Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 65: Is Productivity Bad?

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Is productivity good or bad? [4:28]WORK QUESTIONS - How do you extract good career advice from successful people? [19:16] - How do I improve my GRE score? [27:38] - Is there a category of work between deep and shallow? [29:53] - Should high school students time block? [31:53] - How should I search for my first job during the pandemic? [37:33]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Can psychedelics play a role in the deep life? [45:19] - What are my favorite single-use technologies? [49:22] - Are AI-based writing suggestions a problem? [52:20] - What social internet technologies deserve a resurgence? [57:34]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How can I work deeply in a small apartment? [1:01:58] - How do I help people who hate self help? [1:08:18] - How can I encourage my friends to be deeper? [1:12:18]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Question. Episode 65. I have no quick announcements this week, but we do have a good show. The Deep Dive is back. We'll be doing a deep dive segment on the question of, is productivity good or bad? So that should be interesting. I should add, by the way,

my current timeline for getting these videos of the Deep Dives accessible is February. So within the next few weeks, we should soon have videos of all my deep dives and some key questions being posted online. Stay tuned for that. We also, of course, have a lot of good questions that have been asked in our categories of work, technology, and the deep life, including a question about work that falls between deep and shallow, psychedelics, and convincing friends and family who do not like self-help that maybe they should listen to some self-help. As always, I appreciate the question. questions. If you want to find out how to submit them, go to calnewport.com slash podcast.

And I have the instructions there. Also, of course, I also appreciate the subscriptions, ratings, and in particular reviews. I read all the reviews of the podcast that make me happy, and it helps spread the alert. I believe I just used the word Lurd there. So you can tell I really am a professional broadcaster. All right, so we got a good show. Before we get going, though, let's take a brief moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. I am talking about our good friends at Magic Spoon. As I have argued many times on this podcast, sometimes you need a escape. And what better escape than to reach back to that childhood nostalgia for those fun cereals

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All right. So that's magic spoon.com slash cow. Use to code Cal for free shipping. The other sponsor I want to thank here is me. In particular, I want to advertise my upcoming book, A World Without Email, that comes out on March 2nd. as I talked about on my newsletter, this is my magnum opus on the topic of technology and its intersection with work. It's philosophical. It's pragmatic. It's controversial. I know if you like this podcast,

you'll like that book. If you pre-order it, I really appreciate that. And the show my appreciation, I will be announcing soon a really cool pre-order promo where I don't want to give away too much, but the term email academy is going to be involved. You can get access to this if you pre-order. So if you've already preordered or you are going to preorder, just hold on to your digital receipt. You can just use a confirmation code off of there. I will be announcing this pre-order campaign soon, but for now I just want to keep putting on your radar that if you like deep questions, you are going to love a world without email. Order your copy today to help spread the word. Let's move on now with the deep dive. In today's deep dive segment, we are going to

tackle the question, is productivity good or bad? Now, the origin of this question actually goes back to the spring of 2020. In the spring of 2020, I was having some correspondence with some of my readers who had expressed to me some discomfort with the term productivity. And so I wrote a essay about it on my blog and my email newsletter. That generated a lot more feedback. So I wrote another essay. that generated more feedback, and I wrote a third essays. I wrote three essays in a row pretty close together in which there was a lot of back and forth with me and my audience to try to get our arms around. What do we mean by productivity? Is pursuing productivity something that is inherently good or bad?

What's the right way to make sense of all these conflicting emotions? So I wanted to talk about that today in this deep dive. What I'm going to do is start with a summary of the two major critiques I have encountered about the notion of productivity. And then we'll talk about how we might respond to those critiques. Let's assess those critiques and think about how we might more, if you'll excuse this turn or phrase, productively think about the idea of productivity. So these critiques come in part from, again, this interaction I had with my audience. But after that series of post in the spring of 2020, I also began to read more heavily on this topic. There has been a whole spate of books that has come out in the last couple of years that have basically been focusing on the value of inactivity. So you have like how to do nothing, do nothing. A more recent book called Laisiness Does Not Exist. I actually blurbed that last book. It's really interesting.

I've read How to Do Nothing and Do Nothing. Those are also both very interesting books. So this literature has emerged that you can think of as anti-productivity thinking. So I got into those books to try to understand the critiques. There's also been more writing, I would say, by journalists. Like in particular, one example that several of you have been pointing to me recently is the, the journalist Helen Ann Peterson has recently been writing quite a bit that has really been attacking the notion of productivity and sometimes even calling me out by name in a respectful

way. I like her work a lot. But this conversation is very much alive. So I've been trying to expose myself to all these critiques. So let's summarize the two main categories of those. We can figure out how to think about productivity. So the first category of critique of productivity, and again, I'm simplifying here. All right.

So the scholars out here study this, my apologies, but let's try to make this more accessible. The first category is you can think about it as an economic critique. So what you get here is a sort of standard left of center style thinking about the exploitative nature of capitalism. Right. So this is a threat of thought that goes back to Marx and, of course, is evolved and fractured. But remain pretty strong, especially in the American left, you know, since the, the late 19th century. And it argues that capitalism is fundamentally exploitative and productivity is a part of this

exploitation, right? So that a pursuit of productivity, a focus on productivity, this is part of just the, you know, those with capital exploiting the proletariat. And I assume this critique would put me in sort of the bourgeois superstructure that is unwittingly helping to feel this deterministic wheels of history that at this point is in an exploitative phase. The other major critique on productivity, I'll say it's cultural. So here's where you'll see, in this more accessible form, a sort of apian of Max Weber,

there's a Protestant work ethic. We have these cultures that kind of trick us into valorizing, trying to get a lot of things done. And these cultures serve other purposes. And one of the reasons why we find ourselves overworking and embracing productivity is that we're basically being tricked by malformed cultures in the doing too much. So again, I think the public-facing books will point to things like the Protestant work ethic or maybe more contemporarily sort of Twitter and Instagram humble brag culture about how much

you're working, right, if you're going to be more contemporary. There's also a more sophisticated strain of the cultural creak of productivity that draws more on postmodern influenced critical theories. So this more sophisticated strain will try to deconstruct the notion itself as something, you know, that it's a discourse that its main purpose is to ossify various power hierarchies. I tend to find in the public-facing books and the public-facing articles, you don't find as much of the postmodern critical theory critique because I think it's less accessible to the general public. It's also a little bit more complicated to get right, though within academic circles, I think you hear more of that. An interesting aside, a little academic insider baseball, actually the theorists who are big on the critical theory approaches to thinking about productivity, in general, tend to be more dismissive of the critics who are pushing the economic capitalism as exploitative. The sort of French postmodern foundation of these new critical theories was very disdainful of what they felt like was kind of old-fashioned and boring economic class-based critique.

