Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 77: Does Email Have a Mind of Its Own?

Episode Date: March 8, 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: Does email have a mind of its own? [6:23]WORK QUESTIONS - How do I avoid boring research? [16:35] - How do I learn new skills without becoming overwhelmed? [19:44] - How do I better structure workplace communication? [23:34] - How do I say "no" more often? [29:41]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - When should I stop listening to your podcast? [39:12] - How do I deal with excessive browser tabs? [40:14] - Will the world eventually force me to buy a smartphone? [49:08]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - (A brief meditation on the pleasures of regular autonomous creative work) [52:20] - How long should planning take? [57:28] - Is reading fiction a waste of time? [59:04] - What is your opinion of Alexa? [1:02:41] - Is a mission different than a passion? [1:06:22]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 Questions. Episode 77. Quick announcements. It's nice to be recording a podcast that's not just promoting my book. I've done quite a few of those recently. A World Without Email came out last week, and I have officially been talking about this book too much, at least for my own taste.

It was definitely a busy week. Good week, though. Some highlights. We kick things off with an... excerpt from the book in The New Yorker last week. Then we ran a column I wrote for Wired on the way that new technologies can actually make us less productive. It was actually an interesting piece. Then we had a review in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts ran in Fast Company and Entrepreneur. We did an interview in Fortune. I did Innovation Hub, which is one of my favorite national NPR shows

that I've done a few times. I did Lex Friedman's podcast. That was a lot of fun. Three hours and 40 minutes we recorded. This new long-form world of podcast is no joke. I also did Ezra Klein's podcast. Based on the emails I get from people, a lot of people listen to Ezra Klein's podcast. That's what I learned in the aftermath of that one.

We also got some good reviews coming in from overseas. The Financial Times ran a review. The Times of London ran a review. their T2 magazine also ran a review. It turns out they're sort of two separate entities, even though they're both associated with the Times. So a lot more, too, a lot more articles, a ton of podcasts, I've been doing a lot of podcasts.

So it's been nice. I think the word is out there. So now it's up to the book. If people like it, it will spread and hopefully have an impact. And if they don't, we'll find out soon enough. So thank you for putting up with me talking about the book over this last week or so. I'm happy for things to wind down some.

I do a lot of book launches. They usually don't phase me. This one I've been having sleep trouble, which is not fun. I mean, I classically have sleep issues that come and go, but it's been pretty persistent in the lead up and throughout this launch. I'm just not sleeping very well, so it's not great. So I'm looking forward to that, hopefully improving soon. But looking ahead, I have, you know, this week that this podcast is coming out.

There's some early morning UK things, like a 4 a.m. thing I'm doing tomorrow, which is not great for my lack of sleep right. now. But then I think after next week, we die down to a tail plan where you do a few three or four podcasts a week just to keep popping up and to keep the long tail going. But for the most part, it's not like it has been recently where there'll be three, four hits a day. All right. So anyways, I hope you like the book if you ended up buying it and have had a chance to read a copy. if you're still on the fence, those different interviews and articles should give you some idea about what actually happens in there. In terms of other announcements, I really have been negligent in soliciting new questions for the podcast.

The last time I surveyed my email list for questions was December. And I guess I just got busy with the book launch, et cetera. I would normally refresh those questions much sooner because, I mean, think about everything that's happened since. December, including just my new book, changes in the pandemic, changes in we have a new presidential administration in our country. A lot has happened since that last question survey went out. So earlier today, I sent out the new survey. So if you're a newsletter subscriber, you will get the link to submit your own questions.

You can find out more about that at calnewport.com slash podcast. So we should have some fresh questions going forward. hopefully we'll have a lot less questions to begin with as we prepare for this Christmas season, how would you suggest dot, dot, dot. All right, looking ahead to today's show, again, I'm glad to be back to just answering our standard type of questions about work,

about technology, about the deep life, and not just about the book. I'm going to do another deep dive. It's been a little bit. I want to do another deep dive segment. This is on a topic that I actually cover in my email book, but haven't really talked a lot about recently, and I think it's cool.

So we'll get into that as well. So it should be a good show, Before we get started, however, let's first take a moment to say thanks to one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. I am talking about Magic Spoon. You know, because I've said it on this show many times, one of my favorite memories from childhood is eating that sweet sugar cereal that you know is so bad for you, but you're a kid and who cares. Well, Magic Spoon makes that little moment of escape possible for adults, but without all of the junk. in this stuff we used to eat as kids. This is great-tasting cereal that is zero sugar,

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and use that code cow to save $5 off. And with that, let's get started with the deep dive. In today's deep dive segment, I want to tackle one of the more provocative ideas that I argued in my book, A World Without Email. This is the notion that email has, a mind of its own. Now, what do I mean by this?

Well, let's go back and quickly review the history of how email spread throughout the modern office. In the early 1990s, so from about 1990 to 1995, this technology became quite popular. It spread very quickly, and for a very good reason, it had a pragmatic sales pitch. It was better than fax machines. It was better than voicemail,

and it was better than those memos that we would send with old-fashioned paper throughout the office. So there's existing communication that email could implement faster, cheaper, and better. This was a really big selling proposition, so email became popular. In its wake came a new way of collaborating. Now, this new way of collaborating, I call the hyperactive hive mind workflow. In the hyperactive hive mind workflow, you figure most things out with ad hoc unscheduled back and forth messaging.

The amount of communication we were doing significantly increased. It's why we see this increase in the number of business emails sent per day for more modest numbers like 50 per day towards closer to 126 per day by some estimates by the time we get to 2019. Ethnographic study show people checking their email on average 77 times a day. Other data collection shows that we are looking at an inbox once every six minutes. That actually gets less if your company uses Slack as well. well. So this hyperactive hive mind workflow was one of the most significant shifts in how we work, and it is something that followed behind the initial pragmatic spurred spread of this tool.

So this brings us to the provocative point. Who decided, once email was around, that the hyperactive hive mind was the right way to collaborate, right? And it's important to separate email from this way of working. It's perfectly logical that you have email replacing fax machines, voicemails, and memos, but otherwise not using it that much. I mean, how often did you make voicemails? How often did you send faxes? How often do you send memos in a pre-email age? Not 126 times a day. You didn't go to your fax machine and check your voicemail once every six minutes. So obviously, just because we have email, doesn't mean we have to be communicating so much. So who chose the hyperactive hive mind once it became possible. Well, my argument is the tool did itself. This is what I mean when I say email has a

mind of its own. No one ever sat down and said the hyperactive hive mind is a good way to work. No memo went out that said, congratulations everyone. We now have the ability to communicate constantly. And it's going to make us way more productive. There was no Harvard Business Review front page story saying the age of constant communication is here. Let's celebrate. It just sort of emerged. It was a grassroots thing that emerged. We sort of look back at it once it was here and said, I guess this is how we work now. And so we tried to build better tools like Slack or Microsoft teams to better keep up with this fast pace of communication and make it more convenient. We just accepted it, but we never actually decided it was a good idea. Now, this may seem a little

bit spooky like I'm imputing intent into the tool, like the tool itself has some sort of autonomy and decided, okay, this is how we're going to work. Well, that's not. quite right. What we really want to look at here is a philosophy called technological determinism. A well-known philosophy for those who study the philosophy of technology, technological determinism says tools, when introduced, can have unexpected and unintentional consequences to the social groups in which they are actually put in the place. In other words, you can bring a tool in for one purpose and see that it changes the way that group of people actually behaves in ways that the original introduces of the tools did not intend,

often in ways that no one in the group ever sat down and said, yeah, this is what we should do next. One of the most famous examples of technological determinism is actually the introduction of the horse stirrup into medieval Europe. This is great historical case study. It's called something like technology and the structure. What is this book called? Something like technology and structure and medieval something. Lynn White Jr. anyways, is the name of this.

