Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 8: Fleeing a Collapsing Career, Taking Notes on Books, Building a Deep Life | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on fleeing a collapsing career, taking notes on books, and building a deep life. I also play some question roulette and answer the audio question of the day.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com (I send a survey to this list soliciting questions on a semi-regular basis.)Full list of topics tackled in today’s episode: * Fleeing a collapsing career. * The coming knowledge work productivity revolution. * Configuring your tasks. * Amending Deep Work. * Audio Question: Finding depth in a social office. * Taking notes on books (plus: Kindle versus physical)  * News from social media.  * Thoughts on LinkedIn.  * Running a business as a student.  * Optimal amounts of solitude.  * Finding quality leisure.  * How to build a deep life.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Today we're drawing from a fresh batch of questions that were just recently submitted by my mailing list subscribers over at calnewport.com. Among other topics, we'll talk about fleeing a collapsing career, taking notes on books and finding depth in a shallow job. We're going to test out a new feature, which I call the audio question of the day, and we will later on play some question roulette. Two quick points. One, you may have noticed a new theme music for the podcast. I want to thank listener Jay Kirstens, who also happens to be an accomplished music producer and DJ, who put this together for our show.

So my hat is tipped to you, Jay. you may have also heard last week's habit tune up mini episode. So in this mini episode, I answered audio questions from readers specifically about how to tune up their work or productivity habits. So we went deep on that particular topic and I gave advice like a call-in radio advice show host. I had fun with it. I think I'm going to do some more of these mini episodes. my goal is to release them when I do them midweek.

So this time I was late. I did not get the mini episode out until Friday, but typically I'm going to try to do this maybe on Wednesday. So we have some separation between the mini episodes and the main podcast, which I release on Sunday or Mondays. As always, I am interested in your thoughts and feedback. So you can reach me at Interesting at Calnewport.com. As my longtime readers know,

I don't answer every email I get, but I do read most of them. So I do appreciate that feedback. And of course, if you want to do what you can to help this podcast continue to grow, a subscription to the feed goes a long way. At least that's what I am told. All right, enough with the administrative details. Let's get started. As always, we begin with some work questions.

We kick things off with Samantha, who asks, is it ever worth it to drastically change careers if a profession seems in danger of collapse? So Samantha gave me a little bit more background on this question. She works in a sector that she worries is on its last legs. Well, my short answer, Samantha, is yes. Yes, if your particular company seems in danger of going out of business or if the general sector in which, your job lies seems like it's on its last legs or is about to be severely disrupted in a negative way, that is for sure a good reason to consider shifting jobs. So how do you do that in the most

successful way possible? Well, in my book, so good they can't ignore you. I say if you're going to change jobs, one of your keys should be to preserve as much career capital as possible in that transition. So as you might recall, career capital is my term for the rare and valuable skills that you have built up in your career. The argument of that book is that it's career capital that gives you the type of leverage over what you work on, how you work on, and when you work on it that can make a great job great. That if you want a job that you really enjoy, you have to have something to offer in return. And that's almost always rare and valuable skills, what we call career capital. So the bad type of career shift in general is one that throws out large amounts of your career capital

store. So I talk about in that book, I give this example, I give an example of a marketing executive who for various reasons wanted to leave that marketing executive job. And they were good reasons. This was not a great job for her. But what she did is she shifted from that into being a yoga instructor. It ended up not working out too well. She could not make a living at that, temporarily ended up on food stamps. And the point I made in the book is when we view career transitions through career capital theory, we say, oh, that looks like a really risky move because you have all of this career capital, rare and valuable skills you built up in the world of marketing.

When you go to become a yoga instructor, none of those skills are relevant. So you're basically going into a field in which you have no career capital. You're starting from scratch. And it takes time to build up enough career capital to actually start getting a good return in your career where return in this context means traits in your work that makes it satisfying, meaningful, and enjoyable. So Samantha, that's my general piece of advice. Try to identify what are the rare and valuable skills that you have built up and where can you go that will value those same rare and valuable skills because that'll allow you to really hit the ground running.

And I think the reason why we make this mistake, the reason why we ignore this, the reason why that case study in my book went from the executive position to the yoga instructor job is that we place too much emphasis on the content of our jobs. We have this implicit match theory, which is not that new,

I mean, not that old, rather. It's really only been around since the 1990s, I think is where we really start to see this pick up. I mean, you can trace it back to the late 70s and 80s that the core ideas are laid. But really, it's in the 1990s. We start using the phrase, follow your passion a lot more.

it's here we lay this idea, this match theory, the idea that where does satisfaction come from? The match of the job, the content of the job and how well it matches some sort of intrinsic traits that you possess. This is like the modern Disney movie version of career satisfaction. It's, you know, you have the yoga instructor genes. And the reason why you're unhappy, because you're in the wrong job. If you switch to that right job and you get this match, then you'll be. be happy, right? It's all about the aha moment transformation. This is sort of get rich, quick

fulfillment recipe. Find the thing that matches what you're meant to be and you'll be happy. You'll feel happy ever after. That is a trap. You have to be careful about that. Career capital theory helps you be much more level-headed about it. What are your rare and valuable skills? Go someplace that's going to reward them. And then as I really emphasize in that book, as I really emphasize in queer capital theory in general, you don't get the value. from career capital unless you actually take it out for a spin. So use those skills as leverage. The better you get, the more control you get over your career, the more control you get over your career, the more you can shape it towards things that resonate and away from things that drain.

That is where passion comes from. That's where true satisfaction comes from. So keep that in mind, Samantha. And if you have to switch somewhere that, let's say, only is going to honor some of your career capital, your very first thought should be, I'm now entering training. It's preseason. And I'm going to figure out how quickly can I take the skills that are valuable in this new job that maybe I only have a partial proficiency in and how quickly can I train deliberately practicing myself past where I'm comfortable? How quickly can I rapidly develop those skills so that my career capital scores, stores increase? Because again, as career capital is everything, that is the foundation for satisfaction. So just keep that in mind, Samantha. And I think you can make a shift with a lot more confidence.

Okay, Bill asked the question, can you envision a new type of job functionally that designed knowledge work processes? So what Bill is referring to, and he elaborates this in the background information that he gave for the question, he's referencing some of the writing I've been doing recently about how in knowledge work, everything unfolds in too much of a haphazard fashion. And we don't have structure. We don't have processes. I got into this in some detail of my most recent piece for the New Yorker that looked at remote work and why it failed when it first came up and whether or not we're going to be able to make it work this time around now that we have COVID-induced pushes towards much, much higher levels than remote work than we had originally planned for.

And in that article, I really make this point, as well as in a lot of my blog essays, that we need more structure, we need more what I call workflows in knowledge work to make it more productive and to make things like remote work actually function. So Bill is asking, you know, could there be a job one day? Or that's what you do. You help knowledge work organizations figure out these workflows, structure themselves. And my answer, Bill, is I think, 100%. I think it's going to be a huge sector in the future.

