Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 58: Habit Tune-Up: Clarifying Task Organization, Graduate Student Advice, and My Research Workflow

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover:- Struggling with organizing tasks. [7:41]- Advice for becoming a fantastic graduate student. [14:18]- My research workflow. [19:43]- Book writing basics. [31:14]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.

The Deep Questions podcast is brought you in part by Blinkist. On Monday's episode, I told you about how Blinkist had over 4,000 nonfiction books summarized for their subscribers. In just 15 minutes, you can find out the main ideas of each of these books. I thought today I'd make that a little bit more concrete. Let's actually go over to Blinkist.com. Let's see what's popular right now in society and, culture category, and I'm looking at their most popular book summaries at the moment.

And I'm impressed. Look at this. So you could, in 45 minutes, you could learn about Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, followed by Robin DeAngelo's White Fragility, followed by Jaron Lanier's 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts. Imagine that trio of different books and different takes and different perspectives on our country. In just 45 minutes, you could be up the speed on the main ideas for just those three. This is just an example. I'm just glancing at the website, but my bigger point about Blinkist is you should start off your new year investing in the gift of knowledge. Blinkist makes it easy for you to get up the speed with big thinkers and big ideas, helps you figure out which books you should read more carefully, which books you should avoid.

All of that is possible with Blinkist. Right now they have a special office offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you get a free seven-day trial and 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, Habit Tune Up, mini-episode. The format of these mini-episodes is straightforward. I answer voice questions from listeners about how to tune up their productivity habits. Two quick announcements. Announcement number one, thank you everyone who submitted

new voice questions. We still need more, and you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. A listener wrote me to say it wasn't necessarily clear what that URL was. She was going to speedpipe.com and having a hard time finding it, so I'll spell it out for you. It's speak. S-P-E-A-K-P-P-P-P-Pipe. P-I-P-E-S-P-E-S-P-E-L-Nu-P-E-S-P-E-L-N-NuP-E-S-K-E-L-NuP-E-L-E-L-E-P-E-L-E-V-E-E-V-E-B-E-E-E-V, which we need and which I appreciate. Second, brief announcement is that this is the last episode of the Deep Questions Podcasts for the year 2020. I'm releasing this on New Year's Eve. Most people, I assume, will actually hear it in 2021.

Now, usually I get a little. bit sad during new years that period because I like that whole fall period where we go from holiday to holiday. I like to winter break. I like Christmas. Traditionally, I find the winter spring semester to be a little bit harder just because it starts in the heart of the winter. And there's a really long, really long section usually before you get to things like spring break and warm weather. And so, you know, traditionally, I'm always a little bit sad. And, when we get to the end of the holidays, when we get to the end of the year. Not the case today. I've had enough with 2020. I am happy to get the 2021. I am happy for the pages of the calendar

at this current moment to be ripped out as quickly as possible. It has been a really tough year because of the pandemic. The good news is all pandemics pass. Throughout all of human history, we see pandemics come and go. There's hard days ahead of us, but it seems almost certainly as if there are many more hard days behind us than remain ahead in this particular pandemic, so I'm happy to get rolling towards those better times ahead. In the meantime, one of the things I have been trying to do with this podcast is to give us all something to focus on that we can control, to help us get out of the defensive crouch of terror that the world seems to be trying to push us into and say, well, wait a second, what can I can control? Great. Let me try to take some steps there.

Let me try to make some progress there. Is my work life really disrupted? Okay, maybe I need to get my systems up and going. Am I realizing there's a lot about my current configuration of my existence that's not really that deep? Are there cracks in the way I have things set up that are beginning to widened? Maybe I want to transform and do a deep reset. Maybe now is the time to get that side hustle into a business. Maybe now it's the time to take this idea I had and put it into action or to get that good project going or to get in better shape or whatever it is. But I think humans respond well to hardship when they're able to focus on what they can control and say, well, here, I'm going to go deep. So I'm hoping many of you have found this exercise in 2020,

as helpful as I have being on the recording end of it. It's really helped me keep my focus on what I can control and what I can improve. I also think there is an ancillary benefit lurking to this mindset, which is when we get to the better times, when we find ourselves in July and the vaccination population, immunity rate is at a point where we're not concerned

about big waves anymore, where things are, open, where there are not big waves still to come, when we feel as if we have made it safely to the other side of this disastrous period, if you had been focusing for the last year and a half on what you can control and making it better, you are going to have a head of steam. Once everyone else gets back up out of the crouch and says, okay, what's next? While they're still lacing up their shoes, you're going to be Usain bolting right past them. because you've been honing this mindset, you've been working on these things during the hard times.