And I apologize to the late Lynn White Jr. for messing up. It's something about social change, social structure, technology, and medieval social social structure. I might not have that quite right. My apologies to the late Lynn White Jr., but it's an amazing book because he looks at the historical research. He looks at the archaeological record. He looks at the literary record. He looks at other historical sources.

makes the argument that when the horse stirrup was brought into medieval Europe for a very simple purpose made a little bit easier to handle horses, it led to feudalism. No one intended, no one said feudalism would be a better way to have government. No one said, let's get this horse stirrup in here so we can have futileism. It was an unintentional side effect. And if you really trace this story like Lynn White Jr. does, what you see is that the horse stirrup made it possible for armored knights to brace themselves in the stirrup and therefore have their lance under their arm. They could put the entire momentum of the horse behind their lance strike. And this made them into a type of shock troop.

It was completely unparalleled and dominated the battlefield. It became clear that you had to have armored knights to survive as a political entity in the medieval period. It's very expensive to maintain armored knights because you need a lot of land for the horses. There's money for the armor. and so the political system changed. They basically confiscated lands from the church. They give the nobles. Each noble had their own land.

They had a certain fidelity to the king, but they had their own land on which to maintain their own armored knight force that could then combine this. This was the only way they could figure out how to maintain this force. So this one thing, hey, the horse stirrup will make riding horses easier, changed the lives of millions, the entire political structure of Europe for hundreds of years, right? fast forward to email we get something similar email comes in because the fax machine is annoying next thing we know we're checking an inbox once every six minutes an unintentional change like

feudalism coming out of the stirrup what drives this change is complicated in my book i try to uncover some reasons one is the social feedback loops that got created so when i could communicate with you low friction you know you would send me an email and i would answer it relatively quickly and then you would get the expectation that I would answer quickly and expect a quicker response to your next email. Leslie Perlough at Harvard calls us a cycle of responsiveness. And it just spins until now everyone has spun the cycle enough that everyone's expecting quick responses from everyone else.

Even though no one likes it, it's just the expectation loop closed in. It's also very natural, right? So ad hoc back and forth unstructured messaging is how we communicate with just individuals in our actual physical proximity. If I'm with you in a garage trying to build a boat, we're going to use ad hoc unstructured back and forth communication. Hey, hand me that hammer. Let's screw that in.

So it's a very natural way of communicating. Email made it possible to communicate that way with everyone in your business context. So we fell back onto our natural instinct of let's just figure this out on the fly, not realizing that that doesn't scale. When you're building the proverbial boat with 17 colleagues, six vendors, and 19 clients, it doesn't scale. You can't have that many conversations at once. But our instincts say this is natural. there's also this hidden cost of asynchrony. So once we could talk real quickly with digital messages,

we just thought we could take a lot of what used to be synchronous interactions or just grab you and tell you something and say, well, I'll just shoot you an email. But as we know, when you switch from real time to back and forth messaging, there's a lot of overhead, a lot of extra work, a lot of extra communication involved, because now you don't have all of the structure of being there in real time going back and forth.

So something that took five minutes in, person could generate 15 messages. So as we moved synchronous things to back and forth asynchronous messaging, we thought this would be a A replacing B type transformation, you know, five-minute conversation or quick message over here, but it's not. Each of these things that we moved in the messaging created a lot of messages which really overloaded us, right? So we have all these different forces that aren't really intentional. We weren't really paying attention to, but what they led to was suddenly we were communicating all the time going back and forth all the time. Now, why didn't we change this? Well, this goes back to a previous deep dive dive dive

die from a couple weeks ago on the autonomy trap. In knowledge work, we inappropriately focus on autonomy too much. We leave everything up to the individual in terms of figuring out how they organize their work. So once this hive mind just sort of emerged as a case study of technological determinism, we did not have the culture in place to say, hey, this isn't working well. Let's come in and change this with a better way of collaborating. So we sort of were stuck in this, whatever emerged, whatever felt natural, whichever was flexible, we got stuck in this hyperactive hive mind way of interacting. So yes, technically it is true.

Who chose that we should communicate so much? The tool itself. It was just a spontaneous consequence of introducing this low friction tool into the complex social technical system that is the modern office. But once we recognized that no one ever decided that this way of working is good, that should give us confidence to say, let's look at alternatives. We don't have to be stuck with just whatever political system happened to pop up after someone brought the horse stir up

into our knowledge work version of medieval Europe here. If this really is arbitrary how we're working, then we really need to be saying what might work better. And of course, as I always talk about, once you start asking that question, there's many better answers that arise. And with that, let's do some work questions. Our first question comes from Johanna. She says, I am a PhD student and I am not sure about how to approach challenging tasks such as writing research papers. On the one hand, I want to be really good at what I do. I don't want to just publish a paper just to have it published, which has become a trend to my field.

There are papers that where people don't actually have anything special to say or which are needlessly complex. On the other hand, it doesn't really work to set my ambitions about research quality too high since I will never declare a paper finished. There would always be room for improvement. What is your advice? Well, Johanna, I would say as a PhD student, especially if you are a new PhD student, I would focus on writing well-crafted papers

and doing so at a fast rate. And by fast, I mean whatever fast is for your particular field, different fields differ and what a steady rate of papers would be. And get the best possible collaborators you can easily work with, work with them to write papers that are well crafted and can get published in good places. Even if, even if you think they're not the most exciting. Now, don't do unnecessary obfuscation. Don't write something that has really nothing to say.

But even if it's somewhat minor, even if it's, this is an important extension that someone needs to do and I'm doing it, I think that's good. And why? You're honing your craft. How do you write a paper? How do you get something accepted at a good publication? What can I learn from these collaborators that are better? And you're laying a foundation of publications. As you start laying this foundation, then maybe a couple years into this,

your confidence is growing, your skills are growing, you're learning the field a lot better. These seemingly minor papers have forced you to become an expert, perhaps, on particular new techniques or ideas. So you're building up your skill base. You're also getting closer to that adjacent possible that I talk about in my book, so good they can't ignore you. And then you start saying, okay, where is my mission emerging? I'm at the adjacent possible. I know how to write papers.