So there's this interesting tension, interesting tension between them. But these are the major critiques of productivity. All right. So the first thing I want to note is both of these categories have good things to say and are right in some sense. I mean, I think it is clearly true. I think it's self-evident that one of the ways that companies try to increase productivity is to be more exploitative in their relationship with their workers. In fact, there's a thread of that reality that I talk about that I don't think is covered enough,

which is the degree to which the advent of low friction technology didn't actually make the things we do as knowledge workers more efficient. So this was not like here is a better factory tool, which means you can attach this steering wheel faster. I think the primary goal and the primary value of things like smartphones that could deliver ubiquitous email access and slack is that it allowed companies to extract more productive work hours out of their employees' days. It made it possible for you to work over the weekends. It made it possible for you to work in the evening. It made it impossible. It made it possible for you to work when you're on the sidelines of your kids' soccer game. So it didn't make us better at our work. It actually just allowed us to use more hours of our time to work, which is a very exploitative relationship. And one of the arguments I've made

before is we have a flattening, roughly, and this is very complicated economically, but roughly speaking, we have a flattening of non-industrial productivity throughout this whole period in which high-speed communication tools became ubiquitous. I think the introduction, a lot of these tools brought down our productivity in the sense that the constant context shifting required to exist in a workplace in which everything happens, an email and Slack made us less able to get things done. But the mobile revolution allowed us to compensate for that dropping productivity with doing more work and more hours and it evened out, and we kind of stayed the same. So that's That's one of my theories.

There's obviously also some value to the cultural critiques. I think the very sophisticated sort of postmodern critical theory techniques become a little bit navel-gazing, a little bit circular, a little bit of applying complicated theory for the sake of showing that you're educated enough to apply complicated theory. But if we go to the more accessible versions of the cultural critiques, I think there are clearly subcultures in various industries, et cetera, various demographics

that valorize overwork and leads people to wanting to work more to try to performatively demonstrate that they're working more and that's often not in their best interest. I think the Weber references, the Protestant work ethic,

that theory has been largely undermined by some very interesting sociological research and also I think it's just somewhat out of date. I do not think the influences of 17th or 18th, century Calvinism is really that strong in, let's say, a 25-year-old who is working late hours. Our culture has evolved and has fragmented more its influences, but there's a valid part of the cultural critique, which is there are certain types of subcultures that do valorize work

and overwork, and that has a real material impact on people's psychological well-being. So both of those critiques have something valid in it. So how should we think about productivity? How should we people who, you know, listen to the Deep Questions podcast or read Cal Newport, how should we think about productivity? I like to, I find it useful. And I like to think about productivity in its formal form as you have an input of some resource like labor, thought cycles or whatever.

And that goes through essentially a function that transforms it into an amount of valuable output, right? So productivity, formally speaking, is this mapping from input to output. A lot of these critiques, what they're really critiquing is an approach to productivity where you increase the output by increasing the amount of stuff that's the input. The exploitative relationship with the workers is, let's find a way to get them to put in more into that input so we can get more of the output out there. When we think about these cultures are overworked, a whole notion of the culture is you should put in more hours. Work more. You put more into the function, you get more out.

I like to think about the other aspect of productivity, which is improving that function. So given the same input, the same amount of hours or cognitive cycles, or however we want to measure the resource of the input, given the same input, get more out of the other end for it. improve that function so that two hours of work gets you X units of valuable output versus a much smaller Y. That is the game I'm interested in playing. Now, why is that important? Well, if that function is not optimal, if the way that you transform your available resources in the output is haphazard, if it's unthought through, if it relies on a lot of back and forth hyperactive emailing and keeping things in your head, it's exhausting. It's going to use. It's going to use up a lot of your time, you're more likely to have burnout, and more importantly, you're cutting off

options because to get this amount of output, if you have to put in a lot of time, there's not as much time left for other pursuits that could be meaningful. So to me, in shaping a life that has the various aspects you care about, the more you can make those functions efficient, the more control you have over your life. The better you're going to feel, the more sustainable your work will be, the more healthy you will be both psychologically and physical. So it is worth looking at that function and saying, how do I tighten this thing up so that one hour work produces, you know, a lot more, that one hour work produces what three hours of work might have taken. If I wasn't organizing things, getting things out of my head, managing my time, blocking my time.

Now this by itself, fixing the function by itself, is not going to guarantee you a better outcome because, again, one reaction to fixing this function is great. now I can also increase the hours and have this really tightened up function and really increase the amount of output. You know, for some people, that's what they're trying to do. You're an Elon Musk type. You're trying to build a rocket ship to Mars

and you just want to produce as much possible stuff with your time. Okay, fine, if that's what you want to do, tightening up the function and increasing the time will get you there. But for a lot of people, you could just fall backwards into this trap of them now more effective, so why don't I do more stuff? So the second element I think of thinking about productivity in a positive way is having clarity about what you want out of your life. And we talk about this a lot on this podcast. I talk about it a lot in my writing.

We often use the term the deep life to refer to this notion of you have the various areas of your life that you think are important. I often call these buckets. And you really focus on each area and say, what do I want to do here? What's important? What's the big wins? let me try to minimize the noise. Let me minimize the other activities here that are less valuable. So put my time on things that matter.

Being able to optimize that productivity function is crucial to accomplishing that. So now when you free up time, because you get this stuff over here done more efficiently, you have more time to put over here. When in your remote work, you can actually kind of get your work done by two instead of five because your time blocking and are getting after it, that frees up three hours that you can spend with your kids or three hours you can spend pursuing a, the contemplative life or high quality leisure activity, etc. So that's the way I like to think about productivity is we got to get away from.

Productivity means increase the input so that we get more output. Instead, we have to think productivity is about fixing the function and improving the function that gets us from input to output, so it takes less input to get the outputs. And now we have a ton of options so that when we're trying to craft our ideal life, we have a lot more flexibility in time and what we can produce and how valuable we are to the market. If you don't think about that productivity function, your work life is going to be haphazard. It's going to be stressful. It's going to be exhausting. It's going to take way more time to get things done than it should. And it could lead you to this nihilistic place of like, what's the point of work?

Let's all do nothing. I don't even want to talk about productivity. It stresses me out. And that in itself is not really a terminus that has a sustainable philosophical viability. Right. So is productivity good or bad? I think it can be good if we think. about it the right way. That's the way I think about it. So hopefully this explanation was useful. Hopefully this explanation helps you understand your own potential conflicting feelings about this topic where you have this urge to be more organized, but also you have this urge that you don't want to just be working more for the sake of working. Hopefully this allows you to navigate this complex narrative, let me use it. Let me use a postmodern term here. This palimcess of constructed Foucodeon discourses, however you want to think about it. Hopefully this will help you navigate that and give some foundation for the type of stuff we talk about here on this show. All right, so let's do now some work questions. Our first question comes from Kronis, who says, how do you deal with the unknown denominator when interviewing experts for insights on performance in your field?