We saw this in industrial manufacturing. Once the idea of process engineering emerged, once we realized that, we could treat the efficient production of actual physical goods as a as a process that could be optimized and you could be studied business schools turn their curricula towards this we have we graduate thousands of experts on this people who pour over how do we build this car how could we build this car more efficiently consulting firms are stocked to the ceilings with people who do this type of thinking in other types of sectors and so yes I think that's coming for knowledge work because A, knowledge work is a huge sector of our economy, especially in the American context.

And two, we're terrible at it. So there's just huge blue ocean out there. So once we actually start getting much more efficient about knowledge work, once we realize that's possible, then yes, I think there's going to be a lot of energy in that sector. I think there's going to be a huge subsector of the economy dedicated to just making the other part of the economy work more efficiently. I think it's going to be a really big growth area. And I think we're getting to that point. We're coming up to that tipping point in knowledge work. It's been about 20 years since we've been doing knowledge work in the era of PCs in the

front office and digital networks. We're getting the point where we're ready to get more serious about it. That's roughly the same timeline it took for automobile manufacturing. I did this op-ed for the New York Times earlier this year where I looked at the timeline of automobile manufacturing. So we used to build cars a very simple and flexible way called the craft method. You'd gather a team around the car, and you would build it in place. And your factory just had a lot of teams, each with their own section of the factory floor, building a car. And all the materials were stacked in one place and all the tools were over in the tool place.

It was a very flexible, very natural, very simple way to build cars. and we did it for about 20 years. And then Henry Ford got pretty serious about thinking, hmm, is there a better way to do this? A way that might be less simple, that might be less natural, a way that might be a gigantic pain, a way that might cost a lot more money,

require a lot more overhead, is there a way to do it that even though it might have all those bad traits might produce cars faster? And the answer turned out to be yes. The answer was the assembly line. And it sped up the labor hours, car by a factor of 10 to 100x. And it took about 20 years.

We did the easy way because people were intimidated. It was hard enough just to run a factory and try to convince people to buy cars. We had other things on our minds. And we did that for about 20 years. And then Henry Ford flipped a whole script. We got process engineering. And everyone began to obsess about, well, what's the best way to build cars? And if you go to the Tesla plant right now in Alameda County, California, it looks a lot

different than that craft method with which we started manufacturing cars. and it does it a lot more effectively. The same thing's going to happen in knowledge work is going to require a lot of handholding, a lot of original thinking. A lot of these systems are going to be bespoke to particular organizations or fields in the knowledge economy. So I think, yes, Bill, that is going to be a job. It's going to be a lot of efforts going to be put towards making knowledge efforts much more efficient. All right, Patrick asks, you mentioned when describing your approach to productivity that there are three components, capture, configure, and control.

Can you elaborate on the configure step a little bit more? So if you listen to the last couple of episodes, I've been talking about capture, configure, and control. I've been talking about the elements you need for an effective productivity system. I think I've talked about this in two or three episodes. now. And Patrick is saying, can you take the second of those three things, configure, and talk a little bit more about it? So Patrick, here's the idea. In the capture component of my productivity philosophy, that's where you get everything out of your head and written down in a place you trust. All right. And then the control component that comes last, that's where you actually figure out what you're going to do with a given day,

with a given week. That's when you time block. That's when you make plans. You give your time a job, you take control of your time, you don't just sit there and react. All right, so what happens in between with this configure step? That's when you organize all of the stuff you captured in preparation of actually making plans for what you're going to do in a given day or week or quarter. So what happens with organization? Well, first, as you're staring at this big pile of stuff on your plate, you might start eliminating. You know, like this project would be nice, but I just have too much. Or this thing I'm

doing in my personal life, this household project or something that might be nice to get done. I don't have enough time. So you can start ruthlessly eliminating. Really, the best book on how to do this is Greg McEwen's essentialism. So check that out. I think he is great at capturing both the necessity and the mindset required to minimize things. That happens during this configure component of my productivity philosophy. This is also where you start combining things. You're like, okay, look, these four things over here, these are all part of the same project. Let me get these together into a project. I'll move them on my list. If you're using, let's say, like a Google doc and your list are just labeled bullet list, maybe you'll make a unique bullet list for it.

If you're using Workflowee, which is like a web-based indented bullet list software, which I like, because you can also tag things and then display temporarily just items with the same tag. Same thing. Let me make a separate list for this or indent a list. If you're using something like Trello, you might create a new column or a new board. However you organize your stuff, that's up for you, this is where you might start combining stuff. So again, now we've reduced what's on the plate, and now we're trying to coalesce it.

well these things are all part of the same type of project or these things maybe aren't all all type parts of the same project but they're all the same type of work and i'm going to put them in their own list like things i have to do in my yard etc also during this configure component you can clarify david allen is real big on this there's a big idea from david allen and i think he's right on the mark about this it's harder than you think to actually articulate what the action is that is captured by a given task. Now you throw something down, budget work. You throw that down in your task list to get it out of your head when you're doing the capture, but budget work is not by itself in action. I mean, what does budget work mean? How do I go budget work? You know, what does it look like to see someone do budget work?

What that really is is just a rough reminder that there is specific work you need to do relating to your budget, this configure component of my productivity philosophies where you really sit down and you work that through. Okay, well, budget work. What it really means is I need to do these five things. And I'm going to put that. I'll indent the list and write that all down.

If I'm using Trello and I have a card for the budget work, I'll click on the card to flip it over and have a checklist on the other side of what those elements are. Maybe there's complex dependencies. Well, I have to make this call. And then once I hear back from my accountant about this and I can make a decision on X, You know, it might be kind of complicated.

That takes time. I guess you have to think about your task. You've got to think about your work. You've got to clarify what it means. Also during this configure component is where you might assign status to work. I'm a huge believer in this. I've talked about this before. A universal list that just is really long with a bunch of stuff on it is not useful.

That's not sufficiently structured. That doesn't provide sufficient structure to the landscape of what's on your plate. I'm a big believer that you have to structure this. You have to understand what are the different statuses this type of work has. Like maybe this is stuff I'm working on this week. Maybe this is backburner stuff. Maybe this is part of this project. And once I start that project, here's the things I need to do.

A status that I really like, for example, is if there's people in my professional life that I have to regularly meet with, like we do a lot of business together. You know, like I'm the director of graduate studies right now for the computer science department at Georgia. town in that capacity, I have to do a lot of work with my department chair and I do a lot of work with the graduate program manager. So, you know, I can have a status for things to go over next time I meet with the department chair and a status for things to go over, discuss or decide on next time I have a phone caller meeting with my graduate program manager. And now I can start moving tasks into there. So now they're just not on a big list. It's like, you know, you know, you know where this obligation is now this obligation is over here with this status where I know that

it's something I'm going to deal with when I have my next meeting with this particular person. So adding structure, assigning these statuses, however you want to say it, takes this landscape of anxiety producing obligations and actually puts a framework around it. Am I working on it now or not? It's on the back burner. Okay, if it's now, when am I going to work on it? When I have this meeting, when I'm next working on this project, is am I doing monk mode mornings for deep work? And if I'm doing that, then maybe I have a particular status for here are the things I'm in order that I want to tackle during those monk mode mornings.

