Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 4: Promoting Books without Social Media, Facebook's Fatal Flaw, and Escaping Soul-Crushing Jobs | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on book publicity without social media, Facebook's fatal flaw, and escaping soul-crushing jobs. I also try out a new segment where I answer on the fly randomly selected questions I have not previously seen (to interesting effect). To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.comFull list of topics tackled in today’s episode: * Do I plan to ever have guests on the podcast to help me answer questions? (Yes.) * Deep work in a reactive organization (rant alert). * Tackling an overwhelming number of obligations. * Dealing with unproductive days. * Building good depth rituals. * Deliberate practice and social skills. * When is a PhD program worth it? * Productive people who also use social media. * The good and bad sides of technology. * Side-stepping the YouTube rabbit hole. * Publicizing books when you don't use social media. * Reducing text volume when dating. * Encouraging teens to spend last time on their phones (difficult, but possible!). * Facebook's fatal flaw. * Dealing with a job that "eats" your soul. * Advice for teenagers about to start college. * Fear of failure while pursuing a PhD. * Quarantine ruts impacting productivity (sermon alert). * PLUS: two randomly selected questions (mega sermon alert)Thank you to listener Bit Holiday for the original theme music and transition sound effect (bitholiday.net). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. We're going to cover a lot of great topics today, among other issues. We'll talk about social media for writers, Facebook's fatal flaw, and surviving soul-crushing jobs. I'm also going to try out a new segment. This might be a disaster. So this might be the first and last time I try it, but I am going to try at some point to generate a random question. So select a question randomly from my list that I have never seen before and answer it here live to tape on the air. So I will probably live to regret that. Before we get started, let me answer a deep question that people have been asking me about this show. They're wondering if there is a plan

to ever have guests on the podcast. And I do want to let you know that is the plan. That is the I'm still working out some of the kinks of my technology right now, getting a hang of my setup. But once I have this all dialed in, I would like to have guests occasionally join me to answer your questions alongside with me as well as answer some questions from myself. So that is the plan. I'm hoping to get there relatively soon. Okay, anyways, let's get moving. Remember, I solicit these questions from my emailing list if you want to contribute your questions.

sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Every few weeks, I send out a survey to my mailing list readers that allows them to submit their information and their questions for this podcast. Okay, with that, it's time for work questions. Jared asks, how do you reconcile deep work with working in a reactive, constantly changing an inbox-driven working environment?

Well, Jared, are you a Formula One race car driver? Are you an emergency dispatcher for first responders? Are you an air traffic controller? One of the guys that has to sit at that screen and really rapidly push 10, as they say, so that you don't crash jumbo airliners into each other in the skies above your city? Because if you are, then I will grant that your work is fundamentally reactive, constantly changing, and input driven. but if you're not,

then I would say probably the first step here, instead of trying to shoehorn deep work into a work style where it's not going to actually fit, I would change the work style. Most knowledge work organizations that behave in the reactive, constantly changing inbox-driven environment,

don't need to be. Again, if you're not a Formula One race car driver, if you're not pushing 10, if you're not an emergency dispatcher, you don't have to be almost certainly to accomplish the goal of your organization, bathing yourself in this rapid input, sending information back and forth, constantly checking in on different communication channels.

So the issue here, Jared, is stop trying to think about how to make something that's fundamentally not going to fit with that work style work. How to fit in deep work in a work style that demands distraction and attention. Don't try to make that work, fix to work style. Fixed a work style. Okay, that is a massive task. I know it. This is really the core of the book I've been telling you guys about coming out in the early spring of next year, currently titled A World Without Email. I get deep into this. So it's a big question about how as an individual worker, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of a major company, how do you move your work style away from something that's reactive and constantly changing to inbox driven? It's not easy. So I'm just going to plant this seed right now that you can do it. So really what I'm trying to do here is change your focus.

That when you feel this frustration of I'm always distracted, I'm always busy, I'm not getting done to deep things that really going to move the needle in my career for my company. Shift your focus. Shift it from just given the reality of how we work, how do I fit this in and ask the question, why is this the reality of how we work? Why is this the reality of why we work? Why does everything come through an email inbox? Why do I have 35 different things on my plate?

Is this type of diminishment of intellectual specialization really the right way to run this organization? Should things just happen in an ad hoc manner? If I need something, I shoot off an email, and then you can shoot me one back. We can have a conversation back and forth asynchronously over email. It can be one of 25 different conversations I have going on, and so now I have to manage each of these, which means roughly once every six minutes, which is the average according to the rescue time software makers, the average amount of time between inbox checks for users of their

time tracking software? Is this really the best way to do it? Or could we have some structure? Could we break things down in the processes? Could we have a task board? It makes it crystal clear. Here's what's going on. Here's who's working on it. When something new comes in, we can all look at that board and say, who's got the cycles for it? Who's going to take it? What do they need? Or do we just jump on whatever, slack and say, you know, hey, Cal, can you grab this or thoughts, question mark, or whatever we do today. So clearly I'm scratching the surface of a much deeper issue here. But Jared, this is what I want to nudge you towards. Don't think about the constantly changing inbox driven environment, the always reactive environment as somehow being fundamental. Fix that approach to work.

That can be the foundation on which you're going to be able to work better. And if you're a Formula One car driver, then my apologies, Jared. I would say instead, in that case, you probably should be doing a little bit less deep work and a little bit more shifting. All right, Miranda asks, how do you prioritize things when everything needs to be done? This is familiar to most people. You get into those moments, and for some people this is all the time, where you just feel completely overwhelmed by everything on your plate. and it's just stress. Just pure stress.

I often talk about this. Stress does not come from doing hard things. Stress comes from time pressure, having more things than you think you can get done in the time that you actually have to do them. So what do you do in this case when you feel overwhelmed? Miranda, here's a couple practical tips. First of all, you have to structure and visualize

your entire landscape of commitments. Here's a hint. seeing a bunch of subject lines in an email inbox is not sufficient structure. I suggest using a task board style program like Trello where you can have columns on a virtual board and you can mount virtual cards under different columns. Make different columns for the different classes of obligations, you know, things I need to get back to people on, things I'm still need information on, things I'm waiting to hear from someone else to get back to me on. Things that have to happen right away.

Things that need to be, on the back burner now, I have to really develop it. I need to return to this and figure out what I need to do. You can have columns for these different categories of all these different things floating around in this whirlwind landscape of obligations. And then every one of these obligations goes on a card and goes in a column. This seems maybe at first like it's a superficial exercise. Miranda, it makes a big difference. if you can not only see all the things you need to do, but have structured them, structured them by their status.