I am a surgery resident. I took your advice to heart and have done several interviews with well-regarded master surgeons and have learned a ton of useful insights and strategies, but I wonder about confirmation bias. I can't find a good answer to the question how many people develop that skill or had that happen and yet did not become a master surgeon. So for those who don't know, that advice that you should interview people you admire in your field to figure out what you should be working on to get ahead in your career. This was something

that we first introduced in the course Top Performer that I launched with Scott Young five years ago. You know, that course we've had now, I think, 5,000 students go through that course. So that's where that idea is coming from. And actually, we're working on a new version of the course for next year. So, you know, keep your eyes open for that. By the way, this reminds me, and this is a quick aside, but speaking of online courses, as a lot of you know, Scott Young and I launched a new online course last fall called Life of Focus. And the whole idea of that course was to help you gain more focus in your work and in your personal life and in just your general cognitive skills. And it's a very popular launch, very popular course. We're launching it again here in the new year

due to popular demand, the new session of it. If you want to find out, more, Scott and I set up a website where you can sign up for a waiting list where there's this four-part series Scott wrote that here's what we learned from running life of focus in the fall. Here's the big ideas. So if you're interested in finding out more about the course and hearing about when it opens in the next few weeks, we set up a website, lifeoffocus course.com. But here's key with dashes in between each of those words. So it's life dash of dash focus dash course.com.

If you go there, you can sign up for the mailing list. This week, I think Scott's going to send out. Here's the four thing. Four part series on what we learned about life of focus, what works, what doesn't, what people had to say, and then an announcement about when it opened. So that was a really cool course. I really enjoyed watching the students go through it in the fall. Now that we're in a new year, we have new hope.

It's maybe a good time to think about it again. I really didn't mean to make this question into a commercial. I was just supposed to mention this earlier in the show and I forgot and I'm really bad at sound editing so I don't know how to go in and insert something early on. So, all right, so Kronis, I'm sorry. I did not mean to give a advertisement for Life of Focus Here, though listeners, Life dash of dash, focus, course. com to find out more. But Kronis, let's get back to your question before I was diverted there. So you're asking, your issue is you're asking, what if you interview people, you interview them about what skills are important and the answers you're getting are not necessarily correct? What if it's just confirmation bias?

Well, one thing I would say, and this is definitely a key lesson, having seen thousands of people go through this, is when you're trying to get advice from someone who is not a professional advice giver, do not directly ask them for advice. do not say to the master surgeon in your case, what skills are important? What should I focus on? What's going to be best for my career? It turns out that people are very bad at extracting accurate prescriptive lessons from their own experience. We used to call it in Top Performer, the color folder effect, based on the experience I had years ago when I was researching my book, how to become a straight-A student, where I discovered if you just ask a straight-day student, hey, what's your advice for how to study?

There's this social pressure of, I need to have an answer that sounds smart, and I need something, and they'll just latch on to something. Like, well, I use red folders, which, of course, has nothing to do with how they successfully study, but it was just them trying to have some sort of answer. They wanted to be able to say something clear and coherent and cogent that made them sound smart. So when people are put on the spot, they will come up with answers that are internally consistent, but may have nothing to do with the reality about what really mattered in their experience. So what's the alternative?

Well, if we go back to the colored folder effect, what I learned pretty quickly when researching that book was not to ask the straight-day student, what's your advice for studying, but instead to say, what is the last exam that you took and got a good grade on? Great. Let's talk about how you did study for it. Let's just walk through the timeline. When do you start? How do you take notes? Like whatever the relevant questions are. So it's a journalistic approach where you're basically trying to recreate what the subject did to get their successful solution. And then you as the journalist in this case extracts the

advice out of that information. And so when it comes to career advice in general, that's the right way to do it. Let's talk about your story. You know, how did you start? Then where did you go? What was your next promotion? If you're a surgeon, like where did you train? Where did you do your residency? What happened? At what point did you move on? And when you're getting these stories, you really want to focus on the jumps. You know, you really want to focus on, oh, here's where you went from this residency to getting a chief attending position, if we're going to use the surgeon example here. And that's where you want to hone in a little bit and think about, okay, I'm sure there's like a lot of people who would like that position.

What do you think? Like what was big in your interview? What were they looking for? What do you think the most important thing was? And so you're kind of recreating their story, finding the big jumps that were key to them rising to the place that you admire. And figuring out, you know, trying to interview them, probe them here. Like what was it that made a big difference in that jump?

What were they looking for? I often, you know, advise actually setting up the scenario of, okay, you got this position all of your residents, your fellow residents, let's assume, also wanted this position, what was different between you and them? What do you think the differentiating factor was? It might be like, well, it's my performance review on this

or I'd mastered this new technique. You do this type of interview for a given position. You should be able to then, like a journalist later, go back and recreate, okay, these seem to be the things that made the difference. Now, again, there could be confirmation bias here. They could be missing something that was important. They could be overemphasizing something that's important.

but in my experience, it becomes kind of clear. You know, it's like, well, this surgeon worked under someone who was innovating a new graph technique for artery repair, and it worked really well. And now you are someone who knows that technique. And so that famous surgeon is maybe not available, but you are. And because you knew a really powerful technique, that's how you got your big jump in your surgical career. I mean, I know nothing about surgery, right, but I'm just giving an example here.

It's usually relatively obvious. But you'll get none of this information if you just say, hey, what's your advice? What's your key to success? If you ask that, you're going to hear about red folders. But if you get their story and you really hone in on the big jumps in their story to understand what was different about them and the other people who wanted to make the same jump but didn't, you will come away probably with a pretty accurate answer about what's important to follow a similar path in your own career. Often the answer is not what you want to hear. often the answer means there's going to be some pretty intense focus and deliberate practice that you're going to have to be incredibly diligent about avoiding other things that seem more fun

and seem more interesting. Maybe the answer is going to be, ah, this is high stakes and there's a lot of luck. And even if I really work really hard at it, there's a good chance I'm not going to get there, but at least you know. You have a very accurate picture of how that career works. And having that accurate picture is much better than not when you're trying to figure out, what do I want to do? Is it worth it? and how am I going to do it? Our next question comes from Marguerite, who asks, I'm a recent college graduate, working full-time at a job I love and in a challenging post-back program.

I need to take the GREs for graduate school applications and am having trouble setting up or settling on a strategy to up my math score, which is currently mediocre. Advice. Well, Marguerite, I think this is a good time to talk about my new course. ASEing your GREs with, no, I'm joking. No more implicit accidental advertisements in my questions, I swear. All right, GREs. So with the GREs, in my experience, the very best way to prepare is by doing real GREs.

Right. You get the, you know, I think they were, this might have been written back when I was doing this. Now they're all on the computer, but you get this, you can get this collection from the college board of past GREs. You can take them on the computer. I think my technique for the math gree was I got a book, like a Princeton Review book, studied, here's different types of questions, here's to write types of strategies, and then I just took real GREs under the timing conditions until my score was where I wanted it. So when you're applying to, for example, computer science graduate school at Tier 1 schools like I was doing,

you basically have to have a math score pretty close to perfect. So I just did a bunch of GREs until I could get a high 700s on my math score, and then boom, I was ready. The underlying idea here is that the closer you can get your practice to the actual conditions of performance is often going to be the most effective. So while it's important to at first study, oh, here are the type of questions to show up on the math GREs and here are the common strategies for tackling them. And I vaguely remember these strategies for something about ratios and data tables. I mean, I don't quite remember that it's been a while. Once you have the strategies, you've got to just take them.

