Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 51: Saying "No", Building an Email List Without Social Media, and Falling Short of High Expectations | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about saying "no" when others will say "yes" to the same offer, building an email list without social media, and falling short of high expectations for your life, among many other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can also submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:DEEP DIVE: The Deep Reset, Part 2WORK QUESTIONS - Saying “no” when others will say “yes” [12:51] - Implicit time blocking [16:31] - Academic overwhelm [19:31] - Slogging through the early stages of writing [27:55] - Working hard without being hard on yourself [31:15]  TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Building an email list without social media [35:26] - Reviewing metrics [41:45] - Why I started this podcast [51:42]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - My thoughts on academia [56:24]  - Money/possessions in the deep life [1:00:03] - Falling short of idealistic ideas [1:03:42]  - Is it worth trying to be exceptional? [1:09:46]Thanks 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.

This podcast is brought to you in part by our longtime sponsor, Grammarly. Now, here's the thing. Clarity in how you express yourself is really important. You have probably noticed this when you read a professional article, a long-form piece in a magazine, an op-ed in the newspaper, the way that the points made in those professional pieces of writing seem to be much more convincing than when, say, your friend text you, or you read an argument in an email from your co-worker.

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Blinkis can help accelerate your path towards depth and away from shallow. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Mlinch-S-D-T, M-E K-E-S-D-T, to get 25% off a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Question.

the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Quick announcements for this week. I have arbitrarily decided to call the podcast starting in the new year season two. And I'm trying to put in place a series of improvements to both the sound quality, but also the format and tightness of the episodes. I'm sort of overhauling everything in preparation for season two. of the Deep Questions podcast. So with this in mind, I had a particular question to ask you about right now, which is your opinion on the habit tune up mini episode format. Do you like that format?

Should I do something completely different with the mini episodes? So is it redundant to be doing sort of these productivity questions when we already do questions about work in the main episode format? I am open to suggestions. I am open to feedback. Just send that all to interesting at calnewport.com. I will take your advice seriously as I go through the process this month of trying to make this into an even better podcast as we get towards season two. All right. Last week, we introduced a new opening segment called The Deep Dive in which we look at a topic in depth over several episodes. We started with the topic of the Deep Reset. So let's pick up right now where we left off last week by returning to our Deep dive on the Deep Reset.

Now, as I explained in part one of this discussion, the deep reset describes that feeling a lot of people have had recently about not wanting to necessarily go back to their life as normal after all of the disruption of the pandemic is over. A lot of people feel this deeper intimation that they want something more, they want some sort of change that this experience is pushing them towards some type of transformation. we call this the Deep Reset. In part one, I talked about how common this feeling is, how common it is to have an urge to reset as a response to disruption. I also in part one recommended that to prepare yourself for this reset, that you inject some silence into your life. Among other things, I said you should take your news consumption

and incredibly consolidate that so that you do not have this constant, background hum of amygdala plucking anxiety throughout your day. I also recommended that you did at least one non-urgent commitment in your life. You add at least one non-urgent commitment to something outside of yourself. Just to reset your mind into thinking, I can do actions that are beyond my own interest. I have a lot more options and flexibility to affect the world around me. It seems like a minor thing, but it just changes the way your mind processes and what it looks for. So now you have this silence, what I call solitude often in my writing. And what we want to do now is build on this silence to help lay the foundations for the deep reset to follow. All right, so how do

we do that? Well, I'm going to introduce here a technique I call resonant sampling. So here, Here's how it works. You first have to identify what are the major areas of my life that I care about, that I value what I do there, that it's important to me living a life well lived. Now, in my writing and on my podcast, we often use the terminology buckets to talk about these, the buckets that make up the areas of a deep life. It is useful to break out the things that are important to you into these different categories. So when I talk about these buckets and my own writer on my podcast, I typically I identify as examples.

Craft is probably one of these buckets or categories. Craft being what you produce. This could be your professional life, but craft could also be, let's say, non-professionally. That is not for your income. You produce something sort of artistically that's important to you, whatever it is. But it's the construction of things of value. to the world. Community is a very important bucket for most people. This captures your relationships with your family, your friends, the people who live around you, and also other types of

communities in which you might find yourself, be them physical or virtual. I talk about constitution as one of these buckets. That means your health. Contemplation is another important bucket. That captures your drive to have a philosophical, ethical, and ethical. and or theological engagement with the world and how you live and why you live. And there's others, right? So again, these are just some examples. You can decide for yourself,

what are the sort of buckets, the categories that are important to you in terms of living a life well-lived, but you want to enumerate those. Now, with resident sampling, what you then do is you begin sampling examples of people trying to intentionally prioritize each of these buckets,

and you see what resonates. So you take advantage of this silence that we have injected into your life to actually listen to these internal intimations that when you read about this person, when you watch this documentary, when you chat and meet with this actual person who lives nearby you, do you feel something internal that says, yeah, that feels about right?

or is it not creating any reaction at all? So you're actually looking to listen to your internal intimations to try to figure out what resonates and what doesn't. You are listening to yourself to identify what it is yourself really needs to live a deeper life. Now, this will vary depending on who you are

and what buckets you are looking at, right? So maybe in the Constitution bucket, for example, you look at the Twitter feed of Navy SEAL Jock Willink, who every morning takes a picture of his watch at 4.30 when he gets up to do brutal exercises and then takes a picture of the sweat on the floor next to whatever torture device style exercise equipment he just used, and that's all he posts.

Like maybe that resonates with you, that there's some notion of a very sort of Herkulean strength-building training that resonates. Or maybe on another extreme, you know, watching the chef's table. We're watching the PBS series with Michael Pollan and seeing people selecting fresh ingredients and using them to construct interesting, healthy food,

but also food that they're connected to and feels intertwined with their life. Maybe that really connects with you when you're sampling things within the Constitution bucket. And so on. Maybe in the craft bucket, watching, you know, like I talk about in my book, a deep work video of Rick Fur,

a blacksmith in Wisconsin, forging, you know, ancient weapons and an open door barn overlooking a field with his big beer. Maybe that resonates or maybe it's something completely different. You know, something about like an artist with a really driven artistic endeavor

that really gets to you or you're looking at an entrepreneur that's out there doing some sort of social entrepreneurship. Whatever it is. My point is, you sample, you read things, you watch things, you meet people, you sample within these buckets, you see what resonates, and you keep track of what resonates, have a notebook or do it on your computer. When I do these exercises, I have a small moleskin

notebook I use. I just like the format, but it doesn't really matter so long as that you are purposefully sampling and you're taking notes. So what you're doing here is you're taking advantage of the silence we created with the advice from part one of this deep dive to actually listen to yourself, but to listen to yourself in a more systematic manner. You are extracting wisdom from your own intimations. This wisdom will then be the foundation on which we will talk about how to plan out the details of a deep reset transformation. That in itself is a big topic. So that's what we will pick up with on next week's episode. When we get to part three of the deep dive on the deep reset, we will get into the topic of how to then build on this knowledge you picked up with your resident sampling to figure out, okay, so what changes do I want to actually make?