I mean, again, you're taking raw obligations and you're organizing when are they going to happen. How are they going to happen? What type of work is it? How do I think about it? All of this takes time. And all of this is called configure. And it really is crucial. I think this is the step probably that people most neglect when thinking about productivity.

The capture thing is really exciting. you read David Allen, you get that. The control thing is really exciting. You read my writing on time blocking. You try it. You time block for three days and you're getting a lot more done. You're like, this is great. But the configure, this is why you asked about it, Patrick, and I'm glad you did.

It's a little bit more subtle. It takes way more time than you think. You should be willing to spend about an hour a week on this, maybe more. Do your configure at the beginning of the week. So you have your arms around things for the week ahead of you. Then you go through your week and it's war. You're just capturing things left and right. and at the end of the week, you can sit down and try to configure what's left.

But it's really crucial. People who are very productive in jobs that have a diverse collection of responsibilities and that type of work, to people who do that well, spend a lot of time thinking about how they organize their work. So it's a good question, Patrick. Configure is crucial. Definitely spend time doing configuring. Philip asks,

are there things you've learned since you publish a deep work that you'd like to amend or add to it today. Yeah, I mean, Philip, there is endless elaborations. I think deep work scratches the surface of some of the unintentional consequences of technology in the world of work. It notes, hey, we should be careful about the types of efforts we do in knowledge work. You know, undistracted concentration feels like it's a pretty valuable action. and yet we've sort of accidentally made that more rare because of distraction from technology.

So maybe we should spend some more time thinking about deep work. It gave advice then largely for individuals how to get better at focusing and squeeze some more of it into their life. That's just scratching the surface of this giant sector of our economy and how we got where we are today and what's the impact of that and what's it going to take to actually completely rewire this segment of our economy? There's just huge questions here. I have a whole new book coming out in March that greatly elaborates in all these issues. It's called The World Without Email. I've mentioned it a few times.

I don't want to talk too much about it yet because it's still way too early, but I'm done with the manuscript. We're done with the edit. So I know what's in that book. And I can tell you when you read that new book, you'll realize that deep work was just poking. at the tip of a giant really relevant iceberg. And so, yes, there's a ton to add.

Let me just, let me just focus on one thing, one thing that maybe I think I should have, if I had included in Deep Work itself, would have helped the specific arguments in that book. I don't think, and this is based on the feedback I've gotten from people on the road and from readers, I don't think I talked enough about where Deep Work is relevant in the job landscape. I think some people came away with the impression that deep work is only relevant if your job specifically includes and rewards long periods of unbroken concentration on obviously cognitively demanding things like computer programmers or professors trying to solve proofs or novelist trying to write really good fiction. And it's way more broad than that. Way more broad to that. And I got into this more when I was working on the new book,

but I would like to make this point that deep work is not just about the types of activities that we famously associate with a really deep sort of academic concentration. If you're in a management role, so like what you're mainly doing is managing teams and enabling those teams to do what they do really well, deep work is important. because if you can give each thing you're doing full unbroken concentration and push that through until you're done before moving on to the next thing, you're going to be better at that work. If you can sit there with a team member and give them complete unbroken concentration,

really understand what's going on with them and what they need to succeed without also checking your phone without also glancing on the calendar, you're going to do a better job by that teammate. If you can sit there and work through the strategy, well, what do we need to do this quarter? And let me just give that the patient thought it requires to come to a conclusion without distraction before moving on to the next thing. You're going to make better strategic decisions. What a lot of leaders or managers end up doing today, which is just constant putting out of fires, constant reactivity, and you know, it feels very busy and I guess you feel very necessary, but it doesn't mean that you're doing a great job at managing. Managing is cognitively demanding

to do things one at a time with full concentration without distraction will probably lead to better outcomes. What if you're in a support position? Now, this seems like, okay, this should be the epitome of where deep work does not apply. If your job is, you know, I'm an executive assistant or something like this. But even there, if you're able to tackle things one at a time, give it complete concentration, do it well until you're done and then move on to the next, these things you're doing to support your organization are going to get done at a higher level of

quality and probably at a higher rate overall than if you're instead having to work in a constant state of reactivity. I'm kind of working on this, well, kind of answering this email and I'm on Slack over here and everyone wants me to do everything for them at once and everything gets done in a completely fragmented mush in which things are getting dropped and work is being done at a low quality and I'm completely stressed out. So that's one thing I would have made, I would have done a clearer job emphasizing in deep work. You know who helped actually push that awareness on me? I wrote about in deep work, I wrote about the Twitter slash square CEO Jack Dorsey. And I said, oh, I've been reading all these interviews about how does Jack Dorsey manage to have these two CEO positions at the same

time? Because that was a novel thing. There was an unusual number of articles written about Jack Dorsey's workday and schedule so we could get an interesting insight into a particular CEO's schedule. And I talked about how, you know, he works at a public table and has all these meetings. And I said, look, Jack Dorsey doesn't do deep work. And that's okay. Not everyone needs to be doing deep work. Some positions, that's not necessary. I got a note a couple years later by an early investor in Twitter who knows Jack Dorsey very well, has worked with him a lot. And he's a lot. And he says, Cal, I got a, I have a bone to pick with you. What he's doing, when he's doing that schedule, it looks like not deep work to you where he's

in the public table and he's like this meeting, that meeting, that meeting. It is incredibly deep because he has to give each thing he does intense concentration to understand what's going on, make the right connections, integrate it with his knowledge base and give the right decision or feedback back. He says it's an incredibly cognitively demanding thing. It's very deep just because it takes place at meetings held at his public table and it's not someone staring at a manuscript, whatever, writing. You know, it still is really deep. And I took that point to heart and that that's where I really had this change.

So, so Philip, there's a ton of things to say about the topics that deep work scratches to cover, just the surface of. But here's one that I will add that I wish had been in that book. Management roles and support roles can benefit just as much from sequential work one thing at a time. no distractions, work till you're done, move on to the next thing. They can benefit just as much from that deep approach as the type of roles like programmers,

academics, and writers that we traditionally think about requiring those type of intellectual heroics. All right, so that's it for work questions today. Let's try this new segment. Let's actually hear the voice of one of our readers in what I call the audio question of the day. Hi, Cal.