You've got to take them under time pressure until you do well. And then when you get to the GRE itself, you're like, yeah, I've done exactly this. I sit here, I take it, I know how long it takes, I know what it feels like. I know how to get the higher scores. So just work at it until it gets where you want to get and then take that test and move on. All right. Next up is Brian, who asks, what do you do about work that exist in between? deep and shallow.

I find that design tasks like wire framing in sketch exist in a world between deep and shallow work. I cannot do these tasks when I need to be available on email or chat, but also find I am much more likely to stay on task when I have a small thing to hold my attention like a podcast. Well, this is an interesting question. I know what you're talking about. there's efforts that I call

intermittently deep so it's basically you're working on something that for the most part you can sort of be tuned out but then there's elements where you have to lock in and concentrate so if you're doing a wireframe sketch there may be a key decision you make

about how you're doing something and then a lot of somewhat autopilot type work to make progress on it and then you have to think about something again so it's not let you're in intense focus the whole time you just have moments of intense focus.

I think it's okay if it helps you, if you have a podcast going, if you just recognize you're going to have to pause that podcast when it comes time to do decisions. It'll slow you down, but I don't think it's going to drastically slow you down to the degree of, you know, if you're doing something that was purely deep

and had a podcast going, right? You're trying to write something and listen to a podcast, you're toast. You're right, nothing's going to get done. But if you're doing something where it's, oh, I got a pasta podcast and think about it and then have to tediously drag in wireframe lines for 20 minutes and then pause the podcast and think about what to do next. I think it's fine. I think it's going to barely slow you down.

And if it makes that work more tractable, like easier for you to get going, then, you know, all the more power to you. I mean, we're really talking about shallow work here that has little moments of depth. And so I wouldn't, I wouldn't sweat it too much. If it works for you and you don't feel super slow, go for it. Ishawn asks, how can a high schooler make the most out of time blocking? Well, Sean, that's a good question. I wouldn't recommend that a high school student is doing full out time blocking like a professional would. If you're a high school student, most of your day is already time blocked.

It's called class periods. So you're already sort of used to this mindset. So the time that's left over that's relevant here for thinking about from a scheduling perspective is your time after your school day is over. Now, I don't think you need the time block every minute of this time, but I think you do need a plan for this time. You know, I'm going to work on this homework and on this paper, and here's what I'm going to do it, and here's how long it is.

So you're not time blocking your entire afternoon and evening, but you are blocking off the time you're going to be doing schoolwork. You're going to face it. I'm doing this schoolwork and this time. Here's what I'm working on. So we can call this, I don't know, targeted time blocking. hopefully you have a lot of afternoon and evening time that is being spent on other things like socializing and family and relaxation. This should not be time blocked, but the work you do for your school should be write it down and look at it.

There's a couple advantages to this. Number one, you are facing the reality of what's on your plate. Like a lot of high schoolers just sort of wait until it's later in the evening and just vaguely start working and it ends up, they end up staying up real late. Like you need to see, I need this many hours. Here's how long it's going to take to get my AP. history homework done. And when you confront that, you're going to start things earlier, you're going to spread things out, you're less likely to wait till the day before. Two, and this is probably the huge advantage, the biggest advantage you're going to get is when you have a block

specific time to do this specific schoolwork, it's much easier to say, let me just do that work, no phone. And you will speed up your completion time. If you're a high schooler, you will speed up your completion time for your schoolwork by a factor of three if you're doing it without your phone. If you don't time block your schoolwork and just say vaguely, I'm going to work tonight, all my stuff, then your mind's like, well, of course we're not just going to spend a whole night without our phone, and so then we might as well look at it now. And now let's look at it again. Let's look at it again. So you can time block your time. Like I'm on my phone. I'm doing my TikTok text or whatever it is that kids do these days. And you're like, okay, now it's schoolwork time.

30 minutes to get through my AP history notes. Let's go. Boom. Full focus, done. All right. Now I've got, let me check in on everything and do my, my Instagram, uh, story zoom. I mean, I don't really know what you guys do. Uh, okay, now it's, uh, 90 minutes writing a draft of this paper.

Go. You will be surprised by how much you get done. The only other thing I want to point out is if you're finding Ishaun that you're out of time. Okay, I'm trying to time block my schoolwork. And I, I have so much. work I need to get done. I can't find any time. I'm blocking up all of my free time in the afternoon and evening. You're not going to solve that problem by not time blocking. You're not going to solve that problem by

not confronting how much you actually have on your plate. You're going to solve that problem by looking at your schedule, looking at your study habits, trying to make your academic life more reasonable. I wrote a book about this. It's an answer I give to a lot of questions, but it's very true in this case. I wrote a book about this, how to become a high school superstar. look past the name. It's a very interesting book. Part one of that book is on this notion of underscheduling. And I make a really strong argument that most high school kids are doing too much.

And I talk about how to reduce the amount of time that you do work. I get into a lot of detail in this. But I have this notion of fixing in advance. Like this is how much work I want to be doing as part of a well-balanced life. and then working backwards from that goal with a combination of reducing course load and extracurricular commitments combined with increased efficiency

of how you get that work done. So like no phone and good study habits, etc. And you put those together and you can craft for yourself as a high school student in a life that's academically successful is going to open up interesting college options but does not burn you out,

does not overwhelm you. So it's a really cool book. I love that book because I started writing it. I sold it to, it was an imprint of random house that I used to write for. And then they bought Penguin.

There was all these mergers. Everyone kept getting fired. And I went through like seven editors. So by the time it got to its final editor, this high school superstar book, no one remembered what they had bought or what I was supposed to do. And so I was just free to write whatever I wanted.

And it's a crazy book. It's like Malcolm Gladwell meets A for admissions. It's really interesting. I talk about the mathematics of countersignaling and peacocks and we get into the failed simulation effect. And anyway, it's a really cool book, but the first part really gets into this notion of underscheduling.

It's the foundation for becoming an interesting person and actually having a better life and having better college admissions opportunities, but it really gets into you've got to cut back what you do, you got to control your schedule. So reading that book, how to become a high school superstar, is a good adjunct to this general advice,

which is block the time you're doing school work, confront it, don't run from it, and be as efficient as possible as you can during those blocks. There's a ton of inefficiency in high school. So, Ishaun, the fact that you're asking these questions, you can make your life much, much better just by thinking even a little bit about how I organize structure and approach my student work. All right, let's do one last work question.

This one comes from Pock. He says, what's your career advice for a recent college graduate during a pandemic? I'm a recent college student and stuck with picking a career. I'm not sure about what I want to pursue. I got a degree in sports, science, and psychology, but I want to explore writing and content creation. Well, Pock, I think by far your most stable and lucrative option is to become a professional YouTuber,

so I would drop everything and start doing that. Clearly, I'm joking about that. This is yet another question in which I am going to answer it by pointing towards my own book, so I apologize for this string of accidental self-promotion. But, Pock, it sounds like you really should read my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you, in which I take a critical and somewhat contrary and look at how people end up with careers that they really love. And one of the core ideas in this book is that career capital is king. So career capital is my term for rare and valuable skills.