It's like the baseball, I'm mixing every sports metaphor I can here, guys. I hope you don't mind this. Like the baseball player with the heavy rings on their bat before they get into the batters box, the bat seems a lot lighter, which allows them to shoot under par for a three-pointer with the two-point conversion. My point being, I think we can all say goodbye 2020. Hey, 2021, I know you're going to start off hard before you get quite a bit better. But until you get there, I'm going to keep my head down. I'm going to focus on myself and my

family and my community. I'm going to find where there's shallowness to excise. I'm going to find where there is depth to dive into. I'm going to face all the productivity dragons with courage. And one day we will look up not too long from now and we're going to realize that we are out ahead of the pack and feeling pretty good about ourselves in the state of the world. Maybe we'll have some sort of blowout live event for all of you who have stuck with deep questions this long. But until then, we're going to get after it and we're going to stay deep. All right, let's get started with the questions. Hi, Cal.

My name is Nathan, and I'm a doctor in Australia. My question relates to the friction which I always find with the clarity or configure step of productivity. I'm fully on board with capture because I recognize the value which comes from emptying my brain and I'm pretty good at focusing when it's time for work on a specific task. However, I find that organizing my tasks is a constant struggle to develop a consistent system that I trust. Whenever I try to review or organize, I find myself quickly overwhelmed by decision-furtigued. David Allen asks, is it actionable?

Which helps separate tasks from ideas, but I'm also finding there are different types of tasks. The easiest to deal with are what I've taken to calling concrete tasks, such as put out rubbish or submit final report. These are defined necessary tasks which are cognitively easy to deal with. However, I'm also aware of aspirational tasks, such as summarize war and peace, which are open-ended and don't really matter whether they're completed or not, even if they might help you advance for important areas. Because they are less likely to get done, they tend to pile up and drown out the concrete tasks, which are actually more important to keep up to date with.

Nathan, this is a great question. it allows me to talk about the difference, at least in my productivity philosophy, between tasks and projects. And I think this is probably at the core of your confusion. To use your example, reading war in peace is not a task. It's a project. Now, David Allen would say, reduce that to the next action, reduce that to a concrete task. And David Allen's taxonomy, you would have a context that is like at reading chair. And you would have a task under at reading chair that was whatever, read next 10 pages of war and peace or something like this. I tend to handle these type of things a little bit differently.

To me, projects I'm actively working on will be identified in my quarterly plan. You know, so my quarterly plan will be like one of the things I'm doing this winter is I need to read. read war and peace. Okay. Now when you're doing a weekly plan, you're going to look at that quarterly plan and say, oh, one of the things I'm working on this winter is reading war in peace. And then you're going to look at your week ahead and say, how am I going to make progress on reading war and peace this week?

And your answer there might be different depending on what your week looks like. So it might be, here's what I'm going to do. It's every night from 7 to 7.30, I'm reading a chapter. or I am adding a reading block around my lunch hour this week, which I've done before, myself. You know, lunch is going to be with a book, and it's going to be with this book. And that's what I'm doing this week. Or maybe I'm doing that this week except Wednesday because Wednesday I'm having lunch with someone else or whatever. The point is, this exists in an expository manner in your weekly plan.

Or maybe it's just, I need to put in some big reading sessions this week, try to find at least a couple. maybe that's what it says in your weekly plan. And then when you're working on your daily plan on one of these days, you say, okay, let me add some time this afternoon. Let me time block some time for war and peace. Whatever. The point is that project lives on the quarterly plan and gets expressed, a strategy for making progress on it,

gets expressed in each weekly plan. In my typical productivity approach, there will never be a task in my task system in this example that has to do with War and Peace. I think it's an entirely superfluous and not that useful step to have read War and Peace, read next chapter in War and Peace,

crack cover of War and Peace. I have found that's not that useful to exist in my task list. Again, projects exist on my quarterly plan. They get translated into action into weekly plan. It's often expository. It can differ from week to week.