Where is it? What am I waiting for? All of this is out of your head. Now you have some structure to it. You have a foundation on which you can start to build something. You can actually start to build towards some completion. All right. Now do something similar. Now go to your calendar.

Let's look at it. Not just tomorrow. Not just this week. Let's look at the next month. What's going on? What they're going on? are busy, what days aren't, when do I have meetings? Where's my time already committed? Get a sense of that. Now we put these two things together. A structured, visualized landscape

of your commitments and a visualized landscape of your meetings. So what time you have available, what time you don't. And now you can start planning. And I really suggest planning at multiple scales, having a plan at the seasonal scale. Here's the big things that are going on and and how I want to get them done, like September, I really need to push hard on getting towards this deadline that's going to come at the end of September. Early October, I'm going to shift over to these two projects, etc. Then on the weekly scale,

how do I move around the chess pieces this week to make progress? And here is where, you know, really being able to see this visualized, structured landscape commitments, this visualized calendar, you can really start to make some smart moves. Like, okay, here's what I got to do. I got to spend an hour every morning to really get through X, right? like recently this spring when I was the director of graduate studies in my department at Georgetown we were working on admissions for incoming graduate students that's a lot of

applications I have to look at but when I know that's on my plate and I'm making a plan I'm visualizing the whole game looking at the whole game board then I know like okay an hour a day if I do an hour a day I miss you do at this point in my morning so I don't have to think about it I'll stay on top of it. And I'll get through those commitments. Okay. Where else do I see time? Where else do I see time that's available?

Oh, okay, the afternoons are a little bit free. So this is what I'm going to have to do on Wednesday. Maybe I'm going to make progress on this. And I can batch together these six errands that involve me to go to stores. And, you know, Friday afternoon, that's what I'll do. Friday afternoon will be just for batching together those errands where I have to actually physically drive somewhere. You move around the pieces.

You look at the game board. You move around the pieces. And you know what? on that foundation, you do begin to build completion. You get on top of things. You organize things. You batch things. You take things off your plate.

You delegate some things. You execute where you have time. And you end up being able to fit into your schedule much more work than you thought you could. This is probably two or three X more effective than just saying, okay, what's next? Looking at your inbox trying to figure out something else to do than saying, okay, what's next? that's a supremely ineffective way to work. You've got to be higher level. And so that's my advice, Miranda.

We all face the whirlwind, structure it, structure your time, make a plan, build your structure of completion. This stuff does work. That type of information is going to make things much easier than if you just go from your list or from your inbox and keep asking what's next. Franco asks, do you have very many unproductive days? How do you recover or turn them around? Franco, of course, everyone has unproductive days. There are a lot of reasons for them. Sometimes you're just run down.

Sometimes your schedule doesn't work. Sometimes the big task you're tackling is one that you weren't really ready to tackle and the whole effort falls apart. Don't sweat them. Process, process, process. you know, just keep returning to your process. Here's how I organize my time. Here's how I plan my days.

Execute. Schedule shutdown complete when you're done working. Move on to other parts of life. Repeat the next day. Repeat the next day. Repeat the next day. Not every day is going to be great, but on the large scale,

you're going to get a great amount of work done. All right. Jack asks, do you have any tips on how to build good rituals? Rituals that make distraction less relevant. But like I talk about Jack in deep work, rituals are important, especially if you're going to do cognitively demanding work. That's a state that's not very natural for the human mind. So it will often generate resistance to the energy expenditure that's represented in something like thinking very hard. So having a ritual to help you transition into cognitively demanding work is a very common strategy among people who do that at the elite level.

like I talked about in that book, there is two properties of an effective ritual for shifting into more deep style work. And those properties are time and location. So a good deep work ritual often has some sort of consistency in time. Oh, this is when I do it. First thing in the morning. At the end of the day, midday, whatever it is. Mondays and Fridays, but not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays. And then location is another big aspect of these rituals.

I go to this place to do this work. Now, if the location is the same place you do your normal work, like it's your desk at work at your office, then sometimes location means you temporarily transit through another location to shift your mindset, the biggest example being going for a walk. Okay, I'm going to walk on this route. Every time I'm about to start my particularly cognitively demanding work,

just like Darwin used to do on his estate outside, of London, where he built the sand path over the most scenic portions of his land, and he would walk a set number of circuits on that path every day to help shift his mind into work mode. Same type of thing happens with these deep work rituals. Either you go to a place that you only do deep work in, or you transit through a place, like a particular walking path that puts you into deep work mindset, keep the time consistent.

You're on the right track, Jack. Having these type of rituals makes it. big difference. Juan asks, can you apply deliberate practice concepts to people-related skills? Yes, Juan, that is very common. There are some fields like sales and politics, in which people actually do quite a bit of practice to get better at interacting with other humans. Salespeople definitely do this to get much better at moving someone towards a sale. Politicians, they don't interact in the way that normal human beings do because they have to interact with a huge number of constituents

in a certain type of way. A lot of that is just practice. I know some professional politicians who do actually deliberately work on that. We also find deliberate practice of people-related skills in podcasting even. You know, some of the top podcasters, this is, you know, maybe not as widely known, but some of the top podcasters, part of their ability is how they work with their guests even before the recording begins to get them appropriately comfortable.

And if you go back and listen to old versions of their podcast, you can tell they're not as good at it yet. The guests aren't as comfortable if it's not someone they know. And then you get farther and farther along in their podcast trajectory. The guests seem more comfortable. The interview seemed to be going better. That is all practiced. And if we think about the very top podcast,

in terms of just sheer listener numbers. That would be Joe Rogan. It's something I've heard from friends of mine who have been on his show. He has learned over the years through practice how to bring you into, he has this giant studio space, like a warehouse with a gym and all sorts of other things. He works with the guests, especially if he doesn't know you. You hang out and you talk and he shows you things and he puts you at ease so that by the time you get to the actual studio, he doesn't want you really thinking.

about the one of the two million people who might be listening live while you talk. He even has it down to a science that the transition from you idly chatting with Joe, with the headphones on in the studio to the live stream and recording beginning is very subtle. You know, like, oh, yeah, we're live and we keep going. That's all practice. It's practice about putting someone else at ease and he gets a better product for it. So, WAM, people-related skills are difficult. you can be really good at them or you can be bad at them.