So I look forward to continuing this discussion, but for now, let's do some work questions. Lucas asks, how do I make people respect my schedule if I am freelancing in an environment where somebody else can always take my job, if I say no. Well, Lucas, in the long term, your goal should be to become so good that you can pick and choose what you work on and how much you work on without fear because people are happy to have you when they can get you.

I talk about this in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I say autonomy is one of the big things you can earn with what I call career capital as you become more and more good, you can gain more autonomy over your work. And autonomy, you know, I think I describe it as the dream job elixir in that book because it plays such a big role in satisfaction. And I tell stories in the book exactly of people becoming good enough that they can

set their own freelance terms about how much they work and not worry about it. So that's a good long-term goal. If you want to read another good book about pushing that idea to an extreme, I recommend Paul Jarvis' book, Company of One, a really good book about lifestyle entrepreneurship that talks about how you, as you get better at something, why and how you might want to leverage that to gain more freedom and autonomy, as opposed to what most people do,

which is to leverage that to make their business bigger, to bring on more work. And so Jarvis talks about an alternative mindset that as you get better, you essentially charge more instead of doing more. And what you're trying to do is make the same amount of money for less and less work. I'm simplifying it, but it's a good book. I blurbed it. Check that out.

Now, Lucas, what about the short term? Before you were so good, you can't be ignored. And a lot of fields, there's a lot of hustling that has to happen early on. You're right. You do not get to completely set this is exactly how I want to work. In some fields, if you're not there, if you're not taking jobs, you are forgotten. but this can go too far. You can get into a hustle mindset in which your life becomes less livable because of the sheer

volume of work you take on. You can eventually develop a phobia of saying no, which can be problematic as well. So what I suggest there is having some sort of clear schedule or quota style system you use to determine how much work you do and have this be something that you can really clearly communicate so that people understand when you say no why you say no, that it doesn't just seem random, it doesn't just mean you're flaky. It is, oh, yeah, I know Lucas has this set up where he doesn't do weekend work because he's with his kids. Or he's whatever. He rarely, he can only do evenings one night a week because of his family situation. Or he has room to do

five jobs a week. He already has five books, so he can't do it this week. That makes a big difference. difference. If people know why you were saying no, they're not just going to think, well, Lucas is unreliable. Lucas is flaky. They're going to say, oh, there's clear reasons when he does. They make sense. So I'll ask him again next time. Like, I just happened to hit him after his schedule was full. I happened to hit him after his quota got overfilled. I happen to ask him to do the work at a time where he doesn't normally work. But now I know what his schedule is. I know his quota. So I don't file him away as someone who's flaky and I'll probably say, no. I just think of him as someone who has, you know, his act together when thinking about.

his work, and so that's what I would suggest in the short term. Cam asks, can you time block implicitly? I often try time blocking for a few days, but then fall out of the habit, largely because my days and tasks are pretty routine, so my time block plans are pretty similar day to day. Well, Cam, I have two thoughts here. The first is I think you should still time block, but maybe be more aggressive or innovative with your practice.

So what I mean by this is, I mean, let's say that you really do have pretty routine days. You kind of do the same type of things most days. You kind of have the same sort of task blocks. Use time blocking to innovate what you do during your day. I mean, if anything, time blocking, if you optimally stack and move these things around, might just allow you to finish your work earlier. Or time blocking might allow you to aggressively fit in time every single day for a non-urgent but long-term important endeavor, a new skill, you're building a new initiative

that you're growing, get some excitement back into there. Or maybe there's just some sort of hobby or high-quality leisure activity unrelated to your work. But with time block planning, you can find time for it, you can move it in. What I'm trying to say here, Camas, that when you actually are controlling your time during your workday, you can do a lot with it and get a lot out of it. Get a lot more out of it than just saying, look, I have a rough routine I follow and I sort of more or less go through the motions. You can be more energized, you can be more productive, and you can fit in more interesting things when you actually clear line filled in time block with a time block scheduler type time block planner, whatever your equivalent is actually doing that time blocking.

There's a lot you could do there. The other thing I would recommend is maybe you could consider some time block days and some non-time block days. So some days, it's like, look, I'm just working all day on this. It's not worth time blocking. I get that. I think a lot of writers have told me something similar. They basically are like, look, I get my kids off to school at this point. And then I just kind of write. And I try to be done by late afternoon. They're like, there's nothing to time block here. Okay, I get that. So you might have some days you don't time block. And then days you do. And the days you do, you're like, let me get after it on these days I do and get all my tasks done very efficiently, make progress on non-urgent things. Let me get this new project off the ground.

So you have like really intense time block days where you're getting way more done than you normally would just going through your pretty typical routine and then maybe you have some days you don't time block because it's whatever you're working on one thing and it's not worth it. So those are two suggestions. You know, not everyone needs a time block, but don't forget there is a lot of value latent in your day that can be extracted when you actually apply this philosophy full out. And of course, if you were new to time blocking, you want to know more about this, go to timeblockplanner.com. I explained a method. There's a great video of me explaining how time blocking works.

So for the uninitiated, you can get up to speed there. Joe asks, I'm overwhelmed. I teach, but also need to publish for my profession. But after finishing my teaching obligations, I have little left in the tank to write. As Joe elaborates, he was a sort of a star academic coming out of graduate school. He came out of graduate school into the pandemic, so he took the, quote, first job offer to me because of COVID collapsing the academic job market. As he then goes on,

I'm fortunate to have a job, but now I've moved with my family to a remote place with a 4-4 teaching load, which is being taught in person, making it very difficult because I need to plan the course for both in person and online for those who get quarantined. This is a very tough moment, lots of teaching prep, new place with a young family, and I don't know what's key. or and I know that what's key to my future is that I need to publish. All right. Well, Joe, you've got a lot going on there. For the uninitiated, a 4-4 teaching load means you teach four courses in the fall and four

courses in the spring. That's a heavy teaching load. So by comparison, if you are at, let's say, a really research-focused university, if you're at MIT as a computer scientist, for example, you would typically have a 1-1 teaching load, where you would teach one course in the fall and one course in the spring. At Georgetown, where I am, the computer science department typically has a one-two teaching load. So you teach three total courses over the two semesters just so we can calibrate. It's a heavy load.

