Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 47: BRAD STULBERG on Burn Out, Career Transformation, and Intentional Living

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

In this episode of DEEP QUESTIONS we're joined by a guest host: Brad Stulberg.Brad is a bestselling writer who focuses on human performance. He's known for his books PEAK PERFORMANCE and THE PASSION PARADOX, as well as for his popular "Do It Better" column for Outside Magazine.We go deep on Brad's story, using it to illustrate timeless points on burnout, recovery, transformation, and intentional living. We also talk about the unexpected television commercial that helped vault his first book to success and, of course, answer your questions.You can find out more about Brad at https://www.bradstulberg.com/To submit your own questions for this podcast, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com.Thank you to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. In today's podcast, we will be joined by a special guest, Brad Stolberg. Brad is a writer who focuses on human performance. He draws from a lot of different sources from many different fields of science in his work. He also draws from philosophical and spiritual systems, a very thoughtful writer, who deals with many of the topics we talk about here on the Deep Questions podcast with a real sense of depth and originality that I've always admired. Now, Brad writes for publications such as the New York Times, Wired, New York Magazine, Forbes, Sports Illustrated. He writes the do it better,

column for Outside Magazine. If the name sounds familiar, it is probably from the books that he co-authored with Steve Magnus. That includes peak performance, which I have to say is an underground classic in the world of practical nonfiction, and also The Passion Paradox. A book he wrote basically simultaneously with my book, so good they can't ignore you, dealing with a similar premise, the role of passion and career satisfaction, but he comes at it from a a completely different direction and comes up with some really interesting ideas. I love that book and peak performance quite a bit. He now also host along with Steve the Growth Equation podcast.

I was a guest on this podcast about six months ago. So go back six month ago and you can start listening to the podcast with that episode with me. It's almost like this episode today is round two of my discussion with Brad, though the reality is it's really like round 22, as Brad and I, we talk quite a bit offline, and we have a habit of going on longer than we always originally planned in our conversations, which I think is a good sign. So in today's conversation with Brad, I actually spend quite a bit of time going through his story, starting from college into his first job, key pivot points, how he ended up writing,

and what he's been doing more recently as he has shifted more intense. intentionally towards a purposefully cultivated deep life. I think his story is important because it covers in the specific many general ideas that are important about the type of things we talk about. Topics such as burnout, meaning, getting started in writing, success in writing, cultivating the deep life, reevaluating what's important and what's not, being willing to make big moves, the importance of tattoos in understanding everything

about the psychology of an individual. All of this is covered in our treatment of his story. We also go into some of your questions. We do questions from you, the listeners that you submitted about topics such as food and fitness. We do things about careers and passion.

We also tackle some topics even about social media and what role it should play in your career, what Brad's philosophy is, where it overlaps mine and where it differs. Really good conversation. I was really glad to get this opportunity to pull a lot of wisdom from Brad and deliver it to you. I think you will like this conversation.

I know I sure enjoyed having it. Before we get started, one quick bit of housekeeping. I wanted to talk about a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is Hydrant. I am a big fan of Hyde. You have to stay hydrated, especially if you're active, especially if you are on the go, especially if you're trying to do things deeply.

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Let's get started now with my interview with Brad Stolberg. Brad, thank you for joining me on the Deep Questions podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Cal. I'm definitely looking forward to, I've been looking for this conversation for the last few weeks. Yeah, in some sense, this is round two since I was previously on your podcast, the growth equation podcast earlier in the fall. So for those who subscribe to both, this will be like round two.

And for those who don't, they should so that you can actually make this a round two. And so I had a lot of fun on there. So now it's my chance to turn the tables. And I'm going to ask you some questions about yourself. And then you were going to help me answer some questions from my reader. And of course, I think you are particularly well suited to do this as someone who gives advice for a living. So I think I think our readers are getting a sort of two for one today. So I think they'll be good. Yeah, I'll do my best. It's so funny that, man, it feels like it was six years ago, not six months ago that you were on the growth equation podcast, but such as 2020.

Yeah, time is in all sorts of weird warps. I sometimes compress it way too much and sometimes I stretch it out. So something I'll think of as last year was two or three years ago. and something that happened earlier in the year, I'll sometimes think about as, you know, just happening. I don't know. My mind is everywhere. But let's go back in time. Let's go back in time.

So if I understand the saga of Brad properly, we can start with you at Michigan. This is where you were doing your undergrad? Correct. Okay. So you leave Michigan. And just to let my readers know, I think there's a very interesting aspect to your story

that has to do with overworked. and over-optimization and burnout that's very relevant to the type of things we talk about. So just so they know this is what I'm trying to tease out, give a little telegraphing here. So you went right from Michigan into a high-powered job. Did you go write to McKinsey out of there? I did. I had a summer internship at another one of the larger consulting firms called AT Carney, and then after school I went to McKinsey full-time.

And for people who don't know, McKinsey jobs, It's like also some of the Wall Street Bank jobs in the sense that they're very competitive and they're very difficult to get. They largely fill their ranks from really educated people from really elite schools. So I'm assuming you went through a whole corporate recruiting process at Michigan where you had to estimate how many manhole covers there were in New York and other types of case questions. Was that as intense as the consultants I know say it is? It was a pretty intense interview process for sure. What was interesting is at the time, and this is what, like almost 15 years ago, they were, many of the large consulting firms were recruiting almost exclusively from business schools,

obviously at the graduate level, but then also at the undergraduate level. This was the time when a lot of universities had these new BBA programs. So you'd start as a sophomore or junior of undergraduate school. But McKinsey was different. They felt that if all the other consulting firms are hiring people, from business school. If all the big clients that we serve are hiring people from business school, well, what are we going to bring to them if we hire people from business school? So McKinsey's recruiting philosophy was actually to look outside of business schools. So my undergraduate degree

was in organizational behavior, which was a program that combined economics, psychology, sociology, and political science and a little philosophy sprinkled in. So I was a real generalist. So I didn't have to go through like the superstructure, strong, excuse me, rigid business school interview gauntlet, which was neat. And I think McKinsey still does that, but it's definitely a place where they're hiring English majors and science majors, not just the traditional business school. Right. Well, they hired one of my fellow grad students from MIT when I was a computer science

student, and we shared an office. And I remember McKinsey out of Chicago hired her as a theoretical computer scientist just about to finish her PhD. And I remember they just gave her online courses, like learn accounting. It's easier to teach the computer scientists, I guess, to learn accounting than the accountant to learn computer science. Now, it's still a very hard job to get. So when we're thinking of a young Brad Stolberg, we're thinking about what really good grades,

what was it that allowed you to get the elite job? I had good grades. I worked really hard. I think that I had an interesting story to tell insofar that I, I was really focused within that organizational behavior degree on health and health care systems. And this is a time when health reform is really about to get pushed over the edge. So it was a big area of concern for all the consulting firms. And yeah, like you said, good grades, good test scores, very, very driven.

It's funny, the best way, and this is not my line, I heard it from someone, an old colleague, but the best way to describe people that get hired to McKinsey are super smart, super driven, and super insecure. That makes the best McKinsey consultant because they know that you're going to work your ass off. Interesting. What is the thing, what is the insecurity that they leverage there, the insecurity that you are an imposter or the insecurity that other people are getting ahead of you? What is the mentality there?

I think just that you're, so much of your self-worth is tied up in your performance. So if your self-worth is tied up in your performance or in your intellect or in your ability to be a great consultant, then you're going to do everything in your power to be a great consultant. Yeah. So as far as I can tell from the story, the story that you relay in what ended up your first book, and we'll get to that soon, peak performance. You talk about early in that book what your life was like. And just as a brief aside, something I really appreciated from that story was your mention of the sweat, because I empathize, man. I think we're both the same type of people that if we're in a hot shower, then have to throw on a suit and then, like, go outside,

I have that exact same problem. So you talk about in your book about how you're in D.C. And you had a very efficient morning routine. And you would go very quick from the shower into your suit to outside. And that would open the floodgates, which is a curse. I have been battling my whole life. So, brother, I'm empathetic. I was glad to see that in print.

Yeah. And I know we'll get into this, but that was it, man. And my definition of productivity was really not about output or quality. It was about quantity. So if I could get my morning routine down to 11 minutes, sweat be damned. I'm going to get in the shower. I'm going to brush my teeth while I'm in the shower. I'm already putting on my pants when only one leg is out of the shower, go, go, go.

Because that meant that I could get a workout in before work. And that meant that I could get to work at 830. So I'd have a half an hour of deep thinking time. It was just nonstop getting as much as I could in. Now, what did that look like when you're, that push for efficiency and speed? What did that look like when you are actually doing your work? So what does that mindset lead to? You are trying to finish projects quicker or at a lower level of granularity, get back to emails real quickly.

What does a hyper-efficient approach to work actually look like when you see it in action? So it depends on the people that you're working with. And I know this is something that you've put a lot of recent thought into. I loved your New Yorker article about is the problem individual productivity or is it about systems that just lead to a feeling of never enough? I think some teams it was never enough. And what I mean by that is there just always be emails coming in. So you are just constantly deluged. You can never get ahead.

And it was literally trying to just keep your proverbial email head above water. Really good teams with good managers, good project teams that is. At McKinsey, you tend to be on a team with four to seven people working to solve a gnarly problem. then it was less about the deluge and more just about how can I go deeper. If I've read four research papers on a topic, how can I read six? Because as a young person right out of undergraduate school, the gift of McKinsey is you have so much autonomy and you have so much responsibility. The curse is that you can always do more.

So there was always more to learn. There was always more to try to reassure yourself that the recommendation that you were making was correct. So I just, I don't think I had a concept of the ability to put the brakes on. Is that even possible at that particular employer? To put the brakes on? It's funny. Sometimes I ask myself, could I go back to McKinsey right now and have a better, you know, work.

I don't want to use the word work-life balance because I hate the term balance, but could I be more grounded at a place like McKinsey now? And I think I could and it's still really hard. Yeah, yeah. You could do better is what you're saying. But it's not like it would be obvious. just because of the cultural pressures. Yeah, the cultural pressures.

