Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 85: Are NFTs Frivolous or Fundamental?

Episode Date: April 5, 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: Are NFTs frivolous or fundamental? [6:57]WORK QUESTIONS - Does a world without email mean the return of voicemail? [23:42] - Is Elon Musk right about not pursuing a PhD? [26:31] - Is mastery incompatible with the deep life? [28:47] - Do I need a todo list for my personal life? [39:15] - How do you come up with catchy phrases like "hyperactive hive mind"? [41:26] - Why am I wary of building a team? [44:12]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - How do I use the internet responsibly when there is so much information? [48:02] - How do I learn to code while working a demanding job? [49:33] - What are my (Cal) thoughts on Microsoft Teams? [55:41]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I (Cal) spend my time outside of work and family? [58:49] - How do I unplug from the "productivity machine" and relax? [1:01:10]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 85. Let's start with quick announcements. I want to talk for a moment about my time block planner. If you don't know about the time block planner, we have this website, time block planner.com that explains what it is. It's basically a planner I sell that makes it easy to implement my time block planning methodology for giving every minute of your day a job. This is the fundamental way I think you should organize your day, not based off list and not, God forbid, based off just reacting to emails and instant messages. So the thing I wanted to talk about is updates to the planner format.

So I imagine this planner to be an iterative product, right? Because when you buy one, it's not a permanent purchase like a book, where I have this, I'll never need another. You use it, it gets full, you need another. So I've always imagined this planner to be iterative in that we're going to keep updating and upgrading the design, the features to make it as useful as possible. So over time, as I get feedback from you, the planner becomes better and better. If you have a long time, time blocking routine, my hope is that over the seasons as you go through these planners, they'll be evolving along with you, evolving along with me. They'll be getting better, more focused.

The little details that make the difference will get enhanced. So with that in mind, if you're a time block planner user, send me feedback if you have it. Interesting at calnewport.com. I can't reply to every message, but I do read every message. Just so you know where we are, we have to, we're planning right now, the improvements. We call it gen 2 for the planner. But we have to get through the planners we printed, right, before we can start selling the new version. And we printed quite a few. There's a demand for this. I think people are into time blocking. I think we printed something like 50,000 copies of this planner coming out of the gate. But, you know, I just got my royalty statement. Looks like in that first month in November when it came out, we moved almost half of those already. So we've sold almost already half of those in the first month. So we'll get through that stock relatively soon. I mean, it's not going to be years, right? So now is the time to really be thinking about what we want to do in the next version. There's a couple things already.

I'm working on. I'm working on the lie flatness. I want that to be improved. I'm working on a this is sort of technical, but I've talked with a lot of you about this. Weekend pages don't need their own two page spread. Saturday and Sunday don't both need their own two page spread. You do need capture pages for the weekend, right? Because weekend or not weekend can't have things just in your head. And there might be some sort of rough planning you want to do for the weekend. Not time blocking every minute, but like here's a couple big rocks or a list of the things I want to do during my downtime. And so I'm working on a new design where we can have a two-page spread that covers both days of the weekend. I think that will be a little bit more

efficient. And there's a few other things that we're working on. Something with the cover. But anyways, feedback to interesting on calendipart.com. But I just wanted you to know if you're a time block planner user, keep in mind what you have in your hand now, it's not what it's always going to be. We are going to keep iterating. If you're not a time block plan user, don't wait. Don't wait till the next generation, because I'm not quite sure how long it's going take to clear out the pipeline and get the new version into printing. You might as well build up your skill with the planning now. These changes are going to be incremental improvements. So it's not like it's going to be a drastically different experience. So if you want a time block

plan, go to timeblock plan. Go to timeblock planner.com and learn about it and get started. But keep that feedback coming and keep in mind that over the months and over the years, this is something that is going to evolve with all of us into something that we, and it's something really special. I think after we've done a few iterations of this. It's really locked in based off of the experience of tens of thousands of people using it every day. It's going to be hard for another planner to compare because we have such a tight feedback loop. All right. So I just wanted to say that briefly about the time block planner. Looking at my scripts for today's show, it looks good. We've got a good collection of questions on our normal topics here, work technology

and the deep life. We're also going to do a deep dive. The deep dive has returned. I'm going to do one on a cryptocurrency topic, so beware. Nothing gets me more frustrated, sort of tech-splained email responses than when I, when I wander into the cryptocurrency territory. So that should be fun. And of course, calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how you can submit your own questions. All right, so this all sounds great. But before we dive into the content, I first want to briefly mention one of the sponsors

that makes this podcast possible. My Body Tudor. Now, I have known Adam Gilbert, the founder of My Body Tudor, since 2007, back when he used to write fitness advice on my study Hacks blog. This has been a very successful company for him, and for good reason, it makes a lot of sense.

Here's how My Body Tudor works. Let's say you want to get in better shape. You sign up for My Body Tudor, and you get an online coach, someone who is dedicated to you, and you do this all online, so it doesn't have to be someone who lives nearby

or associated with one of your gyms. They help you work out a realistic and sustainable plan for getting healthier. It includes what you eat. It includes how you move and exercise. And then here's the secret. You check in every day.

The accountability is what makes my body tutor work. You talk to your coach. Yeah, here's what I did. I did the exercise. I stuck with the eating guide we came up with. As Adam says, I'm quoting him here, in fitness, knowledge isn't the problem. Everyone I talk to already knows what to do, where they struggle is turning information into action.