All right. So, Joe, here's my big picture. My big picture reaction before we get to the specifics is you're in the middle of a short-term crisis. A lot of us are in the middle of a short-term crisis. And I think we need to keep that in mind to let ourselves off the hook here. a little bit. You have a 4-4 load. You just moved somewhere remote with your whole family, and who knows, now you have kids, and they're in school, or they're having to do it hybrid, or have to do it online. You don't have child care yet. You've just moved. You're trying to

get ready for a new school. You're prepping 4-4, which is crazy, a crazy load, because you haven't taught any of those courses before. You have this pandemic stress going on. You're doing in-person slash trying to do virtual for the online students, the students who are taking the courses online. Look, I look at this and say, this is not let's master the universe time. This is let's hunker down for a few more months and survive, and then we can stick our head up out of the foxhole

and say, okay, what territory do we want to conquer next? In other words, what I'm saying is, I would not stress too much at this moment, at the end of your first of two of very hard semesters about your research output. Most, not most, I would say, I guess half of academics right now aren't really producing much research this year.

Which half is this? The half that have kids. Now there's this other half of academics who are producing a lot of research because they don't have kids and now they don't have to commute to campus and they actually have extra time. But I would say, Joe, a lot of us

are not doing a lot of researching right now because it's just a, as I like to say, it's a dumpster fire of a time. Things are going to get better. I mean, things are going to get better soon. but right now it's hard and so I don't want you to be beating yourself up because you are not producing right now

as you might be in a normal circumstance under a low teaching load when everything is working well all right so that's my big picture thing and I think this goes for everyone out there especially new academics who are feeling stressed out about not publishing as much this year

none of us are right this is temporary it's okay all right let's get specific though because Joe, you are early in your career, and I don't want you to give up on publication. So I'm going to suggest to you the following for the winter. Come up with a reading reflection routine in which every weekday you are doing some academic reading relevant to your research and or some reflection or thinking. I want you to find a way to make this routine a source of not just invigoration, but also reliance.

relaxation, make it something enjoyable. Like maybe it involves you, you live in a remote place. So maybe it involves you hiking. You know, you reflect and hike through like a scenic thing. Maybe it's something you do in the evening and or, you know, you sit down and maybe you have a, you have like a drink and you sit down by the fire in the winter and your remote place. Like really lean into the fact that you're living somewhere remote and probably cold. And you read by the fire like you're Carl Jung and the moment.

Bollinger Tower, like whatever it is. I want you to have a routine. It doesn't have to be long. It can be 30 minutes a day. But it's something that you really lean into that you look forward to that's a little bit relaxing. It's just you reading and thinking for the sake of reading and thinking. You're just keeping this foundation going, a non-urgent, self-initiated, motivated

academic thought. Well, that's all I want you to worry about. Then as we get closer to the summer, that's where you are going to take the car out in neutral, you're going to put in the drive and you're going to get after it. As we get to summer, a lot's going to be different. You're going to be done prepping all those courses. You are going to have the break that is summer coming up.

Now, if you're at a school where you have the option of doing summer teaching or otherwise you have to have grant funding to pay your summer salary, look, if you have savings that allows you to do neither, this might be a good summer for that, you know, that money you couldn't spend on vacation, during the pandemic, maybe you spend to help fill in your 10-month salary so you really can have some breathing room, but you get to the summer, you're done prepping courses. The pandemic stress is going to be significantly, significantly less than as well. And you don't want to

underestimate the psychological toll of what's going on with the pandemic, but we get past this wave we're in now, which I know seems endless. But let me just give you some optimism. Let me have some optimism, Joe. Look to Europe. You know, they started with a fall wave about a month before us. Basically, everywhere in Europe is well past their peak. The first states in the U.S. to have a fall wave was to Midwest. You don't hear about this a lot, but go to the COVID tracking project. Almost every state in the Midwest peaked about two weeks ago. So like things are going to get better. This wave is going to die down. We're going to have vaccines. We're going to have therapeutics. The summer is going to be a completely different picture. There's a lot of higher education

institutions that are now planning to bring back students for a summer session because they're so confident that there'll be enough vaccinations out there that there really won't be a lot of out-of-control spread. Anyways, you're going to feel much better, and you're going to have more time. And you're going to have spent all winter into the spring thinking and reading in a sort of relaxed and self-motivated way. Now you take that foundation, and now when you hit the summer, that's when I want you to get hardcore.

That's when you're going to start, you know, getting up early and having three hours in the morning or four hours in the morning where you're out at your cabin. And Joe, you don't know this yet, but if you move to somewhere remote to be an academic, I'm telling you you're required to have some land with a cabin somewhere that you can go to and have a little marine stove in there to heat it. You've got to do it, Joe. You're going to go out to your cabin. You're going to hardcore start riding, and the floodgates are going to open up.

So that's my suggestion. So let me just summarize. For everyone out there, we're still in dumpster fire period. We're still in the dumpster fire period. But you can see the trucks coming to extinguish it. You can hear the sirens down the road. So we're still in the dumpster fire. It's fine not to have high expectations for huge levels of production right now.

But now is the time to start laying your plans for like, okay, we're going to have this dumpster pretty soon. And I just, so it's okay that you're not researching now. I don't want you to beat yourself up over it. But I do want you to lay this like intellectual foundation, this winter, to stay connected to why you like that. Your ideas are thinking. You're making connections. You're having thoughts. You're doing slow thinking.

And when you get to the summer, you're going to buy that cap. You are going to go out to that cabin. You're going to do three hours a day. You can do four hours a day. And your rocket ship career will take off then. John asks, how do I stay on target through the research prep outlining stage of writing?

I'm a screenwriter in the middle stage of working on my screenplay. I track deep work hours. I don't track pages yet because I'm not writing any. I'm still in the prep stage where I'm ironing out the story. I often feel overwhelmed and struggle to see if I'm making any progress at all.

Well, John, from what I understand from successful professional screenwriters, like the famous names, is they have the same problem. It's really difficult to get to that stage of the screenwriting where you're figuring out the plot, how it's going to unfold, what the characters are, what the arcs are.

Professional screenwriters, especially those who are given big checks to do this, so there's a lot of time pressure motivation is they attack it incredibly aggressively. Like the cliche, you know, of course you know this already, John, the cliche is that you lock yourself up in a hotel room. And we're going to pound this out. That's the mindset of professional screenwriters, which is different, for example, than novelist. It's much more, you know, every day. I go to my Neil Gaiman writing gazebo in Minnesota or on the island of Sky where he has a house and you just sort of work every day and slowly

tried to, like Michelangelo taking the stone away from the statue beneath, you try to bring out what you're writing. Screenwriters just locked themselves in the room. Aaron Sorkin, for example, little known fact when he wrote the screenplay for the American president. I believe he locked himself in a room at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and he locked himself in there with quite a bit of crack cocaine. He produced that screenplay. He also developed the show Sports Night during a very short period of time. John, what I'm trying to say here is you need a crack habit. it. No, not really. But what I'm trying to emphasize is that screenwriters know it's hard, so they really go hardcore after it. You basically just have to barrel through. Think, think, think. What about

this? What about that? What about this? So you might have to have a similar all hands-on-deck temporary attack mindset to get through the outline prep stage of your screenplay. You might need to do what we called the bimodal approach to deep work that I talk about in my book deep work in which you put aside whole days or whole groups of days where all I'm doing is working on the screenplay. And then when you're done with those groups of days, you do nothing for the screenplay. So like I'm just working normal work, doing my normal job. But then like Friday through Sunday, I am just locked in putting all my energy into it. For whatever reason, that seems to be useful for screenplays.