I work at a university in Australia, and my department has a very casual office culture. It makes it a great place to work socially, but I often find it conflicts with my desire to implement deep work strategies. For example, people often drop into each other's offices for a quick conversation, as opposed to sending an email. At first this seemed great. I didn't have to answer an email,

but now I think it's working against me as times I've blocked out for writing can be easily interrupted. What advice do you have for someone trying to build a better understanding of deep work with their colleagues without sounding too rude. Liam, I know exactly what you're talking about. I work at a university. One of the things I love about university life

and what I've been missing the most these last few months is the drop by culture. You know, I have academic colleagues and you'll look up and they'll be standing in the door and be quiet for a little bit. You'll look, okay, what's going on? And they'll go over the whiteboard. Like, I'm working on this problem.

they start writing out the problem and you know an hour passes and it's really interesting it's really intellectually stimulating i love that aspect about university life but i hear you it can be hard if you're trying to do something that is really cognitive where those type of of distractions is going to break up your flow or if you're on a tight time block schedule which i often am you know because i really try to work nine to five so i'm on a tight time block schedule so sometimes if i'm on one of those schedules i'm like ooh uh i don't think i'm going to recover properly if i lose an hour to someone dropping by. Here's the good news. You work on a university. Universities are full of locations that are literally architected, literally architected to try to support deep work. You have multiple

libraries, for example, that are full of locations that are optimized for thinking. You have all sorts of usually outdoor spaces that are very nicely landscaped and are really great for working. You have other types of buildings where you can sit often for a change of pace and there's some sort of inspirational architecture. And again, a great place to go to do deep work. I do this at Georgetown all the time. I used to write about this a lot. I think if you go back to like that deep work period like 2015 to 2017, I talked about, you know, different places at Georgetown. I would deep work. One of the things I talked about back then was what I called depth circuits where I would

actually move between different locations on campus outside. 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there, 30 minutes there, just to keep it novel and fresh and just to keep my mind working. There's actually a hiking trail off Reservoir Road near Georgetown that connects Reservoir Road down to the canal next to the Potomac and near one of the entrances, but a little bit back into the woods. There's a picnic table. That's a place where I got a lot of deep work done on campus.

The bioethics library, the bioethics library on Georgetown was the original library at Georgetown. And so it is in a very old-fashioned style with wrought iron and two levels and murals painted on the walls. I'd love to go in there and write certain times of years when the students aren't around too much. Which is all to say, Liam, embrace that culture in your university. embrace as well your ability to have access that almost no one else in an office job has to numerous different locations that are architected to help you do deep work. And in fact, that's what they want you to do there. And so don't be shy about getting up and moving around as a key component to how you actually get through your day. All right. So thanks for that, Liam.

Let's move on now to technology questions. Jay asks, what's your process for organizing information that you read from books so that you can get it back while you are later working on articles. Yeah, it's a good question because I read a lot of books and I cite a lot of books both in my blog post and the long form stuff I do for the New York Times, the New Yorker and Wired, and also in my books themselves. So I have a very efficient format I use for note taking in books that I call the slash check format. Now, what I do is when I'm reading a book that I want to use later as a research source. If on a given page there's something there, I think I might need to remember later or something, I think is a key point from the book that will be relevant to

the projects I'm working on. I put a slash. I draw a line across the upper right corner of the page, if it's on the right side or the upper left side, if it's on the left side of the book when it's open. So I put a like a slash across the corner. I then in the actual book itself, we'll put check marks or if it's a long passage, I might bracket it off, but otherwise I tend to put check marks and sometimes we'll do a little bit of underline. So I get right in there. So I like to own hard covers. I get right in there. I write on it. And I make those marks. So now what happens later, if I want to say, okay, I read this book. I know it had relevant stuff. I don't really remember it. Let me go back and see what it is. I can quickly leave through the book

looking at the corners, looking for slashes. I see a slash like, oh, that's a page with something on it. I turn to that page. I jump right down to where the check marks or brackets are, read just those sentences, boom, there's the point. Now, I find with a nonfiction book, even one that is densely relevant, I can usually get through the slashes and checks in about 10 minutes. So I can basically go back and do a 10 minute version of the book once I've read it once with that note taking format. The reason why, you know, I like this note taking format is that it is very efficient. I'm always trying to take friction out of the process. This is something me and my friend Ryan Holiday sometimes talk about. We've, we've talked about this in other podcasts because

Ryan does something very different. He actually copies relevant information onto index cards as he reads and builds up these files of index cards around the books, which in the long term is great. I mean, he has these awesome collections of these index cards. I've seen them. But for me, the problem is I worry that the friction of doing that will prevent me from reading. I want to be able to just jump in and rock and roll wherever I am. And slash checking is incredibly fast and it's really pretty efficient to go back and pull out what you need to know. Now, I went back, Jay, because you asked this question, I went back to the latest long thing I wrote, which was a New Yorker piece. And I did read some books for it. And I went back and check, okay, what did I do with my notes from those books?

And it turns out, in that case, when it came time to write the article, I went through my slash checks in the relevant books and essentially wrote up a summary of the key points. And so I took the books I thought were relevant. I went through the slash checks. It took about 10 or 15 minutes per book to go through those preexisting notes and kind of wrote up a little book report of what the main points were with some page pointers. You know, like this point, which I think is really relevant for the articles on page 20. This point's on page 70.

And then I use those when I was actually writing the article. I could reference those and be like, okay, yeah, yeah, that point was in that book. It was on that page. I could go and find a quote. So, you know, maybe in the end, I ended up where Ryan starts with. I was copying some of that stuff out. but this does allow me to process a lot of books really quickly. And then in that particular case,

I then extracted onto a separate medium, a sort of summary version of those notes. But I'll tell you what I noticed is in those summary version of the notes, those were specific to the article I was writing. So I read through all the slash checks, but only pulled out the things I thought might be relevant to that article and put in the page references so I could go find a quote quickly if needed. And then I had those all laid out when I was writing,

and that made those sources much more available to me as I was writing. So that's why I recommend Jay, low friction note taken on books. It allows you to very quickly pull out the main points. When you then later need to use those main points, you might then need to add in some sort of intermediate steps, such as writing up summaries or however, whatever seems convenient to you. But I love the slash check method. The downside of it is if you grab any book off my shelf, it's not going to have clean pages. So Stephen asked the question. I'm going to jump to this because it's relevant to Jay's question, a quick addendum.

I would say, Stephen asked, which do you prefer Kindle or Physical Books? You know, this is quite relevant to what I just talked about with Jay. I do prefer physical books, especially for research materials, books where I intend to use information from them in my own writing, because I like to slash check format. I will, however, use Kindle versions of books for research. I do this in particular when there's a time sensitivity. Like I'm too impatient to wait a couple days for the hardcover to get here from Amazon or maybe I need to turn something around really quick. And I think this source is going to be relevant.

Then I'll do a Kindle book. You can't slash check obviously in a Kindle book because it's digital, but you can highlight. And that works pretty well too. So in a Kindle book, you can highlight on the screen while you're reading the Kindle book. You can then download your highlights of the book. You can download them. There's a thing you do that it gets. sent to you via email from Amazon in a pretty nice PDF format.