It doesn't really show up on my task list. More generally, I would say this is true of my weekly plans. I see there's two different things. Well, I would say three. Let me say three. There's three things that are going to go on during my working hours in a typical week.

The third thing is what I forgot at first. It's going to be prescheduled things. So meetings, appointments, calls, podcast recordings, things that happen during set times. All right, that's part of my week. Making progress on concrete tasks to use your terminology, that's another thing that's going to happen. You know, I have this task list,

things have been organized, into different statuses, and I need to make progress on things. When I'm doing my weekly plan, I'll really get into what's due soon, what do I want to make progress on, et cetera. I want to maybe identify some quad two, non-urgent but important tasks. Like, okay, why don't I make sure I do these this week? Whatever.

And I have task blocks that show up and my time block plans throughout the week and progress is made. And then I have projects. Now, I was using Reading War and Peace as an example, because you brought that up. But, you know, for me, projects are going to be making progress on an academic paper, making progress on an article, or op-ed that I'm writing, making progress on a book research project, ongoing deep work that can't

be completely mapped out in advance and certainly cannot be consistently broken down into small concrete widget-style actions. So I hope that clarifies. Concrete plans can exist in your task organization systems, and that's where you do a lot of organizing of those. part of your configure. Projects exist on your quarterly plans where they get translated into your weekly plans in an expository way. And that itself is part of configure and capture configure control is what projects am I working on and how am I going to make that work this week? So that's part of your configure. There's the obvious part which is moving task around Trello columns. But the other part is looking at your bigger plans and figuring out this week. I'm writing

every morning. I'm reading during my lunch hour. Tuesday and Thursday, I'm going to make a big push. You know, I'm going to go to a park and hike while trying to think through this math problem. There are two separate types of things. And I think that distinction is based on your question, Nathan, probably will clarify a lot of what was confusing you. And hopefully, hopefully this clarifies as confusion for a lot of people because I realize I've not talked about that distinction very clearly, but it's a critical one. And it is at the core of how I plan my weeks. All right, let's do a question here from a grad student. Hi, Kyle.

What is specific advice for grad students that can help us be a fantastic grad student? Well, I have a few pieces of advice to offer here. I think first, treat being a grad student like a normal job, have set working hours, time block during those working hours, have in place systems that you use for doing things like studying for your classes, reading and taking notes, working on your research. And you really want to try to treat this like a specific job. Two, and I think this is a crucial addendum to the first piece of advice, assume at first that you're really bad at this job and that a lot of your focus is on trying to learn how to do this job better.

I think this is a mistake that I made. I was too quick to jump to planning ideas or systems that I wanted to work, as opposed to spending more time learning from stars about what actually works and what actually matters. So think of yourself as an apprentice. And you are trying to learn from the best advisors and the best more senior students around you. If you're taking classes, what's the right way to study, what, what matters and what's a waste of time

when you're working on research, what's the right way to find a project? What's the right way to find a problem? What's the right way to make progress? Get involved in papers in the junior role and then expand that role over time. You basically want to be learning from those who came before and constantly been shifting into systems you use,

how you time block your day, what you focus on, be ruthless about stuff that's not important, be aggressive about amplifying the stuff that does turn out to be important. Because in the end, I think success in grad school, is having the right type of efforts applied consistently and diligently. And you repeat that by a year or two, and a lot piles up. And it can be formidable at first because nothing's really happening and you're getting down some dead ends in terms of ideas and systems and approaches.

But if you treat yourself like an apprentice, you're learning, you keep adjusting how you approach this, you keep treating it like a job that you're trying to learn more and more. you know, it's like you're a stone worker, and at first you're not very good at it, but you learn how the chisels work and you get better. And just keep at it, work hours every day consistently, you're going to get better and better. And you do this every single day, good results will pile up. Good things will come. The third piece of advice I want to add, and again, this is all an addendum to my original

piece of advice about professionalizing your grad student career. if you're treating this like a job, have an end of the workday like a normal job. Get really serious about shutdown rituals. When you're working, you're working. When you're done, everything gets captured. All open loops get closed. Your day shuts down.