My more concrete advice would be when you're all in on the screenplay and it's all consuming you, you will eventually find traction. Just focus on producing actual milestones or artifacts. like I'm going to get this character sketch done. I'm going to get in my Scrivener the full out outline beats, even if I don't like them or not so I can see them. Now I'm going to fix act too, like have little milestones or artifacts you're doing.

So that's my recommendation. You got to go all sorking on this minus the crack, but plus the just this is all I'm doing. Be by modal. Give it huge chunks of time. Do those chunks as soon as you can and just power through until you get to the place where you can actually start writing that dialogue.

All right, I think we have time for one more work question. Jordan asks, how do you decouple working hard from being too hard on yourself when you inevitably or when in inevitably your plan breaks down due to interruptions or urgent work? As he elaborates, I generally time block my day to move forward on a couple of projects. I can usually get two to three hours of deep work done a day. the deep work is important but not urgent, but more urgent things come along and derail the plan and I end up putting the same deep work projects on my list

the next day. Well, Jordan, to answer your question about not being too hard on yourself, I am actually going to be a little hard on you about scheduling. I am guessing from your answer, this is just a guess, that you're not really doing time blocking. Based on the way that you talk about this here, What I imagine what you're doing is something like the list-based reactive method, with the exception that you tell yourself every day, I want to try to get in a few hours of deep work. And maybe you're even putting some deep work on your calendar.

So most of your day is list-based reactive, but you put aside a few hours optimistically, let's say in the afternoon, to do some deep work. But you find that your day kind of gets away from you. And when you get there, you think, you know, I'm in the middle of things. They don't really have time for this. It's not urgent. Let me take it off my schedule. I think if you did actual peer time blocking, you would have more success with this. With peer time blocking, of course, Jordan, you're not just putting aside some time for deep work.

You're really giving every minute of your day a job. So the non-urgent things, the tasks, those are also getting scheduled. You're also finding time for those things. So that you don't just get to a deep work appointment on your calendar and be like, well, how am I doing right now? Do I have time for this? It's every minute up to that point has also been structured. You see the whole day as one puzzle that you want to solve. So when you are approaching your work with pure time blocking,

this actually gets us to your original question. If you are hard on yourself for not getting to your deep work blocks, when you are time blocking instead, you can divert that self-scrutiny to just your time-blocking process. Now it's not about I am bad because I'm not doing deep work. it's, huh, my time block process is a little bit shaky right now because I've had to reschedule three times. I'm blowing past my email check blocks. I don't have enough time put aside when I have a Zoom meeting block because they always run a half hour later than originally scheduled or whatever

it is, but now your focus is not self-recriminatory, it's process-based. So I got to improve my time blocking habit. Okay, so I need more here. Maybe I need to use conditional blocks. Maybe I need to use the, like I talk about in the intro to my time block planner, the 50% rule. In your first few months, it's time blocking. You should see what your instinct says about how much time you need for something, and then add 50%. Because we chronically underestimate. But the whole idea here is your process focused.

Now you're not being harder to yourself. You're trying to become a better time blocker. And you will become a better time blocker. That's a good place to do your focus. And when you're a better time blocker, you're going to come closer to hitting your schedules. and that is going to give you control over your time. And once you have control over your time, you can decide how much deep work is reasonable,

given your other demands. You can find the best time to do that deep work, and that deep work just gets done, just like your email block gets done, just like your task block gets done, just like your meeting blocks get done. It's all just blocks being executed. And now you're really rocket rolling.

So that's what I would say, Jordan, fix up your time blocking habit, focus on becoming a better time blocker. That's where you should put your energy. Don't be hard on yourself about any particular type of work. just focus on that process. You will become better.

And as you become better, you will get more of that important but non-urgent deep work done. I think that's a pretty good sampling of work questions. Let's move on to now some questions about technology. Nick asks, how do you build an email list without social media? Well, Nick, I don't really like this terminology

of building an email list. I think just makes it into too much of a task-based endeavor where if you have the right channels and you have the right funnels and you do the right pop-ups, then you get X number more of email list subscribers. I think it turns this into too much of an abstract process. And it obscures the reality, which is what you are really doing is providing an email list that help people who really like what you're doing and what you are producing. you're helping them have a better way of keeping up with what you're doing. So the focus is really on being someone that people are interested in. Being someone who people would like to subscribe to an email list because they're so interested in you and what you're producing that they want more convenience and getting access

to it. The focus should be on that act of production, not on the mechanics of how you then gather those people's information, how you inform people that an email list is available. that's kind of an afterthought. And you're going to put the cart before the horse if you're focusing on that before you focus on producing value. And so when I see a question about how do I build an email list without social media, my concern is that what you're thinking about is social media-based techniques for gathering people onto your email list. But again, 10x more important than the interface for gathering email list people is why would people want to be on your email list in the first place?

That's a really hard question. I mean, it is really hard to produce something that a lot of people are very interested in consuming. People have limited time and attention, and a lot of money is being invested in trying to satisfy that time and attention. I mean, just imagine, God knows how many total billions of dollars right now are being spent in creating content for the streaming platform wars that are going on right now. I mean, just imagine how much brainpower and money is being invested right now into producing things. worthy of consumers time and attention. So it's a hard marketplace out there. And that's really where your focus needs to be,

is how can I produce something that people want to consume? Now, Nick, here's the tricky part. The answer might be, right now you can't. Right? I mean, you might like the idea. And I'm not saying this is true about you, Nick. I mean, it may turn out that Nick is short for Nick Cage. You're thinking about how do I get my massive fan base?

How do I get my massive fan base who recognized the cinematic brilliance of Conair and the cinematic brilliance of the rock, which I think we all recognize our peak 1990s movie making. How do I, okay, so if you're Nick Cage, okay, so I don't mean this about you in particular, Nick, but there's a lot of people where the answer to, how do I get people to want to consume my content right now?

I was like, well, you can't right now. There's nothing you can do next week that's going to be that interesting. you might have to actually make yourself more interesting before you can produce things that people want to consume. Now this is not a bad thing because the quest to make yourself more interesting is in itself rewarding. It means you're building a life that's more remarkable

and more impactful, but that might be where your focus needs to be. Is there something I've done, some skills, some mission, something that I've cultivated over time that I'm known for? Am I a world-class crafts person? I wrote about on my blog a few weeks ago about the stone carver. I showed a video of her. And it's just, she's fascinating. Like she does the old-fashioned Michelangelo style block a stone.