My Body Tudor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support. It's a hugely popular company, guys, because it works. Here's a plan and someone to talk to every day about whether or not you are doing that plan. So if, like a lot of us, the pandemic was not exactly friendly to your BMI, My Body Tudor is your way to get back in shape. Now, if you mention deep questions when you sign up, they will give you $50 off your first month. So be sure to mention me when you sign up. I have nothing but good things to say about this service. My Body Tudor, I think it is the smart way to leverage the

internet to get in shape in a sustainable and effective manner. And with that, let's start the show. We begin with a deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is NFTs or non-fungible tokens. I'm going to ask and attempt to answer the question, is this technology frivolous or fundamental? Now, by frivolous, I mean something just of interest to tech insiders or people who are particularly interested in cryptocurrency-style technologies. And by fundamental, I mean something that's going to affect in a non-trivial way,

the way the world operates even outside of those people who are just really interested only in cryptocurrency. So something that might impact the rest of our lives. Why am I thinking about this? Well, I have this conversation coming up on the same day I'm recording this. I'm doing a conversation with Kevin Ruse, who's the technology reporter for the New York Times. And just in this past week, he sold an NFT for one of his New York Times columns for 560. $60,000.

Don't worry, they donated that money to charity. Even more interesting, there's a well-known artist named Beeple who sold an NFT for one of his artworks, actually for a digital scan, a digital picture of one of his artworks for $64 million at auction. So what is going on here, and is it something that we need to pay attention to? I thought this might be an interesting topic for a deep dive. I normally do work topics or deep life topics, and I thought to do a technology. topic would be a nice change of pace.

Two caveats, number one, I'm just winging this. Okay, so it's difficult to talk about cryptocurrency type topics accurately, especially without preparation. So bear that in mind that I just thought this would be interesting to talk about. I turned on the camera and I'm rock and rolling, so give me a little bit of latitude there. And two, I will admit this is a caveat up front. I know a fair amount about the underlying mathematics of the main cryptocurrency mechanisms, in particular the main blockchain algorithms

because I taught a doctoral seminar on blockchain theory a couple of years ago, but I'm not up to speed on the applications of this technology, the specific ways in which people are deploying these chains, how the new version of Ethereum, exactly how it differs than what was going on with the Bitcoin blockchain before.

So I'm not super up to speed on the applications. I know more of the underlying theory. So that's another caveat before I get going here. All right, so before we can assess NFTs, we have to understand them. Before we understand NFTs, we have to understand what a blockchain is. Everyone has their own favored analogy here. So let me try one of my own. Let's imagine now we all just live in the same town.

We're going to deal with just a scale. We all live at the same town. Now imagine in the center of town, we get a big thick paper ledger book. And we bolt it down, you know, on a podium inside the gazebo. in the center of town. As big thick pages, you can't rip them out or add pages, write big thick pages.

Let's say we all come, if we want to add something to this ledger book, we turn to the current page and we can add an entry. We always write in permanent markers. You can't erase or change an entry. And every time we add an entry to a page,

one of us as a town member, we sign it. And let's just assume we all pretty distinctive signatures. You can't fake my signature. I can't fake yours. So what we have here is we can I'll put entries in this ledger book, and they're in a set order. The entry on page four was put there before the entry on page five, and the entry on page five

was written before the entry on page eight. This shared ledger turns out to be a very useful thing for a lot of different interactions and mechanisms. So, you know, I don't know. Let's say, for example, we're trying to sell a house, and we want to temporarily put money into escrow, and then if the paperwork goes through, that money can come out of escrow, you could do this in the ledger book, because I could write, okay, I am putting this much money into escrow, it's going to be here for this many days. If the, you know, conditions are met,

then it goes to Alice, who's buying my house, and I sign it so you know it's for me. And then at some point, the person, someone comes in, the inspector, the banker, and whatever, and says, yeah, these conditions have been met. I'll write that in the ledger and I'll sign it. So now everyone can go look at the ledger and say, okay, Cal wrote, right here and signed that if these conditions were met in the next few days, 10 days or whatever, Alice gets the house. And then a couple days later, we see the person that we trust to check things, said the conditions were met and signed it. So we out now all agree, Alice owns this house. Right. That's really useful if you have, again, a ledger where you put things in order,

you can't change things once they're in there. And you can sign things to everyone knows who wrote what. Right. One of the cool things you can do when you have a shared ledger like this that can't be change is you can create a currency. So imagine we say, okay, here's how this is going to work. We have to initialize the money somewhere. And let's say we let the mayor do that. And on someday, you know, the mayor writes, there is now 10 of these virtual dollars. You know, let's say I'm the mayor and I call them Cal bucks.

There's 10 Cal bucks that exist. We all agree that I'm allowed to do that. I sign this. And I have them. All right. So anyone who looks through the ledger says, here they are. At some point, I want to pay Alice, you know, some money. So I write a ledger entry later.

Me, Cal, I'm giving two of my Cal bucks to Alice and I sign it. Now later, Alice wants to give money to Bob. Alice says, like, okay, I'm going to give one Cal Buck to Bob, and she signs that page. We're all good here because we can flip through the ledger and make sure this all makes sense and see how much money everyone has. Oh, the mayor started with 10. The mayor gave two to Alice. Okay, so now the mayor has eight and Alice has two. in this entry Alice gave one the Bob.

