that we have some sort of plot around the X axis along the bottom.

we have the amount of things on your plate, obligations, projects, et cetera, tasks. And imagine on the y-axis, the vertical axis, we have total value you are producing. I argue what you're going to see is pretty soon that curve is going to peak up and reach a maximum pretty far to the left, pretty far to the not that many things to do. And as you keep moving towards the right, towards more and more things on your plate, that curve is going to come back down. and then it'll put you a plateau for a while, and then it'll, once you get to enough stuff on your plate, it'll actually plummet down to almost no value produced. This is the productivity versus load curve. It is not like a lot of people suspect, something that just keeps going up. Do more things. You're finishing more things. Each thing brings value. More things completely means more value. You produce more and more values. I'm saying, no, no, no, you actually reach your peak of value production potential pretty early in the potential scale of how many things you're actually doing.

Now, why would that be the case? Well, I'm going to give two categories of explanation. The one category I'm going to call negative reasons and the other I'm going to call positive reasons. So the negative reasons why continuing to add more to your plate actually reduces your total value production has to do with some things we've already talked about on this show. Negative things that happen. Negative things that happen when you add more and more work on your plate. and the two big ones we've talked about before. I talked about this in our core idea video about slow productivity.

I talked about this on my appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast. The two things that really get bad as you get more and more stuff on your plate is the anxiety of overload and the overhead of overload. We've talked about this before. The anxiety piece is that we as human beings have this really nice. neat center in our brain. As far as we know, it is unique to humans. We've looked at our close primate relatives and have not found it, at least in the same configuration, but we have this portion in our brain that is good at making long-term plans for the accomplishment of important goals. This separates us from a lot of other animals. How does our brain get us to do things? Well, it makes

us feel good when we construct a plan and execute that plan and accomplish the goal. And it makes us feel bad if we don't. If we don't have a plan or we veer away from our plan. And that's what just steers us, evolutionarily speaking, towards actually making plans towards long-term goals. The problem is this center of our brain cannot deal with 600 unread messages and 75 different open obligations on your task list. When it sees 15 columns on your Trello board and each of them is getting longer and longer, you short-circuit that portion of your brain's ability to conceive making a plan and executing all these different tasks. And when you short-circuit that part of your brain, you flood those negative chemicals.

You feel anxious, you feel uneasy, you're feeling that reaction. It's like we're not sticking with our plans because that brain cannot create plans for that much work. It's very artificial, it's very unnatural to have a ton of stuff on your plate. It's hard to produce good work in that state. The second issue I mentioned is overhead. This is very pragmatic. Every obligation on your plate will bring with it a fixed amount of overhead.

Emails with people checking in on how it's going, meetings or Zoom calls for status updates, everything on your plate, at least everything beyond the trivial size, brings with it a fixed amount of overhead. There's nothing wrong with that overhead when you're looking at a particular thing you're trying to accomplish. It's good.

that you can quickly check in with people on email about how it's going. It's good to meet with people on a regular basis to check in. But as you increase the number of things on your plate, the amount of overhead being brought by each thing is the same. And it adds, and it compounds. And now most of your time ends up with this unavoidable fixed overhead. I have to answer the emails about the 20 different things going on. Each of these 20 different things has its own Zoom meeting.

and it paradoxically, or some might say cruelly, squeezes away the time required to actually do the work. So this is a pragmatic limitation. The more things you have, the more of this overhead, which is useful but does not directly produce value, dominates your schedule. So the amount of literal time left to convert into value is greatly reduced. So those two factors are negative impacts on your ability to produce value. There are also positive impacts. So we said, here's the negative of doing too much. There's positive impacts on doing less.

And I think this is something that we intuit, but we don't often capture precisely, which is if you're looking at a particular pursuit project or activity, the value of what you produce is going to grow non-linearly with the time you put into it. So, for example, doubling the time you put into a particular creative project doesn't necessarily just double the value produce. It might significantly more increase that value because it turns out there's these discontinuous jumps in the value of what you're doing as you cross certain thresholds. There's a discontinuous jump as you move, for example, past the amateur threshold in almost

any creative pursuit. Once what you're producing is no longer just, oh, I kind of did something. this is sort of just an amateur effort and actually has a professional polish, which takes more time. It significantly jumps up in its potential value to the marketplace. There's another discontinuous jump that happens when you push something to the level that it becomes remarkable, which I mean in the literal sense that now you've added something that's so novel, innovative, or well done, that it actually leads people to remark. Ooh, look at that.

That's interesting. It catches people's attention. Something with that attribute jumps up. to another level in value. And all of that requires time. So the more time you put into things, you jump past the amateur level, then you jump past to the remarkable level,

and you get this significant, profound increase in the value of what you are producing. And these effects can also be seen through a market analogy. Essentially, the more time you put on something, the more aggressively, you essentially pair away the other people who could produce

the same level of quality of what you just produce. And as that market gets smaller and smaller, your value jumps up much higher as well. But what this all comes down to is that if you have less things on your plate, you can spend more times on the things that remain. Spending more times on the thing that remain will generate much more value than if you instead spread that same time over many more things. So this is mathematical.