And she's really mastered how you turn that into a statue. And she works in this cool workshop that opens up out of a wooded, onto a wooden courtyard. And I wrote about her a few weeks ago, look, if you're her, you're really interesting. And I want to know about your thoughts on art or life or simplicity or. depth or whatever, right? So, Nick, like, what is your stone carving? What are you doing that's interesting? What have you done? How have you transformed yourself into something that other people might be interested in? Or what expertise have you painstakingly developed is really valuable. Maybe you're someone like Ben Thompson who runs the very popular strategy paid newsletter. He's

just a world-class observer of technology trends. And he's built up that skill over time. So what I say, Nick, is forget building your email list. Let's build a little. Let's build a yourself into someone interesting who can then produce content that other people are going to find interesting. Then you can provide these people who find you interesting an email list. Now, once you're there, once you're an interesting

person producing interesting things and you have people signing up for your email list, then you can ask the question. All right, how do I maybe optimize a little bit how people join this email list? So if you're like me and you have a blog, then maybe you're thinking about what form you do and where you put the forms or whether you have something pop up or if you do a podcast, maybe you want to think about how I talk about signing up for a mailing list.

Hey, social media might even play a role in here. Maybe you have a social media feed that you use very strategically to show off your work, but it's not on your phone and you do it on your browser and you just post things twice a week and you don't go down rabbit holes and you don't reply to people on Twitter. There's all sorts of ways I've talked about where you can leverage social media, you know, in ways that is strategically useful if that's true for you. And maybe you talk about it on there. And you can do all of that.

But this is all sort of window dressing. It's not that complicated. That's the easy part. And that's easy to find out about. So what I want, anyone who's thinking out there, I want to be producing content online. That's great. You got to earn it. And usually the first step is actually making your life, you and yourself and your life

more interesting. But again, that's all good because that is a gift that gives you rewards, even before. you actually alchemize it into email list subscribers. All right. And if you are Nick Cage, well, then my apologies for telling you to make your life more interesting. You, sir, are a hero among men, and I would be eager to sign up for your mailing list. All right. Dean asks, how do you recommend I qualify metrics that I only currently quantify?

I have a bullet journal in which I keep a monthly log of all the time I spend on creative projects, intellectual consumption, wellness practices, etc. I want to implement a, quote, quality analysis, end quote, into my system that documents the quality of how I spend my time in each category in relation to what my goals for that category were for the month. Right, Dean, that's a good question. This is the classic, what do you do with the metrics you track? I am, of course, a big proponent of metric tracking. It's why I have a metric tracking block in my time block planner and recommend that everyone have some metrics for both their professional and non-professional life that they track every day.

Metrics are also at the core of the discipline I teach for transforming your life into a deep life. The first step in that discipline is you identify a keystone habit in each of the main buckets, etc, etc. So I'm real big on metrics. Dean is asking, okay, but what do we do with them? once we've tracked them. What do we do with all this data? Well, I think you're very close to the answer.

So, Dean, you talk about doing a monthly review. I typically recommend a quarterly review instead of a monthly, but we can put aside that argument for now. But you do a bigger review of your life on this semi-regular basis. I think that's a great time to review your metrics. I think I actually get into this in the long-form introduction to my time block planner. or I talk about metric planning. I talk about reviewing the metrics.

And so there's a few things to do here. I mean, one is, yes, just to actually look at the data itself, just very quickly flip through. All right, how did I do? How did I do? How did I do? And if you see an interesting trend, that is a time to note it.

And that's a time to see if there's some action that needs to be made. If, like, you find, for example, you are chronically under hitting whatever you're tracking for some key wellness practices. This might tell you, okay, I need a more substantial change to my schedule. I want to walk 10,000 steps a day. I track it. I never get there.

I rarely get there. Now that you see that, you can say, great, I need to change something. So maybe I need to build a schedule where I first thing I do when I get up is I go for a walk, or I work it in at the end of the day or during the lunch hour, I trade off times with my spouse. Or, you know, it could motivate you to actually put in place more structures. So reviewing the data, looking for trends, and allowing those trends to help inform you to make structural changes. That's useful. The second thing you want to do during this review is maybe change your actual list of metrics themselves.

I talk about this in the introduction to my planner. It's hard to come up with good metrics. Some of them are trivial. A lot of them are just a little bit too hard. And sometimes the problem is not your discipline. Sometimes the problem is not that you need to change your schedule. The problem is that you're not really tracking the right thing to get at this underlying thing you care about. Right.

So maybe you're tracking whatever. You know, you have some sort of intellectual consumption metric. Like, did I hit my goal of reading a book each week? And you never hit the goal. And the reality might be you just don't really have – it's too ambitious. You don't have the time to do that. There's no way you're looking at your schedule. there's no way to make that happen.

But you still want to feed your intellect. You still think intellectual consumption is important. So what you might want to do there is say, I have the wrong metric. How many books that I read this week is the wrong metric? Let me track something different. It will still drive me to invest in and prioritize intellectual consumption, but be just tractable enough that it stretches me, but I can actually get it done. So that's the second thing you want to do during your reviews is to say,

do I need to actually change what it is that I'm tracking? And I think that's good, right? So you have these two things. Are the trends of the last month or last quarter informing me about changes I need to make to my life? Are the trends I'm observing from the last month or last quarter telling me I need to change what it is I track? Now, keep in mind, Dean, that as I often say, at least half of the value, if not 75% of the value of metric tracking comes in just the discipline of tracking the metrics themselves. I have been writing about this as early as my very first book, How to Win at College, which I wrote when I was a college student. Even in that very first book, I talked about knowing that you were going to be writing down,

here's how many deep work hours I got, here's how many steps I took. Did I follow my general eating guidelines from when I woke up until dinner? By the way, these are all three things I track. Knowing you were going to write that down, that it's a rock solid discipline. means that you're more likely to get that extra deep work hour in and not go down the internet rabbit hole. You're more likely to say, I'm not going to eat that junk and just stick with my habits because, you know, I kind of want to check off. I ate right. It means you're going to fight to get that walk in, even though it's not convenient, because you don't want to put down 4,000 steps when you're trying to hit 10,000.

So just knowing you're going to track the metrics is giving you, I would say, the majority of the value of this. But I'm glad you asked this question, Dean, because regular reviews of metrics is where you're you get the rest of the value, and that is my two suggestions for how to actually extract the needed positive information from this really crucial discipline. I want to take a moment to thank another one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible, and I am talking about ExpressVPN. You know, of course, to say the least, I am quite suspicious of big technology and their attempts to exploit us, to exploit our time, to exploit our data, to exploit our attention.

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I also want to talk about purple, makers of the world famous purple mattress and purple pillow. As I've talked about on this podcast before, I am a sleep nerd. You know how online mattress manufacturers have these guarantees where you can return to mattress

if you're not satisfied. I have done that. I have done that because I felt the mattress didn't quite give me what I was looking for. So you can take me seriously when I say purple is the real deal. Now what is it that they have? What's their proprietary technology?