Practice does make a difference. If it's relevant to your work or life, definitely think about this as something you can practice and get better at. Charlie asks, how do you make a PhD program valuable? Well, I think this is a good question. I think with graduate school in general, students don't always think it through as much as they probably should, what it is they're trying to accomplish. And so my advice, especially when it's something like a

doctoral program that's going to take you a lot of time to get through, is you should have a specific thing you want to do that for sure requires to doctorate and you have to have access to the right type of doctorate program to satisfy that requirement. So let me unpack that a little bit. Let's say you enjoyed college. You want to be a professor. You want to sit around and sort of like I do, you want to think big thoughts and write books and do equations on the chalkboard and walk around sort of gothic ivy-covered campuses or whatever are images of a professor. It's a perfectly legitimate interest. It's a really cool job. But here would be a reality check question. Are you a star? Were you a star in college and are you going to a very top graduate program in your subject?

We're going to study under some of the top people? Because if you're not, you're not going to going to get that professorship probably. Probably at any one of these R1 institutions where people do walk around Ivy Covered buildings and think deep thoughts, you know, for every 10-year track position that's open, they're going to have three to 500 applicants. They'll end up interviewing five. And it'll run those five through the ringer to see who's the one that really stands out. So again, make sure you understand, not just this is what I want to do, but am I going to the right program that's going to get me there? Similar for the job market. pocket. Don't just generically assume Charlie that a PhD is better than not having a PhD.

Don't just generically assume, I think I'm interested in this field. So when I go get a PhD in this field, that should open up some interesting opportunities. I always tell people, if you're going to get something like a doctorate for professional reasons, you better have in mind first, this is the job I want and I can't get it without a doctorate. Don't just think having to degree in general is going to be useful. That's often not the case. So be specific. In other words, this is a very functionalist, I guess, approach to thinking about

doctorate-level graduate school. Do not invest a time unless you know what you're getting and you know that you have a good chance of actually getting it by going to one of these programs. All right, that's enough about work. It is time for technology questions. Aditya asks, why are some people productive despite being on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook? Well, here's one secret, Aditya, is that a lot of very successful, productive people who do have social media accounts really don't spend much time using them themselves. They may have teams who use them for them, who will post on their behalf.

or they have a content calendar. And you might notice on the social media platform accounts of some people who you might admire, let's say in the world of ideas, a world of writing, a lot of them often, you know, maybe they post like my friend Ryan Holiday does a quote every day on Twitter. You know, it's some sort of information that's posted every day at a set time. But what you don't see with some of these productive people is them then on Twitter arguing with people or joining in on. threads or going to war over some topic against some sort of imaginary enemy, which is all to say.

Yeah, most people do have social media accounts, but I'm often surprised and pleased to observe the degree to which a lot of very productive people really don't interact that much with them. I used to say this about Mark Zuckerberg in talks I would give, is that no one ever made a fortune by being good at Facebook, but he certainly made a fortune by being able to do the type of deep, undistracted work required to build a complicated distributed system platform

like Facebook. Be the type of person who can build a world-changing platform, not the type of person who spends all of their time just interacting on it. Radislav asks, what are the good and bad sides

of digital technology? Well, Radislav, good way to think about this is through my digital minimalism philosophy. That obviously is the philosophy behind my most recent book, upon aously titled digital minimalism. So the basic notion of digital minimalism is there's not good technology or bad technology. That's not an intrinsic trait of the technology itself.

There's instead two different approaches to integrating technology to your life, one that's good, and one that's probably going to cause problems. So the approach to integrating technology that's probably going to cause problems is what I call maximalism. And this is where you look for any type of value that a new tool could provide and say that is sufficient reason for me to use it. If I can think of anything about this tool that might be useful to me, some value it might give, maybe something it'll prevent me from missing out on, that means I should bring it

into my life. That's maximalism theory that tends to lead people to be completely overwhelmed with too many things, plant their time and attention, and it greatly reduces the value they get out of their time because instead of them choosing what they want to do, they end up servicing much more of these minor value sources. The approach to integrating technology that tends to be much better, the digital minimalist approach is to start with this is what's valuable in my life. Then you work backwards and say, how can I use technology to amplify these things I care about? So now you're using technology

very purposefully. You're amplifying things you actually care about. And then, and this is the key point of digital minimalism philosophy, you're comfortable missing out on everything else. So it's not that tech is good or bad. It's not that it has a good or bad side. I think there's good or bad approaches. If you're putting tech to use for particular values, you're optimizing how you use it for those values, then it's probably going to make your life much better. That's the good. If you instead are just letting anything into your life that casually seems like it's interesting or maybe has some value, you're probably going to have this spiral out of control. It'll end up keeping you from the things that really matter. That's probably bad. Rahul asks, how do you avoid spending hours on YouTube?

when I know one quarter of that time was spent on things if I'm useful. Okay, so what he's saying is that there are useful things he finds on YouTube, but he often ends up spending way more time on the platform than he actually needs to just to find those useful information. Rahul, your question captures the complicated reality of YouTube, because video is really important. I think the democratizing a video is one of the key evolutionary steps in the internet and the value that it offers to society. And obviously, YouTube is a platform that is crucial to democratizing video because it's a place that makes it very easy for you to post video and for other people to watch it.

It's also one of the more steep and attractive rabbit holes on the internet for a lot of people. Fortunately, it's a solvable problem. the YouTube rabbit hole the YouTube rabbit hole I'm going to say the Ubit hole there the YouTube rabbit hole is almost entirely created by the auto recommendations which are generated by

a very clever statistical algorithm that really studies for someone who's watching the type of things you've been watching what is going to get you to click next really good at it it's like the miracle of a machine machine learning on display there. So what should you do about that? You need to block the recommendations.

I think you should just 100%. If you have any concern about YouTube rabbit holes, you need to get a browser plug-in that you put into your web browser that automatically scrubs those off your page. So you can search for the particular useful clip you need. You want to know how to change the oil on your car. You can go to YouTube.com. You can type in how to change the oil on your car. You'll see search results. You can click on one. You can watch it. And there are no recommendations next to it.

There's not that video. Top 10 oil change fails. You're like, maybe I need to click on that. And below that, you know, some awesome maker project to build a robot that changes your oil. And then you kind of click on that and you're off to the races. So you, Rahul, I would say, absolutely have one of those plugins. D.F. Tube, short for, distraction-free tube is a Chrome browser I've heard a lot about but there are others.