And the more senior you get at the firm, you have clients in different states and all the clients want some of your head, excuse me, FaceTime. So you're constantly on the road. Now, something about McKinsey, because I don't want to turn this into McKinsey bashing. McKinsey is a phenomenal place to work. What separates it in my mind from an investment bank

is, yes, you're working 80 hours, but all the partners, instead of wearing like Rolexes and driving fancy cars, they drive like use Camrys and wear digital watches. So people don't go to McKinsey for the prestige and the glitz and the glamour. They go there because they are intellectuals and they love problem solving. So what got me wasn't like wanting to be the man and live in a high-rise apartment or any of that. What got me was I loved problem solving and I just couldn't turn it off. And it was it was interesting problem solving.

Oh, fascinating. Think about it. You're a 23-year-old. You're being brought into enormous health care companies. Health reform's happening. They're saying, we used to only sell directly to businesses. Now we're selling to consumers. What should we consider? It's like we should consider a lot of stuff.

And you're the CEO and you're asking me to help you. Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the, it was intellectual heaven, which is great, but without any mentoring or without any constraints. Yeah. And I'll also add the positive thing I've always heard about McKinsey is it has this dual-track nature where after you've been there for a while, you pick up a lot of skills and a lot of confidence and you understand aspects of business really well. And so a lot of people then just go from McKinsey

to go start a business or to go take a position in a company. Like it's a great springboard for a lot of people into the world of business. And then the other track is, well, I really like the consulting and you stick on the partnership track. But unlike some other ramps like law where Once you're at a big law firm, that's it. You just stay at the law firm until you maybe become partner McKinsey had this very clear off-ramp of, great, now take what you've learned and go build something. So I agree to. Yeah, and I know you have a lot of younger people that listen to this podcast, and I really

enjoyed the recent episode that you did with Dave Epstein, and McKinsey's a phenomenal place to get range. So there are pros and cons to McKinsey. Do I regret it? Not one bit. Did I learn a lot in the process and after? Absolutely. How long were you there? I was there for two years. Two years. Okay. So when you left after two years, looking back at it now, what was the reason? Well, the reason, and again, people are like, you coach people and you write, I've had a very circuitous path. So I'm a big believer in range.

So the acute reason at the time that I left McKinsey was one of the partners that I really admired and worked closely with, took a job with Barack Obama to do health reform. And he said, Brad, I know that you want to go back to grad school. And you've only got three months on your McKinsey contract. But guess what? I'm the lead partner. So I get to rip up those contracts if I want. You're going to come with me to the White House and work with me in the White House. And Bob was a mentor to me. He still is. He's become one of my best friends. He's older than me. He's taught me so much. So I followed him to the White House. and I worked at the White House for three months before eventually going to get a graduate degree in public health. Now, okay, so you go to the White House. That's a very McKinsey-type thing, by the way.

Like, okay, here is a government group that's trying to do some sort of innovative policy, and we need someone who can come in a team that can think from scratch about how it might work. All right, so you go from the White House, you go to get your degree. All right, so we're walking this circuitous path. And I'm burning out, by the way, when I pivot to the White House. So working in the White House was like vacation compared to McKinsey. So I'm suffering from, I would say, just chronic restlessness and stress. And eventually it got to the point where my hands and feet would be cold.

I started to have these weird physical symptoms that really had no organic cause. I didn't get to the point where I was apathetic. I still love the work. But I just, I wasn't feeling good. And more mature me would have immediately realized something's, hey, wire. I think back then I thought, like, I just got to get through this next project, then I'll recover. Right. And before you were even done, the new project would start. Okay. So the White, House felt like a relief. Then grad school probably felt like even more of a relief just based on

grad school. Oh, grad school is the best. And I went to, I went to University of Michigan. It's a demanding program, but a public health degree, it's not like a law degree. It's not the most demanding graduate school. So for me, getting grades was super easy. I just got, and I don't, it's like a weird humble brag. Not super easy. I had to do the work, but I wasn't concerned about getting good grades. So what it allowed me to do was coast in the classes I wasn't interested in and go extremely deep in the classes and with the professors who I did share interests. Right. And I'll just say that was my experience when I was doing almost exclusively student advice back earlier in my career and I was working on study advice. And that was one of the most common things would come up is that people

who return to a schooling environment after being out in a professional environment, almost invariably find it much easier. It's the secret that current students don't like to be admitted, but it's actually not that hard of a job once you've actually been exposed to how hard jobs can actually be. And so, you know, I wrote the study guide, how to become a straight-a student. A big part of the audience was non-traditional students or students who were returning to school later in life. I had a lot of GI Bill people, a lot of people going to college at night or returning to college a little bit later in life for the first time. People who are non-traditional students were much more willing to just be strategic.

Like, okay, what's the rulebook here? How do I study? In a way that a 19-year-old's not because college is something cultural to them and also something psychological and developmental and they don't want to be so strategic. But anyways, that's who would buy my book. and they were just saying, okay, what's the job here? How do I study? Okay, it's not so bad. They would sort of run loops around the younger undergrads or younger grad students, even though they had kids and the family.

A hundred percent. I have a memory of group projects. And these people are brilliant. The people that go straight through, they have to be super smart because they're going straight through to a top grad program. And we do a group project and they just be freaking out about something. And you're just like, guys, it's just school. Like, it's going to be okay. Yeah, yeah. And I don't, you have to be smart. But also, Tony, it was like my secret sauce. Like my my superpower is that because I had been an entrepreneur as a teenager, when I was in college, I was like, okay, let me figure out the rules, like the best way to study, the best way to write papers, the best way to do time management. And once I figured out the rules, I was just, I don't know, it must have been five X more efficient. I mean, the people I was around were brilliant people. But I just needed, it seemed like five X less time to get the work done. Once I realized, oh, here's how you do professional time management. Like, here's how you have. actually plan out writing a paper and you have a schedule and you start a week in advance and you do a couple hours here and a couple hours there. It was like really basic stuff.

And it made you like the best student in the school. So, you know, whatever. All right. So you're, you're going to get that degree. And you said it was in public health, right? So what was the vision? You're coming out of the White House. So I'm assuming you had a vision at this step in your path of policy career, being in a policy shop, working in government or things. think tanks? I mean, were you, was this momentum from your White House experience that was driving your vision as you went through that grad program? Yes and no. So the White House and the experience there showed me that I actually didn't really want to work in government or in politics. It just, it was slow. It wasn't for me. And my experience in McKinsey was very much that I wanted

to work in health care. And the way of it, I thought of it, and I have to put myself back in issues of like 25-year-old Brad is that I'm a problem-solver, and if I can problem-solve, I would rather be problem-solving for healthcare systems that are trying to save lives than problem-solving for consumer product and good companies that are trying to sell t-shirts. The work that I did at McKinsey that I found most fulfilling, and again, this is so weird, and you can say it's good or bad, but was basically counseling like senior leaders at healthcare systems. And you can say it's great because as a decent counselor, you can say, oh my gosh, she's a 23-year-old kid. Why on earth are they paying him to counsel them? I think there's validity in both.

So I went back to public health school knowing that I wanted to work in health care. And though I would have never said I want to go into coaching or be a coach, knowing that I wanted to try to work with the doctors that are leading health care systems that got training in medicine, not in working with people and not in necessarily human performance to help them get more out of themselves as a leader and a doctor. Well, that's an unusual idea for the time, though. Where did that come from? Like a coaching mentality as part of a health care reform. So I grew up an athlete.

And in graduate school, with all the additional time that I had compared to McKinsey, I got super into running and triathlon and that kind of thing. And I was coached, and I'd always been coached as an athlete. And I could remember just how I thought it's nuts that not everyone has coaching because there's nothing special about getting coached as an athlete. You're developing skills and you have someone that can see more objectively than you can and they guide you and they walk the path with you and they help you and all these good things. And I just remember seeing healthcare is so ripe for coaching because, again, it's an industry where a lot of the leaders of the systems

were trained in medicine, not in leading a system. And a lot of the leaders of the systems that weren't trained in medicine don't have the respective doctors because they don't know anything about medicine. Yes, which is basically the issue of health care administration. It's also the issue of university administration, both areas where you're promoting sort of specialist in the field to then oversee incredibly complicated large, huge budget organizations that help support the field. And that is definitely a hard transition.

So that makes a lot of sense. Now, this is sort of a maybe non-sequitorious question, but at this point when you're, we're now at graduate school, did you have at this point already the tattoo sleeve? No, that came over time. Okay. So it hadn't even started yet. That's interesting. I had my first tattoo is actually on my leg, so you haven't seen it because it's hidden my pants on my ankle.

And that happened in graduate school. See, there's something there. Okay, so graduate school. So what, okay, this is a young young question. What is like the deep archetypical phase transition that occurred in graduate school when you're thinking I'm going to start? Let me get my first tattoo. Well, I had, so I got my signing bonus. from McKinsey and decided that I really wanted to go on like a mountain excursion,

because I just love mountains. I still love mountains. So I spent the summer before starting that job at McKinsey in Nepal in the Himalayas and just had like such a beautiful, life-changing experience. I developed like a new spirituality for myself. And at the time, I'm like, why wouldn't I want to put one of these sweet mountains on my leg eventually? And, And then I think what happened in this is going to sound like so crazy. But, you know, I grew up like middle class, suburban neighborhood, went to Michigan. You know, it's still of the age, like, ooh, tattoos. I don't know about that.

I always thought they were cool. But I remember in grad school, and there's no way to say this without sounding totally egotistical, but I'm going to be real with you on this podcast. I remember thinking, I've worked at McKinsey, I've worked at the White House. I want to get a tattoo. If someone doesn't want to give me a job because I have a tattoo, screw them. So that was it. Yes, that's some sort of interesting transition point there,

like a declaration of philosophical, spiritual autonomy or something like that. Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was. Because I'd always thought tattoos were cool. But it was never like, oh, like I want to be a badass or I want to look a certain way. It was just kind of like, what a neat thing. And I've got no problem with people that don't think tattoos are cool. So I'm sure it was like a little bit of like a breaking free or really becoming more myself maybe. I mean, did you ever see this later on in your coaching practice?