Well, they have what's known as the purple grid. It's an innovative new approach to producing sleep materials. It's a patented comfort technology. It's like this moldable, meldable plastic, but it's in a grid. It's in a grid configuration.

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purple is a company that you need to keep on your radar. And of course, they have risk-free trials, like free shipping, free returns. You're going to like purple, but if you have any issues with it, they will take it back. No questions asked. So if you're a sleep nerd like me and you're looking for what is the latest, greatest

technology in the field of sleep material comfort, if you want to experience the Purple Grid for yourself, go to purple.com slash deep 10 and use the promo code deep 10. The numbers one zero, not the word. For a limited time, if you go and use that promo code, you'll get 10% off any order of $200 and more. That's purple.com slash deep 10, promo code, deep 10 for 10% off any order of $200 or more terms apply. I think we have time here for one more technology question.

Cam asks, why did you start this podcast? Well, Cam, that's a good question. I started this podcast in late May. So we've been going now for about six months. Why did I start it? It had to do a lot with the pandemic. So I was feeling disconnected. I'm someone who's on, you know, a college campus most days,

teaching students and going to faculty meetings and working with my graduate students and postdocs. I'm around people a lot. I also travel and speak quite a bit. You know, I go and I fly around the country and I give speeches to audiences and meet interesting people and go to interesting places. You know, right before the pandemic hit, like right as it was hitting, I was supposed to be in London for. a week. I was going to be doing speaking events. I was doing a cool event with Tim Hartford. We were going to do questions on stage at this cool venue in Notting Hill. I was going to do a bunch of radio. So like my life was very interesting in terms of connection, always around people. And so I miss that.

You know, by the time we got the May, I mean, we're just, we're at home. We're on Zoom. And it, I felt disconnected. And I thought the podcast would be a great way to, I don't know, interact with, with you, with my readers and with my listeners and interact with other people. It's not literally real-time interactive, but it did help me feel like I was more connected. And so that was a big piece of the initial motivation. There was also a hustle mode instinct at play here. I got this real strong urge early in the pandemic to gain more independence, to see myself less as a, you know, someone who writes for a big publisher.

company and teaches for a big university, but to see myself more as an independent media company where I had different channels in which I could interact with people. I had sort of my own content I was producing, I was owning. I just had this sense sparked by the economic uncertainty of the early pandemic that I wanted to be more independent. And that's when I began thinking about a podcast as a way to produce and own my own my own my own content and own my own channels with you. It's why I invested in a filming studio here at the Deep Work HQ. It's why soon you will be able to watch a lot more video of me.

I'm beginning by filming the Deep Dive segments, and so I'll be releasing those online, but I'm going to start also filming some of these questions and doing some other types of modules. I launched a course with Scott Young. That was a bid for independence. There were some other things you don't know about, but some sort of behind-the-scenes deals I made or explored. And so I really had this sense early on of, huh, you know, I kind of want to have my own thing going so that when if big institutions struggle during economic downturn, that I'm not just dependent, that I'm not just sitting there saying, geez, you know, I hope you don't cut too much, or geez, I hope you can still help me out here.

So I had that really, that streak of independence. I began to think about me as a media company and not just as a professor and writer. I've actually scaled I've scaled that back since so there's a lot of things I had in mind in addition to this podcast as part of that transformation that I scaled back because you know I just got more comfortable

universities are going to you know Georgetown's going to be fine Penguin Random House is not going anywhere my time is limited we got kids at home so I scaled back that ambition some degree but I still have this independent streak sparked by the beginning

of the pandemic where I want to be an individual, independent, sort of low overhead streamline, very, I don't know what you want to say, sort of innovative media company is its own little thing that has its own interactions with fans and its own income streams, just as a sort of stable foundation on which to actually weather uncertainties like this that might come. So that was also part of the motivation for this podcast. I still have ambitions down the line to eventually having a sort of, not a network, but a suite of shows that I would produce. I really enjoy this. I think it's a good medium. But I am also proceeding with extreme caution because there's nothing I protect more highly than my time and attention.

All right, let's do some questions about the deep life. D asks, what are your thoughts on academia as a tenured professor? Yeah, Dee, it's a good question. I mean, one thing people in my, let's say, writing circles ask me often is, why are you staying in academia? Why don't you write full time? They point out that I am at the moment more successful probably as a writer, I guess more well-known. as a writer than I am as an academic. And certainly in recent years, writing has been significantly more renumerative than being a professor. So they ask, why not just go all in on the

writing? And my answer is because I love academia and the academic life. It's in my blood to me. I don't know. There's nothing, there's few things I would say that are more exciting to me than the notion of being on a campus with old buildings that have been there for hundreds of years, hanging out with really, really smart people trying to solve really hard problems. This is not for everyone. In fact, it's not for most people, but there's something about the way, I don't know, the way I was raised, my family history, my genes, my brain. I don't know what it is, but it's always been very appealing to me.

And it's always been very fulfilling. There's nothing I do in my life that is more intellectually demanding than working on academic problems. So even the most complex things I do as a writer, the most complicated articles or book chapters that I pull together probably uses maybe 50% of the brain power as it takes to try to solve a proof for an open problem that lots of other really smart people are working on.

So I just like that. I like collaborators around the world, when we're not in a pandemic, I travel the world, they come here, I go there, we go to exotic places. I mean, what are their jobs? Could you go as, you know, I did a few years ago to a castle and rural Germany just with other people you know in your field to spend a week drinking cheap German beer and trying to solve problems, right? Like, it's interesting and it's cool if you like that type of thing.

So I'm a big fan of academic life in general, especially for those who feel that calling for using their brain to try to push it to solve complex problems. my biggest complaint about academic life, as I've written about before, is probably the deep to shallow work ratio is skewed. It's not right. It's not optimal. There's too much shallow work that happens in academic life that doesn't really need to be there. It's there not because there is some imperative that it needs to get done. It's there because governance, academically speaking, is a lot more decentralized and ad hoc

than you would have in a company. You have a bunch of professors who are all basically independent. tenured operators, and you can kind of loosely supervised professors, but work just gets generated by committees and groups and informally handed off to people. And so my main complaint is probably the deep to shallow work ratio in academia should be massively skewed towards the deep, and it's not. And so if you want to read more about that, you should see the article I wrote a year or two ago for the Chronicle Review that was titled Is Email Making Professor Stupid. So I have got into this publicly.