I have some expertise in some topics. Where do I see beyond the adjacent possible a new configuration of ideas that's worth exploring that could lead somewhere really big that I'm really fired up about? And then from that perch and with those skills, you tentatively begin down that path. You write your first paper on that path. Maybe it's minor, but now it's minor on a path that you're excited about. And that leads to another and that leads to another. Keep this background beat, though, of other papers going.

Build that foundation, build your reputation, build your skills. But interspersed is now these stepping stones on this path towards something you're really interested in. Your ambition can grow as you take each step farther down that path. So that's what I recommend. Don't try to come up with your epic idea right off the bat. Take some small swings, get some ground balls, get some singles, hit a double here and there. And that's going to get you in the place you need to be to really. put the baseball finally over the fence because if there's any type of metaphor I know

academics enjoy, it is superfluous baseball metaphors. Our next question is from Captain Marvel. I hope to apply for my dream job four to six months from now, but there are many areas to cover algorithms and data structure practices, machine learning statistics, probability, and also scenarios related to behavioral questions. I found that almost too overwhelming that it is difficult to. for me to sense progress, especially on algorithm subjects that I have no formal training and thus sense more struggles. How should one schedule learning and practicing sessions to have a sense of

concrete incremental progress without being overwhelmed? All right, so I got to read between the lines here. You want to learn algorithms, data structures, machine learning, statistics, probability, and behavioral questions. I guess I'm assuming here that your dream job is to be an actor. I have that right. All right, two things come to mind. One, this is a lot of different things. You basically listed a computer science curriculum. So you're not going to master a computer science curriculum in four to six months. I think it's probably more important that you get in the background rhythm of learning hard things,

get started with one thing between now and four to six months from now, so maybe algorithmic basics. And then once you're in that rhythm, you can just always have new things you're trying to learn. And over time, that will become more useful. useful, but also what's useful here is that once you have a job, what you are learning from being in that position can help inform you about what skills you should pick up next. And so this background rhythm of learning new things becomes important. Learning things on your own can be a little bit tricky. I might recommend my friend Scott Young's book, Ultra Learning. Now Scott is someone who did the entire MIT CS curriculum in one year. He wrote a book about how you learn hard

things fast. A lot of good ideas in there. Now, he wrote a whole book about it, which should underscore that it is non-trivial to really set up a good learning project. So take it seriously, but it's definitely possible if you come at it intelligently. Just to pull out a few highlights here, you often want to have some sort of concrete project you're working on that's forcing the learning. So when Scott, for example, was more recently trying to learn some basic neural network programming, I mean, what he did is made a goal of building, I think it was a Scrabble game. He was going to program a Scrabble game where he could play against a computer. So you have this concrete thing you're trying to aim at.

But accomplishing it's going to require you to learn the skills. Two, deliberate practice rules all. So you want to be very clear, okay, here's what I'm doing right now. I'm trying to learn this mathematical rule. I'm trying to learn this algorithm. I'm going to push myself past where I'm comfortable, and I need feedback. So if I can have, for example, problem set problems, that's going to be great. So I can actually try to solve this thing without looking at my notes and either succeed or fail.

So to that end, some sort of class type structure is often useful. There's a lot of online training programs for a lot of these materials that have problems. Also, textbooks can help you. If you're trying to learn algorithms, get the Corman, Leicerson, Revest, and Stein. classic algorithms textbook. They got tons of problems. You can find the answers to all those problems online. Don't tell my algorithm students that though because I assign problems from that book. So have problems for some way of getting feedback on do I really understand this or not and set up the things you're trying to learn. So you have to push yourself past for you're comfortable to actually get there.

And then just put aside regular time, time block it, regular rhythm. These are the days in the morning, these days for 90 minutes is when I do my learning. And then just keep that alive. So once you have your new job, keep going, keep going, always be learning new things. That will be a huge advantage. And of course, once you have all this advanced machine learning skills ready, you will be prepared to land that dream job as an actor. All right, we got one here from Denise. Denise says, in your podcast episodes, you mentioned that we should have more structure regarding communication in the workplace.

I agree, but I'm not sure how to construct or implement such structure. I'm willing to bet you'll cover this in your upcoming book, but as we look forward to and prepare for the new year, are there any concrete nuggets or points of consideration you can suggest? now. All right, so first of all, this is one of these examples I was joking about in the opening of today's episode where I said, I need to send out a new question survey, which I did so that we don't have really dated references. Well, this covers all the dated references. As we're looking forward to the new year, can you give us some hint about what's going to be in this book that comes out later?

Okay, well, it's March and the book already came out. So now I've definitely dated these questions, but I was willing to persevere through those anachronisms because it gives me a chance to talk briefly about a world without email, which I always enjoy doing. So yes, Denise, the whole book is about that. Well, not really. The first half is about the problem. What's wrong with the way we work? How do we get here? Why is it making us disastrously unproductive? Why is it making us miserable? The fact that email has a mind of its own, like I talked about in today's deep dive segment. But then the whole second half is principles for world without email. And I really get into how teams and companies and individuals can begin to overhaul how they work to move away from

this hyperactive hive mind approach with ad hoc unscheduled messages and get the things to require a lot less. So I'm not going to go through all of that. That's in the book. As I always recommend, Denise, the key thing is that you have a copy and that you get a copy for everyone you know and you get to meet you backup copy in case they lose their first copies so they have another one to turn back. I would order 50 copies just to be safe. Let's be reasonable here, Denise. This is very important. but while you're waiting for your 50 copies to arrive, I'm going to give you one piece of advice that's not really spelled out in the book, so it's some bonus advice.

If you want to get started right away with getting better structure, better structure in your communication, and let's say you don't really want to bother people yet, you're still waiting for your 50 copies of the book to arrive to give out the people, so you want to just start experimenting on your own. Here's what I would suggest. for one day

let your email inbox help you learn what the processes are that you repeatedly return to in your work. And the way you do this is every email that comes in that you answer

you first ask implicitly what is the process that this is connected to? What's the thing I do on a repeated basis as part of my job that this email is

connected to you right now? Maybe there's a answer client's question process or a book a speaker process or the brainstorm new ideas for marketing campaign process.

You probably haven't named them before, but you could and let your emails you receive help you uncover what these processes are. Once you see all those processes written down, I say write them down. Ask for each.

Given just what I can control, how can I change how I implement this process to do the coordination and work, required for this process in such a way that reduces the number of unscheduled messages required. So Denise, I want that to be the metric you care about, not time, not complexity, not convenience, but the number of unscheduled questions required. So if the process is answer client questions, and if the way you implicitly implement it right now is just a hyperactive hive mind, just shoot off messages to people who might have answers in

your company and go back and forth until you can get back to the client, you would say, how could I still accomplish this, you know, still get client questions answered in this example with less unscheduled messages. And there might be things you can do. You might say, oh, here's what I do. I grab all these questions as they come in. I immediately respond and say,

thanks for getting into it. We'll get back to you within 48 hours. Move it on to a Trello board. Maybe you have two sessions a week in which you actually go through and answer these questions. You tie it to an already existing staff meeting. So that at the end of the staff meeting that happens twice a week, you say, okay, wait, I have a couple of questions here from a client. I need some feedback on. And you always schedule 20 minutes after or a half hour, you time block after those staff meetings to go and answer those client questions. This is just an example. But what I've done here is put in place a revised process, a revised implementation of this process that requires very few unscheduled messages. You actually just wait till these twice weekly status meetings. And you can get the answers you need from the people right there with no unscheduled messages.