If value increases nonlinearly with time spent, your best strategy is to put as much time as possible on the fewest number of things. That's just pure mathematics. So let's again, let's make this real concrete. if you're writing something, spending almost all your time working on making that thing you're writing really well. So I don't know, you have 20 hours to spend the week. Spending all 20 hours on that is in the end probably going to produce way more value

than if you instead spend five hours on that, five hours on something else, five hours on something else, and then five individual hours on five small things. You can't just take the value of these smaller investments and add them up and get the same as what you would get if you put all that time into do the one thing, because when you put all your time to the one thing, you leap past the levels you were before. So we got negative and positive reasons that tell us less is better. You do too much, all these negative things happen to drag you down. You do less. All these positive impacts happen that push up even more the value you produce. So I think this is the situation we're in right now, in our current world, especially in the American economic scene,

where we have this very large knowledge sector that emphasizes skilled employees with great autonomy to individually produce value. There's so many people who now fall within that type of economic context and in that situation, almost certainly doing less is better and no one does.

And all of the pressure is towards, can't you just do a little more? Can't you answer one more email? Can't you be on one more Zoom call? It is chaos. It is the Wild West when it comes to how we handle work today. And because of that, we're leaving a lot of value on the table. And I'm going to leave it there.

But it is the point I want to make is that we can move beyond simply arguing doing less is good for the human soul, doing more is just the rapacious objective of marauding capitalists. That might be true. But we have this other piece of ammo to use as well. It says actually doing less also produces more value. So it not just makes us happier, not just makes work more sustainable. but it actually increases the value we are able to produce, which makes us again happier. It's all a good cycle. So I'm a huge believer in less. That's one of the three main tenets of my slow productivity philosophy, which has three pieces, do fewer things, working at a natural pace,

obsessing over quality. This is at the beginning of that philosophy, do fewer things. That's a big reason why I believe that's true. Jesse, this is all just secretly me trying to speak to like my academic my academic peers like the people who are above me giving me things to do it's like just let me do less it's all just a cry all just to cry for help uh like we're trying we're we're on a tight schedule today because i have to be on zoom can't be maximizing the value in the world do the people above you work on multiple things are they oh it's crazy if you're in an academic administrative position every minute of your day is scheduled at least you have people doing it for you But it's like being the president.

Yeah. It's just, okay, you know, here's what's next. Here's what's next. You get a lot of questions like that for managers and stuff who just want to do more deep work, but they don't have any time blocks to put it in. Yeah. It's the problem of the entire economy right now. I mean, whatever.

This is the major split I think I have with a lot of other commentators is that we underestimate the degree that these problems come from not knowing how to do this work. It's, we're quick to just, we want an antagonist, so we have someone to fight. So managers are being evil is the instinct. There's a lot of evil managers out there. But even if we had the nicest possible managers who wanted you to thrive, we would still have this overload problem because we don't have the alternatives in place. There's just not enough structure.

We just don't think about this stuff. And so I'm doing what I can to help that. Let's take a quick break from this classic episode of the Deep Questions podcast to talk about one of our sponsors, our friends at Shopify. selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing, however you, chaching. Here's the thing. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million order stage. Shopify is there to help you grow.

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dot com slash deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Element, LMNT. I've been using the Element drink mix for a long time. It offers those electrolytes you need to replenish what you lose through sweat or through lots of talking or dare I say podcasting without the junk. No sugar, no artificial flavor. So I've used it for a long time.

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But in the meantime, get your mix at drink element.com slash deep. All right, let's get back now to our classic episode. All right, Jesse, so I think we should do some questions. Yep. You got to come for. I got one here from Toby. Toby asks, how do I improve my discipline?

My problem is that I have a problem with sticking to my long-term plans. Well, Toby, I think about discipline really more as an identity that you develop than I do an approach to a particular challenge. If you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined person, that that is part of your conception of your identity, then you will be able to, with discipline, pursue many different important objectives in your life. So the question is, how do you get to an identity where you see yourself as a disciplined person? Let me tell you what not to do. Don't just pick out a random ambitious goal and say, you know what, I'm going to do this. I'm going to white knuckle go after this really hard goal because I need to be more disciplined. That's what you're trying to do.

That's not working. I'm not surprised. It's not working. If you've not yet convinced yourself you're a disciplined person, taking on ad hoc large discipline requiring challenges is not going to be a route towards success. So what should you do instead? Well, I think this is where actually the deep life procedure I talk about, the sort of self-awarely, overly pragmatic. approach to building a foundation for a deep life that we've been talking about on the show for over two years is perfect for developing a self-identity as discipline. So remember, there's

two parts to this. Number one, you identify the areas of your life that are important to you. We typically call these the deep life buckets. They differ between different people, but our starter set of these buckets tends to be craft, what you do, what you create, constitution. That's going to be your health community. That's going to be your connections to other people, be it your family, your neighborhood, the people and the organizations where you work at your religious institutions. They'll often throw in contemplation. We're trying to capture philosophy, theology, and ethics. These are all important areas most people's lives. Your list might vary. For each of these areas, the first thing to do is to identify a keystone habit, something in each of

these buckets that you do every day. Something that is, something that is. It's not trivial, but is also tractable. And you track your completion of these habits every day. If you use something like my time block planner, there's a metric tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day. You just track those keystone habits right there. So for example, for Constitution, you wouldn't have something there like I'm going to do a 45-minute intense workout because that's too hard to expect you to be able to do that every day. That's not really tractable. But you also don't want to say, you know, I will do one jumping jack when I get out of bed in the morning.