Because I've come across this. I don't have a good term for it, but I think it's psychologically significant that there's a, and this comes more like people's exposure to self-development writ large, not in like the narrow book sense, but in the general sense, is that there's often this turning point for people where the first time they do something that is not big, but like something that's optional and meaningful and non-trivial and intentional and they just decided to do it. And suddenly there's this awakening of, oh, I am able to do things that are meaningful and intentional and big and not necessarily just like a standard and expected type thing.

And it almost opens up a different view of life as something that can be crafted as opposed to, you know, navigated path on whatever path you have. That is a brilliant insight. Like, tell the computer scientist, we need to put a sidey behind your name because I had, no, I had never thought of that to answer your question. And I got my tattoo around the exact same time. I started like getting off the traditional path and crafting my own. Interesting.

And I never thought of those two things as related. I hadn't thought of that until now. I will say one more thing. I shout out to a high school teacher. So there was a high school teacher, Kevin Ozar, who at the time was like the young cool teacher. he was probably 30 when we were 17. Maybe he's even a little bit younger.

And he was a total nerd. He was an English teacher. He loved literature. And he had the coolest tattoos. And I remember that Ozar taught me that it's okay to be a nerd and have tattoos. So, like, there were these little things that happened around those times. And then I think for whatever reason in graduate school, it just said, okay, I can do this. Did you ever, like going back to McKinsey briefly, was,

there a point, let's say early on, where your mindset was like, yep, this is it. This is what I'm going to do. One day I'll be a partner. Or somehow maybe having done that Tibetan experience right before you started, did that by contrast prevent you from ever feeling completely grounded in this is what I'm going to be doing? Like, did you always have a foot out even if you weren't really recognizing it? Or was there a period where you're like, no, this is, this is it? Like, I think this is what my life is going to be built around. You know, it's hard to say because I can't put myself back in the shoes of the first six months.

My guess is it wasn't long before I realized that I didn't want to be a partner at McKinsey. Yeah. And that's interesting. Right. Well, and it was only two years, so that would make sense. Interesting. All right. We're getting deep here.

The main thing I want to emphasize. Well, there's another thing, Cal, because this is such good. And now I'm just, like, enjoying, like, the therapy session with you. but there's another point that might... Tell me about your father. That might be like an import later. So even before all of that in Michigan, in high school, I really wanted to be a writer.

So I was a part of the school newspaper. I was the best at English. I stunk at math. And like high school kids do, I found the best journalism school, Northwestern Medell School of Journalism. I applied and I didn't get in. And at that point, I'm like, okay, I didn't get into journalism school.

I guess I'll go to Michigan and study like psychology and business. And that was that. And I kind of put writing away. So just keep that in mind because it will come back to writing at some point. That's going to come back. Right. Okay. So now we have to bridge the gap now between graduate school and your first book.

And so there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in between. The main professional bridge, I guess, is coaching. Did you get that off the ground right away? or did you have to go to a company and build up experience? Yeah, exactly. It was the latter. So right now I spent all my time just coaching individuals in writing and researching. Coming out of graduate school, so McKinsey basically says that you can, we'll pay your debt

if you come back to McKinsey. I was super fortunate. I got a scholarship to Michigan. So the finances weren't a problem. So I was free if I wanted to to leave McKinsey. So I did just that. I took a job at a large health care system in Northern California called Kaiser Permanente, and their physician-run medical group, so it's an enormous medical group, like 5,000 physicians.

And within their medical group, they have an internal consulting arm or like a firm within the larger group, and they were looking for someone with a lot of physician executive. They called it physician hands, so someone that could work really well with physicians. So I initially took that role as a full-time coach at Kaiser. Okay. So it was, yeah, it was at Kaiser, but it was doing coaching of the type you conceived. So now we see what Kaiser doing coaching. Now, at some point, you're going to end up a writer again.

I mean, my list of publications I have for you includes the New York Times, Wired, New York Magazine. You have a have or had, you still have, write your column for outside. Yep. a lot of people were probably interested. How does someone who is in a position that doesn't seem connected at all to writing for those type of publications, how did you start that new aspect of your life? All right. So this is, well, we got to backtrack to grad school just for a little bit here.

So in grad school, I mentioned, I was getting really into endurance sports, running, biking, swimming. And this is around the time that every endurance athlete, and I put that in quotes, because I was an armchair athlete. But everyone in their sister and brother had a blog. So I too had a blog on WordPress. It was like Brad's Triathlon Adventures. And no one read my blog.

My readership was one. It was me. And it meant that I was writing weekly. So I wrote throughout grad school a blog for no one. I'm sure in my big 24-year-old head, I thought that everyone was reading my blog, but not even my then-girlfriend, now wife, ever read that blog. But I was writing regularly.

McKinsey turns out is a phenomenal place to get trained to be a good nonfiction writer. Because every single study at McKinsey is basically like writing a nonfiction essay article or book. You have a problem that you're trying to solve. You have some hypotheses, but you don't know much about it. So you do a bunch of research and you talk to a bunch of experts. You come to a conclusion. You make an argument for that conclusion. If you're any good at what you do, you tell the client how you might be wrong.

and a slide deck is just like a nonfiction book. So it's funny because I didn't get into journalism school, but I think McKinsey was actually phenomenal training to become a nonfiction writer. So the writing was always there. It was just never done professionally. It was either done as, in at McKinsey, to be clear, I think in like the nine or ten studies I did there, I only worked in Microsoft Excel once.

I was never the person doing the modeling. I was the person, as I said, coaching, working with the club. clients and then creating the PowerPoint slides. So storytelling. So the writing was always there. I was telling stories in McKinsey. I had this blog that no one read. Fast forward to Kaiser. I was working with these two physicians and one non-physician leader that were building this whole program around what they call life care planning, which is basically the thought that in America we're terrified to talk about death. We hate it. But then what ends up happening is we get close to death. and if we lose the ability to speak for ourselves, our family has to make these impossible decisions.

What should we do? And no one wants that. So we should start talking about the dying process more often. So we can be empowered to let our physicians and our families know what kind of care we'd want at the end. While that was happening, my grandmother in Michigan was dying on an awful death of lung cancer and had none of this kind of advanced care life care planning. So my mom and her sister were arguing over what kind of care she could get. everyone's feeling guilty. My grandma no longer can speak for herself. It was a total train wreck.

In being completely naive to how major journalism works, I wrote an essay and I sent it to the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. And now I would never have done that because who gets their essay in one of those big publications. But for whatever reason, and it's probably a lot of luck. The Los Angeles Times editor loved the story and ended up running it in the LA Times on a Sunday. And the story did well. It was like one of their more well-read stories of the year. And again, I just for, just like their op-ed page. Yeah, they're op-ed page. Exactly. Okay. Interesting. So at that point, all these people, and by people, I mean publications, they started asking me if I wanted to write for them. And I just said yes, because I loved writing. And I had been

writing as a hobby. So I wrote for the Huffington Post. I had a blog. And again, this is 10 years ago. So now writing for the Huffington Post, some people argue, should you do it, you're not getting paid. But I was just like, someone's going to give me a platform to write. I wrote for Men's Fitness, a magazine that I would never recommend to anyone in a million years. But hey, someone's going to pay me $50 to write an article. So I just started writing everywhere. What did people associate you with based off that original LA Times article? Right. So it started off being like, can you write about like health policy? Yeah.

And I'm super into performance in sports. I have a personal interest in burnout because I burnt out at McKinsey and I saw physicians around me burning out. So I said, yeah, of course I'll write about health policy. But very quickly, I started writing more about human performance and particularly human performance for non, not necessarily for athletes. Now, was there a lot of us who. have done this, go through this process. What was what was it like when it was discovered by those you work with that you were also writing when this is something happens often because most of us start writing on the side of doing something else. That's the only way to do it. And there's always an interesting discovery process. For me, I remember when my advisor didn't know I was writing books until she saw some of my books on a display at the MIT bookstore. You writing books? So was the same thing

happening, I guess, at some point. People around you at Kaiser were like, you know, I was reading the L.A. Times the other day. And I was reading men's fitness. And my abs are looking great. But more importantly, I learned a lot from you. Yeah, it's super awkward. Some people love it and are thrilled. Other people want to talk about it. And you don't necessarily want to talk about it all the time. And the worst are the people, they tend to be more senior that are like a little bit jealous. And they're like, well, why did you do that without getting permission? And I remember one particular conversation with someone I didn't love anyways. And I said, I wrote the article. A lot of people in the organization are really happy with it. If you don't like it, you can try to get me fired. And that was the

end of that conversation. Yeah. And you might not have minded it, it sounds like. No, I mean, so, so yes, and I, so as, for the next few years, I, I unknowingly, because I hadn't read Nassim Talib's book, Anti-Fragile yet. But I unknowingly follow. followed what is some of the best advice in all of Tillib's writing, I think, which is what he calls the barbell strategy, which basically says if you want to be a really good rock star, don't quit your day job. You should be an accountant on the side. Because if you're an accountant, you have stable income, you can pay your bills, and it allows you to take more risks in being a rock star. Versus if you get one article published or in his example, you get one song picked up by the

radio and you immediately quit your day job, you have a ton of pressure on you. So then you end up writing clickbait articles or writing shitty songs because you need the money. So it wasn't long before I said, wow, like there's really something here. I want to be a writer. I've always wanted to be a writer, but I didn't quit my job at Kaiser. So at first it was a complete side gig. And then as I started getting more and more opportunities to write, I'm very fortunate at the time my immediate supervisor was wonderful on the same page as me.

and I went to her and I'm like, hey, I really want to keep adding value to the organization. And I'm having opportunities to write in pretty large publications. It's taking more of my time. I'm starting to get paid more. Can I go down to 80 percent? And then that turned into can I go down to 70 percent? And can I go down to 60 percent? So my evolution to like a quote unquote pro writer and coach, it was a three-year period of going down and down and down in time.