And then right away, you know, that's when I get back to the clients. This might seem like more work, like you're waiting longer to do this. Some clients might get annoyed about their question taking a little bit longer to get answered. But you've cut back a ton of unscheduled back and forth messages, each of which might require five to ten inbox checks while you wait for it. So you've actually just had a massive benefit in terms of reducing the amount of cognitive context switches you've done, which is really going to be the goal here. All right, so that's just one example.

But Denise, that's what I would suggest. If you want to get started, list the processes, let your inbox help inform you, what are the things I actually do on a regular basis. And for each, and just go one at a time. You can do this over a few weeks. Start thinking, just given what I can control, can I reduce unscheduled messages. And there's a lot you can do. And this will give you a flavor for the different type of strategies that work.

It will also validate this idea that as you reduce unscheduled messages, the hyperactivity of the hyperactive mind workflow, the hyperactive hive mind workflow, that begins to reduce. pressure to have to check these channels also reduces. And when that pressure reduces, you contact shift left. And when you contact shift less, you're happy and you get more done. So that's a little bit of bonus advice I would give you. It's an interesting way to start experimenting with this more process-centric approach that I preach. All right, our next question

here is from People Pleaser. Hi, Cal, love your books, big time reader. I am what one may call a people pleaser. I tend to take more obligations than I can probably handle. It doesn't help that I'm in academia where I find it hard to say no to request from higher ups because they decide your promotion to some extent. No. Well, people pleaser, this is a big problem more generally, and it's one we should dive into, both why it's a problem and how we can try to solve it, at least in your individual case.

This idea of informally asking people to do things and some people being more likely to say no than others is an issue. I talk about it in my most recent book where I cite research where we had workplace ethnographers actually observing what was going on in an office, and they found that women, for example, were much more likely to say yes to request for what they called non-promotable activities. So activities that were useful but don't actually directly produce value. It's not going to help you get promoted. it's not, hey, take on this big new project. It's can you organize the birthday celebration for Bob? Right.

So what we get is a situation in which your workload is dictated in part by how agreeable you are, a personality trait that has nothing to do with how good you are at your work. And then you begin to implicitly reward less agreeable people and punish more agreeable people, and you end up promoting through your ranks people that are less agreeable. None of this is good for the company. It's also not fair.

So long-term, what's the solution? Well, more transparency and structure about how we actually implement workflows, how we identify, assign, review, and coordinate on work. The type of thing I call for in my book, a world without email, makes it much more difficult to have these informal inequities arise.

If you go to a computer person, programming shop that are very serious about an agile methodology like scrum, you're not going to have someone informally working on a lot more of the program than someone else because all the tasks are up there on a board that everyone can see and is transparent and there's a clear structure for how it is assigned. All right, here's who's working on what. Let's figure out who should work on what next. There's no way to pile a bunch of work on one person's plate in one of those type of systems because you would have to confront exactly what you were doing. I've advocated for something similar in the world of academia. I think there should be service budgets. This is how much time we want you as, let's say, an assistant professor to be doing service. Can't do more.

And so you track it assiduously. And if the chair comes to you and asks you one more thing and it goes beyond that limit, you say, look, this is in my contract. Out of service time. You filled me. You know, Bob the jerk over there. It looks like his service budget is pretty empty. He's pretty good at being gruff and bloviating

and not showing up the faculty meetings when things are getting handed out, but he's got room there and I don't. And if you want to expand the budget, you've got to get permission from the dean or something like this, right? That's a little bit of a thought experiment. I tried to work it through.

Originally, I worked this through in an article I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I expand this idea more in my most recent book. It's semi-thought experiment, semi-real, but it brings us to this notion of if we were actually transparent and clear about how much work you're asking people to do and how that differs between people, a lot of these implicit issues

would be surfaced. And then there would be much easier to skim off the top of these workplace waters. So there's kind of a big picture idea. I just think we're not, we don't structure how we identify a sign and review work. All sorts of weird things happen. Okay. What can you do about it right now in academia. Well, first of all, let me assure you that assuming that you're in a tenure track position, you're at a research university, no, saying yes or no to these service things has very little to do with your promotion. Your promotion is going to be 99% peers in your field writing long, detailed letters about how good you are at your research. And the peers in your field, I'm telling you this someone who's been many tenure committees. This is how tenure, of course,

works at a research university, a tenure line school. Are you, a contributor to your field? Are you good in your field? What have you published? How competitive is it? What do your peers in the field think about it? This is how tenure decisions are largely made. And there's a reason for, I mean, tenure is very regimented, right? Because it's a potentially litigious process. So you have to be very regimented about how this works. You have to be very consistent about how these decisions are made. And really, this is the core of a tenure decision. is these they're not anonymous letters, but they're letters that are just the committee gets to see. Like, okay, here's a leader in your field who's looking at your work, knows you and says this stuff is good or not good.

They'll compare you. They'll say, okay, this person is comparable to so-and-so at this school, so-and-so in this school, and so-and-so in this school, comparable in terms of the quality and originality of your research. That's the whole ballgame. They don't know anything about whether or not you said yes or no when the vice-provost for XYZ asked you to join some committee. They don't know about it. The vice-provost for XYZ is not on your tenure committee. they don't have a say in it. Are you producing work that matters? So there's plenty of academics

who kind of make a game out of how annoying they are when you try to ask them to do things. They do very little, and they do very well in tenure because they're producing. There is a teaching and service component that goes into your decisions, but the teaching is mainly a disqualifier. If you're a bad teacher, that's a problem.

But being a really good teacher is not going to get you tenure. It's just you can't be a bad teacher. And there is a service component, but as assistant professor, they don't really want you doing that much service anyways. And again, service is not going to win or lose you tenure. So I want to assuage your fears there a little bit. But what can you do? Well, if you get more structured about your own commitments and time, here's what's on my plate, here's my semester plan. I break it down on the weekly plans and daily plans. I time block. I have a good sense of what time I have available and how long things take. I have a good sense of how many things I can fit into a semester, how much time I actually need to get papers ready. Now you have a very good sense of your time and your availability. You can essentially put in place quotas. You know, I can afford to be on maybe one major and one minor committee. I found that if I'm very careful about my time, I can fit that in, but nothing more.

I find one program committee per semester maybe is the most I can do because that really eats up three weeks with the reviews and stuff. So if I can do one per semester's okay, more is not going to be okay. Three journal reviews a semester is probably the limit before it starts to eat up too much time. You can begin to figure this stuff out once you're really controlling your time, once you're really keeping track of things. Once you have these quotas, use those with confidence to say no. And you're saying no because I have a quota about how many of committees I can handle,

how many program committees I can handle, how many journal reviews I can handle. And, you know, I've hit that quota for this semester. So I'm going to have to respectfully say no here because in order to keep getting my work done, I try to keep things within the quota. It's scary to do. For some personality types, it's more scary than others. But it's worth doing. And it's worth having that moment of awkwardness to keep control of your schedule. But I have found that academia, the quota system works pretty well because it's hard to argue back against.