And so that works almost just as well. So with a Kindle book, I highlight instead of doing slash checks and then email myself to PDF. And there I have all of the relevant passages. And in some of the Kindle books now, too, you actually will get the page number that corresponds to either the hardcover paperback, which makes citations really easy, though you don't always get that. Stephen and Jay, my combined answer to your questions, hopefully give some more insight into how I read and how I go back and remember things I learn from what I read. All right.

Leland asked, do you get any of your news from social media more specifically Twitter? Well, Leland, not much. I mean, I don't have any social media accounts. I have gotten some news from Twitter. You don't have to have an account to go to directly someone's Twitter page and just see what's on their feed. and I will do that in particular when it comes to baseball or baseball trade rumors. You know, sometimes I just, that's where the information is. And you got to prioritize.

And baseball trade rumors is a place that I prioritize. Or if I'm watching a game and something happens, like someone gets injured, you're not quite sure what's going on. Like the only place to get the information right then is that maybe the on-field reporter or the beat reporter from like the Washington Post in my case, they might have some information they'll put on Twitter. So I'll go directly to their Twitter account. Outside of that, not really.

The other exception is there has been some COVID news I gather for my extended family. You know, I write a newsletter for them every day that focuses in particular on more interesting or positive news around COVID, which is a whole other conversation. But I think it's an important psychology. It's an important psychology that you're not just seeing the worst. most negative possible take on important things in the world, there are a few Twitter feeds where I will go directly to their page because they are pointing towards academic papers I might want to see.

People that are keeping an eye on the preprint servers, for example. And I'll tell you what, even just that little exposure to social media where I don't have an account and I'm not getting any feedback and no one's liking me and no one's retweeting me and no one's emojiing me, even just being exposed to a few people's accounts, I'm telling you, it seems like a terrible place. I don't know how you guys spend so much time. I don't know how anyone spends a lot of time in that world.

It seems like a terrible world to spend time. So Leland, I get very little news from social media. It really would require something as exceptional as the Nationals going to the World Series or Bryce Harper leaving the Nationals for a unknown suitor to get me, or a pandemic, to get me to even glance at social media for news even just a little bit. And I always regret doing it. All right. Another technology question, Theosafat, Theosophat. He asks, what is your take on LinkedIn? I don't know a lot about it.

So in the earlier days of social media when I was first writing about these things, I used to hear from a lot of people that LinkedIn was its own type of thing because it served a very specific purpose, which is networking, but not networking in a generic sense. I mean, what it particularly provided was a way to search your third-degree network. So the people that people you know know, no. That is, that's, it turns out that that is an important neighborhood size in your social network. So the people that you know, who they know can cover a lot of territory, but because there is a common link between you and these other people, because you share someone you know, you can actually still make a reasonable connection to them. And so what LinkedIn would allow you to do is say, huh, I'm interested in Google. I want to talk to someone at Google that'll be good for my career.

And classic LinkedIn, you might not directly know someone who works at Google, but if you know 60 people and they each know 60 people, in that second order neighborhood of size 60 squared, you are very likely maybe to find someone who works at Google. And then you can make an introduction. That's very useful. It's not what people said. That made sense to me. I mean, business networking is all about you need a personal introduction to people. That's how you learn about industries. That's how you find

jobs. So LinkedIn had always been presented to me as something different than what was going on and say Twitter or Facebook because their model was we're going to help you get jobs, not we're going to try to capture your eyeballs. I have been hearing some rumors that's been changing. I guess I again, I don't know much about LinkedIn. I guess I've heard more recently. They're trying to go more of the Instagram, Facebook. Facebook, Twitter direction, where it's just a place you go to consume information, not just to find a job or not just a network. So if that's the case, I guess I would be a little bit more wary about it. I guess my conflict disclosure is Reid Hoffman gave a very nice blurb to so good they can't ignore you. So I've always had goodwill towards LinkedIn because of that.

But again, I don't know a ton about it. You know, I've never used it. I know some people love it. I don't know what's going on today. All right. Juno asks, how do you recommend balancing a business pursuit with schoolwork? Now, Juno elaborated. She gave me some extra information that she is in high school and she's running a business.

Well, Juno, I know a lot about this because I did the same thing. I had a business in high school, Princeton Web Solutions. I've talked about it before on this podcast. I ran it with my good friend Michael Simmons. And we did website design, that type of work, like helping people redo websites or web services. And we ran it out of high school. And yet it does add a pretty sizable extra time constraint.

You know, it does make things complicated. The two things I would recommend is number one, you got to get your act together on your schoolwork. You know, as I talk about a lot, most students are really bad at studying. They have atrocious study habits. They're not really good at it. Basically, the grades are all curved to acknowledge the fact that most students are going to basically procrastinate

and then try to get things done at the last minute. So if you were one of the few to actually take your study skills seriously, to actually experiment and figure out what processes work and what does it, you can get a lot of work done in a lot less time than your peers. And that's going to be crucial for you if you're trying to run a business at the same time. So the very second book I wrote was called How to Become a Straight A Student. And it talked about how college students who got really good grades but weren't grind, how they did it. And that could be useful to you, but also would be useful to you is my third book, How to Become a High School superstar, which is a title I don't love. It's a crazy book.

I love it. It's basically if Malcolm Gladwell wrote a college admissions book, it has signaling theory in there, the failed simulation effect. I do deep journalism on these really quirky kids who really didn't work that hard if I got into the really good schools and I made into a detective problem. How did that happen? I built out a whole theoretical framework about how impressiveness actually works. I mean, it's a it's a crazy book. I loved writing. The very quick backstory to that book is that I sold it right before the financial crash of 2008. And so Random House really contracted. They fired a lot of people. And the book.

got passed through six or seven editors in like six months. So by the time that all stopped, the editor that ended up with that book had no idea what it was that, you know, what was the original idea for the book and what had been agreed on. So I basically was able to just do whatever I wanted and I loved it. But the reason I bring it up to you know is that there's a really long section in that book where I basically adapt the study habit ideas from how to become a straight-day student. I adapt them to the high school setting. So that's a great place to get started. I mean, it's like, this is what you should do as a high school student if you want to significantly reduce the time you have to spend on school work without reducing your options post high school graduation.

So get your act together on schoolwork. Again, it's low hanging fruit because most students are terrible at it. Either of those two books will help you. I will also say, I don't know what your particular type of business is, but you need to have incredibly clear processes for how you interact with clients. You are not very available. You're at high school. You're not going to be able to meet the sort of full availability expectations that some clients might expect from the average sort of knowledge work vendor or company that they work with. What Michael and I learned is that it's okay if you're not that available if you're instead very organized and clear about how your work happens. And I've talked about this before, I think, on the podcast, but we had

we had a client extra net that we programmed. We had a process that was incredibly clear. They could see in a custom web-based interface like exactly where their project was, what was coming next. We had a work diary. That was crucial. It was basically a blog. So they could see what was being done on their project. You know, that's 80% of why clients bother you is because they're not sure that you're actually doing work. And then we had these clear milestones and check-ins and they signed everything and every document got, you know, scanned and put into this extra net. And we did all this extra work. because we had no phones, we had no laptops, and we were in school for eight hours a day, and we couldn't be reached, and that worked. So that's my other piece of advice. Get your processes for client communication, the expectations they have about how you work and how they learn about it. Get that all really clear. So they don't have to fall back to just, well, just be available.