And be then aggressively focused on the other buckets that make a deep life deep. All right, as a grad student, you actually have a lot more flexibility and free time, then you probably realize. I think grad students have a way of trying to stretch things out and make it seem like that's not the case, but it is the case.

Don't take that for granted. You need to develop out a full personhood during this part of your life. First of all, because it gives you a buffer against burnout, but second of all, it gives you a foundation of depth on which when you go to whatever you're going to do next, you already have this foundation of deep living in other aspects of your life that you're not going to want to give up.

and you'll avoid that trap of maybe just monofocusing your way through grad school, going into the job market after that, four years later looking up and saying, man, I'm miserable. So take advantage of your free time, take advantage of your autonomy and flexibility to focus on those other buckets of a deep life. Like community, like constitution, like contemplation outside of the context of just the work you do as a student.

Recently, I've been thinking about a new alliterative, bucket name celebration, which is my term for that part of your life where you focus on things that are just awe-inspiring or quality, just for the sake of being quality, that you can get real gratitude out of. It's where you do the hike to see that sunset. It's where you master a particular type of cooking. It's where you just really enjoy getting a first edition of a book that's important to you, whatever it is. I've been adding that bucket to my thinking recently as well. the bigger point here being work on all those buckets. When you're working, you're working, when you're done, you're not.

That can make grad student life really exceptional because you have all these interesting things going on. You're discovering yourself. You're discovering what makes a deep life deep. And in your professional part, in the part of your life dedicated to the bucket we call craft, it's a really interesting job. It's you're a grad student. You're learning all this interesting stuff and you're apprenticing yourself and you're getting better at it. You put all of those pieces together.

and I think you are going to not just become a fantastic grad student, you are going to have a fantastic experience during this really cool part of your life. All right, following this general theme, let's go to a question now about my workflow for my academic research. Hi, Cal, I'm Khalid from Pakistan. I'm doing my PhD in energy engineering. I want to thank you for all the good work you are doing on this. podcast and blog and all the books you have written. You talk a lot about general productivity workflow like capture, configure, control systems. I want to know what is your research workflow, like how you read papers, what you do with them once you have read and how you get ideas

for your own papers. Thanks and sorry for No Greek mythological references. Well, I don't want it to seem like I'm a stickler about the mythological references. Roman references would be fine too. All right, so I can be flexible here. This question about my research workflow as an academic, I think it's a good one. Because one point it allows me to emphasize is that, at least in my corner of academia, and I think this is true for lots of areas, finding good topics is really hard.

and you spend a lot of time on it, and you should think of it as something that requires a lot of time. Don't downgrade when you conceptualize the academic life. Don't downgrade the amount of effort that goes into finding the problem. I think we think a lot about the work that goes into writing the paper, solving the proof, or getting the experiments going, but figuring out what to write, what to solve, or what to experiment on in the first place. And that's really non-trivial. So I will give a little insight into how I do it.

Again, for listeners who don't know, I'm a theoretical computer scientist. Most of my work is focused on proofs. So we'll design algorithms and analyze them. I've also have had some specialty in the past on proving fundamental impossibility results, so no possible algorithm can do better than this in this particular type of context. So it's all pen paper proofs. there are two types of papers in my world. I would say there is continuations of a research direction already established.

This is a little bit more obvious, right? You finish a paper in a particular research direction that's already been established and you say, what's the next natural thing to look at in this general area? That's an easier question to answer. You know, because as you work on something, you learn more techniques, more people cite your work, you read what other people are doing, that inspires ideas for what you should do next. You have a lot of tools to work with. You have a lot of techniques to try to apply. You have a lot of things that you cut off when you were working on a prior paper, you know, particular routes where you say, I don't want to get too diverted right now, but then you remember that's something to come back to.