I mean, basically the only argument is I don't care what you think is a reasonable amount of work. I think you should be doing more than what's reasonable. And usually people don't want to make that argument. The other thing you can deploy, and I just did this the other day, is say, I don't want to do that. I don't think I have time, and I don't think I'd be good at it. So if you're asking if I'm interested, the answer is no. If it's mission critical, then we'll have another conversation. So I've done this before, where it's, look, I don't want the department to be in a jam.

If there's something where I got to just step up here and take one for the team, because I'm the best person to handle this new thing. this happening. It needs to be handled. I don't want to pass off all the work, but generally it's something that I'm really full right now and I wouldn't normally do it. I've done that before. And that's usually it works as well. I mean, if it is mission critical, they'll tell you and you'll do it. And a lot of times it's not. And the key is you clearly communicate, I don't want to do this. I have a very full semester and I don't like this. Right. Don't hide from that. Again, I think this type of clarity matters. All right. So anyways, I covered the general and I covered the specific. Generally, this is a huge problem that we need systemic solutions for in the specifics.

Get your own act together. Figure out what quotas are reasonable. Say yes until those quotas are filled. Be clear about the quotas when they are filled. Don't be shy telling people when you really don't want to do something and then say, okay, if it's mission critical, come back to me and we can talk about it. For the most part, people really will respect that. And if it is mission critical, they'll let you know. And if it's not, maybe the jerk Bob, who hasn't shown up in the last three faculty meetings, maybe it's time for him to take on that new committee assignment. All right, let's move on with some technology questions. Z-Lu asks, when should I stop listening to your podcast and do some deep work?

Well, Zilu, you should never stop listening to my podcast. It should be the background of your entire day. Come on, it's good serious. I mean, honestly, the way I think about podcasts to give a serious answer is it's a great backdrop for other things you have to do that aren't cognitively demanding. Housework, exercise, doing your daily walk, and your vitamin D, going to the store. Podcasts are a great thing to keep playing so that you can actually engage with interesting ideas while you're doing non-interesting things.

Just make sure that you occasionally do at least one short thing, maybe once a day and one longer thing once a week in which you have no podcast in your ear, nothing in your hand. It's just you alone with your own thoughts. but as long as you're getting a regular dose of that vitamin solitude, as I call it. Just use podcast as a backdrop for other activities. When you're not doing those other activities, focus, get after it, do some deep work. All right, our next question comes from TABR. Taber asks, how do you deal with too many tabs open?

I am a PhD student. I often come upon something that's either relevant for my research or just interesting in general that I would like to read, watch, or otherwise engage with at some point. this result is hundreds of tabs open, only a few of which I will ever come back to. Taber, I hate excessive browser tabs. My wife knows this because I often get on her case for how many browser tabs are open in her browser.

I rarely have more than a few open. I do find it very distracting. Just seeing those tabs up there, A, it calls to your attention, right? You're trying to do one thing and you see those tabs up there. It's really tempting just to go up there and grab them. but also just the clutter itself, I find to be harmful to concentration in the moment. Just seeing all this stuff is up there.

Even if I'm not reading all the articles, I can't see the text, just seeing all those titles. I don't know. It puts me in a cluttered state of mind. It stresses me out. I don't think it's clearly. So what's the answer? Well, I'll tell you what I do. I always have open.

No matter what I'm doing on my computer and no matter which computer I'm using, like right in front of me now, I have multiple computers. I own a lot of computers. Every one of my computers has a plain text file on the desktop called working memory. I always have that open. If I'm browsing the web or writing or whatever, I just have this blank plain text file. I use it as an extension of my working memory. If I come across a link or something that might be interesting, I copied a link, drop it into a text file. Give a little title, drop it in the text file.

Come across something else. copy it, put into the text file. No tabs, but ugly looking URLs in this plain text file. And I mean plain. I use a Macs for the most part. And I use text edit and I do plain text format, not even RTF formatting. So no bolds, nothing, just plain asky characters. Now, if I have a lot of links I'm grabbing, maybe I'm in a research or I'm web surfing or something like that or in a research mode, I'll maybe start to organize them. So now it just caps, I can put little categories. articles about boredom, interesting neuroscience,

and just move copy paste, incredibly quick, low friction, copy paste these little named URLs in between these caps locked categories. Just builds and builds. And there it is. And I save that file. And if I want to work on it now,

I have links I can grab and throw into my browser bar and see what those articles are. I can come back to it later in the day and not forget about it and not worry about it, being in my browser, and I have to keep it in my browser

as I do other things, and then that generates new tabs, and I have to keep those in my browser so I don't lose them over time. I get 100 tabs open. No, my browser stays clean. Maybe I get to the end of my day. I get to my time block planner out.

I'm doing shutdown complete, and I still haven't done anything with those links. Well, then I can move it into my permanent note-taking system. So maybe I just grab all those URLs about articles on boredom for my last example and throw it into an Evernote in the right Evernote notebook. Or I look at it and say, you know what?

On second thought, these interesting links about some political thing or whatever. Maybe it's not so interesting, so I'll just delete it. But you're not holding it in your brain, and you're not holding it in browser tabs that you see and grow and clutter your attention as your day of internet interaction continues. That's what I'd like to do. And by the way, use working memory.com for everything.

You clean out your inbox, grab, and all the things you need to do, capture them in there so you can organize them and think about them and then execute them one by one as opposed to trying to deal with them as you encounter them in your inbox. That's for whatever reason better. I copy text and put it in there that I'm going to later send to someone else. I work through thoughts in there.

I make plans for the days in there. I'm telling you there's few productivity tools more useful than a plain text file that you can just flexibly use for anything. Eliminating browser tabs and organizing information, that's a great use of it, but it's one of hundreds.

So I am a big advocate for plain text files. simple, usually trumps complicated. We don't need some sort of complex note-taking software with bidirectional reversible links and all these other types of things going on, being captured through voice memos and auto-sorted with AI. I'm telling you, just dot txt,

copy paste, copy-pace, move, move, move. Use when you're ready. All right, so tabbert, get rid of the tabs. Use a plain text file. It'll make things better. Something else that will make things better. is 4-Sigmatics ground mushroom coffee with lion's main mushroom. 4-Sigmatic has been a longtime sponsor of this podcast, and for good reason, I love this coffee

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Clear writing is also necessary for communicating to others well, getting people to respect you and your point of view. It just gives you a sharper understanding even of the world of ideas in which you operate. Now, if you're a professional writer like me, you're constantly working with editors that helps you get this feedback. This sentence isn't clear. Why are you using that word? cut that out, cut that out.