And the way that many careers function is as you build up career capital, so as you develop rare and valuable skills, you are able to then invest this metaphorical resource to get in return to types of things that make great careers great. You want a ton of autonomy, you want a ton of impact, you want to be working on really interesting projects, you want whatever it is you're looking for that's going to make that job great almost always you have to have something to offer in return.

And the thing you have to offer in return is rare and valuable skills. So the path to building a career you really love starts with, like an apprentice, I want to put my head down and using the principles of deliberate practice, build up rare and valuable skills absolutely as fast as possible. That is my currency to make my job great. The problem is when people instead focus on what I call the match theory, they focus instead on, is this the job I want? What does this job offer me? You begin looking at those things that make a great career great and wondering, well, can I just find a job now that has those

and gives those to me? And if it doesn't, then maybe it's not the right job. And a big argument in that book is that we overvalue this idea that the match of the specific work to our intrinsic personality is going to be fundamental to whether or not we like a job or not. And the reality for 99% of people is much more transactional. You get good, being good allows you to shape your job somewhere cool. So your first few years in a job, it's not about do I love this every day. It's about how good am I getting at skills that matter so they can make this job better? I think that is the more productive mindset. So how do you choose what job to start this career capital acquisition process with, you shouldn't just throw a dart. Not all jobs are made equal. So just because there doesn't

exist a one true passion you have to follow doesn't mean that any job could be a potential source. A few things I would suggest, Pock, is, you know, obviously look for work that seems interesting to you. Look for work that leverages whatever existing skills, whatever existing rare and valuable skills you have, all things being equal, work that leverages or will value, those existing skills is better than work that won't, because that means you already have a head start in acquiring career capital. You should also care about things like lifestyle factors. So if you have some vision of what you like in your life, are you Gordon, Gecko, Elon Musk, like, let's rock and roll, I want to be, I want to be, you know, Master of the Universe, let's attack, let's go,

like that, if that's very appealing to you, that's a, that opens, that's a different type of job. If you're instead, you know, I want to get my mountain biking time in. I like to read. I don't like to be overwhelmed or stressed by work. That's a different class of job that's going to satisfy that. Location matters, right? If you're, I want to be out in nature and, you know, hiking in the weekends and this and that, a job that forces you to be in, you know, downtown L.A.

is not going to be nearly as good as a fit for you as a job that's in, you know, Boulder, Colorado. Or it's fully remote so you can live, you know, in Asheville or something like this and still do the work. So lifestyle factors, is it congruent? Like where the culture of the company, the location and the work rhythms, is it congruent with the things I generally am looking for in a lifestyle I enjoy? So these things matter. Yeah, this seems interesting. It takes advantage of capital I already have. It's conducive for the general type of lifestyle I want to live.

I would add a fourth thing. It seems like it will reward career capital with options and flexibility. So you want to make sure that this is a job that there are skills you can master. And if you do master them, it will give you options. It will be rewarded. And the type of reward I care about here is more autonomy, not just financial, but autonomy. Like this is the problem, for example, with corporate law jobs. If you get really good at what you do in corporate law, you gain more money for sure,

but you actually lose autonomy. Now you have to run a group. Now your hours get even larger. You get more and more locked in. You lose autonomy as you get better. Whereas in other fields, as you get better, you get more options. More people want your services. You can trade your care capitals for different types of projects.

If you become an excellent computer programmer, you have more options. Like, oh, I could go work for this company. I could start my own company. I could do freelance. I could just work six months a year. So that would be the fourth thing I would say. So there you go. That's probably going to open up a lot of options.

There's no one true passion. Just anything that scores well on those four categories, like that's as good as any other. That's as good as any other job option for being the foundation of building a very meaningful and passionate work life. So choose something that scores well on those four areas. don't overthink it beyond that. Turn your attention then to honing your skills.

Like an apprentice with the principles of the deliberate practice, much so good that kind of ignore you gets all into this. And focus on how you're going to feel about this job, not on day five, but year five. After you've had enough time to get good enough that you have some leverage and you can take that leverage out for a spin to mix the metaphors and begin shaping your career in ways that matter. That's the long game you want to have.

So it's good news, bad news, Poc. The good news is you don't have to overswet this choice you're about to make of what job to take because many, many positions will score reasonably well on those categories I just gave you. The bad news is, however, your work is only just beginning once you take the job. Almost everything in the formula that's going to lead you to passion and meaning and satisfaction happens once you take the job, whether or not you're sufficiently deliberate in building up your career capital. So if you approach your career with that mindset, which again is all laid out in my book, I think you are going to have a really good probability of ending up with a working

life you love. And as much as I love talking about work, I think we should move on now to some technology questions. E asks, how do you feel about psychedelics as a potential portal into a deep life? Personally, I'm terrified of psychedelics. My mind is a weird and scary enough place as it is, even without the introduction of powerful psychoactive substances. But the talk a little bit more generally, I mean, you might be on to something E. So a few years ago, I did a speaking gig. I was speaking at a conference.

And Michael Pollan was another speaker there. And I listened to his talk about his book from a few years back on psychedelics. It was really interesting. There's a lot of compelling research that says properly dosed and guided psychedelic trips can have really positive impacts. And some of these impacts really do seem to overlap some of the things we talk about with our definition of the deep life. One of the places where medically speaking, these guided psychedelic experiences have had a positive impact is with the psychological state of terminal cancer patients. I heard Paulin talk about this. It really helps stave off the otherwise expected, let's say, depression.

And in part because what they are exposed to during the trip can be something that opens their mind to the world and the interconnectedness and takes them outside of themselves because of the ego-dissolving impact of the substances that then makes it easier to sort of appreciate the, world and their life and what they do have and makes death seem less scary. And when you hear results like this, you think, yeah, probably a similar type of guided trip could really help you reset your understanding of your life. What are your buckets? What's important? What's not? It's just their scary substances. So what I imagine is going to happen is that as methodologies and best practices for these guided experiences are increasingly being hashed out in these more narrow areas like terminal cancer patients. Another area where there's been a lot of success in focus recently is in working with post-traumatic stress responses in vets. It's another place where

low-dose psychedelics has been very useful. I think as these rigorous medical investigations work through the best practices, how does this actually work, what dosage, what type of guidance, how do we minimize the dangers, what's the right way to do it, we will see it creep into other parts of the world of psychotherapy, at which point, once it feels like it is safe and replicatable, hey, I think it might end up being a relatively accepted and quite effective way to help lay the foundation of a deep life. Who knows? Maybe there's a future where once a year, you do your guided trip so that you can sort of step back and look at your quarterly plans and figure out and reconnect with what's important. What do I want to do? So I wouldn't be surprised

if pollen is right, I think Tim Ferriss has invested some money in some of the research efforts. I think they're looking at like microdosing of some psychedelics and treatments of depression. So I've heard him talk about this as well. But if pollen and Ferris and these other advocates of medical intervention through psychedelics are correct, you might be on something here. I wouldn't be surprised if more people will have access to this approach, to sharpening their understanding of a deep life, which makes this a good time for me to introduce

Scott Young and I's New Venture, which is a psychedelics and marijuana dispensary. It's called The Deep Toke. And I recommend, okay, guys, I'm joking. I'm just feeling bad about how much implicit advertising I'm accidentally doing in this show. So now I'm just straight up making fun of myself. All right, this is a sign I need to move on,

which we will do now with our next question, which comes from donkey. who says, you mentioned previously that some of your favorite technology is focused on a single function, such as your pedometer. What are some of your other favorites? Yeah, I talk about in digital minimalism, this idea of single-use technology as being a powerful one, that as we move to general use technology, there is these unintentional side effects, that, yeah, it's great that my personal computer can do all these different things.