So a lot of what you're going to write is a continuation of something that you have already established. The second category of papers, which is much more difficult, is figuring out something from scratch. This is a research direction that did not exist before, a type of problem or question that I have not asked or tried to answer before. Now, this is hard because you have to find something that's useful to the field, tractable, right? So it actually has to be something you can make progress on, but not too easy. You know, if it's really easy, then there's nothing really to do. I mean, maybe there are some obvious results to point out, but you're not going to get a peer-review paper out of that.

So that's where a lot of the effort goes as in identifying new research directions, which can then spawn four or five, six papers, at least in a row, at least in our field. So how do we do that? I have a stable of collaborators, some of whom I've been working with for 15 years or more now. I mean, a lot of these are people that came out of MIT with me

back in the early 2000s and then other collaborators I've just met over time and we're interested in similar problems. We literally just get together on a semi-regular basis. You know, last summer, obviously we didn't

but typically it's in the summer. There's at least one or two conferences that I will go to most years, one in the summer, one in the fall, where you get together with your collaborators, you're presenting your papers, you're looking at their papers, you're listening to other people's papers,

and you're talking. And there's a lot of talking and it's really cool and I really enjoy it and I do kind of miss it this year. A lot of talking. What about this? What about this problem? Would this be interesting? Hey, so and so did this. What do you think?

We also just get together. You know, I mean, I'm thinking last summer, obviously travel wasn't happening because the pandemic. But the summer before, like many summers previously, I have a couple of collaborators that just they gather in the D.C. area most summers. And we just get together and we'll spend a week and we go to a conference room. And we have a stack of papers we've read that are interesting, and we just kind of go through it. Is there something here? Is there something there? We'll solve some results. Oh, is that interesting? Let's do some basic results on this problem. We'll just kind of do it together at the whiteboard. Is there something here? And it's really often out of those conversations that we get a bunch of ideas.

And then you select out of those. And this is just based on experience. I've just solved a lot of things. I've written a lot of papers. I don't know how many papers I've written, 60 or 70 peer-review papers at this point. So you have some experience, and you're like, let's try this, let's try that. And then we just start rolling. You have collaborators, you bounce ideas off of each other. Sometimes I do this on my own. This is a little bit more rare in my particular field, but I do this in a way that's a little bit rare in my field. I'll do solo authored papers, just because sometimes I'll get an idea that's interesting and I like thinking.

And so sometimes I'm just doing this with myself. It's an idea I think is interesting, and I'll just wander and roam and think about it, and eventually transform it into a paper that I just write up on my own. Most people don't do that. I do it. It's sort of in some sense, almost like a productivity skills flex.

Like, look, I've got enough control over my schedule that I can actually make progress on papers without having the prod of other collaborators. But the problem is my collaborators are smarter than me, so I think I write smarter papers when I have them involved. But I do both. That's what it looks like.

But the more general point here is, finding what to work on, and this goes beyond just academic circles, often takes a lot more time and attention and systemization and just sheer volume of effort investment than we realize. I think this holds whether you're trying to start a company or write a book or start a new podcast or get a new initiative going inside of your existing company, you should probably be comfortable with this is not going to be easy to get the right idea. And I always think that's good.

I think it's good because it's a competitive advantage if you're willing to put in the effort because most people don't realize they need to. And I think it explains a lot in a lot of fields where you see certain people that you're like, man, they just keep taking big swings and getting a lot of hits and how do they do it? Well, I think a lot of it is they're probably just spending more time thinking and investigating and trying to figure out and work with people and taking inputs and test things and just much more effort than the people around them trying to figure out what to work on. and it just gives them more plate appearances,

and you have more plate appearances, you are going to get more hits. Let's take a moment to talk about another sponsor who makes this podcast possible, and that is Four Sigma. In Monday's episode, I talked about Four Sigmaics' mushroom coffee, which includes Lions Main Mushroom for Productivity

and Chaga Mushroom for Immune Support. I mentioned that the mushroom aspect of this coffee gives it a unique physiological profile that makes it useful for building up a deep work hook. It just feels different than other things, so it's a good thing to train your brain to associate. Drinking four-sigmatic means it's time to go deep. I wanted to mention today also that it is easier on your stomach. It is a good coffee to brew for one of your last coffees of the day. The instant version of the four-sigmatic I sometimes use. has less caffeine than normal coffee,

and it's just a smoother feel to it. I don't use cream, right? I'm a harsh black coffee drinker. This stuff is smooth. It's easier on the stomach. It's a good sort of, I need one more hit for one more deep work session this morning,

and I don't think I can have another cup of high octane coffee of the type I sometimes otherwise drink. So I just wanted to mention that not only is a good hook for deep work, It is also gentler on your stomach. At the moment, they have some deals going on now that could get you up to 50% off. On top of these deals, they can get you up to 50% off.