We could make this tighter. And that feedback loop we get from editors makes us better at thinking, makes us better at encountering and dealing with the world. Well, the Grammarly Premium product can bring that same type of editing feedback to all of the writing you do. Whether you're writing on your desktop or you're writing on your phone, whether you are using Outlook or Gmail or Twitter or LinkedIn

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And this word is overused. There's some redundancy here. You would be surprised how much of editing is taking out redundancies. and you mentioned this word two sentences ago, and then you mentioned again here, that's going to catch the ear and take people off of your argument, but also the product can help you avoid boring

or bland words with more effective or memorable words. The idea is it's like having an automated editor for any writing you do, wherever you do your writing. And the more you get into this feedback loop, more clarity, better words, more clarity, better words, the better writer you become,

therefore the better thinker you become, and a lot good, comes from that. So you can elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off Grammarly Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. All right, let's do one more technology question. This one comes from Hugh. After reading digital minimalism, I sold my smartphone and bought a Nokia. Now I go to bed earlier, sleep better, speak to my family more, read more books, spend more time walking in nature, consume less media, and I'm writing my first novel.

I love the changes and never want to go back. Well, let me interrupt the question right here. I love that. I love that list. That's classic digital minimalism right there. Yeah, your smartphone's useful, but man, that's a lot of useful stuff that Hugh is talking about here. So that's good. That's exciting.

Dot, dot, dot. He is having some issues, so let's continue the question. However, many essential services, banking, public transport, etc. are becoming paperless and app only. Will I eventually have to cave to pressure from the mainstream world to own a smartphone again? Well, the way I think about this is there is a threshold between inconvenience and pain. So when you're being minimalist about technologies, you are going to induce a lot of inconveniences when you take certain technologies out of your life because they don't offer

enough value. That little bit of value they do offer is now being missed and it is going to cause inconveniences. Where this becomes a problem is when inconvenience translates into pain. It's a real pain point. And that can be a little bit subtle. It's fine. I think inconvenience is fine. Where it becomes a real problem, then things get a little bit dicier.

that is when we begin to think about, okay, and again, I'm applying a digital minimalist lens here. That's when we begin to think about, okay, this thing that's caused me a lot of pain because I'm not using this technology, how can I reduce that pain with as minimum of collateral damage as possible? And that's the way I like to think about these things.

So for example, I have a smartphone, but I got the smallest, my other one broke, so I got a new one recently, and it's the smallest iPhone they make. And I wanted the iPhone because Uber is important to me. It hasn't been as important during the pandemic. In fact, on reflection, I think I've only taken one Uber. Yeah, this whole pen is crazy.

I took an Uber to go do the interview with Lex, Lex Friedman the other day, but I think of the car repair shop. Anyways, whatever. Typically, I do a lot of travel, and Uber's useful, right? And I need that on the smartphone, so I have it on there. I text a lot with my wife to coordinate when we're out and about we're trying to figure things out with kids

and we like to send each other pictures of what's going on with whatever kids we have with us you know, that's good, easy to do on a smartphone like an iPhone so I like it for that purpose. But I don't have, for example, any games or social media apps

or news apps or really any app on that phone that could capture my attention or be a reasonable source of distraction. I don't have email on my smartphone. And that's an interesting one. that causes a lot of inconveniences but rarely pain. It sometimes can cause pain, though, right? There's the other day, so I was going, actually, I mentioned, you know, the last time I took an Uber was to do this podcast interview downtown.

And I had told Lex, I'll just text you when I get there. So you don't have to wait for me. You can just come down. And then I went, was waiting for my Uber. It was about to get there. And I realized, when second. His phone number is an email. And I don't have email on my phone.

So if I ended up getting in that car and going downtown, I wouldn't have any real way of contacting him because I don't know the number. It's an email. I don't have access to the email, right? So that's where it was hovering on the edge of pain, though most of the time has really just been an inconvenience. I'm like, ooh, it'd be useful to check this, but I can't. When I set up appointments, like when I get my haircut, I usually email myself the date of the new appointment because I say like, oh, when I check my email next, I'll add it to my calendar. That's just inconvenience, but being stranded without being able to contact the person I was meeting, that would be pain, right? So, inconvenience pain.

So you got to ask, where do you have real pain and where is it inconvenience? Okay, so let's assume there's some things cropping up now that really are a source of pain, like your banking app or something like this. The question is, how do we reduce the pain while minimizing collateral damage? Well, if it's something like a banking app, like you mentioned, you could put that on a tablet. You don't need the banking app necessarily with you everywhere you go. If it's just I need to go in there to move money around or to do virtual deposits of checks, you could have it on a tablet, for example. You don't necessarily have to have a smartphone for that.

You also mentioned transport. It's like my Uber example, or if you use a bus track or to see buses or come. I mean, if that's becoming a real pain, it's making it very difficult for you to travel or move around your city because you need these apps to do so, then you might think about some sort of dumbed-down smartphone like I use, where you have a phone where there's very little on it, except for the apps you use,

and maybe you don't even bring it with you all the time. You know, you have your Nokia, maybe you're doing call forwarding, and you just bring that simplified smartphone with you when you need the apps, and other times you just have your Nokia for you. I think you'll find it's not going to make much of a difference. You're out of the habit of looking at this phone all the time. If you have it in your pocket with nothing all that alluring, it's not like you're going to pull it out and load up the browser

and start trying to log into social media networks manually on your browser. Yeah, it's too much of a pain if you're not in the habit of it. So that's what I would say there. For the places where it really is a pain, not having access to this app is making a problem. Say, is there a way I can do this on my desktop or a tablet? And if not, all right, I'm going to get a cheap, dumbed-down smartphone. It's just going to have those apps.

on it that I'm not going to use all the time. And I think you'll still be getting most of those benefits that you mentioned from your more minimalist approach. And with that, let's do a couple questions about the deep life. You know, I should say before we do the next question, this is kind of nice. It's been a little while since I've just done a classic episode, Monday episode of the show where I'm just answering questions because last week was an interview. and the week before I recorded in advance.

And I've been just doing a lot of podcast interviews about my one book, which has been fine, but it's just a lot. And I'm kind of reaching my limit of that. And this is sort of nostalgic because this is what I've been doing. This is how we've been communicating since June, you know, just coming to my studio recording these podcasts. I like, this is, okay, this is a, a unprompted discussion right here. But I find real value, at least this might be my personality.

in regular autonomous rhythm of creation. I like that a lot, where it's, you know, here's something I believe in that I'm producing and is creative and I do it on a regular schedule, and it's the schedule I created, and I'm just,

there's a rhythm of doing that. And I know on like Mondays, I sit down and I record, and I get a lot of pleasure out of that, whereas I get a lot of stress out of, okay, there's a lot of stuff happening all of a sudden, a lot of interesting opportunities and let's go over here and talk to this person,

do this interview, and write this thing. And suddenly there's lots of things going on and lots of energy and lots of people involved and deadlines. It stresses me out. So I don't know if this has something to do with our human wiring or if it's just my personality, but I was just recognizing that as I've returned now

to just doing our podcast. And I got a lot of pleasure out of this summer and fall and the early winter being able to just have this regular rhythm of this is what I do. You know, construction, accreeding over time, more and more creative construction and value, putting out there in the world, letting it build up an audience.