It's great that my phone can do all of these different things, but the downside of this is that you are finding your attention pulled in many different directions. I'm on my phone to look up directions, but I also jump over to social media. Let's see what's going on on email, and maybe I should jump to this news app, and it can be a cognitive environment that is quite alluring and because of that quite also distracting. So I love my pedometer. You know, it's a little piece of plastic with a watch battery and an LCD screen, and all it does count steps.

And at midnight, it resets to count, and it can show you your steps for today. It'll show your steps from yesterday. Great single-use piece of technology. My time block planner is another single-use technology that I really enjoyed. This book does one thing. Organize your daily time. It's all it does. It does it well.

If you own one, bring one with you, that's what you do with it. So I enjoy that. A good spiral-bound thick grid paper notebook. It's another single use tool I like for me. This is where I do proofs. I'm thinking through a proof. Take notes in the notebook. That's all the notebook does.

That's all it's for. It serves that purpose very well. There's a real clarity of thought and purpose when you open up the notebook. So that'd be another example. You could also count, of course, just the codex. The old-fashioned printed bound book is a fantastic single-use technology. This is a technology that is shaped to do one thing. to deliver you information on a topic in a way that is easy to both browse and reference and move back and forth through.

It's portable, requires no batteries, it's incredibly durable, it has a density of information, it's very flexible in terms of the ease of flipping pages. We take that for granted, but that was a huge innovation over scroll-based information where it's actually very non-trivial to move from one section to another because you have to roll and unroll a scroll. The codex solve this problem. You can flip the pages. It's much more efficient. It's a great single-use technology.

So, yeah, in general, I like this question, Donkey, because I like beautifully engineered single-use technology items. It just more matches, I think, our human instinct, and it induces focus. It induces appreciation of quality.

I'm a single-use fan type of guy. Moving on. Bradford asks, how will the use of AI text editors change the way we think and write? As I start to use AI text editors, such as those built into Gmail and Microsoft, it is convenient to have suggestions that make my writing more clear and concise. However, I wonder what tradeoffs are being made. You know, I would say, Bradford, I'm not too concerned about these AI tools that come in and suggest spelling fixes or grammar fixes or how to complete the sentence that you are trying to write.

I mean, it's an interesting notion. Will this shape the way we write in such a way that unintentionally the AI feedback loop moves our writing to a new sort of style? Like, that's actually an interesting question. Like, theoretically, that's interesting. The way a lot of these tools are deployed now, though, I don't think it's that different than what professional writers have always had in terms of editing. If you write for a newspaper or something like this, there's the editor that a wrong word, simplify, you know, cut this out. That was a standard feedback loop in writing, and we're just making it more accessible. So now when you're writing your email or writing your memo in your job, it's like as if you get your own copy editor. And more than anything

else, I think it just makes your writing clear. You kind of learn some of these things and then you stop making those mistakes. So I think on a whole it's a good, it's probably a good thing. again, though, this bigger question of, is it possible that somehow the AI that's going into feeding these suggestions creates a feedback loop that moves us into a new vernacular, a new dialect? Like, that's a really cool, interesting theoretical question. You could probably write a well-received peer-reviewed paper on that topic, but I don't actually know if any of that is true. But good food for thought.

Speaking of food, if you are looking to get into better shape and to get more healthy in this new year, look no farther than our sponsor, My Body Tudor. This is the company that was started by my friend Adam Gilbert, who used to be the health guest columnist on my old study hacks blog. It is a 100% online coaching program in which you are matched with a coach who you meet with regularly online. They build a meal plan, they build a workout plan and then they hold you accountable. Did you do the things you were going to do? As Adam always says, the information is the easy part about getting healthy. It's the accountability that makes a difference. You know what you should do, but are you actually doing it? Having to look this online coach

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And speaking of New Year's resolutions, if you are looking to get more depth out of your deep work sessions this year, consider four-sigmatics ground mushroom coffee with Lions Main Mushroom. As I've talked about before on this podcast, it's a great tasting cup of coffee. It's got a little bit lower caffeine than normal,

so it makes you less jittery. The ground mushroom gives it a nutty, flavor does not taste like mushrooms, but there is also other psychological impacts from this mushroom additive that makes drinking this coffee a physiologically distinct event. And so it makes for a great deep work hook. If your ritual is to brew up a cup of four-sigmatic before each deep work session, your mind will soon recognize that unique feeling that you get from four-sigmatic's custom blend with the lion's main mushroom. And it knows now is the time to start doing deep work. That is how I use it. Look, this stuff has over 20,000 five-star reviews. All of their products

have a 100% money-back guarantee. So you've got to love every sipper. You'll get your money back. So I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on this best-selling mushroom coffee product. It's just for us. That is DeepQuest Questions listeners. You can get up to 40% off and free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for deep questions listeners and is not available under regular website. So you will save up to 40% and get free shipping. If you go to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep. Four-Sigmatic.com slash deep to fuel your deep work with the power of mushrooms. All right, let's do one more technology question here. This one is from Martin.

Martin asks, you mention aspects of the social internet that you really enjoy, like blogging. Are there any aspects that you believe have been phased out of use, but you would like to see make a resurgence? Well, Martin, I think RSS is a technology that, though still around, took a big hit once Google stopped supporting their Google Reader product. and it is something I think should make a resurgence. So we have seen a shift of content creation moving off of these social media platforms where, you know, they're dystopian penopticon where you are a digital sharecropper and everyone owns what you're doing, you can't control it. And we've seen this exodus of content creators from the social media platforms and onto things like substack email newsletters.

So I do like this idea of I'm moving away from a platform in which everything is completely controlled and sort of dystopianly surveilled to platforms that are much more direct, much more distributed, much more under the content creator's control. I write this. It gets sent to you because you want to see it. However, it's pretty inefficient to have all of these different content creators that are all sending emails. You could get all those emails to your inbox, but you get a ton of other email too and it can be pretty overwhelming. These emails arrive. in a haphazardly, and you know, you hope they don't get blanketed in other messages. You hope they arrive in a time when you're ready to read them. So if you wanted to solve that problem, you would end up where we were in 2005. You would say, well, what really should happen here is that these people should be writing on their own websites, you know, like a blog or something like this. And it could be delivered by email, but also be syndicated with RSS.