Like, that's not going to get you anywhere. So instead you might want to do something like, I want to hit this many steps in a day. It require a little bit of planning. Like I walk my kids to school, I'll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between meetings. But it's tractable if I think about it. My friend Brian Johnson of Optimize fame had this great constitution habit where he had a number of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing, I think he would do 10 burpees. And it was like 23 minutes or 20, there was some amount of time that he had, because he had read

somewhere. If you sit for more than this much time, it starts to be bad. And so it's just every, whatever it was, 23 minutes, he would do 10 burpees. And was it a fantastic boom? Now, I think it helps that he doesn't work in the bullpen of a crowded office. I mean, I, maybe that would be an awesome thing to do, but it probably would draw some interesting attention. He, you know, he works on his own company, so he works at his own house. But 10 burpees three times an hour, roughly. And the way he pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to concentration, to concentrate like a laser because your body's always moving. It never gets into a sedentary. But anyways, for someone who works in their own home, works from home on their own business,

very tractable, very tractable keystone habit. It takes 15 seconds or whatever every time. me do it. The fact that I think 10 burpees takes 15 seconds shows that I don't know, I don't know a lot about burpees. Does he still do that? I don't know. We should have him on the show. We should, we should ask him. I know at one point he was training, he was really into, and I don't think he will mind me telling this story, because I think he's talked about it himself. He was really into Spartan racing. The Spartan races? Yeah, because he was friends with Joe DeSena. So he knew the guy who started it. And he was making a run at some point for doing them at a very high level, which requires, it turns out it requires a lot of training. You have to master a lot of these individual disciplines.

But anyways, in his house, in the room where he worked, which I think might have been their bedroom, he had installed into the ceiling of the room the hanging obstacles from the Sparta race. So I guess you do like Ninja Warrior type stuff in that race. Like you have to like swing you're holding on to like rope knots and whatever. Yeah. And yeah. He installed them into the ceiling of the room so that when he was doing these breaks, he's like instead of just burpees, let me jump up and just like do the whatever hanging challenge. Tell you what, you do that for a few months.

Your grip strength and balance. Like you just own it. Like you don't even. And I guess that's what you need to do to compete at a high level. You could just jump up there and boom, boom, boom, boom. And so that's commitment. He probably still work out too during the day, I would think, separately. Yeah, yeah.

And he had a whole thing. Yeah. So you still have a workout. So it was less, this was less about, which again, I think is an important point. Like if your Keystone habits are not, their job is not to capture everything you need to do or it's important for that bucket. It's like getting up and doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day is a great way of saying you take motion important. you take your body important, you think there's a mind-body connection, but it's not everything you need to do for exercise.

You probably need to be doing weights. You probably need to be doing cardio. So it's a good point is that your keystone habits are not trying to take on the weight of everything important in that bucket. They are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously and you're willing to take effort towards that bucket every day that's non-trivial. Now, it takes a while to get those keystone habits right. You have to experiment a little bit, but you get to the point where you're knocking off,

if you have four buckets or five buckets, you're checking off all those metrics every day. You see it every day. You don't want to break the chain. Right. That's step one. You've already now leveled up discipline. Your identity as someone who's disciplined is now leveled up. You do stuff that's optional because it reflects your values, even if it's hard.

Now you're at a higher level. The next part of my general Deep Life Foundation program is then you dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by one and overhaul that part of your life when you're focusing on that particular bucket. So in the one to two months you're focusing on constitution, now you're getting serious about your health and fitness and you're starting to make changes and figuring out, like maybe you're like, I'm going to start training for this sport. Like I'll tell you right now, Jesse, one of the things I'm doing, it's a goal is before

my 40th birthday, which is in June. so it's coming up. You might not remember what's like to be in your 30s, of course. I mean, you've been 40 for literally weeks at this point, so you probably don't remember. But my birthday is coming up, as we've talked about, I want to, this is arbitrary, but I want to be able to once again row 2,000 meters on my concept 2 at a sub 2 minute 500 meter pace. So this just connects me back to my, my, my, my deep past when I was rowing for Dartmouth. I remember the type of splits I could pull. So like seven and change something.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, I was like, I would feel good at the age of 40 if, because I got, God knows what I could pull when I was 19 doing this. I could pull, but I'm 30 pounds heavier now. So it does have an advantage. Like I can actually, I was a lightweight rower. So I can now actually move that thing. But anyways, it's kind of arbitrary.

But it's like, it's hard, but not impossible. But I would feel good if I can be pulling sub two minute 500 splits for a 2,000 meters. So like I'm training for that right now. But that's the type of thing. Okay, when you're doing an overhaul of a bucket, you start you figure out these challenges, you get your equipment in place. I mean, not to make a full, full circle connection, but I got that concept too, actually, from Brian Johnson. Sent the two me as a gift. So there we go.

Nice gift. Yeah, he's a nice guy. Known for a very long time. So anyways, that's the type of thing you will come away from doing the intense focus on the bucket with. Like, okay, now I'm going to start training to do this and I've overhauled my diet and I now am joined this team, this wreck, you know, with other dads that we play, whatever. And so, you know, when you you give the one to two month focus, you really are changing your life more substantially to really integrate that area of value more deeply. And there's a lot of experimentation in that. That's why it takes one or two months.

You try some things. It's not really working. So you change your goals or challenges or habits. So you find something that's really working. You come out of that second step, Toby, you're going to be a much more disciplined person. Step one, you build that base with a keystone. Step two, you overhaul, tractable overhauls to experimentation. All the parts are important to your life.

After that, now it's down the line, you're like, oh, here's a new long-term plan that I believe in. Let me do some work towards it. No problem. That's what you do. Your discipline. That's what you're going to do. That's what you're going to do. So once you've changed the identity, then you can take on new challenges.