It's kind of a hard to solve problem again, just because of the unstructured nature of academic governance. But overall, D, I love being an academic and I, you know, feel lucky that they let me do that as a job. Micah asks, does your view of the deep life change your view of money and possessions? Are you a thoroughgoing minimalist? list. Well, Micah, I think the pursuit of a deep life will really influence how you think about things like money, how you think about things like the acquisitions of possessions, but this will be a side effect of the pursuit of the deep life, not a tier one focus. So let me explain what I mean by this. I think there's a tendency in the broader world of self-improvement to sometimes focus on the

negatives, like to put a stake in the sand and say, this is something that I think is not important to me. And I want to declare that I am not putting much attention on this. You might say, stuff is not important to me. And so I'm going to, because of that, declutter. Or money is not important to me. And because of that, I'm going to be very intentional on how I choose my job to focus on things that's not money. That's okay. But the way I I approach to deep life usually flips that. I focus on the positives, the things that are important to me. And then you try to craft your life to amplify these things are important.

And when you're focusing on the things that are important, a side effect of that is the things that aren't important won't get much emphasis. All right, so let me make that a little bit clear. Let's think about money, right? You could say, I want to put a stake in the sand and declare myself as someone who does not think money is all that important. That is not what I am pursuing in my working life. Or you could instead be focusing on, well, here is what is important to me. Maybe it's going to be things like time affluence and independence over my schedule, being there as a leader for my family, and thick community connections.

I want to be involved in my community. I want to be an important leader in my community. Let's say those are things that are positively important to you. Well, if you embrace that, you are not going to end up pursuing things just for the sake of money. Even though you didn't put a stake in the stand and say money's not important to me, it's like you're not going to pursue a track, a partner track at a law firm or a managing director track at an investment bank. If you know time affluence, family, and community connections is important to you because that job just would not be compatible with the things that are important to you.

You get to the same place but from two different directions. either you're declaring what you don't care about or you're focusing on what you do care about and because of that, the things that don't matter get pushed to the side. I like that latter approach. That's typically my deep life approach. It's also, by the way,

how I recommend people in my book, digital minimalism, how I recommend people rehab their digital lives instead of focusing on the technological behaviors they don't like and declaring they're not going to do that. So instead of saying, I don't like how much time I'm going to spend on Instagram, so I'm going to spend less time on Instagram.

Instead of doing that, they focus on what they really care about. And then they deploy technology habits to help the things they care about. And if Instagram usage doesn't end up as something that's really helpful for the things they care about, it just implicitly doesn't happen. And so what I'm saying here, Micah, is we can generalize that approach to all of life. Focus, at least as my approach, focus on what you really care about, amplify those things, prioritize those things, the stuff that doesn't matter

will be as a natural consequence de-emphasized. P.D. asks, how can we become okay with falling short of idealistic ideas about massively changing the world for the better? I am in a normal knowledge work tech job and I don't know in what way I could make that big of a difference.

I'm not solving the biggest issues of humanity. Well, PD, I think the issue here is that your notion of making a difference is too simplistic. I think this is common, especially among younger people. I mean, I really picked this up in particular among college students, where their notion of living a life that gives back that improves the world focuses on these sort of grandiose examples. You're like Paul Farmer or late-stage. Bill Gates or something like this, right? You're creating a huge organization that just is non-profit and directly focused on trying to improve the world. Now, the danger with that

simplistic ideal is like most people aren't going to do that. And then what some people will try to do is just maybe get a job at one of these nonprofits. And then they realize that it's not magical there and that there's overhead and infighting and the work is stressful and the leader's kind of a jerk. And then that could be very disillusioning as well. So what I want to do is have a richer definition of what it means to live a life of impact. And I think this can be much more localized than you are allowing right now, P.D. So the foundation you want to lay, if you'll sort of excuse some impromptu preaching, the foundation you want to lay is you want to live a life of character,

you want to dedicate yourself to your family and to your community. You want to be the type of person who has many people. come to your funeral. That's a foundation of a life of impact. And until recently, it was basically what most people thought of of what they aim to be, to be a leader in their family and their community, to be someone that other people respected, to apply their time and attention to help improve those who are around them.

That is a deeply human notion of giving back. That's a deeply human notion of impact. And it is very fulfilling and it's very meaningful. And so that is where if I was early in my career, if I was early in raising a family, as I see from your elaboration, that is where I would put my focus right now. Laying that type of foundation, that is a foundation of impact. That is a foundation that is going to make your life much richer and much more resilient to the types of ups and downs that you will face. Now then, as you leave this sort of early adulthood, acute stage of establishing your career, getting your family, you know, up and running, you're going through the baby stage and the toddler stage and the elementary

school stage. As you get through that acute phase, now you can start to build on that foundation and say, beyond just living a life of character and dedicate myself to my family and community and being a leader in my community, now I want to actually maybe put in place some sort of initiatives, initiate some sort of projects that gives back above and beyond. Now, again, I'm not talking about Paul Farmer here. I'm not talking about an international aid organization. be very local, for your town, your local school, your local church, right? I mean, it can be

intensely local and intensely intertwined with thick connections to people who are actually around you, but you can take that energy that went into producing, just trying to get through that acute stage of starting up a family and a life and a career, you can take the energy now that is no longer so urgently needed in those elements and turn it towards more explicitly trying to actually produce and give back. But again, probably, probably at a much more local scale than you're used to thinking about. I'll recommend the book. I think David Brooks's book, The Second Mountain, is good on this.

Brooks talks about how the stage you are in right now is the first mountain. you are scaling the first mountain. But once you're done with that, you get to the second stage of life, which is scaling the second mountain, which is a mountain that is outward facing. It's not about you building up your career. It's not about you trying to get your family together.

It's about you trying to connect and give back to those around you. There's a lot of great examples in that book, and you'll notice most of those examples are relatively regionalized and localized. It, again, it is not people starting Teach for America or doing Doctors Without Borders or something at a very large international scale. If you want to cut out the middleman and get down to the book that Brooks draws a lot of his ideas from, I would recommend Richard Roar's book Falling Upward.

That's Roar, R-O-H-R. He lays out these ideas. He draws from philosophical and theological sources, I think, more directly. Brooks is secularizes Roar, so that might be more comfortable for you. Roar is a monastic. His book is more explicitly Christian, though not in an evangelical style of Christianity. He just draws more, I think, on Christian resources and making his argument, but it's also philosophically quite astute.

He pulls from a lot of modern philosophical thinkers as well. So I think those two books falling upward and the second mountain both get you at this richer and more nuanced notion of how you build a life of impact that goes beyond just, you know, I won the Nobel Peace Prize. And so, Pedy, I think it sounds like you are at a stage in your life where it is good to start thinking about these things. So I hope those two books prove useful in your own quest. All right, our final question here tackles a similar type of issue that we just discussed in response to PDE's question. And this one comes from a college student named Andy. Andy asks, is it worth trying to be exceptional? I'm in my first year of

university trying to figure out who I am and where I want to be. I'm good at most things that I choose to commit to, but I consider myself more of a generalist unable to find something to focus on. I feel like my brain is constantly switched on, but I constantly alternate between being happy with what I have and happy to live a normal life with good balance and then wanting to be more. Well, Andy, first of all, let me say I empathize with your question here. I was similar in college. The overwhelming psychological memory I have of college was impatience. I felt a potential, I felt a drive, and I wanted to be doing big exceptional things right away,

and I was impatient that I was only 20, and I couldn't. You know, I figured out the studying thing pretty early on. As I documented in my book, how to become a straight-A student. I figured out how to study in a fraction of the time and get really good grades, and so I was bored with that. I started writing. There was a columnist for the newspaper. It became the editor of the Dartmouth's humor magazine.