I think this is something that almost everyone who uses YouTube on a regular basis should do. Don't use it as an idle entertainment source. Use it like a video library that has all of the information you need. Do not see YouTube as something that just while away a few minutes because those few minutes will turn into hours. Mary asks, how can writers publicize themselves if they don't want to use social media platforms? Well, I would say the best form of publicity, of course, Mary, is to write really good books. To write books that people love, books that change people's lives, books that make people want to share them. Nothing that's going to spread the word better about your book more than it just being very good.

So being able to find more time to actually put on the writing of the book is almost always going to help your publicity efforts. Another thing that I think is useful here is to keep in mind that though it's true that social media does help sell books, because people talk about and recommend books on social media, that matters from a sales perspective. What authors often get wrong is that those sales aren't predominantly coming from the author's social media platform. they come from other people who like the book talking about it on their own platforms, which brings us back to a piece of advice number one, which is write a really good book that people love. People will want to share it.

They'll use whatever accounts that they do. They will make TikTok snap tweet streets or however that works. Whatever people do this day is you doing it yourself talking about your own book is less important than you think. So let other people do the work of using social media to sell your book. And beyond that, point number three, I would say, have a good website with a mailing list. You want to have a place to capture people who come across your book and like it and want to know what you're up to. You want to have a foundation for that.

If you want to write essays or blog post, I'm a big fan of that. I think that's fine. It means people who like you can come back and find this nice archive of your thoughts and they're more encouraged to join your mailing list where now you have a way to talk with them. obviously podcasting is emerging as another way to publicize your book. I think the rule of thumb here is you don't build a platform. You're not going to build a platform with your podcast because no one's going to know about it or listen to it if you don't already have a platform. More or less seems to be true. So a podcast can be a natural extension of your platform, but probably only after you've already gathered some recognition, you have a list.

people have bought your book. There's already people out there who know and like you beyond, let's say, just your mother and close friends. All right. Aloha asks, how do you consolidate texting? I assume also maybe reduced texting when dating someone new. Aloha, I'm going to guess you're a young person, as I know this is a common problem, just a sheer amount of text messaging that the kids these days on my lawn tend to do before I swipe my broom at them and try to shoe them off there. Here's my main advice. I hear this from my younger readers. Two things.

One, just say, look, I'm not a big text person. So they know that. They'll get used to that. And two, actually on a regular basis, put in place interactions that don't involve text messaging, right? Go on dates. spend time with someone, send them things, send them recommendations, say, hey, email, I thought you might like this, I thought this was funny.

Like, you know, interact, just don't do it over the texting. And just make it clear that you're not a texting person. Now, of course, to back that up, don't bring your phone with you when you're with the person and be on it all the time because then they're going to think, oh, you are a texting person. You obviously, you know, just have me on the side or something like this. There's something shady going on. You actually need to be someone who doesn't text a lot. But if you do that and you replace those interactions with other better,

types of interactions, typically they'll be fine. And if they're not fine, you should give them one of my books to read, so they will be fine. And if they're still not fine, if they don't like what I have to say in my books, well, then they're a terrible person anyways, and you should break up with them. All right. Nicole asks, how can we encourage teenagers to put away their phones and PlayStation? Ooh. All right.

That's a hard question. I didn't have a direct answer for it when I was writing digital minimalism, but I did find encouraging a lot of the interactions I had with parents when I was on the road promoting digital minimalism. And here's a common refrain I heard from, honest to goodness parents. Okay. they what they would report back to me is that in many cases their kids their teenage kids were more frustrated with this life of constant connectivity than they realized more of these kids than we realize don't want to be looking at the phone all the time it's exhausting and it's anxiety

provoking they're sort of looking for the nudge the permission that they can try to do something different. So what's the permission that seems to be most useful for what I heard from these parents is that the chapter of my book that got into the degree to which social media companies are exploiting people. The way is that they are engineering addictiveness into their products. The ways in which they completely overhauled their product from something where you post information about yourselves to instead these endless scroll timelines, just push primal buttons and make you engaged in the moment but exhausted in the long term. The way that they're basically just sucking monetizable minutes and data out of you as if

you have that hose in the back of your head inside the Matrix movie, that sense that you're being exploited, monetized, and taken advantage of by these companies that understand your psychological vulnerabilities and prey on them, that really hits deep for teenagers because teenagers are anti-authoritarian and hate that type of thing. The cigarette, anti-cigarette lobby, had a lot of success with this when I was a kid. When I was a kid in the 1990s, at some point, I think this was spending the money that the government won in some of those initial class action lawsuits against the tobacco companies that they won. So suddenly we had a lot of money to spend on reducing cigarette use.

And one of the things they did, the government hired a really high-end ad firm, really good marketers. And say, come up with an ad campaign to get young people. to stop smoking. Look, the government's not good at this. We remember the ads with the eggs. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. I mean, you know, who was that stopping from using drugs? I'm not sure. Chickens, I guess. But what this fancy ad company did, who actually knew what they were doing is they started a campaign called The Truth. And it was a lot of, like, hidden camera footage of tobacco executives talking about, about, you know, what they were doing to manipulate kids and get them to smoke more because that was

good money for them. Ooh, teens hate that. Yeah, I don't want to see the blurred face kind of out of shape guy on the hidden camera footage talking about how, how I'm just a stooge in their plan to make more money. And that really made a difference, actually. That campaign really did make a difference with teen smoking. So that seems to be the information that helps teenagers in particular get pushed over that edge from, I'm getting kind of exhausted about this to, hey, I could actually take a stand to not being using social media. It could be subversive. It could be a sort of mini anti-capitalist revolution of a type that will get me plotted from

my peers. And so that chapter in my book that really gets into that details of how we're exploited. Or similarly to play Tristan Harris's 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, where he goes through all this information. and holds up the phone. And Anderson says, are you saying this thing is like a slot machine in my pocket? And Tristan says, that's right. You play in that interview or that article, that chapter for my book, whatever it is.

That works better than you might imagine for a lot of teenagers. And I hope more of you actually attempt this with your teenagers. Because what we know from psychology is if you have a classroom full of 16-year-olds who are fed up with their phones, but feel kind of socially pressured into it or don't know what else to do. If you want to change your behavior, you don't need the entire class to stop using social media first. You need like two or three people in your class to do it. And now there is another option.

You have a socially approved option, and you can make that shift too. So you can actually have massive shifts in social group behaviors that all tip after just a small number of people make changes. So anyways, I'm glad. Nicolet that you ask that question. And I hope more and more people try this with their teenagers. Talk to them about the way they're being exploited.