The only final thing I'll say is even as a very self-disciplined person, if your challenges don't make sense, if your mind doesn't believe that it's worth doing or that your plan's actually going to accomplish what it is, you will still struggle with discipline. So you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do. Your brain is not dumb. I feel like I'm going to be a Nobel Prize winning novelist because I'm going to do national novel writing month. Three days in, your mind's like, this is stupid. We don't know what we're doing. This is not a good book.

I'm not going to do this. And that's not a failure of discipline. That's a failure of planning. So that's the only other copy I'll give. Even after you become a self-disciplined person, you need goals. Your mind actually trust. All right. Rolling on here, we got a question from Luke. Luke says, could you please work through an example

where you break down a genuinely complicated long-term goal through quarterly, weekly, and daily planning? So, Luke, the biggest problem people have with long-term planning is trying to actually do too much of the planning up front. I think a better way of thinking about this is that there is a feedback loop approach to planning out, structuring, and executing longer projects. Like what I'll often do, do is if there's a longer-term project, like this summer, I put finish book proposals onto my quarterly plan, like finish them by the New Year's. That was my plan. I just put that on there. It's a very high level. And then when I got to my weekly plan, I started like, okay, this is like one of my things I want to work on, like let me get started into this. And it's really

once you dive into something. So on your weekly plan, you're putting a slight time to it. It's only then that you really begin to discover its contours. Oh, how is this really going? Where do I really need to spend time? How is this going to naturally break up at the different parts? And then you can go back and refine that quarterly plan a little bit later. It's like, okay, what we really want to do then is like this month get the sample

chapters together. It gets more specific, but it gets more specific because you get specific feedback from actually putting boots on the ground. So go back to my original plan of writing book proposals. I submitted those last week. So my original plan of do it by the new year was just throwing a dart generally in the direction of the dartboard. But I couldn't really make a good prediction of how long it was going to take and how I was going to get it done and how it was going to break down on the different pieces until I was actually doing it. So that's the main thing I'm going to say, Luke, is when you first start a long-term plan, you should be doing shockingly little thinking about that plan.

Just get going. Once you're convinced this is something important to do, start putting aside time during your weekly planning. That weekly planning will influence your daily planning. And let that feedback help you refine and improve those plans. And don't be mad at yourself when you get the timing wrong because it's impossible to do. You don't get a gold medal for guessing how long a hard project is going to take. All right. You get a gold medal for continually to follow the multi-scale planning process to let the feedback refine your plans to execute good weekly plan.

based on your quarterly plans and the realities of your schedule, doing good time block plans, based on your weekly plans. That is the thing you want to do. Trust that process. How long things actually take to happen? Well, I don't know. Did your family get COVID? Did you have a giant project dropped on your lap you weren't expecting?

Did something blow up two months in that you thought was going to be easy to complete and you had to go over and start over? Like, who knows? You can't predict that. Why would you expect you could? Follow the multi-scale process, refine your long-term plan, as you unfold your work on them. Do that and you should be happy with what you're doing.

All right. Well, that's a lot of me talking. Why don't we take a call, Jesse? Do we have a call queued up that we can go to here? Yeah, we sure do. It's from Laura. She's got a question about a book. Are you read?

All right. Hi, Cal. I've been reading your book, Digital Minimalism. I'm about over halfway through right now, and I'm looking forward to decluttering my technology life. I also saw a book that just came out called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. It's by Johann Hari. I think it just came out this month in January, and I was wondering if you've read it and what you think about it.

It seems like something that could definitely help with productivity. Thank you. Well, Laura, I like Johan's work. So that's the third book of his that I know about. Let me not bury the lead. I have not read it. I have not read Stolen Focus. Not because there's something I dislike about it, but because when you write a book on a topic and you're done with that book, it's not uncommon that you're kind of done with the topic in the sense that it's actually very difficult to get motivated to read a similar book.

It's very common among writers, especially writers, even writers who read very widely like I do. I just don't want to read something that is covering very similar ground to something I've written about too because I've spent a lot of time on those topics. I'm probably, I'm going to guess I know the same people he's quoting. I know the same stories. I've spent years in that world. So that's entirely a function of just I'm up to my ears in that topic. Now, here's what I like about Harry, though. I will say this.

his approach to books. He has a certain formula that I appreciate, which is the big inversion formula. You thought X about this big topic, but the reality is Y. And the reality Y is often something that's going to be a little bit aspiration. Like, oh, now that I understand that,

that gives me hope. That gives me a plan. I love that type of writing. That's a Johann's approach. So he had this book out called Chasing the Scream years ago. that was about drug addiction. And that was an interesting book because what he was arguing there, his big inversion in that book, if I understand it correctly, it's been a while, is that we have this reductive,

chemical-only cultural understanding of drug addiction, right? So his thing is, okay, the way we are taught about drug addiction is that if the mad scientist kidnapped you and strapped you down, it's like, I'm going to put. heroin into your veins every day, you would be released when he finally released you from his evil layer, you would be a heroin addict. That is the way we understand it. Like these drugs chemically build these dependencies in our brain and then we can't shake them. But he said if that was the case, there should be a lot of heroin-addicted grandmothers in the UK because in the UK, the standard drug they give for pain killing for hip replacement is dimerol, which is just medical

heroin. So we have all these grandmothers in the UK getting basically a few weeks worth of heroin as their standard treatment for their hip, and they come away just fine. They don't come away addicted to it or looking for heroin. And he said the missing factor in chasing the screen was there's also a socioc psycho component to it. So it's not just the chemical going into your body. It's when the chemical is going into your body as a means of escaping from something in your life, from pain, from post-traumatic stress, from trauma. It is the combination of that potent chemical, which gets right into your brain, plus the psycho-emotional usage of that to escape that creates the, like, impossible to shake addiction loop.