I like that. So I am kind of looking forward to us as this book tour dies down and I'm still in this nice period where I'm on research leave, so I'm not teaching this semester. Just be working on my research, recording the podcast,

getting back into that rhythm. I don't know, it was just hitting me. But that's not actually a question. So let's get on to the actual first question here, which comes from Sherry, who asks, how much time do you spend weekly with the planning and journaling process? Well, it can really depend, Sherry.

I mean, in general, if you are doing my system of quarterly, weekly, and daily planning, the quarterly plans could take a while to set up. You might want to go for a walk or spend a half day reflecting on a weekend, figuring out your plan for the quarter or semester ahead, and you might return to that plan. a few times throughout the semester to change it. I actually get into some of this in the last episodes, so the Habit Tuneup episode 76 of this podcast.

I have a voice question from someone about updating quarterly plans. I get into what should be in those plans and how often you should update them. Weekly plans, you of course do once a week. You look at your quarterly plan. When you build your weekly plan, you also look at your task, you look at your calendar,

everything else that's relevant. I find actually building the weekly plan takes not too long, maybe 20 minutes. However, I tend to also empty out my various inboxes to zero and do some organizing of my tasks and my task system as long as I'm doing that to sort of get a fresh start for the week. And so I usually think about an hour to an hour and a half to really clean everything up, organize everything,

clean out inboxes, clear out all your captures, and build a weekly plan. And then when you're building your daily time block plan, if you do time blocking, you're just glancing at your weekly plan, you're glancing at your calendar, you're glancing at your task list, you're making a preliminary plan,

this is 10 minutes tops. All right, Lori asks, is reading fiction a waste of time? No, it's not. It has both benefits for your brain and for your soul. From the brain perspective, it's just complicated

what actually has to happen within your neurons that try to construct an interior your mental image of what's happening. To construct and simulate with mere neurons, the emotions of the characters involved, to keep track of who is who, who is saying what,

where they're located in multidimensional emotional space and where they are located in the three-dimensional space of this world or scene you have to create in your mind. All of that uses a lot of your brain. It's like calisthenics. It's going to get your brain in shape. Reading is very unnatural. It takes a lot of training. You're basically, as you learn to read as a kid, you are co-opting.

Centers of your brain evolved for one purpose into this new purpose. It's very difficult. We do the pain because it has such an advantage to actually have this skill. So the workout all of those cognitive muscles is great. So fiction reading can be great for that. In fact, it can be way more mentally demanding, a good, well-constructed novel that's emotionally valent. it can be way more cognitive than, say, a light nonfiction book. It's also good for your soul because it forces empathy.

If you're reading with something that has good, well-constructed characters written well, it's almost like a magic trick what this does. Your brain is simulating the minds of these other characters, using the information gleaned from the written word. These simulations give you fantastic empathy and understanding how different people in different situations, what their life is like and how they feel, and this really helps you approach real people in the real world,

real situations in the real world, with way more flexibility and empathy. Reading widely, especially really good novels, is great for opening your mind. So that's why I say it's also good for your soul. So, Laurie, no, fiction reading is good, especially good fiction books. I should do more of it.

And it's one of the things I'm probably going to try to do more of. Now, I just mentioned the last meditation I did recently in this episode. I'm on a research leave, working on some cool research, but I haven't gotten that benefit this winter slash spring of real autonomy, cognitive autonomy, the sort of, let me go out to a field that's sunny. I'm going to read this book for two hours.

And then I'm going to go for a hike in the woods with my graph notebook to try to make progress on this math problem. That's my vision. That's where I'm happiest. Because of the book launch, I haven't been able to do that yet. I'm doing the research, the point of the research leave, but all the other time is filled with book launch stuff temporarily. So it's more stressful than it is relaxing. So I'm really looking forward to getting this autonomy back.

And that's one of the things I'm really working on during this upcoming spring is more reading. I mean, I read a lot for my work. I have to read a lot of nonfiction. I have to read a lot to prepare to write books. I have to read a lot to prepare to write articles. But I want to do more reading that's detached from any of those projects, reading from a large, variety of challenging genres, especially more fiction reading. I'm doing a lot of nonfiction reading right now, but more fiction reading. I want to do a lot of this outside. Get a little bit of

fresh air, get a little bit of sunlight. So, you know, Lori, I am excited about getting more fiction reading going as soon as I'm able to. So let that be an extra endorsement of spending some time with those types of books. All right, this next question is one I probably should have put into the technology question segment of the show. I just missed it and now I'm seeing it here. but it's an interesting question, so let's tackle it anyways, even if we're in maybe the wrong section of the show for it. All right.

Tom asks, what is your opinion regarding virtual assistance, such as Alexa? Well, Tom, I don't trust them. My guess, and I think this is more or less correct, is the reason why there's so many of these assistants available, so like Alexa and Google Home,

and they're very cheap, and there's not. not really a great reason for them to be there at first, right? It's one of these things for first adopters, like with the Apple Watch tell you, I don't know, we can turn music off and on with our voice, or we can adjust the thermostat, or it can do these various things. You didn't really need to be done, but it's kind of cool. You can do it with your voice. What's the purpose of these? Is the idea that Amazon thinks it's going to be a huge market that's going to make them a lot of money? I don't know. I mean, they sell these things pretty cheap. What I think is really

happening here is they need data and feedback to help build up models for doing parsing of the semantic intent of spoken word. The real killer app, the thing that's going to be an incredibly large industry, is being able to have an AI agent that you can talk to and it knows what you're talking about. Not so useful in the home so much as in the workplace, right? This is where there's going to be a huge market. Google or Amazon is going to have this type of speech parsing semantic understanding AI on tap that you can just sort of pay for as you need it. it's going to revolutionize the workplace, probably not be great for workers, put a lot of people out of business, put a lot of people out of jobs,

but it's going to be great for companies. Now, if I need a call about an issue, I can have an interaction, natural language and the AI agent on the other end can understand what I'm saying and help direct me to what I need. I have to deal with customer support. An AI agent can do that. I'm just a high-level creative worker. I can now have a chief of staff that is an AI agent that I can just talk to

and it knows what I'm talking about. Like, oh, it understands what I mean is that I need to go try to schedule a meeting with this person or to go find this information. It's so incredibly valuable that these companies were willing to sell below cost, if necessary, these boxes to put in everyone's homes where you could tell it to turn on music or not

because that's a ton of data. Millions and millions of people with millions and millions and millions of different inflections and voices and all these different hundreds of accents and ways of talking and all these different questions they're asking for free are now subjects in your data collection experiment.

All these interactions with all these different people all around the world is helping them build out these models that is going to be a open up a commercial market that is going to dwarf and size the market of, oh, people are spending 50 bucks to get one of these things in their house to play music for them. That's not the market.