Show them my book. Show them that Tristan Harris video. And hopefully we can get enough teenagers to be revolutionary in their social media habits that they can open up those proverbial floodgates. Okay, final technology question. Jessica wants to know, what do you think the future will be for the major? social media companies. Well, I actually think, Jessica, that the major platforms are in a much more precarious situation than many people realize. We look at their really big user numbers and think, man,

these are BEMith conglomerates, monopolies that aren't going to go anywhere anytime soon. They're going to be a major part of our life. Look at the influence they're having on our culture. But I actually think their situation is much more precarious. And I think Facebook, Facebook led the way towards this more precarious situation. Facebook has a fatal flaw that I don't hear being talked about probably as much as it should be right now. Okay, here is the flaw. We have to rewind back to this period 2010 to 2012 when Facebook was really heavily re-engineering their experience because they were trying to get their user minutes up so that their revenue would be up and their IPO could proceed successfully. So they made some sacrifices. And they made some short-term sacrifices to get those

numbers up that I think gives them a fatal flaw going forward. In particular, one of the big things they did is moved away from the original sales pitch of their platform. The original sales pitch was network effect, network effect, network effect. Everyone you know is on here. Everyone you know is on here and has a profile in which they talk about what they're up to. Remember relationship status? Pictures of what was going on in their life. Because everyone you know is on here, you can then log on the Facebook and go check the profile of people you know.

And therefore, say hi, connect with them, check in on what's going on in their life. this was the Facebook pitch. We are going to help you connect with other people. The problem is that this did not generate enough eyeball minutes on the screen. I mean, there's only so much time I'm going to spend in a given week looking at my friends and families' Facebook profiles to see what they're up to. That promise, that network effect promise maybe would have gotten me to sign up for Facebook. I'm not going to use at two or three hours a day doing that. It's just not compelling enough. So they made a change. They said, okay, forget all of that. Forget the fact that we are trying to connect you with people you know. No, no, what we're going to do instead is blow up the profile model. We're going to blow up

the profile model. And instead, we're going to put in place this algorithmically generated bottomless scrolling timeline where we have algorithms pulling interesting information from people you know, but also people you don't know, and also from companies and also from major news sources. And we're going to put it together in this timeline that's going to be really interesting. It'll be really interesting to you because we know a lot about you. We have algorithms that have studied your behavior. We kind of know what type of things you want to read. And you can just scroll this thing infinitely. Just keep scrolling. It's going to be lots of stuff. All that's going to sort of capture your attention. So in the short term, hey, this was great for Facebook because people,

spent more time on it they transformed Facebook from this connection machine into a distraction machine i am bored i am bored i'm in line i can just boom immediately going to have as soon as i hit that icon just infinite scroll stream of information selected and perfected to capture my attention yeah some of it comes from people i know but that's only important with respect to the fact that makes it kind of interesting to you the algorithm just measures well if he knows this person and it's something that they really agrees with or really doesn't agree with, that might be a little bit more interesting that somebody doesn't know, so I'll put that into your feed. But really, this is no longer about connection. It's about distraction. As I talked about in digital minimalism, they then added to

this the social approval indicators like likes that really draws you in as well, because you want to see what other people are thinking about what you said, and that also helps draw you to the screen. But once you're there, you have this endless scroll pleasing, algorithmically generated timeline. So yes, people started using Facebook a lot more. This is basically the model that the other social media platforms then followed suit with. It's all about these sort of optimized bottomless timelines. They're just there as soon as you're bored that you can scroll as long as you need to be in a state of stupor. So why is that a fatal flaw?

And it got usage minutes up dramatically. Facebook is now worth whatever, $500 billion. It seemed like it worked really well. Well, here's the fatal flaw. They gave up their network effect advantage. If you're mainly a source of distraction, not specifically a source of connection, then the fact that everyone I know is on your network

doesn't really matter as much anymore. In fact, increasingly, after those shifts were made, people took the original desire to use digital tools to connect with people they know, and they took them out of those platforms and moved them over to other technologies. I mean, how many people do you know, for example, especially if you're above a certain age, who basically took their social, digital social interactions off of Facebook and Instagram

and have moved them over to text chains. You have a group text message that people just send stuff back and forth on. It's an agnostic technology. It's not trying to addict you to the text message screen. it's not trying to show you advertisements. It's not mining your text messaging information and selling it to the highest bidder. It's just your phone company offering group text. I mean, how many people you know who maybe used to say,

I share my baby pictures on Facebook so that the grandparents can see it, now just have the grandparents on a group text chain. You know what, it's easier because you're taking the pictures on your phone anyway, so why not just drop it right in the eye message? internationally WhatsApp does a lot of this people say yeah I just I have WhatsApp groups you know not going into Facebook to talk to my friends I'm not going on the Instagram that's in pictures to my relatives so they seeded the ground on connectivity to people you know without that network effects is not so important so now you're playing in a a much more

precarious playground which is oh well okay but we give you interesting stuff to look at We give you distraction. We're good at it. We give you distraction at a moment's notice. All right, they are good at that, but a lot of other people can be good at that too. There is no barrier to entry there anymore. I mean, podcast, for example, are becoming huge business. That's another source of distraction that has nothing to do with the social media companies.

You say, well, I could scroll passively the algorithmically generated timeline on Facebook, but you know, I could spend a few hours with this podcast host, like who's doing an interview with someone, and I'm going to find that maybe even more stimulating. We also can see the rise of things like what I call long-tail social media, which are social media platforms with much smaller audiences, very niche audiences, that can really ramp up the idea that you're being inspired or learning about things or connecting to interesting people. But when you don't need your third cousin to be on the platform, just 30 interesting people, Facebook loses its advantage.

We begin to see those rising as well. So I predict, Jessica, that there is going to be, obviously, the social internet, it's a huge innovation that'll stick around, social media, that particular incarnation of the social internet will be around, but there will be many more social media platforms, many more niche platforms. The idea that everyone is going to be using the same three or four big players and they are going to have such an influence over us and our clients. culture. I think that's going away. I think Facebook's shift towards user engagement now that all

the other platforms followed is a fatal flaw or it will ultimately prove fatal, or at least I hope I am right about that. All right. Time now for a new segment. What I call, what we call it question roulette. Essentially what I'm going to do here is load up a random question that I have not ever seen before and I will answer it on the fly. I hope this is not a terribly disturbing question. Here we go. It's thinking. Loaded. All right, Jimma. Jimma asks, what would you look for when hiring a PhD student or a postdoc outside of their academic achievements? Well, let's assume that we're talking about hiring for an academic position. so hiring a PhD student or a postdoc to be a professor.