And the funny thing, Cal is even today, I'm still. I'm no longer a full-time employer, anything like that. But I'm still on staff as a coach at Kaiser. So I still coach 10 physicians. So I've had a wonderful relationship with Kaiser. Yeah. But you added your own coaching at some point during this period. I mean, how does that even start?

How do you even let people know? So that happened after my first book, Peak Performance came out. So that was the business card. That was the business card. Yep. You know how it goes. It was totally pulling. marketing. I just started having people emailing me asking me if I do any coaching, which I

hadn't done private coaching. I was very honest. I said, I don't have a private coaching practice, but I've actually worked with a very niche audience physicians. And the people reaching out to me by and large weren't physicians. They were executives. I said no to a few because of imposter syndrome. And then I met an executive coach named Ed Battista in San Francisco. And he told me that you're just as good as anyone. So you should just start saying yes and get over your So I started saying yes, and that's how the private practice took off. Now, when you were writing your articles during this period, were the articles pushing you to expose yourself to new ideas or information, or were you gathering grist for the mill

otherwise? I mean, writing as much as you were, you need a lot of ideas, which are based off a lot of different whatever studies and information. So was it a push or poll model there? Was it like, oh, I have a habit of I go and read all the time? Or was it I pitch good ideas and then I have to go read in order to fulfill that pitch? Like, what's the chicken and the egg there? Phenomenal question.

It was all curiosity driven. So I am a voracious reader. I always have been. I would just read everything and then come up with ideas. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. That makes sense.

That makes sense. In the kind of writing I do, right? Like, you know, you know this. It's very rarely am I going to be like, oh, here's a groundbreaking study. I'm going to do a whole book about it. It's much more like, these people in sports are doing this, and these people in business are doing it, and in medicine, they're doing it this way. In cognitive psychology, they found this, and in anthropology, they found that. And holy, moly, there's a real pattern here that can help us think about the world.

So my writing is very similar to my reading. It's broad. It has a lot of range, and it's looking for patterns in different disciplines in trying to unsurface those patterns and then make them useful. And it's those patterns just for the listeners who are thinking about writing or thinking, I want to write for the Times and Wired and Outside. The people like Brad, who are very successful with broad freelance careers like that, tend to be the people who are very good at doing exactly that. Because that's exactly what you need for good pitches for those publications. I have an interesting take on something that brings in some information together in a somewhat unique synthesis is a pretty good superpower.

So for those out there who are, I guess, looking to do that one day, but early on in the process, that's probably, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but that's probably a muscle to start developing. I agree. I think it's a really important muscle. I think that a really good definition of creativity that I just love is it's not thinking of something new per se. It's taking multiple things that are already there and putting them together in a way that leads to a new insight. Yeah, I always say this to people. Like the two things people often get wrong about the type of writing. We do like practical nonfiction and people get wrong in particular about my writing is that I'm not really trying to convince people of something. And I'm rarely actually introducing someone to something they don't know anything about. Like basically all I do is take something that it seems to me like a lot of people think is true

and just are having a hard time articulating it and giving them some good words. you feel distracted at work, you feel like something's off. Let's call that deep work. Let's call this shallow work. Let's, you know, I'll bring in some stuff so you can understand the significance of that. But I'm just helping the choir understand or digital minimalism. Everyone was already uneasy about their phones. And I was like, well, let me just kind of help you understand why that is.

And just give you some vocabulary. And here's what maybe resonates for you with these people who have a better relationship. And it's because it's built on intention. And because I get that question, even the other day I was doing an interview. They're like, well, didn't you have people? people who disagreed with that. How did you convince them? I said, I wasn't trying to. That's not really what we do. People have intimations of something more or less is true or important, but they need help articulating it. So that might just be unique to the tech topics I write about,

but I think that's something people can get wrong. Yeah, there's a real there there. And you and I have talked offline about just the power of giving people a new vocabulary. So like deep work or digital minimalism or in my case, stress plus rest equals growth. Um, it allows you to take something that you can't express, by definition, new vocabulary, name it, but then also wrestle with it. So, like, you're right. Like, deep work, my experience of deep work was the ability to now talk to my wife about deep work or talk to colleagues about deep work.

It's not necessarily following the Kelnuport playbook recipe down to a T, although I have taken many of your very practical tips. But for me, the biggest benefit of your work, and even my own work when I do research, is it's giving myself a mental model that I can then wrestle with and use to communicate to other people. Another way that I like to think about nonfiction writing, the kind of work that we do is our readers are driving down the road and the big trees on the side of the road and they kind of know it's there. Our job is just to point it to them so they can see it for themselves. Yeah, because that's classic coaching, right? It's not, let me tell, I've analyzed your life and

let me tell you what you should do. That's not coaching. that would be nice. It is tell me about, well, not exactly how you do it, but, you know, tell me about your life. I will let help you clarify what you know you have to do. And that's probably simplifying it, but yeah. And strokes, yes. Yeah. Okay. So now I think we've, we've, we've, we've kind of made the transition from Brad 1.0 to Brad 2.0, the transition that the, the, I'm going to write a story for you here. The, the spark, there's like sort of a spark into bet of a sort of autonomous, intentional, spirituality, self-crafted lifestyle. You get a turning point at graduate school where there's the mythical tattoo we've talked about,

but it sounds like the engagement in endurance sports as like an intense high-quality leisure activity is probably exactly the same idea. It's, okay, now I'm doing something just because I want to and it's interesting and it's meaningful and it's, you know, its own thing. And so now we're coming out of a, you know, Brad goes into the coaching, but almost immediately you're writing and then you're moving down to be more autonomous and then you bring in your own coaching clients. The thing that apex of the transition is your book, your first book, peak performance.

And for the readers who don't know it, this is like an underground classic in people who do this type of practical nonfiction. And it was a, tell me if it's a summary, if this elevator pitch is fair. But basically, one of the big things it did is took the notion of the role of recovery that is well understood in athletics. And it brought it into other types of cognitive performance as well, that stress plus rest equals growth. Like you have to push yourself. You also have to then recover. And I'm assuming a direct reaction to your McKinsey experience, you're realizing that's not something people do.

So you can correct me here in a second if I didn't get that quite right. but that book was really well received. What was your experience with jumping into the ranks of book writing, joining forces with your co-author Steve Magnus, and putting together that title? Yeah, it was all wonderful. Because, again, you have to put yourself in my shoes. I got rejected from journalism school.

I wrote this article, got very lucky that an editor saw, and it resonated with her. Started writing for free for the Huffington Post, started writing more about human performance, was writing for just bad magazines. Sorry if men's fitness editors are out there, but never take fitness advice from men's fitness. And it's funny, I didn't write long for them because I was writing like these highbrow psychology things. And eventually, like, this is probably a better fit for elsewhere. I'm like, yeah, I think you're right.

But again, they're paying me to write. So I was just following my interest, having a blast. And then the opportunity, someone's going to pay me to write a book. I don't have to pay you. You're going to give me a cover designer and an editor, and you're going to put it in bookstores? This is insane. They come to you?

Well, no. We had to, so my co-author and I, and it's, so I met my co-author. So Steve Magnus, great guy. We've done two books together. We do all kinds of work together. A formerly very fast young man as well. Yeah, world-class athlete in high school, predominantly an athletic coach. He had this phenomenal blog around,

what he called the science of running. But he was uncovering lots of the same themes in running, and he was kind of looking to more of the intellectual performance world for ideas on running, and I was looking to the sports world for ideas on intellectual performance. So we started reading each other's stuff and like a pen pal relationship back and forth, and out of it, this creative partnership forge. So there's actually a funny story behind peak performance there. I can tell it real quick. So Steve and I had this pen pal relationship, as I said, for probably about six months. And it got to a point where the comfort level built up that I told Steve, I'm like, hey, man, I have this, this is crazy, but I have this idea for a book. What do you think?

We got on the phone and we talked about it. And he said, oh my gosh, I have a very similar idea and I can send you 90 pages of notes to prove it. So he sent me his notes. There's 70% alignment. And we're like, why don't we just do this together? So that was the genesis of us deciding to write peak performance together. And then we had to go through the whole rigmarole of, you know, how it goes, finding an agent, selling the book. But all of that was just extra credit. Like, Steve and I would have written this book as an electronic PDF if we had to. Yeah. And it hit a chord, and it sounds like that was the second turning point because it opened up a coaching practice in your spare time. Then later came in that book, to be clear, that book outperformed our wildest dreams. Like again,

We went in there. We would have paid our publisher to make us a cool, pretty cover and sell our book. And that book went on to be translated into 15 language and sold over 200,000 copies in like one year. I mean, it was just, it was so wildly more successful than either of us could have ever imagined. So that was a big turning point. And it's like skill and luck because I'd say the skill is that we pushed really hard. We followed our interest. We took smart risks.

we wrote the book, the luck and what a lot of people don't know is that Audible ran their first national television commercial around the time our book came out. And they chose our book along with the Leonardo da Vinci autobiography is like the two books to feature in their commercial. So we had a month of national TV pub for our book. It was wild. So, okay. So what does that feel?