So that was chasing the scream. So it's like this kind of interesting version. Inject heroin, the mad scientist injects into you every day, you're not going to be addicted. You start taking the pain pills they gave you for your hip after your hip feels better because you're depressed about losing your job. And it's like, this helps, I need this to not feel depressed about losing my job. Then suddenly you can have a life-destroying addiction. So that was chasing the screen.

Then he wrote a book called Lost Connections that was talking about depression. And again, he was arguing that there is this biochemical model of depression that's too reductive. This idea that depression is just caused by something goes wrong with neurotransmitters. It's entirely chemical. and we can take pills to try to fix it, it's all you can do. And he's like, though there's a chemical component, I think his big argument in lost connections is, again,

there's a socio-psychocomponent as well. Like also, a big source of depression is the things that are making you feel bad. Like someone close to you died. Like you're really sad about it. Like you feel hopeless about your work situation, that you've lost some jobs. You can't get into their jobs. You're feeling worthless.

He's like the sociocological aspect of depression. really matter too. And if we just say, like, don't worry, don't worry. It's just your chemicals will give you a pill to fix it. And don't also say, what's going on in your life? Can we also, let's make your wife better? He's like you're leaving most of the tools on the table. So that's like classic Yon Harari. So in Stolen Focus, he's applying this to distraction and the attention economy. I don't know the book, the thesis really well, because again, it's too close to home. So I don't really want to get into it. But I think he's, he's, I think his inversion there, if I understand vaguely is, you think you're more distracted.

because you're like lazy. There's all these new shiny distractions out there and you can't help yourself. He's like, that's not the case. The attention economy has put billions of dollars to steal your focus away. Like there was this Apollo mission size effort to distract you and you had no chance. That's what I think he's saying. And if it is, I agree because I've written a lot about that. So anyways, he's an entertaining writer.

I like chasing the scream and lost connections. and people who read, I give a lot of notes about lost focus. So obviously, lots of people are sending it to me to read, but people aren't telling me what they think about it. So let me know. If you read it, let me know, let me know what you think. All right, well, speaking of books, Jesse, this is the first episode that will air in April, right? We're recording it, I mean, in May.

Yep. Yeah. We're recording it in April, but it'll be the first one that we release in May. And what's our tradition is the first episode that we either record or release in each month. I discussed the five books I read in the month before. And though it's only the 28th, I have, as is my habit, long since finished my five books for April. So I figure we can talk about them now in our standard, what I read segment. All right.

So in April of 2022, my first book I read, and we talked about this on the show, was the seven-story mountain by Thomas Merton. So you'll remember, this is the story. It came out in 1948. it was a memoir of Thomas Merton who had grown up with his artist father traveling throughout Europe, ended up in the States, ended up at Columbia, was sort of an intellectual writer, started teaching English literature classes, and dropped everything and became a trappist monk at the Garden of Gassimini, Trappist Monastery in Kentucky. And the trappist, if you don't know, are pretty, pretty far on the aesthetic. aesthetic end. You know, we're going to, we're not out there in the community, also having jobs, and we're not Jesuits that are also astronomers.

It's like, no, we're chopping wood and waking up four times in the middle of the night to the say prayers. So it was about that transition. It's very influential. It's very influential because it came out during this post-war doldrums period where people were adrift and moving the suburbs and getting boring jobs. And so this book of reinventing. and focusing on depth and values in a radical way.

And this is a clear example of my notion of the deep life and action really struck a court. So I figured I needed to read it because so much more this recent is informed by it, whether the author's note or not. We talked about it before because I tried to read it on Kindle and I was like, nah, this book can't be read on Kindle. I need a hardcover. But instead of just like a normal person buying a hardcover, I went back and bought a first edition, first printing from 1948 to the book. I think it really mattered. I think it really helped. I think it really changed my experience of reading the book.

And it's a long one. It's 400 something pages in the original hardcover, which are wide pages. And they didn't mess around with this sort of business book you buy in the airport in the 2020s, you know, double-spaced lines and giant fonts. They didn't mess around with that back in the 40s. You know, people had time. So the lines are small. So it took me a while to read. But I'm really glad I did.

I'm really glad I did. I know more about Catholic practice now than I ever have before. So I recommend it. It's a foundational book that so many more self-transformation books, all of the big self-transformation books that fall in the 20th centuries were informed by seven-story mountain. And he's a good writer. All right. So speaking about writing, I then went on to read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

I had never read that. No, I had read the other famous writing. instruction books. So bird by bird, if you don't know, is Anne Lamott's book about writing. It's a book about writing. Now, because, as you might expect, I've internalized the patriarchy, I had read Stephen King's book on writing, on writing, probably because of the the male gendered gaze was more comfortable for me than the female gays or what have you. But for whatever reason, I had never read Bird by Bird. But it is right up there with Stephen King's on writing as one of the two most famous nonfiction books about writing from the last whatever three or four decades.

I like Anne Lamont. I mean, I like her writing. I like her as a person, just her, excuse me, like just her approach to life. She lives and she's had an interesting, difficult life. And I always go deep stocker mode on the houses of writers. And so she bought this cool piece of land in Northern California that was kind of run down and they slowly converted it over time into this like oasis. I love that type of stuff.