If that's your question, you know, what does matter? Well, academic achievements, let me just push back on that a little bit because it could mean different things. It could mean the right thing or it could mean something that really doesn't matter as much. So if you're thinking, Jimma, of academic achievements having to do with your grades or your courses, you have the wrong mental model for how academic careers happen. No one cares about your grades as a PhD student.

no one really cares about your courses. That's just something that they just expect you're going to do, do well, pass your qualifiers. That's kind of the easy part. This is very different. Let's say like an undergraduate being hired into the job market where your GPA might be a fundamental data point. You're going from the doctoral or postdoctoral market into, let's say, an academic position. No one ever cares or will look up what your grades are. They assume you're smart and got good grades who cares.

papers how many what venues how many citations that really matters letters really matter as well honest assessments from other professors this person is good or not their work is important or it's not they don't actually say not but you say it in a way that you can read between the lines that's what matters and then finally if you make it to an interview in person so let's say you go to a college campus. How you get along with people matters more than it should. Your talk, I think matters a lot more than it should. I see this all the time.

You know, I don't know, one hour. Maybe you're not a great presenter. It doesn't go well. But if you give an unusually good talk, it just leaves a good taste in people's mind. So all of those factors which are not directly academic play a role as well. All right, guys, let's do one more here. Again, this is a question I have never seen before. I hope it's not something like Cal,

how come you never come to see your abandoned sun or something like this? All right, let's see. Charles, well, I would say this is probably the opposite of an easy, quick question. What's the point in living a meaningful life?

Boy, Charles. That's pretty big for question roulette. We're just trying to answer this without preparation. I mean, this, Charles, this is the here's my quick answer to this i mean this is the the core question of human existence this is you know uh paul gogan's famous slogan you know where are we where'd we come from why are we here these are the deep existential questions the greatest minds and sources of wisdom in human history have worked on it so it is good that you're answering them uh it is good

that you realize that it's not something that you should be able to come up with scratch from scratch a question or an answer from on your own i think the right place to start is with what the big minds have already come up with you got to start with that foundation and i think that that's going to mean the ancient wisdom traditions we can pull from philosophy go back and read the ancients read aristotle read the ethics you can pull from eastern theology Read the Bhagavad Gita. I messed it up a little bit, but let's call it the Gita. Baga God.

Baga Vad Gita. There we go. That's not, it's important to say it right, so I apologize for that. Read that in translation. Really interesting source of wisdom. Go back to the sort of ancient Judeo-Christian wisdom traditions. What do we know from Judaism? What do we know from Christianity?

What do we know from Islam? These are people who have thought about this for a long time, but not just thought about a long time. It is ideas that have survived for a long time. They've been put through the memetic ringer and come out on the other side. You go more modern. All the great philosophers thought about this. The transcendentalist, man, I'm really,

this is what you get for roulette is mispronunciations. Question roulette. But you're still with me here, Charles, right? The transcendentalist, talking now 19th century New England. really interesting take on internalized revelation and the transcendence of nature. Read the row. Some really interesting thoughts there. Read Emerson.

There's some really interesting thoughts going on there. You can read the great existentialist philosophers. If you're feeling like this question seems in a nihilistic mood, you might read a little satra. But maybe if you are feeling a little bit more feisty, you can read. some Nietzsche, read about the supermitch, read, and there's just a lot going on here. Go to Carl Jung. Carl Jung is fasting for a lot of people who are trying to tackle these questions for the first time. I mean, these notions that we have these archetypical stories embedded in some sense in our brains that are going to resonate with us because they are capturing some notion

of truth about the human condition and human flourishing is really interesting. Some of his stuff is difficult. Some of it is not. Read Joseph Campbell. Campbell studied under Jung and is more accessible than Jung. If you don't want to read it, watch Campbell's interview. It's six parts done with PBS 1988. Bill Moyers interviewed him at the Skywalker Ranch about mythology and its foundations.

It's sort of a cleaned up Jung for public consumption. Read that one of the most watched series in PBS. history, you know, read that. Read Karen Armstrong's a case for God. Wonderful at, she is not religious. So let me just tell you this. I mean, she was a former Catholic nun who had a terrible experience. She is not Christian. She's not religious, but she's a scholar of religion. And that book does a really interesting job at trying to place religion into context, into the context of its time and talking about how how we lose so much of the power of some of these traditions when we see it through a post-enlightment mindset of ah you're trying to make assertions of fact and are those are those

empirically validatable assertion of facts those notions didn't exist in 800 bc these were these were you know you'll see right away in the ancient wisdom tradition she makes this point clear again and again they say the truce that we're trying to talk about are ineffable ineffable means cannot be accurately articulated in our words with our limited mind. So the best we can do here is through various type of action and ritual and activity get intimations of something that's too complicated. It's the opposite of trying to make claims about empirical reality, which is why, by the way, all serious religious scholars get really frustrated by the fundamentalist movement,

which itself was a reaction to the Enlightenment development of empiricalism. empirical thought, very, very new in the history of religion, not something that say Augustine would recognize as making a lot of sense. All right, so Charles, you've really kicked off a really long answer here to a short question, but it is a very deep question. And what I'm basically trying, let me summarize this for you, is, you know, don't take it from me. Take it from everybody else. In other words, you're asking the right question. The answer takes some time. Before you can get an answer that makes sense for you, you need to go back and see some of these answers that some of these great minds have worked on throughout the long history of the human condition.

And I think the optimistic thing you will find, not that you will love all of these answers, but the optimistic thing you will find is that almost all of these great minds are working backwards from an intuition that is as ingrained into the human psyche as anything there is, which is this notion that there is a meaning to life. There is a point to it. We feel it. We feel it when when that certain, we see that certain thing.

We have that certain experience. We do that certain activity. We get that feeling of, yeah, this feels purposeful and right. We know that it is out there. And all of this great corpus of literature I'm citing here, it's just people trying to fill in the details of,

of a reality that they never questioned. which is there is meaning and purpose and beauty in life, but it does require work. It's not always going to come in the form you think. So Charles, hopefully this will spur you to start your journey and start your journey with optimism. You don't need an answer to the question, is life meaningful?