So now Alice has one and Bob has one. If Bob tried to write an entry, he shows up at the podium, he goes to the ledger, he goes to a blank page and says, Bob, you know, Bob is going to give Alice 50 Cal bucks. Well, everyone's going to look through the ledger and get there and say, he doesn't have it. Where did he get 50 Calbuck? He doesn't have it. So we will ignore that. So now you can actually have a circulating currency and just keep track of it just by adding

entries in this ledger that says, I'm giving this much of my money to this people. And because it's written in black and white and everyone sees it, I can't trick people. I can't give the same money away twice because everyone sees every page I write. No one can pretend to be me to give away my money because my signature is hard to replicate. It's very useful. So now the shared book we have with a good set of signatures allows us to even implement a currency without actually having to have real money in the town. All right. So what are blockchains? Blockchains just implement these ledgers over the internet. It's digital. There's not actually a book you send messages around. You don't sign it with a permanent marker. You sign it using cryptographic tools,

but gives you the same type of thing. You can cryptographically sign it in a way where no one can fake your signature and everyone can verify that it really did. It really did come from you. That is basically what a blockchain is, it's just a digital ledger book. Now, the problem is when you're trying to build one of these things digitally is how do you decide which page comes next? Because if anyone can basically just propose by sending out on the internet, here's the next page I want to add to our digital blockchain, to our digital ledger, here it is. And there's thousands of people all sending these out at the same time. How will we ever agree what the real order is?

So the big breakthrough in the Nakamoto algorithm for the original Bitcoin blockchain is they say, okay, before we will allow you to send out a proposal, if we're going to accept a proposal to add your page to our digital ledger book here, you have to solve a puzzle. And the puzzle's hard for computers to solve. It's going to take you a while. And because it's a hard puzzle to solve, people can only be adding pages at a relatively slow rate. And if it takes 10 or 15 minutes to solve these puzzles, even with a lot of computational power, there's going to be a very small number of next pages being proposed. And in fact, when I have a page to propose,

probably I'm the only person who has solved a puzzle nearby recently. And so everyone will see it and everyone will add it before anyone else solves a page. And if there's a couple pages that are solved at the same time, you get a fork, but we'll resolve that pretty quickly.

Don't worry about those details, right? Now, what if I build a really powerful computer and now I can solve these really fast? Well, that doesn't work because basically the agreement for how it works is we say we want it to take about, I think with the Nakamona Bitcoin blockchain around 10 minutes per puzzle.

So we base the difficulty of the puzzle on sort of how fast people are solving it. So if someone starts solving, like adding pages fast, we make the puzzle harder. So it takes a well. All right. That is what blockchains are.

It's variations on that theme. We're building a ledger. It's in a fixed order. You can't change it once it's in there. Everyone sees the same order. People can sign things. Bitcoin is just a currency, for example, built on the Bitcoin blockchain in just the way I talked about with CalBucks.

There are certain events in the blockchain where new currency is created. So there's a Genesis block that the very first block of the Bitcoin blockchain came with some Bitcoin that could be passed around. You also automatically get some Bitcoin if you are the one who solves a puzzle that adds a page. So it incentivize people to work to add pages to the ledger. And then you just, hey, I'm giving this many Bitcoin, this fraction of Bitcoins to this person. you put in the ledger, everyone checks that you have it,

and everyone now knows how much you have and how much new person has. So that's all currencies like Bitcoin actually are. You have a blockchain, you use it to keep track of how money's moving around. All right, ooh, long summary. This brings us to NFTs. NFT is just another type of transaction

you can put on a blockchain. It's a transaction that says this thing, there's some assets, It's like ownership papers. Here's who owns it. And there's a mechanism for passing it on to someone else so that they then own it. So if you currently own it, you currently have the ownership. There's a way that you can now give that ownership up to somebody else.

And you sign this so people see that you're really doing it. Conceptually, just think about this like, I have something, right? And everyone knows I have it and it's mine. And I go into our ledger in town and I write, you know, okay, I am giving ownership of this thing to Bob. and I sign it. Now Bob has it. And if Bob wants to give it to Alice, he can. You can say, you know, I own this thing.

You can go back and check into a ledger. Cal gave it to me. I'm going to give it to Alice and I sign it. So it's not unlike how we move currency and keep track of currency in these ledgers. The only difference is it's non-fungible. You can't break it up. Only one person can own the thing at a time.

So if you own it, you can give the entire ownership to someone else. Not a piece of it. Whereas with money, I can give a little bit of a Bitcoin to someone else. Right? That's all that is. This is all a non-fungible token is. What are these ownership papers in these NFTs actually pointing to? What are the things that people own?

This is where it gets a little bit weird, because right now what people are doing with NFTs is they're, it's conceptually a little bit hazy. It's digital assets, right? So like what Kevin Roos did is said, okay, here's, I have this non-fungible token I have created for a New York Times column. Well, really, he says it's, it's a, the ownership of a digital copy of the column.

this digital copy of the column. And then someone paid $560,000. And so he then wrote in the blockchain, and I think they do these on the Ethereum blockchain is where most NFTs are right now. Okay, I'm now passing ownership of this to this person who paid $560,000. So now that person owns this digital copy of the article.