Just be available and I'll bother you and just make sure things are going because that's not going to work well in high school. Your teachers are not going to enjoy you doing surreptitious phone calls or email in class. that will get old fast. All right, let's play a quick round of question roulette. As you'll recall, the idea with question roulette is that I randomly select a question from those submitted to my readers, a question I have never seen before until right at this moment, and I do my best to answer it with no further preparation.

So I already have it loaded. I have not looked at it. Let me just switch over here and scroll down the screen. Okay, so today's question, that question comes from Jacob. Here it is. How do you find time for deep schoolwork while also working a full-time 9-to-5? Is it ethically wrong to give less than 100% at work

if you're still meeting performance goals? You know, Jacob, I tend to fall for most jobs. I tend to fall onto the line of if you're doing good work, you're doing good work. you know and I think most bosses would agree now if you put this in their face if you don't show up until 11 if you tell them I only need to work half a day because I'm so good and I'm going to go work on schoolwork or you have your your chemistry set out in the scenario I'm assuming you're for some reason doing a chemistry degree at your office but you have your chemistry set out you know if your cubicle

okay you're forcing the issue and they're going to say okay I have to do something about this but if you're discreet about it and you're getting your work done I think it is fine It is fine if you're able to work in some other professional efforts that are useful to you or meaningful to you. Again, you just have to be reasonable. So how do you do that? You've got to control your time. All right. So Jacob, time block, time block, time block.

That's going to be crucial to you. I talk about it in almost every episode. You got to give every minute of your day a job. You have to control that time. That time blocking should be part of a much more sophisticated, productivity system. The last three episodes, I feel like I've talked about the three components of my system. Capture, configure, control, or the time blocking is the control piece.

Do that, those first two pieces as well. I mean, you really just have to be on top of your game. If you're on top of your game, if you make yourself into an incredibly organized person in terms of productivity, someone who also is really good at focusing hard when it comes time to focus, you know, I think you can buy yourself some extra time. The other things I would recommend, Jacob, is starting your workday a little later. So let's say you normally get to the office at 9. Maybe you get to the office at 930, but you start working on schoolwork at 8.

You know, you try to find a way to get in a good block before the day begins. And you know what if you're doing a degree at the same time as work, you're probably going to have to tap weekends. You're probably going to have to tap some evenings. you know, that's not a steady state you want to be in. That's not what you want your career to require for always. But you're trying to do two things at the same time. You want to really get after it. I get that.

And so you might need to tap those times outside of the nine and five as well. So I'll put those all together. Become a productivity ninja with a particular focus on that time blocking control aspect. So you can fit in some of this work during your day. You might have to do some stuff before work happens. You might have to tap some evenings. You might have to tap some of the weekend. this is just temporary, so it's okay.

And just don't shove this in your boss's face, and you should be okay. All right, that's another round of question roulette that we have survived. So let's move on right now to our final segment, which is questions about the deep life. Easton asks, how much solitude should someone have per day? Well, Easton, I don't think it's a formula. you know, I don't think it's like how many units of vitamin C you should have or something like this, but I would say roughly speaking, basically every day you need to have multiple moments where you are alone with your own thoughts.

So it's just you observing the world around you alone with your own thoughts, nothing in your ears, nothing in your hands, no one in front of you. These can be brief. Five minutes here, 10 minutes there. When you walk the dog or when you go to get coffee at your office before you come back to your cubicle or the one direction of your commute or something like this. They don't have to be long, but they should happen throughout your day. Think of it as a steam release valve, right?

Your brain cannot be in this sort of processing inputs from other mind type reactive mode all the time. So there should just be these relief valves every day. They can be brief. They don't require you to do something special. They don't require you to have, you know, a meditation session on your calendar. Just step away from the distractions a few times a day. At least once a week, however, you should have a much longer period in which you really spend some good time alone with your thoughts in the world around you, preferably walking, you know, walking in the woods, if possible, do the whole Thoreau or Nietzsche type strategy there.

So this is a little bit more organized. Like, I'm going to go take an hour where I do nothing but think. I'm going to think through some things. I'm going to organize my experience about the world. I'm going to organize information. I'm going to reflect on myself and my life. I'm going to look at the things around me. hey look at those what's happening with the weather what's happening with the trees and just

give yourself at least an hour that should be maybe once a week or so so if every day you get these little hits of solitude and about once a week you get at least one long hit of solitude you'll be fine if you do less than that you might begin to suffer from acute solitude deprivation which will manifest itself with anxiety sense of jitteriness sense of a little bit of existential existential dread nibbling away at the at the corners of your consciousness. If you don't want those things, avoid solitude deprivation. That's my prescription, Euston. All right. Alia asks, among all analog hobbies, which ones do you find to be of higher quality? Then she notes a hobby such as hiking, for example, she's worried because she says,

look, it's neither productive and it doesn't require a specialized skill, but I think it has other advantages. Can that count? So I think what's going on here, Alia, is that you may have too restrictive of a definition of what makes a good analog leisure activity. So, of course, as readers of my most recent book, Digital Minimalism, know, I really advocate that you spend more time doing leisure activities that don't involve a screen, what I call high-quality leisure activities, things that you do for no other reason just for their own sort of the intrinsic pleasure of it. I go back to Aristotle.

I make the argument that this is crucial and this is something that we got away from because of the easy distraction from our phones. And so Eliah is saying, you know, I'm worried like, just something like hiking not count is not not quality enough. And so let me, let me expand a little bit what I mean by a good high quality leisure activity. I would say, Eli, that there's sort of three properties that you should be looking for. And you don't need all three of these, but maybe at least one of these properties for something to be a good analog leisure activity. something that requires you to develop skill and then reap rewards when you deploy that skill. That's a great type of analog hobby.

So you get better at something. And it's clear you're getting better at something. And there's some reward that comes from it. Like your time gets faster on your shell when you're out there scolding. Or you can actually now play that song on your guitar and people recognize it. They're kind of impressed. That's a good type of quality. another type of good quality would be what I would think of as like connoisseurship or quality

appreciation so if the activity there's some element of quality that you develop taste for and you really get to appreciate it so like this might involve you know you really get into coffee or into a certain type of music and you can really understand oh man that berlin symphonic performance of whatever uh whatever you're you know Beethoven but whatever it is but the fact is I understand why that's good and why that's better than the high school band is playing in. I know what was happening with that music. So you begin to appreciate quality. You begin to develop what Ira Glass talks about developing taste as the precursor to then going on and doing really interesting things.