I started doing research and really put some energy into that and published some academic computer science papers while I was there. But I felt really impatient to the point where, you know, at Dartmouth, basically every male on campus joins a fraternity. There's just nothing to do in Hanover, New Hampshire, except to go to the fraternies. There's literally nowhere to go. And so I went through that process and bit of fraternity. And I forgot the terminology, but was accepted into a fraternity. and I went to the first day of whatever you call it, like the induction procedure.

And I left and said, no, never mind. And why? Because I was so impatient. I was like, I don't want to waste my time. I don't know. It feels like you have to do a lot of drinking and you would waste a lot of time being hung over.

And I want to go. I want to write things and publish things. I want to change the world. So I felt that way, Andy, to the point that I was like one of the only males on campus at Dartmouth not in a fraternity because I was so driven to want to just produce. And I didn't know how to do it. And I was frustrated.

So I empathize. That being said, I can look back and offer you advice by basically looking back and thinking about the advice I would have given 20-year-old me. And here are the two things I think are important. Number one, it is very difficult at your early stage in adulthood to map out the path ahead of you. And it is probably a waste of time to try to do so in too much detail. I know it's frustrating that you can't say here's the plan. Here's where I'm going to be at 30 and here's where I'm going to be at 40. But it's really difficult to do where you are at your current point.

So you need to have just some acceptance around that. And two, I would say your pursuit to become better at things or to become exceptional has to be part of a broader pursuit to live a worthy deep life. Speaking from experience, you do not want to try to isolate your pursuit of craft and impact in the professional sphere, you'd not want to try to isolate that from the rest of your life. There is no resilience in that.

That is fragile. It's a source of frustration. You are setting yourself up for real issues when you hit the inevitable obstacles above. So what I would recommend, Andy, is actually applying something like the deep life transformation approach that I talk about often on this podcast

where you identify the various buckets that are important in your life. you can customize these, but the examples I always give is craft and community and constitution and contemplation. And in those buckets, you will find

the focus on exceptionality, professionally speaking, and that would be like in the craft bucket. So now as a college student, that probably means, okay, let me get my academic game together. If I haven't read, you know, Cal's books on how to study,

let me read them because they work. Maybe I want to time block, plan because if you do that as a college student, it's like a superpower. You know, like let's, let's really lock in, uh, become a star student. That's fine. Let me master my courses. Let me make sure I don't over schedule. That's fine. Uh, what else does craft mean as a college student? Well, maybe you're going to try to actually develop a particular skill outside of just your classes. I think that's good. It's good to have a craft that you're honing. I really worked on honing my writing ability when I was your age. Uh, that paid off. So maybe you have something like that

going on. So you have this craft bucket where you can really focus on, I want to get good at the things I'm doing now, doing them very well. I want to get used to this idea of honing skills because I want to. It's not urgent. No one's forcing me to do it, but I'm honing a skill just because I want in a self-directed way to get better at things that I find interesting and that are potentially impactful down the line. Do that. And that's part of your craft bucket. But look at the other buckets as well. like the Constitution bucket. You know, you have the flexibility, not to mention the metabolism and the physiology

as a college student to be really healthy, to be in really good shape, to have an immune system that can just take whatever comes at it and handle it, right? So like you're prioritizing that as well, and maybe there's some athletic endeavors that you're really getting into. The community piece is really important.

You know, are you, what are you involved with on your campus? Are you building really good friendships? Is there an organization on campus you're a part of that you're really thickly involved in? I mean, these things really matter at your age. And if you go with the contemplation bucket, that's really important at college. This is the time to be, you know, reading philosophy and reading theology and having long conversations and doing my sort of romantic scholar type over the top endeavors. You know, go search my blog for my early articles on the romantic scholar for more details. but you know, you should be bringing, as I talk about,

Heidegger to a local bar to pretentiously read with a pint of Heffawizen. You should be taking Whitman on hikes into the woods. You should, like I did at this age, you know, reading Emerson, reading Emerson by the Charles River underneath a tree. I mean, come on. Like, you should be doing these type of things,

like feeding your intellectual life, trying to understand philosophy, have a tentative philosophical foundation for your life, a tentative ethical foundation for your life. All these things are important. Craft is in there. But you want to be not prioritizing craft or everything else. It's just one of these buckets that you're giving your attention to as you're beginning to craft a deep life. That's the way to do it. Now again, as I talked about with my first point, you're not going to be able to plan out all the way from scratch where you're going to be 10 years from now. When I was 20, I couldn't quite map out where I would be right now when I'm 38.

But I was focusing on my writing. I just thought that'd be important. I was focusing on my research. I thought that would be important. And that mindset applied month after month, year after year, got me somewhere interesting. So that's my recommendation, Andy, is make your whole life deeper. make your life exceptional. Then you are going to not only have more meaning and satisfaction in your day-to-day existence,

you're going to be very resilient for the obstacles and bumps that are coming, and you will be building skills, you will be building craft, you will be getting used to this idea of systematically focusing on what's important professionally and trying to get better at it. Again, you can't predict necessarily where that's going to lead, but if you have that mindset starting today, it will lead you to really interesting, cool places with your work. but it will do so as part of this bigger package of trying to build a deeper life.

That is what I would have told 20-year-old me. I think it would have calmed the me down. I don't know, maybe it probably would have stopped me from walking out of that fraternity basement because it turned out that those were great guys and would have been cool to have that thicker connection with them. And I don't know, I probably would have spent more time pretentiously reading Heidegger

at local pubs in Hanover, New Hampshire. And I don't know. There's worse things to do probably with your time. So what I'm trying to say, Andy, is a good question. We'll take a breath. We'll take a beat. You don't got to figure it all out over the next couple of years. You don't got to commit to a particular path.

You don't have to be the world's best at something by the age of 26 to be happy in life. Let's lay the foundation now of living a deeper life. Let Kraft be a piece of that. And even though you can't predict where this will lead, where it does lead will be worth, going. All right. Well, that is all the time we have for this week's episode. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions.

If you want to submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list, account Newport.com. That is where I send out the occasional link to surveys where I gather these queries. If you want to find out more about time blocking, you can go to timeblock planner.com. I'll be back later this week with a mini episode.

And until then, as always, Stay deep