But what does that really mean? Not really anything. I mean, anyone could download and have that digital copy of the article. In this case, there's no rights being passed along. The New York Times maintains the copyrights on it. So it's not like, oh, what I'm really passing along is ownership rights of the, I have

permission to print this and no one else does. So I really get something unique there. Same thing with Beeple. When Beele sold art, he did send you a painting. Technically, the NFT was for a digital picture of a physical piece of art he did, to which he still

retains the copyright. So the person who paid $64 million is for technically he owns a digital picture, but that digital picture is attached to the NFT, anyone can download it, anyone has access to it. That's the thing that kind of makes NFTs weird. I think the right way to think about them, though, is to sort of forget the thing that's attached to them.

Really, what is happening with NFTs right now is that it is commodities, so some sort of scarce resource that can be traded. And the thing that gives some value to these commodities, the things that makes them scarce. The things that makes it so that it's not just anyone can say, here's a picture and I'm selling it for $560,000. I'm selling it for $64 million is cultural currency. Kevin Ruse has cultural currency. He's a known tech reporter. So he says, okay, I'm creating this ownership paper. Who cares that it's pointing to this article? The thing is, like, I'm a well-known person who's created something that can be owned, a collectible, and it's connected to this

cultural moment, like this article or this whatever, this artwork I'm doing at the moment. Sure, that's what it gives it some cultural valency. But the fact that I'm well known and I'm only creating some of these makes it scarce and gives it some sort of cultural valency. And that's why people will take, well, I kind of want to buy it just abstractly. It's a commodity like anything else. And this commodity is scarce because Kevin's only going to produce so many. There's only so many culturally relevant things are going to happen. He's only going to create so many of these. If he made an NFT for every word he's ever written, like, I never mind anymore. That's not so scarce. but yeah, he's not, and he's well known,

and so now it's a commodity that has some cultural valency we can trade it. The fact that there's a digital file attached to it, I think, is actually kind of a red herring here. So that's what I think NFTs are. It's basically a way to create commodities out of cultural currency because their scarcity, they can be traded like anything else.

Why might you pay money for this? Because someone else might pay more. Because it's of the moment and it's interesting. All right, so is this fundamental or is this frivolous? I'm going to say neither. I don't think there's anything new here about NFTs that's different than any of the other types of

smart contract-enabled transactions that are happening on blockchains. That means that there's some fundamental breakthrough here that's going to, in short order, change the way that most of us are going to encounter the world, change the way the world operates in some sort of major way. I think this is more of an insider thing right now.

I think right now, again, it's commodifying cultural currency is interesting. It's an interesting commentary on value. It's an interesting commentary on commodities. It's fun. It's intriguing. Tech people like it. But I don't know if this NFTs itself is going to have a huge impact.

I would contrast that to, let's say, digital currencies like Bitcoin. Because that's actually doing something that's fundamentally very provocative. It's saying, can a currency exist without an institutional backstop? an institutional backstop that sort of has control over that currency and how much of it there is and its value. Is it possible to have a currency that exists in an entirely distributed way? That's, I think, more fundamentally philosophically provocative. I think an NFT is just saying it's taking the transaction capability of the blockchain and saying, hey, can we make commodities out of cultural currency.

So for this moment, and I'll probably eat these words, because I always get things wrong with blockchain technology. I would say, if you're really into cryptocurrencies and this type of tech, if you're really into cryptocurrencies and this type of tech, a tech insider, it's fascinating. It should be studied. There's going to be a lot of smart articles written about it. If you're not, if you care about the world of tech, it impacts your life or your business, but you're not a real cryptocurrency type nerd,

I don't know that there's anything yet that you need to be paying a lot of attention to. So then again, maybe what I really need to do right now is take a video of this deep dive, a digital MP4, attach it to an NFT and see if I2 can get $560,000. Because if that's the case, and it's relevant, it's not frivolous to me. So maybe I should go figure out how to do that.

In the meantime, however, let's do some work questions. Our first question comes from Scott, who asks, remember voicemail in the 1980s? Not sure anyone wants a world without email if it leads to that. I do remember voicemail. In fact, I remember when voicemail first became a feature offered by the phone company,

and you no longer had to use. use a tape-based answering machine, because I remember those as well, where you would listen to it rewind. The tape would rewind and then click and then playback the messages that were recorded when you were away. So we've come a long way. But I think this is an important topic because it gets at what is the real issue with email? If we're not careful about this question, we can confuse the harms with the benefits and that makes the whole thing a confusing jumble and hard to actually deal with. So here's a very quick history. I've talked about this before, so it'll be fast.

In the first half of the 1990s, email spread widely through offices. It spread because it solved a real problem and it solved it well. It was a much more effective replacement for voicemail, but also fax machines and also enter office memos. Those were core to office coordination. They had a lot of flaws. Email did them cheaper, email did them better, email did them faster. That's why email was so popular.

No one has any trouble with this. No one wants to go back to fax machines or voicemail or inter-office memos. We're glad that email replaced those. The issue came after email arrived for those purposes. So it came to get rid of voicemail, but in its wake came the hyperactive hive mind workflow where we began to primarily collaborate with unscheduled back and forth ad hoc messaging. It's the hive mind that's killing us. This is the whole idea of my book, A World Without Email.

It is a hive mind that is killing us because if you have many, many back and forth asynchronous, ad hoc unscheduled conversations going back and forth, you have to check those inboxes all the time. You have to to keep up with that work. And these constant checks are going to be a productivity disaster. It's important that we think about these two things because we have to hold two thoughts at the same time in our head that seem to be contradictory. Thought number one, email did things that was great. Thought number two, email is making us miserable. Both are true.