You develop that type of taste. That's another type of property that makes an analog hobby or analog leisure activity high quality. And then also the third one I would say is something that's immersive. You can get lost into it. you can even enter into a state of flow. All those three things are great things. They all mark a leisure activity as high quality and something that's probably worth spending time on. You don't need all three.

One or two would be fine. So for example, hiking, like what you're noting is that, okay, hiking doesn't necessarily require a highly specialized skill unless you're doing like backpacking or endurance hiking. That's true. But it does have that quality appreciation piece. like a lot of what people like about hiking is that they really grow to enjoy the the natural settings that they encounter that's very powerful and it can be immersive you can really get lost in a flow state when it's just you and you're breathing as you're moving through these settings so hiking would satisfy that really well just like something like learning the guitar you get

some quality appreciation you know you learn about how guitars are harder it's not necessarily that immersive because practicing is really hard you're not going to get stuck in a flow state but you're building up a skill so it satisfies one of those properties and it's good. So that's what I say, Alia. I want to overthink it. Have some combination of those properties. It's something that you were going to get great reward from from spending time doing.

And you're going to get significantly more reward from spending time doing than you would looking at a screen. Now let me just add one quick addendum to that. Reading. Reading is one of my hobbies. How does it fall into those three categories? It's immersive. You get lost in the world, either the world of ideas or the fictional world

being created and quality appreciation is crucial. You begin, especially with nonfiction reading, you begin to appreciate a complex new set of ideas. You build a new structure in your head of understanding some sort of topic. And again, that's fantastic. So I just wanted to mention that because that's my number one, high quality leisure activity, and it definitely falls in under those properties. Okay, Maniche asks, how can I bring my life back in track? In his elaboration, he talks about, he says things like, I'm just being too lazy. I'm constantly overthinking things. You know, it would be great if you could talk about like how to make real friends that will stay with you or things I should follow.

I mean, look, I just feel lost. Well, Manish, I think the deep life framework is one that can help you find your way again. Now, there's a few components to it. classically the components I talk about are craft, constitution, community, and contemplation. Recently, I've been adding a fifth to that sometimes, which I call competency. It kind of falls under craft,

but sometimes I want to pull it out. Let's go through those really quickly because, Manish, what I'm going to prescribe to you is the way to get your life back on track is to get your life in order. Right? to stand up, apply a little discipline, and say, I'm going to take these different elements that are crucial to a fulfilling and meaningful and otherwise known as deep life. And I'm going to start doing some work in each of those things. And I'll tell you, you start building those

foundations in these different areas. Suddenly, the entire structure of your life becomes a lot more stable. And the stuff you worry about, you worry about less. You're a little bit less anxious about things. You're a little bit more confident about things. You, you, you, you, through the thing you get friends that are more true. Those relationships are deeper. You get more appreciation out of life. There's more excitement. You're more resilient to the hard times that, hey, as we've learned,

they're waiting for you, as we've all learned. And so this is what I'm going to prescribe. So let's go through those briefly. All right. So we have craft. Craft is what you do for a living, like what you build, how you make a living, how you try to impact the world. It's a big one.

So you need to start taking that seriously. I've written a lot about it. So good they can't ignore you. That book is going to be very important here. It's all about the discipline, diligent acquisition of skills in something that is useful and something that as you get better at that, you're going to have a lot more control over your career. But the key thing is you begin to get satisfaction almost right away from just the process of building those skills. You don't have to get to the destination of the dream job before you can.

reap rewards from the craft bucket of the deep life. It's once you actually start taking your craft seriously, right away you begin to get rewards. All right, let's talk about Constitution. Constitution is your health, both physical and mental. You got to get after that. Manisha, you got to take that seriously. You've got to think about how do you eat? Is your body getting the basic movement and muscle stress that the human body expects every day? If it's not, bad things are going to happen. You should be a little bit radical here. And by radical, I mean, you know, you're someone who the people you know think of as, oh, yeah, they're a little over the top with, you know, the fitness stuff they're into or the eating stuff they're into. Being a little bit over the top is a signal to yourself that you take this seriously.

It pushes you to interesting places. It can be a real sense of confidence boosting, resilience and satisfaction. So take care of your constitution. Start small, but take care of that. community. You know, don't come at this right now. So community is your connection to other people around you and in your life. Don't come,

don't come at this from how do I make people be my friends? Come at it instead from how am I going to be useful to my communities, to my family, to the people at my university, to the people in my town. How can I be useful? I want to be useful. I want to be useful.

I want to serve. I want to start building some connections that are established on not the transactional question of what can you bring to me? Are you someone who's going to come and hang out with me? Or you're someone who's going to make me feel less lonely, but more about you saying, how can I sacrifice on behalf of you in a way that is helpful? There are fewer sources of meaning that are deeper in the human experience.

And that's because we are an intrinsically social species. And because of that, because sociology was absolutely at the core of our species' survival and our species' eventual dominance of the planet, it's so embedded in that human homo sapien DNA that we get an incredible sense of reward when we're out there actually tending these connections we're serving the tribe we're acting on behalf of the tribe just a little aside maniche i mean this is exactly the deeply paleolithic instinct that incredibly modern services like social media has hijacked recently and that's why they're doing so

well i mean what are you getting on twitter what you're getting on twitter it's basically like remember the Sims, that simulation game where you were running sort of simulated people, it's like the Sims for cavemen, right? I mean, it's like, let's go back and touch on these Paleolithic instincts for tribal connection and sacrifice on your tribe and connect with your community. But instead of actually going and doing that with real people, we'll just kind of simulate it on these online worlds where we yell at people and click little icons of thumbs and do emojis and obsess over it, right? Why are those platforms so successful? because they're hijacking something that's very deep, which are sociality. So, Manish, sacrifice. Sacrifice on behalf of other people.

Be useful. Stand up. Take responsibility. Do what you're going to do on behalf of the people who are around you. All right. Then finally, contemplation. Well, you know, contemplation is that this is the deep thinking of life. This is how you develop your philosophies and your ethical systems.