I love the insider baseball of it. What does it feel like to be on the other side of that? What's the evidence you get that, wait a second, I think something big is happening with the book? I mean, for us it was the, so the sales were good. Don't get me wrong before that commercial, but they ran that commercial for two weeks, and it was during the NCAA tournament. So a lot of people watching TV. And just to see, and an audible sales went way up, but so to hardcover sales, because it's just a billboard of our book on TV in between NCAA tournament games.

again, we just laughed at it because like we wanted to stay humble and all we could do is laugh because we're like, why did they choose our book? Like, what is going on? So I think the only advice is like if you catch a good break like that, realize that that's just luck. And it's with creative endeavors too. You've talked about this prior on this podcast. Like quantity really matters because the more darts you throw, the more one might hit and this one hit. So yeah, we were just, were thrilled and to this day all we can do is laugh. Yeah, that's so cool. You got the TV coverage. So that book became a national bestseller six months after it came out. So kind of like a Ryan holiday book. It was a very steady sales, but then that commercial just took it over the top. And

those two weeks, it sold the gazillion copies. Oh, I didn't realize that was six months in. Okay, so it had been out. Okay, so you were out there like, okay, hey, this was great. We published this book. Yeah, it was well enough where we were confident we could get. get another book deal and keep writing, and people were reading it. But the, and it had been translated, so international reception was good, but the big push came when we caught that break and got that commercial. I want to take a brief moment to talk about four-sigmatic coffee. Now, I have talked about four-sigmatic before.

They offer a ground mushroom coffee that has Lions main mushroom integrated in it. Don't worry. It does not taste like mushrooms. It has a nutty, dark taste. I really enjoy it. It's smooth. It's good on your stomach. But that lion's main mushroom, I don't know what it does, but it gives you a different cognitive effect than just the caffeine by itself. Why is that good? Well, as I've talked about on this podcast before, I now associate that feeling with depth. It's a smooth, good-taste, and unique coffee that has this extra little cognitive hit from the mushroom coffee. So when I drink it, it is a unique physiological state. I drink it before I do deep work. And this has allowed my mind to build a connection. Oh, when I feel that four-sigmatic way, it's deep work time. It is a hook into periods of concentration.

Those type of hooks can be very important for helping to rest your attention away from distraction and put it towards focus. And 4Sigmatic has become one of my go-to hooks. It's also just a great cup of coffee. I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee, but it's just for Deep Question listeners. You can get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep.

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So then you go on and write the passion paradox. How many years later was that? So we wrote the passion paradox before peak performance was published. So Steve and I are both pushers. As you heard from McKinsey, Steve's wired very similarly to me. So the story there is quick. and I can try to tell it quickly at least. So Steve lived in Houston at the time.

I lived in the Bay Area, and we did a fair amount of work in person, but most of it was virtual. But we had planned to get together to go through all the edits from our editor on peak performance for two weeks. And like so often happens in publishing, these editors are very busy.

They have all kinds of fire drills come up all the time. Right when Steve lands in San Francisco, we get a note from our editor saying that he's running a month behind. So now we've got 14 days together. And unlike normal people, oh, and in his note, to be clear, he's like, this is a phenomenal book. I'm so pleased. My publisher is thrilled.

We don't have too many big edits. I'll get back to you in a month. Sorry, I'm running behind. So unlike normal people that would have, you know, had a six pack of beer and gone to the beach for two weeks, Steve and I were content for like 30 minutes. And then we looked at each other. We're like, well, shit, what are we going to do for the next two weeks? And then we looked at each other again and we said, why can't we just be content?

Like, why do we have to keep pushing? Where does this drive come from? We've always been told that our drive and passion is a good thing, but is it? And then we said, well, wait a minute. What if we write a book on that? So we took two weeks. Write a book on the force that pushed you to write the book. I love the letter in this year.

So we took two weeks, a lot of time in coffee shops, and we outlined that book, and that became the passion paradox. which one of the interesting things about that book is it it provides a really interesting natural experiment because I'm a similar demographically and intellectually to you in the sense of like roughly the same age and I write in roughly the same spaces and I wrote a book on a similar topic around the same time and we did so completely independently of each other so it's I find so good they can't ignore you and the passion paradox combined to be this interesting natural experiment is it if you had just rewound the tape. I'm like, okay, now what if, like, how it shows, like, we round the tape and I wrote the book again, like, what other way could it have gone? And so you get this kind of interesting coverage of the topic because it's starting from similar places and then it goes in different places.

And so I've always recommended the people, oh, you should read both those books together. Yep. Because. Yeah, and vice versa. Like, so good they can't ignore you. I always say it's the perfect compliment. The way that I talk about your book next to the passion paradox is the passion paradox is like more of the deep psychological. Where does drive come from?

When is it good? When is it bad? What does it mean about your childhood? What does it mean about your future? How do you transition out of drive? That's the passion paradox. Your book is like you're a really driven person. Everyone that's telling you to follow your passion, you should think twice.

Here's why and here's what to do instead. Yeah. Passion turns out to be, it's one of these words that embeds so much, which is like, it's good and bad. It's bad when you're trying to come up with book titles because then everyone, as you probably experienced at your publisher, keeps saying, people are going to think this is for like couples. Like this is about like, but, but it just underscores. There's so much, it's like a palimcess that has like so much that's been scraped off and rewritten on it. And, and I think that's what makes it so rich.

And yet we use it. It's like a signifier that we throw around casually when thinking about our careers, not realizing that there is such a complicated substructure. So, yeah, I think that's a good way of talking about it. Like, so good, it cares about just the very notion of match theory and the idea that you're matching to something you're wired for, what roles that plays in satisfaction. And I think, so it's almost as if that sort of thing doesn't exist as strongly as we think. And yours is looking at the actual experience of like what psychologists call passion,

the sort of, I don't know exactly how they define it, but this sort of really intense attraction or drive to do something. And you looked at the harmonious. What's the opposite of harmonious in that research? The harmonious and negative passion. What's the terminology? Obsessive. Yeah.

And I read a lot of that literature because obviously it's what comes up too when you're searching through journals for passion. And so it's like different sides of a similar coin. but like pretty distinct side. So, so recommended. Both those books are recommended. So that's cool.

So now we've gotten to the place where you're writing, you're writing books, your articles are written to your books. Your books are well received. And where we'll try to bring it to a landing before doing a few readers questions is that more recently,

you got to go through an exercise I always daydream about and we like to talk about on the podcast. You went through an exercise where you and your wife sort of. We did the deep life thing. You'd start. from scratch. You said, wait a second. We're not bound to an office. Like our work is complete

location independent. Let's start with the map of the whole country and figure out where we can go anywhere. Where do we want to go? I love, you know, I've talked to you offline about it. I love that idea. So you went through that process. Where did you come from and where did you end up? I think our listeners want to know. Well, if your, if your Cal's colleagues or administrators at Georgetown and you're listening, now's a good time to turn it off because I'm recruiting the Newport family to Asheville, North Carolina, very hard every day. He's not joking. He sent me a real estate listing the other day, so it's serious here. So we moved to Asheville, Asheville, North Carolina from Oakland, California, and yeah, so far it's been great. We're thrilled to have made the move.

And when you describe Asheville, we get small town style but artsy downtown. Freakish weather. I look up the weather, by the way. It's like in this weird because it's high up. It's, it doesn't get as hot in the summer. Yeah, it's like one of these weird. 40 to 80. Yeah, it's like Eagle Tanger range in Parks and Rec in some sort of weird microclimate.

It doesn't get nearly as hot as the rest of the state because it's up high, but because it's in that it doesn't get south enough that it doesn't get that cold. And it is surrounded by mountains and woods. So there's trails and mountain biking and climbing and all that type of stuff that you, you started to get pretty into way back when during graduate school, right? So it's a very athletic place. I first heard of Asheville. So there's an author named Eric Weiner who writes these wonderful like half psychology, half travel books. Are you familiar with his work? Well, I know his book. I know the geography, what geography of happiness? Geography of Bliss. What was it called? Yeah, Geography of Bliss. So that's

when I first heard of Asheville. This is like, I don't know, in 2012, when that book first came out, he goes around the whole world finding out the happiest places. And then he's asked, in the last chapter, he asks himself, what's the happiest place in America? And he named Asheville. And I had never even heard of Asheville. So that, like, planted a seed. And then I visited once. I really liked it.

But we didn't get serious about moving here until about a year and a half ago. And for a multiple, you know, multitude of factors, but the big ones being my wife's family is in D.C. where you are. And California is very far from D.C. Asheville is a seven, eight hour drive, 45-minute flight. And then the second thing is we started to think about wealth, not as money, but is autonomy. And the level of autonomy we have here and hope to have here in the future is a lot higher than in the Bay Area simply because the cost of living in the Bay Area is so high.

So what does this actually mean? My wife in the Bay Area would have to work full-time as a corporate lawyer, and I would have to churn out books every year and have a 30-person coaching roster. That might be an exaggeration, but it's really freaking expensive to live there, especially with kids. Here, my wife can work hourly as a lawyer, titrate up, titrate down based on her intellectual appetite for work. I can write a book every few years, have a very small coaching roster, so I can pick and choose my coaching clients and have a lot more time to read and think. So it felt like this huge monumental decision and we were so unsure and I really missed Oakland for the first couple weeks. And now that we're settling in, it's like, oh my gosh, like I have so much more time to craft my days how I want

to. So nothing but positive things to say. And it's not just me. This is a trend, right? It's been written about in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, that people are fleeing these more expensive cities for these smaller pockets. Austin, Texas, Boise, Idaho, Cordillane. I'm sure there are others I'm missing. Spartanburg, South Carolina. So just like smaller towns. Yeah. I mean, for our generation, the person who, who, I mean, that idea is timeless. Like there's different currencies other than just currency. I can go to Vicky like Robbins and your money or your life. and the sort of more modern times or go back to Thoreau. I mean, this is what Walden was an economics book.

People often get that wrong. And Walden is about what you did. I mean, he really was doing a careful economic ledger of like, what actually, how much money does it actually take to cover all of my needs? Okay. And how much labor then does it take to generate that much money? And the whole experiment at Walden was like, okay, so what if I did just that much work that I could cover all my needs? I have food.

I have shelter, the simple cabin I built. And then I could use the rest of the time is my lifetime to do other things I want to do with. And he made this really complex economic argument that's often missed, which is that ends up working out better for most people because as you pursue more currency, you have to give up more of your time and your life force, he called it. But as you're giving up more of that, then you don't really have much left to actually make use of what the money gives you. And he had the funny example of, you know, you buy the wagon to bring your goods to market.