It's true because voicemails were a real pain and the hyperactive hive mind is devastating. Both of those things are true. Once we have a clear view of the landscape, then we have a much clearer path of solutions, which is, okay, everything we're focused on is making the hyperactive hive mind go away. Not bringing back fax machines,

not bringing back voicemail, but figuring out other ways of collaborating that does not require tons of unscheduled back-and-forth messaging. So, Scott, I hope that clarifies both the problem we face and what the solutions might look like. Our next question comes from Vibhanti, who says, recently I heard an interview with Elon Musk.

He was talking about the utility delta of not pursuing a PhD and why most people are better off not pursuing one. I am at the crossroads of whether choosing to work in the industry or pursue further research via PhD. It would be kind of you if you tell us what should be the intentions behind pursuing a PhD and when not to go for one. All right, well, this is a question I answer roughly once a month,

but I figure it's important to come back to once a month because it keeps getting asked. My theory on PhD, as my longtime listeners know, is that you pursue one if and only if there is a specific job that you are excited about getting, for which you have clear evidence that a PhD is required to get that job, and you have pretty good evidence, that the caliber of program in which you're going to get that PhD will be sufficient to help you secure that job.

So it is incredibly utilitarian. This job requires a PhD from the type of place I am able to get into a PhD program. If that is not the case, then don't get the PhD. It is not an exploratory move. It's not, let me just do this for a while and see what it opens up. It's, I want to work at a biotech company like Pfizer, you know, in their vaccine lab, so I can do stuff. like invent mRNA vaccines or be involved in those teams. Oh, I see.

I definitely need a PhD in microbiology or biology to get that job. And, okay, I got into this program here. That's a good enough program that'll probably get me that job. Great. Let's do it. That makes a lot of sense. Or I want to be a professor at an R1 research university and solve proofs and pretend like I'm John Nash from a beautiful mind.

So speaking from experience here. Okay, yeah, I need a PhD to get that job. Can I get into a good enough school? Oh, I get into a good school. Okay, so I got a chance. If I get in this school and get this PhD, I can get this job I really want. That's when you go for a PhD. Never as just a way to explore.

Never as just something to kill time and you'll see what options it opens up. Only when that is the bridge that crosses the chasm on the particular career path you want to go should you actually invest that time. So in other words, Elon Musk is probably largely right here. Our next question comes from Roger. Roger says, I am a big fan of your work and also that of Robert Green. whose book, Mastery, is one of my favorites. How can these ideas come together to both support achieving greatness in craft without sacrificing the other buckets of a deep life?

All right. It's an interesting question, Roger. I mean, you're basically asking about greatness as an objective. Is that so all-consuming that other areas of your life are going to have to suffer? It's an important question. first I want to say I like Robert Green and I like mastery a lot. I remember reading that book. I read it right after my first kid was born.

For whatever reason, I remember reading that book. Really great in-depth case studies of how people become really good at things. In fact, I should probably go back and reread it because I remember really enjoying that book. I had one nitpick with it, which is minor. Early in the book, Green makes a leap that I didn't quite agree with. So he started by observing that there is a large amount of, depending on how you measure, a large amount of genetic diversity between individuals, right? Like my genetic code is different in non-trivial ways from your code, which is different from other people's code. How diverse is it?

Well, no two people are the same or even close to being the same, right? There's enough differences in our genes that everyone is unique genetically. Okay, sure. It's a biochemical reality. But he made the leap from that. This is my memory. He made the leap from that to saying, therefore, what it is each person is meant to do in a professional context is somewhat unique. We can leap from that to saying we each have sort of a job that we should be doing.

We're kind of wired for a particular passion. And obviously, readers of my book so good they can't ignore you, which came out right around the time that I read Mastery, would know that I don't quite agree with that. I do not believe the phenotypic expression of genetic diversity has a lot to do in most cases with what job in whatever particular economic context we happen to live in right now, what job we're better suited for. I would say the phenotypic expression of most genetic diversity has almost nothing to do with affinities for some work versus another. I do not make the leap from us having unique genes to the leap of we have unique jobs that we're wired to do. I'm obviously a bigger believer in the theory that though there's particular skills we have versus other, perhaps some inclinations for one thing versus other,

a lot of career passion is something that's cultivated over time and not something that we begin with that we're wired with and then we then discover. So that's a particular trope that I'm somewhat alone and disputing, but I have been relatively consistently disputing for a long time. That's neither here nor there. It's a great book. I just remember having that nitpick

and never really having a chance to talk about it. So there we go. So let's get back to the original question here that was asking whether the quest to become a master at something valuable necessarily means that you have to make sacrifices in other areas of your life. Well, I have two things to say here.

First, it kind of depends on what the mastery is, the character of the mastery you're trying to develop. For example, if you are at a very elite level mastering a very specific skill, like you have a gift for something that you're really trying to hone. Often, actually, the training is so intense and so structured that there's only so much you can do.

And because you're operating at an elite level, you don't have other things going on in your life. So it's not like this training is happening on the side while you work a job. You can ironically actually have more free time than the normal, let's say, office worker. So if you're trying to become a perfect, professional, let's see you're a chess player and you're at like a Magnus Carlson level of skill.