The book is good. It's focused on fiction writing. And I'll say the main thing I came away with, other than Anne Lamont is a great writer. And the main thing I came away with is fiction writing, I think attracts more. aspiring writers than nonfiction. Because on paper, becoming a success seems easier. And what I mean by that is when you read bird by bird or you read Stephen King's book and you read about novel writing, the only real activity you do is sit down at a computer and write. And so it's all about that, like just sitting down there and writing and overcoming to psychological fears.

So in theory, if you've never written anything before, you have all of the tools and things you need to potentially write a great novel. You just have to sit down to and write where nonfiction seems more scary, right? It's like, I got to get a book deal first. You don't write nonfiction before you get the book. I got to go actually talk to people. I got to do interviews. So it seems harder. But the reality is when you read something like bird by bird is like, oh, my God, fiction is so much harder.

Like, yeah, yeah, you can just get going. But man, it's just you in the screen and you have to just craft out of nowhere these characters and narratives that reveal the human experience and do so with perfect craft because any deviation from perfect craft is going to ring out. We're in nonfiction. I don't know. You just have to be competent. I have something to read about.

I did research on it. If I just do the work to do the research and I know how to write in a way that's not going to annoy people, like you can be in the game. So I think this is the the allure of national novel writing month and fiction writing and bird by bird is like maybe if I just sit there at the keyboard, you know, of mice and men is going to come out. But I think it's way harder. So I'm glad I'm not a fiction writer. That just seems like it's impossible. It's like trying to be a screenwriter.

Everyone's like, I bet I could do that because I know movies. Movies seem straightforward. And it's impossible. It's impossible to actually like write because everyone gets. do it, but to do it well, it's like near impossible. So anyways, a good book makes me glad I'm a nonfiction writer. And to all you aspiring writers out there, nonfiction is actually a way, it's way easier in my opinion to like be a working writer than in fiction. All right. Then I went on and read some fiction because April had some good weather. In good

weather, I like to have fun books to read. So I went and read the Carl Sagan novel Contact, which actually I really enjoyed. So it was a premise of the book was it focused on someone at SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And Carl Sagan works through what would happen if we actually did get a signal from an alien civilization. And the parts I like the best actually is he works through the science of how that would work. You know, like, okay, it would be a signal on this frequency that corresponds to the emission frequency of hydrogen and there would be pulses corresponding to the prime numbers because that would be really universal.

And then they're using various modulation screens to encode information into those symbols. And so anyways, I thought that was real interesting. So I really love the part where he got in whenever he would get into the science of like how alien communication would work and how we would track it down. I love those parts. But that was pretty good characters as well. I mean, it was a good book.

And I love when scientists write books and they're good. The only nerd comment I need to make, my apologies to the Sagan estate. Actually, no apology. It's not his fault. It's a demonstration of how things have changed. So the book takes place like in 99. And so he gets right a lot of things. He didn't get the internet right.

So they had instead these like portable fax machines they would carry around that like would send message. they would like send and receive messages through portable fax machines. Like he wasn't quite there on the internet, but, but, you know, it was pretty close. But the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is that I noticed,

is the aliens used for one of the layers of encoding in their signal, phase modulation. And in, in the book, Sagan's like, oh, we don't,

phase modulation is something that theoretically you could do, but it's not something that we use, really. in like human devices. We know about it, but it's just not something we're used to. Based on my understanding,

phase modulation is actually now heavily used in wireless data protocols, like in particular in 802.11 protocols for access points, like phase modulations at the core of it. So that was a prediction that was gotten wrong in the age of Wi-Fi phase modulation is well used. So what I'm doing here, Jesse, is I'm giving the people the information they really care about.

You know, you cut past the superfluous and you focus in on what is it that the crowds really care about. And I, look, if there's one thing I will say about deep questions listeners, they are RF modulation, RF modulation fans. Yeah, you got us primed up for your comments about Jurassic Park a couple months ago. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, forget any mistake I said about Jurassic Park. The overlooking the importance of phase modulation. I mean, let me get going about QAM constellation encoding.

This all came from, by the way, so again, no one cares about this. I'm mainly a theoretician, but I do theory. I used to do theory about problems that were motivated by wireless network. So for my postdoc, for my two years as a postdoc at MIT, I left the theory group and I went up to the network and mobile systems group and learned a lot about how wireless network technology actually works. So there you go. It finally paid off in allowing me to do an awesome, cool critique of Carl Sagan. I don't want to say that makes this book a garbage book, but, you know, if you're going to get modulation wrong, I mean, I don't know, guys. I don't know what we're doing here.

All right. Then I went on and read a book I found in a Little Free Library at the field where my oldest son was playing Little League called Blue Latitudes. So this is Tony Horwitz. I'm a big Tony Horwitz booster. He died a few years ago, like at the age of 60. Just tragic. Just like heart attack. Just boom,

streets of DC, you know, fickle finger of fate, which was really tragic. Fascinating guy. Talk about a writing power couple, by the way. So he married Geraldine Brooks,

the novelist. When he married her, he had a Pulitzer from his, uh, war correspondent reporting. And then not long after they got married, she got a Pulitzer for one of her novels. I don't know if it was March or The Crossing. So it's a dual Pulitzer couple, a nonfiction writer and a novelist.