And now you can get there in 20 minutes instead of an hour, but you have to work two extra hours a week to afford the wagon. You didn't really end up better off. But I think for our generation, Tim Ferriss, like, re-brought that idea up. And this was back in 2007 with a four-hour work week, which I think through the sands of times gets inappropriately characterized from like the lifestyle design,

like bro entrepreneur had scammy business type angle. But my memory of why that book resonated so much in 2007 is that his core idea was, well, wait a second, what are the currencies that matter and time and mobility and being able to have autonomy over your life? Like, oh, these are really important. How would you optimize for those? And I think that's the same thread that got picked up more recently with like the financial independence, retire early fire community. They come at it from another angle. But again, it's about how do we rebalance that? So it's like this timeless idea that in the last 10 years has come up a bunch of times.

But I'm always very excited when I see people act on it. And then I get very aspirational and make all sorts of plans. So your report from this deep, you know, deep life newly engineered is that it's a positive report. That's good to hear. I'd say it's a very positive report. I think another thing to include, and you've written a ton about this in a different context with digital minimalism. is I'd really like frame it as a value decision as well.

So not values, but like just how much benefit, like cost over benefit. And my wife and I, like we're, our needs are pretty simple. We love being outside and we love feeling like we're a part of a tight-knit community. And there's so much more of it the Bay Area has that you pay for. It has this restaurant scene and theater scene and art scene and all that stuff that's great, but that's not high in our priority list. So for us, it was really like, what do we enjoy spending our time doing and are there places we can do that with more autonomy?

Now, are you going to open a quirky bookstore at some point? No, I can. There's a malaprops. So there's a phenomenal one of these bookstores that's been around forever. And that was like another fun thing about moving to a small town is immediately already just feeling so much more ownership. So the first kind of psychological boundary I made is. As I said, I am done buying any books from Amazon.

I'm buying all of my books from my independent bookstore because it makes my town cool and I want it to be here forever. Yeah. That's one of my dreams. I'm going to have a bookstore one day. Well, what you're, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to externalize all my dreams on you. I think what you need to do is eventually- What are you waiting for, man?

I sent you that listing. You could have like growth EQ, deep compounds. We could walk in the woods. We could have Walden-style sheds where we, yeah, where we think. yeah, I am too busy. My issue, I'm too busy. I did a good job of focusing in on just things that I think are I really enjoy and are really important and I really like to do. And it's craftsmanship. It's just I have too many of them to do. So I got like halfway there, but kind of messed up the equation a little bit. And you learn and you adapt. And as you know, like I'm 40% serious,

60% just giving you a hard time. I think the other thing that is, it's really an interesting exercise to go through, whether it's every year, every few years, is, am I doing this because I want to? Am I doing this because there's a ton of habit energy? Or am I doing this because there is ego attached to it that maybe three years ago made tons of sense? But now isn't my identity, isn't who I am. And, you know, maybe it's like you wear all these different hats, right? Computer scientists, lecture, public intellectual, writer for a person. Degis Outlets like The New Yorker, bookwriter, all these things.

And it's like reexamining like, huh, like where do I want to prioritize and how does that shift how I spend my time in perhaps my geography. Well, I mean, that's certainly a lesson to draw from your life, whether it's intentional or not, the importance of the regular revisiting of those questions. Because, you know, if you hadn't done that, I mean, you would probably be a relatively successful, probably unhealthy partner at, you know, McKinsey or something. So I think there is a lesson in there about you have to keep reevaluate. I mean, there's obvious turning points like kids, for example, coming, kids getting to a certain age, certain career milestones. There's a lot of obvious

milestones at which to look back. But even without those milestones, I think there's a lesson there. It's what's the right fit. And I swear, I'm not like, McKinsey's not paying me to constantly say this. McKinsey is a great place. It just wasn't the right place for me to have a career. For people, it is. Yeah, I have a friend here who is at, he's a partner now at McKinsey and DC, and he loves it. And I think it's great for him. And he's really happy there. Yeah, it's just, it's constantly like a reevaluating. I talk about this to my coaching clients all the time. It's like, you know, where, and it's so hard because sometimes it requires shutting like past identities or past attachments, but it's a reevaluating of like, where am I now? Where do I,

I want to be, what do I want to hold on, what do I want to hold on to? And like, how can I best match my external environment to my internal goals and values? And that can change year over year, decade over decade. For some people, it changes 15 times. For other people, it never changes. And I do think that's key. I mean, something I've told, I talk about to, you know, my listeners occasionally is, you know, one way to capture that is to have, you know, I call it a strategic plan, you can call it whatever you want, but, you know, to have this document that you revisit at least once a quarter where, like, what is my current vision? And, you know, I will say, I've talked about on the podcast, I have this document. I sort of split it into work and life

outside of work, but they're intertwined because those two things are intertwined. And just from a tactics perspective, I have a separate document that is values. So it's more abstract. then, oh, this is things I want in my life or what I want to, you know, maybe this much work or nature, this or that's much more abstract. And the values document influences, you reflect on that when you then go to your strategic plan and say, okay, is this reflecting that? Right. Is this reflecting the values?

And then you come back to it every quarter and it's interesting to see how it evolves. So that might be one way. Certainly an exercise I do a lot, but it's an interesting way to think of it. And who knows, maybe that evolution will end up with Asheville. Though I'll say one of my writer friends in Austin just the other day sent me a picture. So competition here, Brad, he sent me a picture of an outdoor office he built on his ranch. And there's a path from his house and you can go one way to get to his pond and another way to get to his outdoor office, which he built after I was telling him about my Deep Work HQ office. So there's competition now.

So I have the vision of the, the, the, Asheville woods and mountain and mountain and and hike like Thoreau at Katahdin. And then I have the vision of I can, you know, be on my ranch and my outdoor office. I think it's going to get pretty hot in that office though. So that's, that's what you have going for you. All right. Well, this has been great. I want to, we've been rolling for a little bit, but just to the stick with the conceit of

the show, I want to at least do a few questions, at least a few questions. at least a few questions that were sent in since there is questions in the name of the show. And so let's just do a few here where we can get your take. I've grabbed a few from a few different categories like career and energy and fitness, all sorts of different things. Let's just grab a couple here and we'll see what you have to say. So we'll put you on the hot seat. All right.

So here's one that is, this will go back to your men's, was it men's health or men's fitness? Men's fitness. Your men's fitness days. Yeah, how do I keep my 12 fact? All right. So I have a question from Ryan. It's a waste of time. But anyways, like, don't keep a full pack. Yeah. Who's going to see that? All right. So I have a question from Ryan. And also a 12 pack basically means you have to be an extreme diet, right? That's like you have to go to an artificially low body fat thing. It's like something you do temporarily for photo shoots. How many abdomens you can see abdomens? I don't even know if that's the right word. How many bumps you can see with your shirt off says nothing about your core strength and nothing about your health? I would almost. argue the more that you can see, the more worried I am about your health. But that's, yeah,

like you're not, you're not even right. All right. So, so speaking of which Ryan's question is, uh, I think that what you put into your body is important to achieving your best results. You've mentioned the quote from Michael Pollan, eat food, not too much, mostly plants, but can you go into more detail about what your diet includes? And I'll just change this to like what a good diet should include. He says, do you take any supplements? I'll change that to should you take any supplements. Ryan, Brad knows a lot. lot more about this type of stuff than I do. So, Brad, give us a secret. What should we be eating? Should we be supplementing? All right. So Michael Pollan is very hard to top on this. A twist on this

that maybe makes it a little bit more actionable is try to avoid foods that come wrapped in plastic. It's just another way of saying don't eat processed foods. I'm a big believer that there is no best diet. So once you're eliminating processed foods, there are a million different healthy ways to eat. Some people really feel good on a lower carbohydrate diet. Some people feel great on a high carbohydrate diet. I think carbs in the recent past have gotten a bad name, and that's because there's a big difference between potato chips and french fries and brown rice and sweet potatoes, which comes back to the avoid stuff that becomes wrapped in plastic. In terms of, go ahead, Kel.

No, go ahead. Go on. I was just going to say, in terms of supplements, I personally don't take any supplements. I think that the golden rule there is if you have a clinical deficiency and you know that you're deficient, then yes, they can be effective. Otherwise, there's all kinds of research that shows that you end up just peeing them out. So it's better to save your money and buy Kel's books. What about vitamin D in the winter? Does the good form of vitamin D supplementation actually help prevent a deficiency when you have very little skin that can get sun exposure?

So the research on this is mixed. The gold standard is if you can get sun, you should get sun. And it's less about temperature. It's more about the UV rays. So even if you live in a winter climate, if you can go outside on a sunny day, that's better than vitamin D. And the dose is very small. I think you need like 15 to 18 minutes depending on your latitude. If you can't get sun, some physicians and some research which say yes, vitamin D is helpful. Others would say it doesn't really make a difference. You're getting enough sun in the other times of the year. It's not something unless, again, you have a known deficiency that is worth worrying about, in my opinion. I think you will stress more about whether or not you should be taking vitamin D and that stress will have more of a deleterious effect on your your health, then whether or not you're getting the vitamin D.

Right. So now I have a question here. This is just mainly a chance for you and I to be scolding. But Sean asked about doing productive meditation. That's where you, you know, thinking walks, which I know you do a lot of. He asked about how do you do that in the winter when it might be too cold to think and walk outside without your thoughts being disrupted by the cold? He says because I was a PhD student in MIT, he was curious how I did it back

thin. So my instinct here is to be scolding and says, what do you mean is too cold to walk or too cold to think? Put on a jacket. Like go outside. It's kind of, it's a unique experience to be outside in the cold, just like it is in the heat. And being outside and walking is a year-round thing. Do you, do you back up my smug scolding on this one? I do. I think I'll, I'll, I'll be a little bit more compassionate. And what I will say is that yes, it can suck to go outside in the dead of winter. You know, I spent a lot of time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is just a cold gray wind vortex. Get through the first 10 minutes. It's like it's like open water swimming in a cold ocean. The first 10 minutes, your brain hurts, your teeth hurt. It's freezing. Your hands hurt. It sucks.