I mean, all you're doing is training chess, that one ability. You don't have another job. There's only so much chess training you can do in a day. Two to four hours is going to be max, given the intensity at which they typically practice. And if you're not in tournament season, if you're not traveling, you might actually have a lot of time. Similarly, if you're Max Scherzer, the ace of the Washington Nationals pitching staff, and it's January, you're really careful. I mean, you're very specific about, you have to train. You're very specific about what training, but you're more worried about over-training or injury than anything else, right?

So there's probably Max Scherzerer in January does a couple hours of work. Probably does a couple hours of work a day at most. There's only so much you can do. And it's not like he has another job, right, because he gets something like $20 million a year. He's on a $200 million-plus deal with the nationals, right? So, no, he doesn't need another job. So he ironically actually has more time than, let's say, like the typical professor does. Actually, I've heard that Max, because he lives in the DC area, actually trains at Georgetown in the offseason.

So that's one of my goals. Now, he only has one year left. That's his last year. So it's probably too late. Running into him on the Georgetown campus was one of my life goals. Huge Max Jersey fan. But you know what? This is his last season.

He might get a contract extension. But if you know Max and you think he needs to know more about deep work, you need to connect us. You got to connect us quick. All right. So if you have an elite skill. and you're really honing that one skill, you might have plenty of time for other things. So that's the first thing I want to point out.

In other types of fields, though, that's not the case. Let's say you're trying to build your startup from nothing to a unicorn valuation. There's probably no way to do that without huge hours. And it's going to require sacrifices. Some particular pursuits of mastery, interestingly enough, require more sacrifices early on, but if and when you get better,

you can get by with less sacrifices. I think writing is like this. If you're John Grisham, you actually have tons of autonomy. You have tons of time. It's very easy to live a deeper life. I've talked about Grisham often on this podcast. He's very carefully used his writing ability

and his brand as leverage to build the deepest possible life. So when his, as I've said before, when his longtime assistant retired a few years ago, he didn't even bother to hire another one because he had simplified his life down to the point where all he does is write a book a year, a little bit of publicity when the book comes out. He doesn't do anything else related to his books.

He writes a few hours every day, that's it. When the book comes out, there's some publicity he does and that's it. He doesn't even need an assistant because no one even knows how to contact him. He doesn't want you to contact him. All he does is write. So he has a ton of autonomy. John Grisham writing the manuscript for A Time to Kill, his first book was up at 5 a.m.

riding on a legal pad because he had a legal practice in Mississippi and was a member of the state legislature, so it took away time. Same guy doing the same thing as he got better at it, actually, its impact got less, not worse. So that's the other dynamic here. So let's summarize all these points. Some very elite level things leave you a lot of autonomy. Some elite level things suck up your autonomy mightily, so you have to be ready for that when you go into them. Some shift over time. At first they might take more time.

but if you get where you're trying to get, you get more time down the road. More time can actually be freed up. The second point I want to make here, though, is a lot of time when people are making sacrifices and other parts of their life en route to quote-unquote mastery, they're not really realistically pursuing high levels of mastery, winner take-all style elite mastery, John Grisham, Max Scherzer, Magnus Carlson, they're not really pursuing that.

what they're really doing is saying I could be at this level of success and I want to be at a higher level of success in terms of recognition and money. This higher level requires almost all of my time compared to this level below, which doesn't require all of my time. But this higher level I'm going to get to

that requires almost all my time is nowhere near world class. It's nowhere near world class, right? But it's just more than this other level. That's worth knowing, because if what's really happening here is that you are giving up on your other deep life buckets, because you're trying to crush it whenever you're doing, you're staying up until midnight, you're getting up at six, and yeah, you're making more money, you're getting some more recognition, your podcast is getting some more listeners because you're doing these extra episodes, you're doing it at night after work. But the difference between that and if you were working twice, like half as much and had a much more autonomy and free time, if the difference is not much, you know, well, you didn't get that promotion, so your salary is 25% less. or yeah, you have a podcast you enjoy,

but it's whatever, your listenership is X instead of Y. And why is not materially different. $90,000 a year versus $50,000 a year or something like this. And then it's really worse thinking. Is that benefit worth the value of the other things I'm giving up? And so I think this is the deeper point here is that it's theoretically interesting

to think about elite level skills and what's required, what's LeBron James's life like every day, what's Tom Hanks's life like. But it's really not relevant to 99.99% of people. What most people are dealing with is just trying to calibrate, given my particular skills and circumstances and drive, do I want to be low gear, medium gear, high gear, and what's the trade-off in terms of these other parts of my life?

When you're doing bucket-type thinking, that becomes a lot more clear because you're saying, you know, I'm trying to overhaul the community aspect of my bucket, and I'm finding it hard because I work till nine every night. Huh. Now I see that sacrifice really clear. Okay, well, what am I getting from working from nine every night? Well, it allows me to have this position at this job, which I have some respect and it makes some good money.

Could I preserve some of that in a different type of position? Well, I could give up some money, but we could live cheaper. But do this work? I think people might respect more. Oh, and then I can do better in my community bucket. Great, that's a good trade. So thinking in terms of buckets, I think makes these trades more explicit. I mean, this was probably a question for the deal.

deep life section of the show. But career mastery is also a work type question. So I'm glad we had a chance to get into this. There's a question later on in the show that also deals with some of these topics. So put a pin in these thoughts and we'll come at them from another angle in just a little bit. All right. Our next question comes from Oneika. Do you do your planning and organization of master to do list at work only? Or do you do that in your personal life as well? Well, Onika, I organize both parts of my life, and I do it at different scales. So at the semester or quarterly plan scale, I have a plan for my professional life and I have a plan for my personal life. I look at that personal life when I make my weekly plans, my weekly plans involve stuff in my personal life.