You have a really good RSS reader. where you just see, okay, here are the people I follow. They're divided by categories. When they write new things, it shows up in my reader. It's like a digital newspaper that has been created just for me from the people I like. And now you just have to go to this one tool. It has nothing to do with your email inbox. You go to this one tool when it comes time to consume content created by interesting people.

And boom, here's everything just new. And there's tools like this, like Insta Paper and others that try to make this experience really nice. but I just think we're going to end up where we were in 2005, 15 years later. Social media came along. This was more profitable. All the big money went behind social media because it's profitable for the small number of people who actually can enjoy in the profits of the social media platforms. It's no surprise that Google was not going to support RSS.

There's way more ad money to be made. If you can control people's experience, we're breaking free from that. We're going back to newsletter construction. I just think we're going to end up where we were before with very nice readers where we can subscribe to content streams from people that we admire and want to know what they have to say. I think what we probably need

to make this resurgence good is we know how to do good readers. They exist. They existed before. Figuring out the pay thing. Right. So if you're interested in substack as a business model, well here is another business model that I think is important. Make it easy for people to do RSS feeds

where they are paid subscriptions. Or you have multiple feeds. Here's the free tier. Here's the other tier. Very easy for you as a content creator to create these streams. And it doesn't go into an email inbox. It goes into a reader. And you can, you know, this one costs a dollar a month.

This one costs $10 a month. You know, and make it really easy. I kind of have this budget of money I want to spend on content. And I'm kind of spreading it out over these different things. I've discovered a dollar a month for this. Five dollars a month for this. Here's my $30 a month worth of content. And it comes into a reader and not into an email inbox.

That's what I would like to see. I think we're going to end up back there. And what I'm trying to say is kids these days don't understand that in the beginning of Web 2.0, those of us like me who are around in the beginning, we had it all figured out. Our rock and roll music is better than your rock and roll music. We will soon realize that we had some pretty good ideas back then in the beginning. All right, that's good for technology. Let's move on now to some questions about the deep life. Let's kick things off with Stephen. Stephen says,

Hi, Cal, I am very interested in living a deeper, more meaningful life filled with deep work and nourishing leisure. However, I live in a small one-bedroom apartment with my partner during a pandemic, and I long for the type of spaces you have at the Deep Work HQ. Do you have any strategies for how to get deep work done in a small, not always quiet space, besides buying noise canceling headphones. Well, Stephen, first I should say you're longing for something like the Deep Work HQ is well justified. This has to be one of my sort of favorite things I have done in my professional life in a long time. I recognize that this is not generally an accessible solution.

Most people do not have an audience that you've painstakingly built up over 15 years on which you can build out a podcast that then supports a standalone an office, but yeah, it has been great. I love coming here. I love being able to have a separation between work and non-work and post-pandemic. I think this is going to, the Deep Work HQ is going to remain a part of my repertoire. All right. So that feels like I'm putting salt in your wound. So let's try to get to some answers here.

First, let me give a preface. The preface is the pandemic is going to end. And so what we're talking about here might just. before a temporary fix. I just want to keep emphasizing this. All pandemics throughout the history of humankind have come, and they have gone. This one will go to. And so in the middle of it, it can seem like it is interminable, and this is what life is.

Five years from now, we're going to look back, and it's not going to seem so long. So I'm saying this just to keep in mind that at some point, you're going to have a lot more solutions available because you won't necessarily be working out of your one-bedroom apartment. You'll be able to go back to an office. If you work in an office job, if you don't, you can look into co-working spaces, which is an industry sector that is really exploding because of the pressures of increased remote work to the pandemic created. Coffee shops and other types of work environments, libraries. I used to go to a lot of the museums on the mall in D.C. And there's different corners of different museums I would go to to get work done in because it was just

exotic, interesting environments, right? You know, huge number of options will be open again once the pandemic is open over. So, like, let's not despair. Let's focus now on what you can do right now with that optimistic undercurrent of this as temporary fixes to a dumpster fire of a situation. So what can you do right now?

I think the most of my advice to you is going to center around buying a good jacket. And to be more clear about that, get outside more. Get outside more, right? I know right now it's winter. I don't know where you live. You might live somewhere warm or maybe you live somewhere cold, but get outside more so that you have more of a diversity of places that you can go to work.

Do calls while you walk. Find outdoor places where you can work. Be willing to get exotic with that. I mean, I do a lot of work. Traditionally, I would go to various parks and hiking trails. Like, yeah, I'm going to be here for two hours. I'm going to be hiking and thinking with that. my notebook and working on this problem.

You know, be bold about bringing your laptop somewhere outside where it's scenic and there's a brook and it's cold but you have a good jacket on and you're writing a memo. So break this mindset that work has to happen indoors. It has to happen at the same desk. Get really creative about it. And the small town I live outside of Washington, D.C., there's a lot of outdoor dining options, but they don't want you using laptops there because there's limited seating, right? So it's, you don't want people parking.

But like my town, we closed off some streets and have also put out near the, the restaurants and the coffee shops near my HQ, like picnic tables and chairs just for public use. Go there to read. Go there to work. Print things out. Let the printer be your friend. Let me print out all these things. And I'm going to go read them outside with a wool hat on in the sun and a chair that's in the town square that was set up or whatever. You see what I'm saying.

Use fire pits. I was just talking to a friend of mine about this the other night. I think he used lighting a fire in his fire pit as a ritual to help transition him into a thinking mindset and he did two hours of reading by the fire. Like, okay, if it's cold, get a fire pit going, right? Go light a fire and do work next to it. All of these have the undercurrent of become more adventurous about what you consider to be an appropriate place to do work. get out of that one-bedroom apartment a lot. It makes your day more interesting.

You can probably extract more depth from your mind. I've talked about on this podcast before that years ago, I used to write on my blog for students. I would write about this notion of adventure studying. It was very similar. Students that were burnt out being stuck in the same dorm room or library studying, and we would challenge each other to who could find the more exotic place to go do schoolwork. and people would send in photos

and I would post them and that would encourage other people to try to be even more elaborate and people would be studying by waterfalls and sneaking onto the roof of the astronomy building and going to modern art museums and finding a chair by a window that overlooked the river and that's where they would go and get their work done

and there was this whole ethic of who can go to a more sublime, dramatic location to get work done and it really shook people out of their doldrums of my dorm at the library. So it's the same mindset. It's not adventure studying. It's adventure knowledge work. What's the same idea?

So get out of your, get out of your apartment, build some fires, work outside, go do some hiking, take all your calls on foot. One of the silver linings of this sort of otherwise terrible moment we're in is that we kind of have a lot of flexibility. There's not a lot of rules. The offices are closed and everyone's kind of scrambling. So take advantage of it and make the next whatever it is number of months into a pretty interesting period of your working life. our next question comes from Octavius, who says, I have talked about your podcast and books to people who are important to me, for example, friends and family.