And then suddenly your body kind of like realizes, oh, wow, it's cold. And then you can actually feel really good and think really clearly. Like there's this crispness that comes about. So I would say, force yourself to bundle up, buy a nice jacket, wear it, bundle up, force yourself to get to the 12 minute mark. And then if you want to turn around inside, go inside, but just get to 12 minutes. I mean, this was my survival in Boston. So during my postdoc years, I lived in Boston and not Cambridge, and I had a dog

that I'd bring to the office. And I would bring them home midday, and it would be a run every day. and we'd run on the Charles and cross certain bridges or whatever, but it was running on the river. And in Boston, New Balance, they keep all of the running paths salted and plowed. So it's kind of cool.

So the snow is really high. And it would just be cold. I mean, just like dead cold, but it was by far, I think it saved me from all sorts of psychological distress, from all the things going on in my life at that point, the stress of entering the job market.

I'd got my first big book deal then. like insomnia issues and the bee out there and we do this run no matter what the temperature was you'd be freezing and then you weren't and we would go out on one of the barges

in the Charles and we would be in my dog we would shovel snow until we could get down to the surface of the barge and then we would do my Navy SEAL push-up routine with like the snow around you

I think that saved me though because it takes 10 minutes you're right and then you would warm up because your core temperature would warm up and you're getting sunlight in a place. I mean, I think

to quantify it, I think Boston has sun for about 19 minutes a day during the deep winter, right? So you're getting like sun when you can and you're sweating and it's quiet in a certain way and I don't know, I look back on that fondly. My, it led me now, like my biggest thing I unfairly judge people for

is what I call the parka in the commute. And so whenever I see someone like in traffic when I'm commuting, wearing a parka in the winter, I'm just thinking, all right, that is someone who wanted to avoid that two minutes of feeling cold while they waited for their car to warm up. And they're willing to sacrifice being like too hot and like uncomfortable for an hour to avoid two minutes of slightly, you know, you're going to be cold for two minutes. But then you're going to be much more comfortable just being in your shirt in the car once the heater gets going.

You know, it's not comfortable to drive in traffic in a parka. And so I don't know. I always summarize it. don't be the person driving in traffic in the parka. Be willing to put up a little bit, there's probably a bigger metaphor here for all the life, be willing to put up with a little bit of acute discomfort to enable higher returns in the long term.

Yeah, but says the guy, at least for me, that moved to the Bay Area because Ann Arbor was too cold. You know, so it's like there's a layhardiness there for sure. But I agree with you. And the other thing I'd say to this listener, is I've never met someone that has regretted a winter walk. So, like, if you come back from these walks after an hour and you're like, oh, I shouldn't have done that, most people love getting into a heated house, having a coffee or a hot chocolate,

you got your blood flowing, you exercise, so you move your body, you are outside, you sleep better. So I think, like, so many of the things, Kel, that you talk about on this show and, like, deep work itself, it's the kind of thing where you have to get through the first 10 minutes. which are rarely going to feel as good as what you were doing before. But then once you get through those 10 minutes, it's a really nourishing, energizing activity. So here's a business question. Happy L.A. Girl says, how can we build an audience as a thought leader without social media? So I think that's a good place to ask you, what do you do with social media?

From a business perspective, how do you work with that? Because I know you're very thoughtful about these things. So what's your thoughtful approach to social media and your business? Yeah, so it is a good question. I have a Twitter account at B. Stalberg that I do use. And I have mixed feelings about Twitter. I can't stand it and loathe it for all the reasons that you do. And I've met some really interesting people on social media.

I met my co-author, Steve. I was scared to say it because I'm on the deep questions Cal Newport podcast, but the reason I learned about Steve's blog is Twitter. So I don't know if I would have written these books had I not had a Twitter account. So Twitter is a place where I'm fairly active. What that means is I probably tweet once to twice a day, and I probably check in with Twitter in a very Cal Newportian way. You know, maybe once or twice a day for 10 minutes,

but it's not something I just do to fill up. time. It's very intentional. It's like, huh, like I'm going to check in, respond to people, see certain people that I follow if they've shared anything interesting, and then get off. All other social media, I'm not on. The growth equation, which is my collaborative endeavor with Steve, we have a social media person that we pay to post for us. And the reason I am not on is not because I'm this elitist, self-righteous person. It's the opposite. It's because I'm a total junkie. And if I was on multiple social media, I would just waste all my time, energy. I'd go on dopamine roller coasters of feeling validated and not validated. You know, you've talked about

this ad infinitum cal. These systems are built to get you addicted. And I don't have superpowers that can stop me from getting addicted. So therefore, I choose to not be on them. Well, I think what's important in your answer is that you work backwards from the underlying value. So, you know, you know that meeting interesting people or discovering interesting people is important. And so you're deploying Twitter to do that. So you know why you're using Twitter. And that allows you to optimize it. So if you know that's why you're using Twitter,

it's much easier not to have it open for three hours a day, whatever, yelling at people or going on dopamine roller coasters. And so I think that's what's crucial there. And then let's say like happy LA girl, let's say they have a similar value. But she finds she's having a harder time controlling. her Twitter use, even though she only really wants it to meet interesting people. Now that you know why you use it, now you can find alternatives as well. You're like, well, what I really am trying

to do is meet interesting people. I'm having a hard time with Twitter. It's like a little bit too addictive for me. You know what? I could probably come up with some other ways to use the social internet or maybe even the world around me to like constantly meet people or being encounter interesting people. Once you know the value, you can find different ways to get at it. And so I think that's great. And I hope the listeners take that away from your answer is you're working backwards from what you're, oh, I want to do this. Oh, this tool helps me. And I seem to be able to use that way. These tools want to help me with that. So why would I be on them? Yeah. And something else, though, I've been thinking more about, right? I watched the movie The Social Dilemma. I just reread Neal Postman's book amusing ourselves to death is I don't know how much longer I'll be on social media. And it might not be forever because I'm increasingly worried not only about what it's doing to my brain, but definitely. definitely what it's doing to my brain, especially when I use it more frequently than I'd like, but also just like the collective brain. And something I've been thinking more and more about is this issue of context switching that social media promotes. So you can scroll Instagram,

for example, on Holocaust Remembrance Day and see pictures of dead bodies piled up at a death camp, such an important, somber moment. And literally within a millisecond, see a picture of a vegetarian egg white omelet. And I just don't think that is good for public discourse. So I don't know. I'm increasingly becoming more critical of social media and my thinking, but I don't want to be a hypocrite. I do have Twitter. And to give the diehard Kel Newport fans a laugh out there, there was once a time when Kel and I were doing a little gossip about another one of the these kind of public intellectual book writers who will not be named. And this person was, in my opinion, going off the rails. And it is very true, Cal does not have Twitter, but Cal will occasionally

look at a picture of Twitter that I sent him on my phone. That did happen. That was enough. That was enough to keep me off it for another year. I was like, oh, okay, that's what happens on there. Oh. Yeah. Well, and the thing, my, like, I don't know, techno-libertarian economic philosophy that's developing is that the, the aspects I think of social internet style tools or business that are sustainable and positive is when you combine audience acquisition friction with platform independence. So, you know, audience platform acquisition friction, it's like when you had your blog or with a podcast or with a book where it's, it's really non-trivial to get an audience to listen for you. And this is like one of the things, Tristan talks about this well, Tristan Harris.

This is like one of the things that is most powerful and insiduous about social media. It's like what they really figured out how to package was not just your attention, but how to give you attention. And it is this notion of, and the way that some of the modern networks like TikTok really, really play on this, of like, we're going to give you some extra views now, to give you that hit, to give you this sense of an audience is listening to you. We'll show you to 20,000 people right away.

So you have a video that kind of takes off and you feel like you have an audience and people are paying attention to you. And when you lower the friction to audience acquisition, I think that causes a lot of problems. So. No one is above it. Like I coach on this. It's so worth mentioning. I get totally addicted. And if I have a really pithy tweet and I find myself checking 10 times in the next hour if it's over 100 retweets, Like, you're never going to get over that.

All that you can hope to do, and sorry to interject Cal, but I think it's important is if you are going to use a platform, all that you can hope to do is develop enough self-awareness to catch yourself when you're doing it and create better boundaries. Yeah. And to not underestimate the power of attention is the friction's being really removed. You can, just like a tweet that has the right phrasing and the right timing can get you like a lot of attention. in a way where in high friction audience acquisition, you know, medium, there is no like accidental way to just casually gather a lot of attention. It's hard. Like I got to write an article. I got to build my skills. I got to build up to bigger publications. I have to craft something that's like really meaningful. And that friction is really important because it leads to audience acquisition friction

leads to much more, I think, thoughtful and contextualized content, which is the social internet at its best. And then platform independence, I think, is key that the more distributed the ownership of the platform to better, which is why I'm big on blogs, even though they're kind of old-fashioned, but I think podcasts right now are excellent. Podcasts are incredibly independent. I mean, you have a hoster that, like a server somewhere that hosts your podcast, and then many different players and browsers can point to your podcast on your server, but it's like an incredibly independent thing, which I think is fantastic.

And it is high audience acquisition friction. It's hard to get people to listen to your podcast. Also, news, I think substack is doing something interesting. I mean, I don't know how I feel about one company owning all that. I think a lot of those journalists could probably just do this on their own with, you know, a weekend's worth of work. You know, you don't, but the notion of like an email newsletter that people pay for, hard to acquire an audience. It's going to contextualize the information a lot more, much more distributed in terms of like, I'm in charge of this and no one else is or trying to monetize it. So anyways, that's what I'm looking for these days, which is, I think, a different answer than people often assume I might have.

which is just, well, the internet is bad. You shouldn't be trying to connect to people on the internet or discover things or express yourself. I think the internet's great for that. I just think these particular tools are problematic. So there we go. That's a vision of what makes an internet tool potentially good. Though Brad had forgot to mention that him and Steve have a very popular TikTok account where they dance out, dance out advice about recovery to modern 80s pop tunes.