You know, working on this house project. I'm working on this fitness thing. I'm trying to, you know, whatever. We need to buy these equipment for the kids' sports. I think that thing, through in the weekly plan just like I would work. The daily plan when I'm time-blocked planning, I time-blocked-plan my work hours. If there is personal or home-related stuff that needs to happen during my work hours that day, that will go in the time-block plan because every hour during those hours gets a job. So, oh, here's the break where I'm going to run to the store. I shut down complete at the end of my work hours.

I don't time-block the evenings. I don't suggest that. I don't time-block the weekends. I don't suggest that. I might, however, have some notes about what I want to do. that evening or what the evening plan is going to be. I sometimes will just jot these at the bottom of my time block plan. So like I have the last block of the workday.

And then below it I might write like evening underline and just have some bullet points and like remember to take out the garbage. Remember that we're going over the neighbors, whatever, right? So a few rough reminder notes so I know what's happening that evening. And yes, I have a to do-do list to capture personal stuff because where else is it going to go? Stuff that has to get done in my life outside of work has to get done. If it's not written down in a trusted system, the use of David Allen term, it's being kept track of in my head. And then it's using up resources, it's causing anxiety.

That's no good. So yeah, there's got to be a master to-do list for your home life as well. So basically, I organize my personal life similar to my business life. The plans that semester quarterly plan might be a little looser for my personal life than like my business life. I have deadlines I'm trying to hit. And I'm not time block planning most of my personal life hours. But otherwise, similar principles are at play. All right, let's do a question from Dirk.

Dirk says, how do you come up with catchy phrases like hyperactive hive mind or productivity poison? Well, Dirk, I think a lot. I think a lot. So ideas that show up in my articles that show up in for sure my books, the type of ideas I come back to again and again in these podcasts. It's like a polished stone. It starts with something rough, an intuition that is rough based on my knowledge and skills and observation. And then you have to smooth that stone. And in this metaphor, the grit is thought matter.

I think about it. I think about it. I think about it. Often while walking, sometimes in the shower, sometimes when I'm working on another article and trying to get the ideas together. Sometimes during interviews, the phrase productivity poison, for example, came out of just the interviews I was doing for a world without email. I just was talking about the book from different angles. And when I do a lot of interviews around a book, I often clarify the way I think about the book. often new terminology arises and this idea that context switching's productivity poison, it just came

out of one of these interviews and then I stuck with it. The hyperactive hive mine took me a while. I mean, I remember when I cracked it. I'd been working on this book idea for a while at that point. And I needed a name for the thing we were doing. And it evolved over a couple weeks and then I finally got it just right. I remember that pretty clearly when I finally cracked it. So there's just a lot of think, think, think, think, refine, refine, refine. Like right now I'm working on new book What book do I want to write next? And I'm talking with my agent about this a lot. I don't know what iteration we're on now.

I just send our iterations. Like, no, okay, here's a new iteration. Here's a new iteration. What if the title's this, what's the description is this? And then I go and I think about it. And I go on a walk and I'm stuck, I'm stuck. I have some insights. New iteration.

I send it to her, get some feedback, repeat. This can happen for months. Sometimes it takes more than a year. And then eventually, all of this tumbling around metaphorical thought matter, knocks off the rough edges, smooths off. the rough surface and you get something kind of polished in the end. So there's really no shortcut often to catchy phrases or ideas that really click. Then just put it in the time to think.

Thinking is something I don't think we do enough about. We tend to think too much about information and not enough about the act of processing that information. If you're interested in this, I wrote a blog post the week before this podcast is being released. It was called In Defense of Thinking. And I get into some of that concept. really lost track of thinking of thinking as a tier one activity to actually do and build our life around. And that's an issue. But I still do. And I think others should as well. So you might

enjoy Dirk that podcast, which elaborate, I mean that blog post rather, which elaborates these ideas. All right. Let's do one last work question. Christian asks, can you talk more about why you prefer the company of one mindset rather than the outsourcing building a team mindset? So when Christian says a company of one, he's referring to the book of that title by Paul Jarvis, which I blurbed. It's a book I really enjoy. It argues that for a lot of people, the better path, instead of trying to build their company to be as large as possible, is to build it to be very profitable, right? Keep it very small as you get better. Instead of using that leverage to expand, use it to get more money per hour, to get more flexibility, more in time.

and how you work for the same amount of money, that this company of one mindset was actually for a lot of people are probably going to make you more happy. And as I've talked about before, I tend to lean towards that. I mean, it seems to me when we're talking about intellectual work in particular, so I'm producing valuable information just using my brain, organizational simplicity is important. The more you build out a large company and a virtual team

of all these different people you work with and these many different assistants and marketing people, and it's busy and it feels exciting and it opens up all these opportunities, everyone comes with an overhead. Every new person or team is more overhead in your life, which means less time for producing the value,

which means you bring in less money, which means that your revenue to cost ratio gets worse. It doesn't seem like a great formula. Now, again, this is personal taste because also I get overwhelmed easily. I don't like being busy. I'm introverted. I don't need to be on the phone with a lot of people.