But anyways, I mean, the book, he's probably his most famous book is Confederates in the Attic, which is a fantastic book, the first Horowitz book I wrote. But he does these, these are like nonfiction travel log type books. in blue latitudes, he was tracing Captain Cook's journeys through the Pacific of the 18th century. And so he's going all over, like, remote Pacific islands and all the way up to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. And he's really good at this travel writing because he's a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent. So he knows how to go to these remote, interesting places and insert himself into interesting situations and find interesting people. He's twitchy and high energy and is just

constantly trying to find places to go and people to meet. And he's a good, so it's interesting. He does interesting things. And so in this book, he's doing interesting things. He's on these islands you've never heard of meeting these characters who he, who capture so interestingly, like the life on these islands and the impact of colonialism, et cetera, written beautifully and just interleaving with the story of Captain Cook. Great book, but long. It's another 450 pager. So it took me while. It took me a while. So I had two 450 pages this month. So I was surprised by how long that took. The final book I read, this is a bit of an odd one. This is a deep poll. Uncle Petros and Gold Blocks Conjecture. That is a long process by which I came to this book.

It is a novel written by a mathematician, a Greek mathematician named Apostolus doxiatis. So between this and Sagan, as you can see, I'm on a kick of scientists writing books about their field. And the book is about it. It's like a young boy and his uncle and his uncle was like this super math prodigy who became obsessed with trying to solve gold box conjecture, which was at the time one of the three big famous number theory conjectures that hadn't been solved. So the Riemann hypothesis, Fermat's Last Theorem, and the Goldblot conjecture. Firmats has since been proven by Andrew Wiles. Was the Reimann solved?

Can you look that up, Jesse? The Reimann hypothesis? I have this vague memory of this Reim-I-M-A-N-N. I have this vague memory of this eccentric mathematician George or Goreg or something solved it and didn't even show up. But I might be thinking

about something different. So you have to fact-check me on that. Anyways. Wikipedia says, many consider it to be the most important unsolved problem pure mathematics in the first paragraph. So what did he? Oh, look up. I think he solved, um, uh, Poincere, um, Poincere, Poincere, Poncarri's conjecture. P-O-N-P-O-N-C-A-R-E accent to goo. Conjecture. Maybe that's what he, he solved, the guy I'm thinking about. So just is a fact check that.

Maybe that's what it was. Originally conjectured by Henry Poncari, in 1904, the theorem conserved spaces that locally look like ordinary three-dimensional space. Yeah. Was it solved? Attempts to resolve the conjecture drove much progress in the field of geometric topology

during the 20th century. So a guy with whose name started with G, who solved it? I'll keep on looking. Yeah. Anyways, the point be, there was something famous solved and the guy was this weirdest centric. I think he was Russia.

and he didn't even show up for, I think he got to give him like a Fields Medal or something, he didn't even show up. But anyways, this book was sort of about a character like this. So it's a math prodigy who became obsessed with solving this conjecture. And basically his life fell apart because of that. And it is from the perspective of his son who kind of uncovers this.

And so it's cool. You know, it's a short book. I wouldn't say there's a lot of sophisticated plot. And there's like long periods of just exposition of like, let me just tell you. Let me just summarize my uncle's story. And it kind of just tells the story. But it's really cool because he puts in a lot of famous figures from logic and number theory and analysis. So Turing plays a role.

Kurt Gertl shows up in the book. He's hanging out with Rajanaman and Hardy at Cambridge. And so it's cool. It's like all these mathematical cameos. Not much really happens. But I love to see special. list in their fields, write fiction about their fields because I want to do that one day. So maybe that's why I was reading Sagan and Uncle Petros.

You should have used your French accent. Yeah, the proper pronunciation is Henry, Hongkai, is how, if you're going to be sophisticated, you're saying, you're like, that's good. Remember when the guy from Russia saw the Henry, Hong Kong koi conjecture. Yeah, that was good. So do we figure out? Is that the thing he solved? I was reading through the Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is unbelievable. One guy tried to solve in the 30s, but then it was retracted. A bunch of other guys tried in the 50s and 60s. Well, I'm sure there's some nerd listening. He's a bigger nerd to me who will ride in, and please do. An exposition of attempts to prove this conjection can be found in the book. Because I'm thinking about...

Care's Prize by George. because this is what I'm all right someone has to write in there's someone who solved something hard in the last 10 years maybe the last 15 years and his name was george and he's Russian and he's eccentric it's not the rhyme in hypothesis it's not doesn't sound like it's a pun carry conjecture so all right someone has to write in uh and set us straight i got a quick question yeah so before you would say that you read two chapters today before you bumped up to five books a month right yeah so So what do you think you read like four chapters of day now? It's uneven. Yeah. So, I mean, part of what happens is you just when you take advantage of quiet time to like go nuts. Like once you're in the habit of reading, you're looking for times to kind of go nuts and read. And so some days you don't get that much time in.

You just have your standard times you read. And other days you're like, ooh, I have, you know, an half hour. Like the kids are with my wife and they're coming home. they won't be home for a half hour or something. And if it's your default activity, you just, you'll lean into it. Great, I can really, and once you get into the books, and I talked about this in the podcast last week, that once you're no longer are using your phone, it's a default source of distraction. And conversely, you've gotten really into like the books you're reading and the idea of reading

books and your mind is used to that. You begin to crave it. It's great. Like, this is what, this is what I want. Like, everything slows down. The leisure is deeper. Your brain gets quiet. Your thoughts get clear.

I just really am more and more of an advocate of this is, this is the medicine people need right now. Or any of the five audiobooks? None of those five are audiobooks. None of those five are audiobooks. I'm listening to the first book from the expanse series, sci-fi series. I was listening to that on audio, but it's long. It's a 40-hour book. So I was listening to that off and on throughout.

And then I'm also listening to the Steve Martin's professional memoir, Born Standing Up. I just finished that, actually. Yeah, I mean, I'd read it. Obviously, it was influential in my work, but I read it in 2007 or something. So I don't remember. There's so much I don't remember. So I'm enjoying that.