I've worked out an exclusive additional 10% off all sales products, but it's just for my listeners. So if you want that deal, go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for deep questions, listeners, and not available on the regular website. That is 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. Let's also talk about Headspace. As I mentioned in Monday's episode,

if you are looking in the new year to develop an anxiety-reducing, focus-boasting, mindfulness meditation habit, Headspace is the app to help guide you. 600,000 five-star reviews, over 60 million downloads. what they are doing. You know, I was looking at the Headspace website just recently as I was preparing to record

this episode. And I was looking at their various guided meditations. And I saw one that caught my attention, which was for walking. A guided walking meditation. I really like this idea because I used to do this. When I was a postdoc, during my postdoc years at MIT, as I've mentioned, I used to walk from my apartment in Beacon Hill to the campus in Cambridge. and I had this habit of the first part of my walk,

starting on Beacon Hill and going all the way across to Charles, what's the Longfellow Bridge, I guess it was called, all the way across the Longfellow Bridge, only observing the world around me. I used mindfulness meditation techniques to keep bringing my attention back. I got really good, for example, at observing how the leaves changed and the properties of the snow and the ice. I've been reading a lot of Thoreau at this point,

so maybe that should make some sense. It's incredibly restorative. Anyways, I'm happy to see that there is a walking meditation, guided meditation in the Headspace app. Just one example of the many, many different guided meditations. They have to help you do some cognitive training. All right. So if you go to headspace.com slash questions,

you can get a free one-month trial with access to that full library of meditations, including their walking meditations. That's headspace.com slash question. All right, moving on, let's do a question. on a topic that's always a fan favorite, which is advice for book writing. Hey, Cal, how you doing? My name is Jesse Miller, and I heard on your most recent podcast and need for more audio questions. So I just wanted to help you out and submit one. But my question is more in regards to the nonfiction book writing process, as I have some

ideas about some topics. And I was wondering if you write the book first, or I know you've touched on it before, but if you could elaborate a little bit more on the actual process, because or do you go out and find a publisher or find an agent first to, you know, kind of get the structure of it as well. I do a lot of writing for my lacrosse blog and stuff. So I just have some ideas and wouldn't mind if you could touch on that. Thanks a lot. Bye. Well, first of all, Jesse, thanks for reminding people about our need for audio questions.

If you want to submit your own audio question, that is speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. The word speak, Spea, A, K, followed by the word pipe. P-I-P-E-L-Nuport. You can record questions straight from your browser. Well, Jesse, you're doing the right thing asking for information and advice about bookwriting. There have been countless thousands of hours wasted around the world, you know, each day or each week, by people who jump into the bookwriting process, not wanting to know how it actually works. It's a point I make on this podcast a lot. There's a lot of ways that people want book writing to work,

and then there's how it actually works. If you do not actually work with the reality of the industry, you're very unlikely to actually have some success. You've done the right thing by asking. I've gone through this advice a few times, so I'll be a little bit quick here because some listeners might have heard it before. But I just wanted to touch on that more general point first,

that yes, find out how things work before you ever invest too much serious effort or time into it. So for nonfiction book writing, no, you don't write the book first. You first land an agent. So it's easier to get an agent than it is to sell a book. So if you can't get an agent, you're not going to sell the books. There's no reason for you to be directly sending things to publishers. They know the agents.