You need an answer to the question of what are the different ways that people extract that meaning we know is there and which of those solutions feels like it's going to fit with me. All right. So that's a good question. Charles. Thank you for making this new segment, essentially as difficult as possible. It's probably the most difficult question to have to answer live on the fly. But I'm glad you asked it because I think it is an important one. All right. With that in mind, it is time for questions about the deep life. All right, David, hopefully you will help us keep it light here. Let's see what your question is.

David, you ask, I am keen to hear your reflections on the value of being great at what you do for living while your job at the same time is eating your soul. All right, David, that was not accomplishing the goal here. I was looking for a question along the lines of, Cal, why are you so great? Is it ever trouble you how great you are? That's what I'm looking for. Or Cal, I run the textbook commission for the California Board of Education and we are assigning your book to all six million of our students.

Could you help get in touch with the bulk? sales office at your publisher. That's what I was looking for, David. Instead, you're asking about jobs that eat at your soul. But, okay, I guess as long as we're feeling unnecessarily philosophic, let's roll with it. If you hate your job, you should find another job. I have this whole section in my book, so good they can't ignore you,

where I talk about essentially, I think I call them disqualifiers. Here's disqualifiers that means that a job, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how good your skills are, this is not a job you should stay in. And one is if it, and this might be what I'm guessing is going on here, David, one of those disqualifiers is if you don't like the people or if what you're doing sort of goes against your underlying value system

or understanding the morality or the world, if it goes against something fundamental, man, that's a disqualifier. No matter how good you are at what you do, no matter how much skill you have. That sounds like that's the issue here. The question is, how do you make that change? Don't just go for the,

dramatic, right? A common mistake, and I talk about this and so good, a common mistake people make is that drama in the change will somehow transmute into dramatic results in terms of how you feel after the change. That if I drop this job I dislike as a lawyer and go all the way in the other direction and open a vineyard, you know, something that's dramatically different and dramatic place and that's going to make me dramatically more happier. But the drama of your change actually does not play a big role in the satisfaction you then derive once you are done. So what I often advise,

and I get into this in the book, so good they can't ignore you, is that you want to try as much as possible to preserve as much of your career capital that you already have in your new location. Career capital is my term for rare and valuable skills that you can use as leverage to get out of your career things that resonate with you. So if you're a lawyer at a big firm and it's eaten at your soul, it's like the clients that are billing and how arbitrary it seems and how much time it takes, don't open the vineyard. Instead ask, you know, I do have this very expensive skill, very valuable skill that gives me a lot of leverage to take control of my career.

Where can I take that to where I can then apply that leverage to get things? things into my working life that I like a lot more. In that lawyer example, this happens all the time. It's why every time you go to a beautiful location on vacation, you see there's that sort of cute little house in the downtown with a lawyer shingle hanging out front. Yeah, that's someone who was in a career that ate at their soul and made a transition that still preserve some of that career capital they had already built. So they didn't have to start from scratch. And to formulate, that this all comes back to is that it is your rare and valuable skills. That's the foundation on which all things good typically are built in your career so you don't want to give that up. So that's my advice,

David, get out of that job, but don't go open to vineyard. Find a place that can at least make some use of your skill but gives you a lot more flexibility in applying that leverage so that you can really get that job in a direction that's less soul devouring. Isabel asks, what is the main advice you have for teenagers who are about to enter college or university. Well, two things, Isabel. One, read my, all my answers involve my books, but just what happens when you write a lot of books. Read my 2006 book, How to Become a Straight A Student.

It's just straight up. Here's how to study. Here's how to take notes. Here's how to write papers. I interviewed 50 straight A students who didn't seem like grinds from a variety of schools. I asked them how they study. I asked them how they write papers. I asked them how they take notes.

I took the best ideas. That's in the book. That will save you hours. If you're doing all-nighters, you are studying bad. You're studying poorly. It is in your favor to be able to know how to study most students don't. That book will teach you. The other thing I would recommend is to go back to my blog, calnewport.com.

I used to write exclusively advice for college students. And I would say go back and search for my articles on two topics. The Zen valedictorian? and the Romantic Scholar. So I have a series of blog post on both of these topics. And they're both about how to have a meaningful, successful, satisfying college career in which you avoid burnout, in which you avoid stress, and yet end up with really a large number of interesting options post-graduation.

So quick background. I wrote that study guide. I gave a lot of talks at colleges afterwards, and I discovered that there was a huge stress issue on college campuses that had emerged in the 2000s. And so those blog series on the Zen Valedictorian and the Romantic Scholar capture what I used to talk about in my talks. And they give you a framework for understanding college life in which you're trying to build something that's meaningful and satisfying that still opens up lots of interesting opportunities for you post-graduation, but prevents college from devolving into something that's more stressful and, grinding. All right. So, Isabel, you did it right. Questions that allow me to say,

buy my book, I like. David and Charles, questions that require deep philosophical musing on the fly. You know, that's more difficult. But you know, I'm glad we have both types here. All right. We're running a little longer. So let's just do two more questions here before we call it a day. Arwin asks, how do you overcome the feeling of failure that's leading you to almost give up on your PhD. I'm sort of, I'm cutting this down a little bit. There's a longer question here. Arwin, this is an interesting point.

I used to write about this more. Again, when I was doing student-focused writing, dissertation writing, and I would say PhD programs in general have fostered this culture, online in particular, that insist that being a doctoral student is this really terrible difficult thing.

I remember there was a blog that was popular when I was in grad school and writing about this stuff that was called dissertation hell. It was just all self-reflectively about just how hard and terrible and impossible it was to be a PhD student. I do not like these cultures. I do not like these cultures. Here's why I think these cultures emerged. And this might be flippant. So, you know, Arwin, my apologies if this comes across is flipping. But my observation at the time when I was a grad student is that a lot of PhD students

struggled with the worry that what they were doing was not a real job. Their friends had real jobs where they had to go to an office and work hard all day. Their parents had real jobs. And let's be honest, being a doctoral student does not feel like a real job. You go in, like you kind of see a professor maybe once or twice a week. there could be whole days where you do nothing and other times where you're busy. And my somewhat flippant analysis was by cultivating these cultures of misery around doctoral work, it at least gave you a way of saying, hey, this is really hard.

It was like this was implicit. Like you might not be doing this consciously, but it's a way of saying, oh, this is really difficult. And so therefore it's justified as something to do. The other aspect at play behind these cultures is that there is just almost no structure. in doctoral programs. And for some people, by some, I mean basically most. It's really, really hard. Right?