Yeah, it's at Cal Newport. So go check it out. man, there's a bunch of fake Cal Newports out there. One of the fake Cal Newports on Twitter seems to be really anti-Semitic, so that's fun. And then there's another one. Anyways, there's a lot of fun. And fun fact, Twitter does not make it easy for you to take down fake accounts if you're not a user of Twitter. If you're a blue check user of Twitter, you're like, let's get that out of there.

If you're not a user of Twitter, they're basically their stance is, why this is like a net loss for us? Why would we take a count down where someone could be looking at it, even though they have my picture? And the name is literally like Cal Newport 2 or something. And back to that question, because there's one more point to add. I've been thinking about this a lot. It's a section in my fourth coming book that doesn't come out until later next year,

but it's been on my mind. And that is to get really clear, and I have to do this all the time, and honest with yourself about what are you actually using the platform for? Is it truly a business imperative? Do you really need it to meet people? Or are you actually just using this for these little ego boost to feel relevant? Because there is such an allure to being what I call an internet celebrity. But all the internet celebrities that I know, and I'm not above this,

when I spend a month chasing internet stardom or celebritydom, whatever, that looks like, I am not happy. The happiest people that I know are celebrities in their own neighborhoods, in their towns, in their small companies. So I'm not saying that you should never have social media. Clearly, I do. But really ask yourself, do I need it? Now, if you're trying to sell a book or a national product and a social media account helps you reach a lot of people, sure. But if actually what you need is just a couple hundred people to buy your product or service, I would really try to start smaller in person and in your community. So the tagline that I've been telling myself in people I coach is don't aim to be a celebrity on the internet, name to be a celebrity in your neighborhood.

I love that. Yeah, if you need 100 people to validate you by paying attention to you, make it 100 people in your community who are impressed by you because you ran an initiative that was useful. Or because you're the person who shows up when people are having a hard. time or you know, you're the person at the school or at your church or whatever that gets together the committee when, you know, someone is sick and we're going to get food there. I am completely with you. I think that craving is what social media hijacked cynically. Like we're wired to, we're wired to want to be, have standing in our community, but in a sort of tribal, smaller, physically proximate sense. And then that's what you hack when you get those stupid, you know, numbers next to the heart or the retweets.

And you're absolutely right. Being better known is terrible in a lot of ways. I mean, I don't know if it used to be different, but yeah, like careful what you wish for. Like let me, I'll tell you,

I'm not that well known, but like I'm well known enough that I'll, you know, on a semi-regular basis, get recognized places, um, like a couple times a year or something like that. So nothing,

nothing great. Uh, it's just, it's not, I miss when it was smaller. I miss when it was just like my blog community who I've known for a long time because all that happens is people yell at you all the time.

And I'm not on social media and people yell at me all the time. And people write articles. It's a fun one. Like how many times have you had, you know, when you start getting people writing and publishing articles that are just attacking you, you know, because you're just an abstraction.

Yeah. So it's like, what do you, it's not, if that's the thing you're going, for, I couldn't imagine going for just that attention without, at least like, if that's a side effect of you're doing something you think is important, okay, you have to put up with it. But to just seek it on its own, it really doesn't match with our minds. And it's pretty

terrible. I mean, it's, it's, we're not well suited for like lots of people being mad at you, or at least seemingly so all the time. Yeah, 100% agree. Yeah. All right. Well, let's do, let's do, let's do one more here. Because I know we're running a little bit long. Um, all right, here's like going to passion paradox slightly and also just your coaching and general, T-dub says, how can a 40-something-year-old who has fully bought into but has been disappointed by the passion mindset, which is my word for like, it's all about matching your work to your passion, shift her thinking and salvage or change her career based on, well, she says the principles of career capital and the craftsm mindset, but let's change that to, you know,

based on the advice of Brad. So you have someone in their 40s. who has just been following their passion again and again and it's not working, what should they do? All right. So the first thing that I would say is to step back and lower the bar from passion to interest or curiosity. Another route, and you mentioned this earlier, it's something I talk a lot about with my coaching clients, are values. So you can ask yourself, what are the things I'm interested in?

what are the things I'm curious about or what are my core values. And if you feel like you don't have core values, you could say, who's someone in my community that I really admire? What do I admire about that person? And then those can be values that you can adopt for this exercise. Then you have to ask yourself, all right, well, first off, can I pursue those things in my current job or my current life? Because sometimes you don't have to make a radical switch, right?

the passion model, as you've written about and I've written about, says you need to immediately quit your job and follow your next passion. No, you can actually job craft pretty often, and you can not have to make these drastic life changes and still pursue more of those interest, curiosities, or values. If you do find yourself just running into a dead end, you can't make it happen in your current set up, then I'd say, what does incrementalism look like here? You know, Nassim to Libes Barbell. It's certainly the strategy that I followed. So before you just quit your job, how can you keep doing what you're doing so that you can pay the bills and have that stability and then gradually pursue these interests elsewhere. And then as you incrementally

pursue those interests, you can shift more of your time, energy to those things. So good, they can't ignore you to say one of Kells books, you get better at them, you can demand more value, and then you make that shift. I have to use myself as an example here, but there's all kinds of research that shows this to be true. People look at me and they're like, overnight, you became a fairly well-read writer. No, I didn't. It was 10 years. One of my favorite research studies, this is in the Passion Paradox, shows that people that quit their job to launch companies are 60 to, well, I guess it's 30 to 60% less successful than people that keep their current job and incrementally start another company. So I think it's a lot of word vomit.

My big takeaway there is lower the bar from I need to be passionate to this is something I'm interested in. This is something I can pursue mastery in. This is something I'm curious about. This aligns with my values. And then don't fall into the passion thinking trap of immediately making a big switch. Do it incrementally. But I'm curious, Cal, how would you answer that question? No, that's 100% in line with what I would recommend.

Yeah, you lower the bar, because that's what people would push back off and about so good. Oh, so you're saying I can just throw a dart at a job listing and whatever it hits, I could be just as happy and that as anything else. Like, no, there's certain things you're better suited for for others and certain things that are better matched than others. It's just about lowering the bar. The one true passion is you're meant to be a basketball commentator. And if you don't do that, you're going to be miserable.

Whereas what you're saying, I just 100% agree with. The bar is just a lot lower for the starting point. So that first step is a lot easier. I'm interested in this. I'm well suited for this. I already have some skills in that. I like where it could lead. I like the options.

A lot of things might satisfy those properties. Any of them are a good place to start. Now, of course, you have to do a lot more work once you're there. So follow your passion puts all the work up front. Oh, you've got to find the perfect thing. But then once you find it, you'll be happy from day one. It's easy once you have it. And I think this inversion is much more accurate.

The choice is a lot easier than you think. But the effort required to increase. incrementally explore and build skills and see how it works and it takes longer than you think is that's where the effort is. So I think that's great advice and it just underscores why I get so frustrated when we just take all of this and condense it down to just famous people saying, oh yeah, just follow your passion. Oh, go ahead.

Sorry, Kelly. It's just not that there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with like being passionate about your work or trying to find something good. It's the simplification is the crime because it's more complicated. And if you don't arm people with more complicated, understandings of like this is how you do something as hard as crafting your crew that's meaningful. If you just give them the slogan, you know, good luck. Yeah, there's so much nuance. One of my more like one of the more interesting bodies of research that we looked into for

the Passion Paradox was the parallels between falling in love and finding a career that you're really happy about. And this all, the research on mindset, is like 100% aligned. So individuals that have a passion model of career that think that there's going to be a job that's like lightning striking and they're going to know from day one that it's the perfect job and they're going to groove in and have the perfect fit, those people tend to switch jobs much more frequently than people with what researchers call a development mindset of career passion, which is people that think that actually

my goal is not to be passionate about this career on day one. my goal is to be passionate about it on year 10. So it's a path to that. And researchers that study like romantic passion and love, they find the same thing. They call it a soulmate theory of love. And people that think that there's only one soulmate for them out in the world are 10 times more likely to end up single than people who have a much lower bar and say, actually, there's probably a lot of people I'm compatible with.

And no one's going to be my soulmate on the first date or the fifth date. my goal isn't to have the perfect soulmate on day one. My goal is at year 40 to look my partner in the eye and be like, wow, we've really become soulmates. And I just found that fascinating. Like to a T, I don't want to quote, I'd have to go back into my book. But the numbers are something like 78% for work and 76% for love end up unhappy if they have that mindset where it's got to be passionate for at first glimpse.

Yeah, I think that is exactly it. So T-W, take that advice into mind. Those are studies of the type that, you know, I wish I had cited in my book because it gets at the heart of, I think, real truths about passion and satisfaction and meaning in work. Speaking of meaning and satisfaction, this is probably a good place to wrap this up. I know we've gone a little bit longer than I normally do, but I was really enjoying the conversation. I think my listeners do as well. If you want more Brad Wisdom, everyone, growth equation podcast, you can get that wisdom injected straight into your proverbial digital veins.

Then there is his books as well, co-authored with Steve Magnus, peak performance, and the Passion Paradox. We really are, I don't know, doppelgangers intellectually at some time. So if you're a Brad fan that wants a little bit more, you can read some Cal. And if you're a Cal fan that wants a little bit more, you can read some Brad. and I think you will be pleased with what you discover. So, Brad, thank you for coming on to the podcast. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Kale. I love all the conversations that we have offline,

so it was fun to put one online. Maybe sometime soon we'll be hiking through the snow to do a joint podcast recording at our studio at the Mala Props Bookstore in downtown Asheville. So who knows, that could be our future. All right, Cal. And thanks everyone for listening. All right, thanks, Brad.

All right, that's all the time we have for today's episodes. Thank you to Brad Stolberg for joining us. If you haven't signed up for my mailing list yet at calnewport.com, you should do that. I'm about to send out a new survey soliciting podcast questions. That is how you can submit your own questions for this podcast. I should be back later this week with a habit tune-up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.