The market is, here's a half-billion-dollar industry that we can provide all of the smarts for. Here's a $50 billion industry over here that you can cut half the employees out if you can just turn on our tap of natural language processing robots. So that's what I think is going on here. They need data, they need data, they need data.

This is how you get it. You sell these things cheap. You have them do novel things. So, yeah, I don't, I'm not super excited about them. I'm very wary about how much they're listening, how much information they're trying to capture. I mean, again, I think they're driven

by wanting to get data to actually make these models better. I don't know that there's something more insiduous, necessarily going on, but the whole thing is an experiment that I don't want to pay my own money necessarily to be a part of. All right, I think we have time for one more question here. This comes from Esther. You've been pretty adamant so far in stating that having a passion and pursuing it is so very Disney. Your friend Greg McEwen, however, does talk about having a unique mission. Do you see a difference in points of view there? And how should one place the two subjects in one's life. Well, the Disney reference is a good one. I've written about this before. I've talked about

this before. I think this notion that the key to workplace happiness is that you have a pre-existing passion and that once you get the courage to follow that passion, you live happily ever after is way too simplistic. I've called it before like a Disney movie. You know, once you decide to be true to yourself, everything goes well. Workplace satisfaction is way more complicated than that. So when we simplify down too much, oh, this is the key, just, you know, follow your dreams and you will be okay, you round off all the interesting hard edges, you round off all the nuance, you round off all the complexities of actually trying to build out a career in our current economy, and when you round off all those details, it's much less likely that you're going to succeed in your goal and building

a working life that you feel really proud of. I've talked about this before on the show. I think one of the more egregious examples of this Disney thinking is the Pixar movie actually Cars three where it's kind of a mixed premise. Like the movie starts with Lightning McQueen. There's a very talented race car. I can't believe I'm talking about this. I have a lot of kids. I've seen these a lot.

A very talented race car. He's winning all the races. And then this new technology comes in. So there are carbon fiber cars that are designed with fancy computers. And they're just faster, right? They're just better technologies. Lightning McQueen can't keep up. He ends up down in, I guess, like the car equivalent.

I think it's Florida. they don't really use American states. It's kind of weird the overlap between the car's world and the real world and how much our world existed. I mean, did the cars kill everybody? And now they've taken over. I mean, why would they have Route 66 exist

in the car world going to the same place? I mean, I think there's a dark history to these movies in which there's a lot of automotive murder happening. But moving past that darkness, Lightning McQueen goes down to try to train, and there's this trainer there who's helping him. And, you know, in the end, he can't quite get good enough, right?

I mean, there's these new fancy cars, and he's getting older, he's not going to be good enough, and it's all fine. But then the twist of the movie is you find out that the trainer had always wanted to be a car racer, but had been told that she couldn't. And for whatever reason, they just say, I guess you should go into this race now,

and she's able to beat all of the very fast new technology cars. That's this Disney philosophy of career satisfaction distilled that all that mattered was being brave enough to go after the thing that you know you should be doing even though other people told you shouldn't. And that courage makes you with no training,

without a lifetime of trying to develop your race car skills, without all the fancy computers and carbon fiber stuff that meant the Lightning McQueen, which had been the very best race car in this whole world of murderous automobiles who killed all the humans a couple years ago. And there's still, I'm telling you, there's corpses inside some of those tire, of humans is really much darker than we know.

He was being beat by these really fancy cars. What mattered for this trainer car was that, you know, she was brave enough to believe in herself, and she was winning the race immediately. All right. Now, that is a distillation of the Disney approach to career satisfaction, which is focus on the match between what you do and the job. The main obstacle you have to overcome is typically just having to courage to follow that passion.

There may be some obstacles, like a murderous car telling you that you can't do it, but if you can just have the courage to overcome those obstacles, you will be the very best race car in the world, beating cars that were designed from scratch to be way faster that have spent their entire lives training because you believe in yourself. And that's too simple.

And that's too simple. Okay. So I wrote this whole book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It came out in 2012. It makes this argument. Passion is good, this book says, but it's something that actually tends to cultivate over time

as part of the career, not the precondition for the entire career. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times this is. not. You get more passionate about what you're doing as you develop, as you get better, as you get more skills, as you invest these skills into things that make great jobs great. Well, that brings us to mission. Well, McEwen talks about mission, but I also talk about mission in so good they can't ignore you. So Esther, I'll point you towards that book because I get specifically into the role of mission

and developing a career for which you will eventually feel passion. And what I identify is that mission is one of the things you can leverage to cultivate more passion. And a mission is where you have a very clear, a very clear vision of this is what I'm trying to do and this is worthwhile. Now, if you have a guiding mission like that for your efforts, you get a lot more satisfaction of those efforts. Those efforts tend to have more impact. Your passion for those efforts, therefore, tends to grow. Now, how do you find a mission for your work? Well, one of the key points I make in that book is that it is hard to come up with a good mission from scratch if you don't know a lot about the field yet.

I give examples of this, of college kids saying I'm going to go start a nonprofit that's going to change the world, but they don't have any particular expertise on which they can actually build a real sustainable mission that's actually going to make progress. They do random stuff, and it kind of falls apart. So where do you find good missions? Well, I alluded to this earlier in the episode, very early in the episode, I talked about the adjacent possible. This comes from that chapter in So Good They Can't Ignore You. It's a term I borrowed from the system biologist Stuart Kaufman, who was talking about more evolutionary fitness,

but we can apply it in the career space. The adjacent possible is where you get to the cutting edge of a field, you can then see into the adjacent possible beyond the cutting edge where new combinations and configurations of existing cutting edge ideas or strategies or skills exist, and as these recombinations and steps forward in the adjacent possible that you discover powerful missions, like, oh, I could use.

this approach in this way and we can make a lot of effort on this problem or on this issue or a product that does this. And the message there was, okay, well, you got to get to the cutting edge before you can see the adjacent possible. So if you want a good mission, you've got to get really good at something rare and valuable that also opens up lots of different options once you're good at it. And then you've got to really be looking around once you're good to say, what can I do with these skills? It's a real long way of saying, Esther, that mission is an organizing an organizing objective in your work and it can be a very powerful source of passion, they find a mission you have to get really good at something first. Otherwise, you're going to

come up with something that's probably not going to work and it's probably going to peter out. You have to have some interest in what you're doing to get really good at it. As you get really good at it, you'll get more interest in it. When you find a mission for the work, that interest will probably transmorgify into, and I'm using a Calvin and Hobbs term there, into real powerful passion. It doesn't always work that way. It's not so cookie cutter, but that's the distinction between mission and passion that I see. But again, read so good they can't ignore you if you really want to get at those details. And then once you've read so good they can ignore you, don't watch Cars 3. It is really going to annoy you. And it's also going to leave that really

unsettling question, where are all of the human bodies? Because I think they're there. I think they're under the stands in those car stadium. I'm telling you, there's a darker version of this movie that exist out there. And on that happy note, let's wrap up. this week's episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to submit your own questions. Remember to check out my new book, A World Without Email. Available everywhere, books are sold. I will be back on Thursday, at least if I don't sleep through it,

with a habit tune up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.