It's really, really hard sometimes to, like, build up a year's worth of self-motivated work with high-stakes evaluation without structure, without milestones around the way. And so some of this sort of a sense of failure or misery also comes from just its novel. Lack of structure is a novel setup for work that takes some adjusting to. I point that out only to say those are largely constructed cultures. Arwin, you are going to be fine. You're going to be fine. Write your dissertation.

Focus on the process. Don't think about your dissertation as like, here's this big thing I have to do. I can't imagine doing it. You don't have to write a dissertation. What you have to do this week is read these three sources. And you've got to take good notes. Then you've got to repeat. And you're going to repeat 25 times in a row.

And you know what? You do that 25 times in a row. Wow, you know a lot about this. this topic. Same thing with writing. If you're worried about the lack of structure, give yourself structure. Same time every day, make it first thing in the morning, make it three hours, you do it every weekday, you take Saturdays off, and you just work methodically. You'll be fine. Focus on the process. This is what happens. I've supervised and graduated PhD students. I've been a PhD student. It's a process of accretion, accretion of knowledge, accretion of writing. You come out on the other end,

eventually having polished something that's really good. But just like making a Michelangelo style sculpture out of marble, the marble is pretty messy for a long time before, after a lot of work, a lot of rethinking, a lot of polishing, a lot of chipping, you eventually get it to something that looks good. And that's just like it is for dissertation, Arwen, you're going to be fine. Focus on your process, focus on your ritual. It's going to be a very rewarding experience. And remember, these cultures of misery, they are widespread in the doctoral world, and they

are largely unjustified and you should feel no guilt at all detaching yourself from them. Dissertation writing is not hell. It is instead a hell of a rewarding experience once you're done. I believe in you, you will be fine. All right. Final question of this episode, Farah. She asked, I'm sort of in a rut ever since the quarantine and it has taken a toll on my productivity as well as my overall morale, what can I do to get out of this rut and sustain

my productivity? Well, Farah, first thing, it is fine to be in a rut. This is a very stressful anxiety-producing thing. But you know what? The hope, there is hope here because we know for a fact that it is not a permanent thing. It is already getting much better. And as someone who follows this closely, I can tell you, if you stop reading and watching the news, it will feel even more better because they're doing you no favors and giving you a nicely balanced optimistic portrayal of what's going on in the world. That's not exactly their business model. Things are getting better. Things will continue to get better. So cut yourself a bit of a break. Yeah, we're less productive. We're anxious. We don't feel great. That's completely normal.

If anything, that gives us some insight into what is important about us. What is it that's making you anxious? What is it that worries you? Why is it so morale-busting? not, for example, to be able to do some of these minor things we used to take for granted, like just connecting with the parents outside your kid's school as you drop them off in the morning. That tells you something about what you care about. It's good to know what you care about. It's good to clarify that. The foundation on which building a more satisfying and purposeful life will be built. So it's okay is the first part of my answer. It's okay to feel toll on your productivity. It's okay for your morale to be lower. All right. So what do you get out

how do you get out of this rut? How do you sustain productivity? You come at it from the perspective of responsibility. This is hard, but I have some responsibilities here. I got to keep my family running. I've got to provide for my family, so I've got to keep my job if I still have it. And maybe the organization I work for, I believe in, you've got to do my part to keep them afloat. What can I take on? What responsibility can I take on? The carrying of the burden on your back is often the foundation for finding great satisfaction and otherwise hard times. So you switch to that mindset. Okay, now that you're in that mindset, how do you make sense of all these things? We'll go back and hear my advice from earlier in the episode I gave to Miranda about, hey, structure, structure what's

on your plate, get out of virtual taskboard, have columns for categories, have obligations on cards, visualize your calendar, make a weekly plan. How am I going to tackle this? What makes more sense? I've taken on responsibilities to get these things done. How do I get them? done. Then when you get to each day, use something like time block planning. Don't sit there and let your energy drive you. Say, what do I want to do next? What do I want to do next? And hope that that's going to build you a good day. Instead, block out. Here's when I'm working. Here's when I can work, right? This is when I can work. This is when I'm watching the kids while my spouse works or whatever your setup is. Actually block out the time, assign specific task to specific blocks of time.

Give yourself a particular specific schedule. It's a starting point and an end point. And every minute has a job. And now you've really reduced, okay, what's the motivation you have to conjure now? It is, come hell or high water, I can do this today. I'm going to execute this schedule. I'm going to hit the time blocks. Here's what I'm supposed to be doing now. I'm going to get it done. Here's what I'm supposed to be doing now. I'm going to get it done. And I'm going to get to the end of schedule and then, you know, maybe my happy hourglass of wine will be a little bit more full than it might have been less February and that's just fine because we all are having a toll that we're facing, but you're saying, I have a plan and I'm executing.

And all my motivation is on I can do this. All I got to do is execute today's plan today. Tomorrow will be tomorrow. Right. So to summarize these points for our number one, we're all in ruts. So you need to beat yourself up over that. Number two, shift to a mindset of I am going to take on responsibility. I am going to find my meaning in actually putting other people on my back.

Because the water is kind of high. And I know it's going to get low soon, but it's kind of high now. And I'm still able to stand and I'm still tall and I'm going to put people on my back. And number three, the pragmatic. Get your affairs in order. Get your house in order here. You organize. You structure.

You visualize. You plan. You create time block schedules for every day. You put all your energy into just a singular goal of I'm going to try to stick with and execute my schedule when it's done, it's done. And then you got to make your rewind, your leisure, you're relaxed, you're seeking of gratitude. You have to pump up that game too. Because when you're done with that, you need that more than you've ever needed it before

to keep recharging that tank so you can do just one more day. And Farah, I'm telling you, as someone who's been following it, today was a lot easier than yesterday and is an order of magnitude easier than it was, let's say, on April 1st. So you do this. You're going to come out of this with the silver lining of realizing that you were more resilient than you thought. You're going to be more in touch with what matters in you than you thought. You're going to have more confidence in yourself than you thought. You're going to find more value in the world. It's better at finding and appreciating the value than you thought. It's called post-traumatic

growth. I think a lot of people are going to experience it. If they do the right behavior right now, and Farah, that's my prescription for what you should do now. That is how I think about productivity in the quarantine. And with that, I think we should probably bring this particular episode of deep questions to a conclusion. So thank you everyone for your questions. I'm running low on my current group of questions, so I will probably put out a call soon on my mailing list for a new group of questions. So if you're on my mailing list, look out for that.

If you're not, you can join at calnewport.com. Otherwise, until the next time, stay deep.