I'm almost done with that as well. I'm actually, so I have three books I'm reading simultaneously right now, and I'm pretty close on all three. So like once we cross over the May boundary, I'm probably going to be three books in, you know, by the first week of May. Because I just kind of have a bunch going in parallel right now. I actually miscounted. So I was on, we were on a little trip to the beach when I finished the fifth book and I thought it was my fourth. So I had like a lot of other stuff going.

And so then so then I spread out. It's like, well, let me make progress in a lot of books so that I can finish them all. So I'm just off schedule now. So I'm finishing stuff like halfway through a month and kind of starting the new stuff. It's just my reading's not scheduled with the start of the month, basically. But there you have it. All right. Let's take another quick break from this classic episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

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Jesse, let's do one last call. and then I'll call it quits after that. Sounds good. We've got a question about your process for writing articles as opposed to nonfiction books. Hi, Cal. I have a question today about the nonfiction column writing you do for the New Yorker in the New York Times. Is the formula to do something like that the same as you often share for nonfiction books? By that I mean be the right person to write about that right topic.

Don't suck at writing and have a solid and interesting idea. Whereas the path here are different since there are no age. agents and no book deals. For someone who aspires to do something like that, what is the playbook? Thank you. No, that's a good question. It's a subtle distinction that you're asking about here. So when I talk about how to become a nonfiction writer, one of the core points I make is that when it comes to nonfiction books, there is a insatiable demand for more product. For various economic reasons. The publishing houses need full pipelines. They need lots of books moving through those pipelines. So we sometimes paint this picture of mustache twirling gatekeepers who just don't

understand your brilliance that you have to somehow get around to get your book published. It's the opposite. They are desperate for books to publish. They need books in the pipeline. You have to have a lot of books on the shelves just to make the economics of being a publisher work. So given that reality, it's a good situation for the aspiring nonfiction book writer. And I gave that three-point formula for becoming one that you just summarized there. You need to have an idea that people are going to feel like they need to read. You need to be the right person to write that idea and they need to write it in a way that's not going to raise flags. You don't have to be John McPhee, but you can't be amateur.

It just has to be professional writing. If you can find that idea for which you're the right person and you can write at a non-amature level, which takes some work. But again, we're not talking about becoming John McPhee. You have a good shot of being able to publish a nonfiction book. It doesn't mean you're going to get paid a lot of money for it. But you have a good shot of doing it because there's an insatiable demand. There's more slots basically to fill than they often have books to put into it.

Writing for a magazine, like writing for the New Yorker or writing op-eds for the New York Times, it's a different situation. So I think it switches from a seller's market to a buyer's market. There's not the same notion of we have an insatiable need for like more and more product is actually there's limited number of slots. The New York Times only has so many op-ed slots per day. And half of those are going to editorial board members and members who are permanent salary columnists. There's very little space there. You know, same for a magazine like The New Yorker. I think there's just only so many slots they have to fill.

So that's a different type of world. And so, yeah, getting into that world is going to require more than just, I have an idea. I'm the right person to write it and I can write it at a good level. Usually something else has to be involved. And there's a lot of different paths into those worlds. Some people come into those worlds through specific expertise coupled with a good riding ability. So you might have someone like in a Tule Gawande who has all of this medical expertise as a doctor who learned how to write really well.

It's like, oh, that's really rare. And like the New Yorker would say, great. Now we have this sort of distinctive expert insider voice on medicines. You know, that's one way into it. You have people like Gia Tolentino at the New Yorker who she just developed an incredibly original voice. And that's just, it's just sheer talent. So they came knocking on her door at some point.

You have this voice that captures the mood of your generation in these times. And so that's just sheer talent. So yeah, that's much harder. And so we should just be honest about that. And again, my experience with the New Yorker is they come to you. And I don't know if that's always the case for everyone there. But it feels a little bit sometimes like the Yankees in the 90s. Like, okay, yeah, good work, Rodriguez over there and the Rangers.

You can come play for us now because, and then every. everyone jumps at it. So there's a little bit of that. There's not much you can do to force that. Again, I don't know if that's everyone's experience. That's just the story I've heard from the writers I've talked to. New York Times is kind of similar. How do you end up doing op-edged for the New York Times? Often they're asking you. So they've seen something else, things you've written, they know about you. And they're like, you know what? This person would have a good take on this topic. And so it's a lot of you being asked to do things. So yeah, I don't think the right way into the world of nonfiction writing is not my first thing is to be a New Yorker writer or New York Times op-ed writer. Books are a great way in. Magazines or publications in which they actually have a content issue. They need more content. Those are a good way in. You know, produce stuff. Be so good. You can't be ignored. There's a lot of ways into nonfiction. And then there is a small number of these opportunities that you can't really control. And so if they come your way, that's great. I feel grateful every day about the ones that have come my way. if they don't, that's fine too.

As long as you're producing stuff you're proud of, interesting opportunities will come up. So that's a good question. So there's definitely a distinction between selling a nonfiction book and writing for an elite publication. All right. Well, speaking about writing, this is a bad transition. There's nothing to do with writing.

Speaking about the things that keep me from my writing and my podcasting, I've got to go jump on Zoom. So let's wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions and their calls. If you like what you heard, you will like what you see on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Kalmuport Media. Whole episodes are up there as well as clips of selected individual segments. We'll be back next week, the new episode, the Deep Questions Podcast.

And until then, as always, stay deep.