They trust the agents. They have lunch with them every week. They figure out what they're looking for. The agents tell them what they have available. that's how this world, for the most part, works. Your agent helps you write a proposal. That proposal is then sold. Once that proposal is sold, you get some advance money, and you go out and you write the book. It's due at certain times. When you hand it in, you get more advanced money. When it comes out, you get more. A year later, you get the rest of it, et cetera, et cetera. All right, so you know,

you don't write the book first. How do you land the agent? Well, for nonfiction, you have two giant categories. Again, I've mentioned this before, so I'll go quick. If you're writing general nonfiction, I'm like, hey, I want to do a history of Kit Carson. I want to do a book about, you know, these interesting kids at MIT who cheated Las Vegas with a card counting scheme, right? If you're doing that type of nonfiction writing, you need to be a professional writer or a professional in that field. So maybe you're a professional academic historian and you're writing about Kit Carson or you are in the case of the MIT story, you're a professional journalist, et cetera.

Okay, this category is not relevant to you, so we'll put that aside. So then we get to what we sometimes think about as practical nonfiction. And this is people who are not professional writers or professional scholars, who are instead people who are writing about something that they know about just from their own life

or their own experiences. In that case, you need three things. one, it has to be an idea that there's going to be a non-trivial audience that is going to feel like they need to read that book. So, for example, if your idea is my journey as a lacrosse player and just my life as a lacrosse player and coach, that's not a topic that a lot of people are going to feel like, man, I got to read that when I hear about it. on the other hand, if the book was how to get a lacrosse scholarship 10 point plan,

there is an audience that play lacrosse and would like to get a college scholarship and they would say, yeah, I really need that book. I want that information, right? So it has to be something that a non-trival audience is going to feel like they need to have or need to read. Two, you need to be the right person to write it. So again, you mentioned that you're a lacrosse coach,

so that's a topic you could write in. if you had another book about, you know, ballet secrets, it wouldn't make sense for you to write it. And the third thing is you have to be a non-bad writer. No, I make a distinction between non-bad and really good. Practical nonfiction doesn't require that you are a, you know, Harper's New Yorker-style writer with a lot of control over your sentences and insight or this or that, but you can't be amateur. there's just a threshold of writing ability that when you're above that writing ability, it doesn't catch the reader's attention.

Like this is just information being conveyed. It seems like a book. Like it seems like a professional book. If you're below that threshold, if your writing is sufficiently amateur, you can't be published. Right? Publisher can't put out a book if the writing is not at a level that it is going to escape notice. If the writing is at a level where people are going to say, oh, this feels too colloquial, too familiar, This is someone who's not really up to speed with certain types of grammar or vocabulary or this or that.

It's going to be a problem. So you need to be a non-band writer. You don't have to be Hemingway, but you can't be, you know, Hank your angry neighbor sending emails to cable news channels. So that requires some practice. So you have to find places to write, venues to write for lower stakes, lower threshold places. But places where you can just write and hone that, you know, university training will help you write better. you can take courses to write better

you can take writing courses you can find websites you say you have a blog that's good you know so you have things that can get your writing push your writing until it's no longer notably amateur that's the three things a topic someone has to will feel like they have to read you being the right person to read it

and being a non-bad writer then you're ready to go find an agent it's easy to query an agent you can find a million web pages about how to do it agents want to hear pitches they want authors they want material they can sell. No one's trying to get keep you out of there. There's no artificial scarcity that you have to find an inroad around by doing something clever on social media. They want you to be good. They want

you to have a book that can be sellable. Look up online how to pitch an agent. Define to write agent to pitch. Just go find a similar book. Turn to the acknowledgments. See which agent that author thinks. Those are going to be great targets. That's how I found my longtime agent. And that is the key to practical nonfiction writing. Now again, general nonfiction writing where it's big ideas or historical, that's a different world, that's professional journalist, that's professional scholars. We will put that aside for now. I just want to make that distinction that these two different sides of the nonfiction writing coin feel a little bit different. All right, Jesse, I hope you found that useful and I hope I see your name and print at some point in the near future. I do look forward to your

ballet tip memoir. All right, so since it's a holiday, let's wrap this episode up. Let's all join in kicking 2020 out of the door. We have a much better 2021 ahead. We also have a lot more deep questions podcast ahead. I am soldiering on. I will be back next week with the next full-length episode. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

So let's look up, look to the future. future, stand tall, get after it, and as always, stay deep.