You cannot bypass that portion of your life. you need philosophies on which you're going to base how you think about the world and in which you ground your actions and decisions. There's a lot of different ways to do this, right? When we've kind of lost the art, we've lost the art recently. It's actually kind of sad of developing personal philosophies. I mean, this is what college students used to do. This was the cliche, right? It's what made college students so pretentious and annoying is that we would learn, like, oh, I'm going to go, I'm going to read these books. And man, I'm really taken by this scholar, you know, and like I'm a real Nietzsche guy now. And, and, and you're like,

I found it out and I figured it out. And other people are so dumb. They don't know about these things. And then, and then, you know, your dad gets mad at you over your freshman summer because you're being incredibly annoying because you think you figured out the world. But you know what you're, you're actually figuring out is, oh, I figure out how to build philosophies. You got to read long form things, hard things. You have to think about it. You have to take something that's really hard. then you have to read something that attacks it. Then you have to read something that's an alternative and you have to triangulate those three things

and come out of that collision with much deeper roots to your understanding. You do that enough times. You can build up a philosophy and it's something you can live off of and it might change a few times and the one you come up as a college freshman, you know, it might be like Anne Rand or something like this

and it might get, you know, more sophisticated as you go on or not. But you need philosophies. We've lost this skill. You've got to regain that skill. You've got to read long form. You've got to challenge your mind. mind. You got to sit at the feet of some of the best thinkers in history. You can do that through books. You got to read their best arguments. You got to read the best counter arguments. You got to

read the best alternatives. You have to let those things collide. You have to let those collisions lay roots. And on those roots, you're going to grow these trees on which you're going to get unshakable intellectual confidence in how you approach your life. I think that's really important. We've lost that skill. I mean, what do we do today? And I don't mean to go on a tangent, but what do we do today. I think a lot of what we see on social media is basically what I call intellectual groupieism. Like, well, I don't want to do that work. I just, I want just what are someone else tell me the cliff notes. Like what's the idea? What are the basic ideas right now we all agree with? And more importantly, like what's good and what's bad? And how do I, okay, so what do I do to make

sure I'm doing the good thing and not the bad thing? Like, great, I'm with it. And now I'm going to, with great fervence, say, this is, you know, I'm going to push this philosophy, but you know, there's nothing below it. You haven't read any of the things. You haven't done the hard reading. You haven't confronted the criticism. You haven't read the alternative and let that collide and then let your roots grow deep. You're just a, like a social media, you're often just a groupie for intellectuals and say,

I just trust you. Just give me the cliff notes I need because I just want to be a part of, you know, I want to go around with your metaphorical jam band and make sure I have bootleg tapes, I guess, from your concerts, if we're going to torture this fish-related or Grateful Dead related analogy. But you know what I'm talking about here. We don't do this anymore. We don't build philosophies from scratch. We don't go to the sources.

Social media says, don't bother with that. And in fact, if you do bother with it, we might yell at you. So just come on. We'll give you the cliff note. So don't do that. Many issues you need to actually go and build philosophies. I've talked about before the great philosophical traditions and the great religious traditions have a lot of this done. Right. So it's not a bad idea that if you have, for example, a family religious heritage or you have a particular religious heritage for which you feel some sort of intimation or resonance, you know, there is a lot of wisdom captured in those that I think we dismiss.

That's not a bad place to go. There's classical philosophical traditions that I know a lot of of people get a lot of value out of where a lot of this work has been done now you have a framework to study that's been poured over you're not starting from scratch and that's fine too but what i'm trying to say here in the contemplation section monisha is you need to be thinking for yourself hard stuff you got to reflect on it and read other hard stuff and other hard stuff and start figuring out what am i all about what are the ideas in which i base my ethics on which i base my decisions on which I base my actions. That's going to evolve. You don't have to get it right. Don't let it the first time. Don't let that the magnitude of that challenge scare you off. But you can't

skip that and you can't replace that by just being an intellectual groupie on Twitter. That's just going to make you anxious and angry. And then you're going to burn out and you're going to end up somewhere worse. There's very little philosophical insight on Twitter. There's very little philosophical insight on Instagram. You know, that has to happen in your own head and has to happen after hours and hours of actually doing long-form, nuanced reading. All right. So you got those buckets. You have craft.

You have constitution. You have community. And you have contemplation. These are all crucial to the deep life. So, you want to focus on those buckets and you want to start getting after it in each of those buckets. You don't have to get it perfect.

You don't have to figure out a master plan for each of those. But what I'm going to ask is that four months from now, one month for each bucket, you have made a significant stride in each of them. first month focus on the first one second month keep alive what you put in place that first month while now focusing on the second one third month keep alive the two things you put in place for the first two while you focus on the third and the fourth month do that for the fourth now if you want to add in this competency bucket i talked about i think that might be helpful for you as well so competency what i mean by that is regaining a sense of what's known as self-ethicacy that is belief that

you are able to actually influence things in the world or make positive outcomes happen. So basically it's just a belief in your own capability. I think that's important. I think in particular, there's a lot of young men that crave, and I don't know if this is cultural. I don't know if this is in genetic. I don't know. I just observe it.

Young men in particular often are hungry for this sense of competency and can feel quite a drift without it. And I think in a world where things are increasingly ambiguous and digital, you know, so it's you don't move a plow, but you answer emails for a living, you know, where it's, it's not as, it's, it used to be impossible that you could go through life without being competent at clear cut things that you're doing that you know how to do, you know how to do well. Now you can have a job where you're a social media brand manager for a marketing brand boutique consultancy and your grandfather would have no idea what what that means. Your great grandfather is like, I have no idea.

Nothing you do themes like work to me. All right. So we're in a more complicated time. So competency is something that suddenly became rare. And especially young men seem to really crave this. So, so, Manish, I might add that bucket for you. And so maybe add a fifth month where you work on competency.

And really what that can mean at first is like you literally are just learning how to do things, like how to build something or how to fix something. you know, like it's just convincing yourself, oh, I'm the type of person who can do hard things well or complicated things or skilled things well. All right. So I'm going to add that bucket for you just because I'm drawing from your elaboration. I think this could also be relevant. Five buckets, five months, make some large stride in each. Just one is fine, but in each of these strides make some change in your life, some commitment that you stick to that shows you're serious about it.

Then you're going to get a taste for it, and you're going to like how it feels that these five buckets have something going on there. And then you're going to keep pushing on these five buckets. You're going to work on that craft more. You're going to get a little bit more radical about your constitution. Your ties to your community are going to deepen.

Your contemplation is going to get more and more intense and rich as you pour through books and develop philosophies and listen to long-form interviews with smart people. people and you ignore the intellectual groupism on Twitter because that's not going to get you where you need to get. That's going to start to seem hopelessly superficial. And you're building up your competency. You could do things. I know how to do this. Let me build this. Let me fix this. Let me learn this. You're doing these things. You're going to want to do more and more of them. And Manish, I think you're going to feel that your life is on a solid foundation.

And the sense of being lost is going to go away. The sense of like you have to make some one grand gesture, that there's one thing that's a problem. If you could just fix it, like, it's just my job is completely wrong. If I could get this job, it'd all be fixed. Like those type of grand Disney movie plot type feelings that there's a, you know, there's a prince coming that's going to change everything overnight. That's going to kind of diminish. And you're going to have confidence in Monash. And you're going to have confidence in and in Monash. And you're going to feel a resilience and an energy towards life. I really believe that the deep life is the best type of life to lead. So I believe in

Amnesian, you will do great. All right, so that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, everyone who contributed their questions to this episode. Again, if you want to contribute questions to a future episode, you need to sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. That is where I send the surveys in which I actually solicit these queries. And of course, if you like the podcast, please tell a friend or subscribe in your podcast player as I've heard that really helps.

Otherwise, until next time, as always, stay deep.