However, some of them claim that they won't read or listen to your work because they don't like the quote, self-help unquote genre since they don't need someone telling them how to live. I mean, Octavia, a lot of people just don't like the genre. You know, either they're dismissive of it, right, which I get. Like a lot of the stuff written in the genre is cheesy. It's, you know, it's people conjure images of Tony Robbins getting the crowd to jump up and dance and it seems unsophisticated. It's why like New York-based journalistic writers like Malcolm Gladwell won't put advice in their books even though they know that their readers are reading books like the tipping point to extract useful information, but it's just unsophisticated.

to give advice. It's Brian Tracy. It's Tony Robbins. It's, it's, uh, uh, seven habits, a highly effective people. It's unsophisticated. So people are dismissive. I get that. And a lot of this stuff is nonsense. So like why, why waste your time trying to figure out what's nonsense and what is not? Other people get defensive. Right. So it's not just that they dismiss it, but they will get defensive if you try to push self-help on them. Different genres, I think, induce different levels of defensiveness. Probably the king. of defensiveness creation is probably financial advice. I think there's no way to get people more,

their backup harder than when you talk to them about like, ooh, you should, especially if you're related to it. You should read this book about like Dave Ramsey, like how to manage your money. For whatever reason, that gets people really defensive. I think productivity stuff like I do is a little less controversial. I think people are more willing to like, yeah, sure.

I have a hard time manage my time. I'm happy to look at some ideas and see if they're helpful. I think people get a little bit less defensive. about it, but some people really are. I mean, there's a whole subculture of journalists out there that just really dislike me, for example. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know exactly why. I don't know if it's because I don't fit neatly into an existing tribe, so it's hard to kind of categorize me. I don't know if it's just I have a punchable face. Like, I don't know. It just seems like someone like, I don't want to listen to this guy. Maybe I represent a lot of other things to people that are distressing. Maybe there's a profession. I don't know, right? But here's the thing.

That's just what it is. So what should you do, Octavius? Well, look, you're not going to force your friends and family to, you know, listen to deep questions or to read getting things done. I just suggest that you focus on yourself and build the best deepest life you can for yourself. Use the advice that works. Bended the advice that doesn't. people will become curious, right? And they'll ask about it.

Yeah, you seem organized. Like, what's going on? I see that you have this planner with this ribbon. What's going on here? You're like, it's what I use. Or, you know, like, yeah, you seem like low stress recently. You're like, yeah, you know, here's what I've done.

I've cut back on my work. I've been focusing on my contemplation bucket. There's this deep life idea that I've been following. And, you know, when people ask, honestly, you can give them an honest answer about what you do. And some of them will be like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, is that a self-help thing? Like, never mind. But other people are like, oh, oh, that's a self-help thing. it's interesting. And then they will secretly, like, read a book or listen to a podcast.

That's basically the best you can do, right? 50% of people are always going to be defensive about this. There's 20% of people who are going to be instinctually dismissive, but might come around if they kind of see it working well and hear about in the right way. And so that's pretty much the best you can do with your friends and family. So going forward, really just focus on yourself, live deeply, be the change that you would like to see in your social world, and some of those ideas will percolate out. All right, let's do one more question here. This one comes from Andrew. And he asks, how can I encourage my peers and friends to think more critically and deeply about the state of the

world and their places in it? I am a first-year undergraduate student and have recently started reading more deeply and thinking more about philosophical, cultural, and societal subjects. My question is, how can I help encourage deep, long-form, and long-term conversations among my friends and peers about topics such as technology's effects on everyday life and the public discourse? Well, Andrew, I'm glad that you're having an intellectual awakening at college. You're being exposed to new ideas and aggressively trying to pursue and construct your own tentative frameworks for understanding the world at a deeper level of complexity. That's what college really should be for most people. And I'm glad that you are having this traditional college experience. I would also caution you some. I mean, I think as a as a first year undergraduate, if you're running around telling your friends like,

hey, we need to have long form and long term conversations about technology's effect on everyday life and public discourse, you may have less friends as a second year student. Right. That could become that could become a little bit insufferable. Now, I'm joking here a little bit, but there's a more general point here, which is your intellectual life in general does not have to fully overlap with your social life. And there are topics in which I am a world-class expert, including some topics in applied mathematics and some topics within the philosophy of technology. Most of my conversations with my friends and family are not about these topics, right?

I mean, I don't, we just, you know, we had some friends over for a fire pit last night. I was not talking about technological determinism. I was not talking about the rise of social construction of technology versus technological determinism and how the rejuvenation of technological determinism gives us better tools for understanding the un-predictable dynamical responses of new socio-technological systems. It's a topic that's interesting to me. I've written a lot about it. but I'm not talking about it at the fire pit. The same thing is, you know, if I've seen my family,

I'm not saying like, hey, how's it been, how the kid's been? Let me talk about how we can actually use Shannon and Weaver's source coding theorem to find an alternative route to getting a lower bound on randomized uniform contention resolution algorithms. It's something I know a lot about. It's something I'm working on. But that would not be the appropriate place to talk about it. Right.

So you can have a social life that's not. completely congruent or completely overlapping with your intellectual life. Now, that doesn't mean that your intellectual life has to be completely bottled up and isolated, but what I would recommend is systematically developing your intellectual life and trying to actually produce write articles for student publications. Take specialized seminars with professors with small number of students in the class. Start whatever, a podcast, wherever you want to do. Like find ways to actually work through these thoughts and produce original thoughts

and get them out in the world, and you will begin to meet people who are interested in those specific ideas. So within your broader group of friends, you will have a smaller number of friends who like to have a long-form, long-term discussions about the technological impacts of public discourse. And here's the thing. That's good, because you want to have people that you can talk through these ideas you've been thinking deeply about, and that can be very fulfilling, but you also don't want to just have people like that because it's exhausting. If your entire life, all of your conversations exist at this really sort of exalted level of complexity. And so you have other friends that, you know, it's your beer pong partner or whatever,

right? And you have different types of conversations and you have different types of relationships because there's different parts of life that are important and being there for people and connection and contemplation and constitution. There's all these other parts of life that are important and friends can play a role in that. And I think having that, diversity of different friend types is probably the right way to approach, if you're going to approach an intellectual life, and I'm telling you this from experience as someone who is, you know, makes a living thinking, having a good mix of different types of conversations and different types of friends, or friends that you have both conversations with. Like sometimes, like we talk deeply about this and

other times we're talking about football. I think that's all really good. You know, if you become too much in your head that the intellectual world in your head is the main thing that matters. You're going to be lacking resilience in your life. A lot can go wrong in your head. It's a dangerous place to have everything based. You need other parts of your life. You need other things that are important, other types of people, other types of conversations. So basically, I'm encouraging you, Andrew. Good for you for saying, I want to develop more complex thoughts on things that matter. I'm in college. Let's take advantage of it. Produce stuff. Get involved in conversations with other people who care. Find people who do want to

talk to you about that. Just don't think all your friends need to fall into that category. That will be a really good mix. If you can go from philosophy to pong without skipping a beat, you are probably well set to have a productive college experience. All right, well, speaking of productivity, why don't I wrap up this episode and let you get on with other parts of your day? If you want to submit your own questions, go to Cal Newport.com slash podcast. to find out how. I'll be back later this week with a habit to not many episode.

And until then, as always, stay deep.