I don't like activity. I like having tons of autonomy and how I spend my time. All of this is harder if I had a really large team. But the quote that I think is kind of smart along these lines, which I mentioned sometimes is I heard, I believe it was Joe Rogan who said once, you know, Joe doesn't have an assistant. Most people in Hollywood have assistants.

He doesn't have an assistant. And his whole argument was, if I ever got to the point where I felt like I needed an assistant, that would be the signal that I needed to do less, not that I should hire an assistant. And he's someone that, you know, did a $100 million deal for his podcast, but seems to, and I don't know him,

seems to have a lot of time for other parts of his life because he has all of these other pursuits and fitness and comedy and hunting and jihitsu. There's all these things he does, which are very time consuming. So he must have a lot of free time, right? So I think that's perhaps an example of just focusing on a small number of things, doing them well.

If you think you need an assistant, then simplify. I think he has this one guy, Jamie, that runs all of his sound and video, and he's very good, and he pays him well. He's like, that's all I need is to hire a few security guards so that, you know, crazy people don't break into his compound. But I think that's kind of inspiring because you're someone who can have a big audience, but then have a lot of time to do lots of interesting things in your life. So it's all about this revenue to cost ratio and what level of output you're able to produce

for each of those ratios. And I think for a lot of intellectual work, that sweet spot is svelt. Now, it doesn't mean I don't have people. I mean, there's people I hire to do lots of things that I don't really do well or know how to do well. I mean, I have a web person on retainer to mess around with WordPress, and there's people who help me with the podcast.

I mean, these are technical things that I hire people that help me do because I don't really know how to do it well and it's time-consuming. But I'm wary of building a company that has full-time employees or team members, even though it can be, the energy can be intoxicated in the moment. I want to keep things felt. If I feel like I need that,

I'm going to follow the Joe Rogan approach and say, there's my signal that I'm probably doing too much. And with that, let's do some technology questions. Our first question comes from Aditya. How do you use the internet when there are just so many relevant sources of information? I understand the internet is one infinite pool of information,

but most of the times there's just a lot of quality, quantity of quantity of information. You get just by visiting one site and get more information that way than just reading a book for a few hours. So how do I fall out of this trap? Well, Aditya, I think the key to the internet, like any of these digital tools, is that you have to deploy it

towards certain ends. And if you know why you're deploying one of these tools, then you can put the necessary guardrails around it. So your question reads a little bit like general use of the internet. Like there's all this interesting stuff on there. So like I'm on there just looking at stuff. But the right way to think about it is here is something important to me.

I need this information to do this thing. Oh, the internet has some of that information. Okay, so I'm using the internet to get this type of information. Now you know what you need. And then it's just a matter of, okay, what's going to be enough? This is enough to make progress. Let's not go down too many rabbit holes. That's just research 101.

You get what you need without falling down too many rabbit holes, but also give yourself some time to fall down some rabbit holes if it's useful. But you're using the internet for a particular purpose. it's pretty easy to measure when, okay, this is good enough, I have enough information to do what I need, and then you move on. So that's the more general solution I'm going to give here, is use these like tools.

As part of a project you've thought a lot about, not as things that you just mess around with because you see them there in the work chest and say, why not just throw this hammer around? All right, we got a question here from Code Dreamer. I'm a second year PhD student studying cancer biology. Increasingly, I'm seeing the rise of bioinformatics and computational biology in my field.

But he mainly works in the wet lab. I'm going to align this a little bit. Basically, he has a lot to do. He's working on his qualifying exam. He has lab experiments. But he wants to learn Python and R using an online tutorial because it would be useful to his field.

Codreamer then ask, please share some advice as I still have over three years left in the PhD and I want to learn computation skills aside from my normal PhD commitments. Ah, learn to code. Isn't this something that's going to get me thrown off Twitter if I say? If I say learn to code.

So how do you do it? Well, first of all, look, if you're in a busy period, then don't do it right now. Look ahead the summer when I'm done with my classes, when I'm done with my qualifying exams. It's not a bad thing to do. I'm generally in favor of procrastinating getting started on things, but then doing something well once you get started. I talked about that in, I think. in the last mini episode, last Thursday's episode, I think I talked about it then. Maybe it was in last week's episode. So wait until you have a better time.

Your PhD students, there's going to be up and down times. Now, that being said, if you think all the times are equally busy, then five hours a week will get you there. Figure it out in advance on your calendar. You can put two of those hours or two and a half of those hours on a weekend morning, and then we're talking about an hour, two days a week or three days a week, maybe first thing in the morning before you get going, find a good time for it to happen, maybe a little bit earlier than you normal start work. And just be really clear about your activities.

If you're doing an online tutorial, know exactly what that means for the hour that you have scheduled. I'm going to do this module. I'm going to do the exercises. I'm going to do them in an active recall mindset without looking at my notes to see if I can get it right. That is what I'm doing this hour. So you need a lot of clarity.

Otherwise, it's going to be hard to get the work if you don't know what you're doing. And then I think five hours a week, just do that. and just do that. Do that for a month. You'll be in a much better place. You can find five hours. Let's take a moment to talk about Blinkist. I have mentioned them often on this podcast, and for good reason the service they offer is something I think is really important. Ideas are currency in our current information age. Books are a great source of these ideas,

but it is hard to tell in advance what books are worth your time investment. enter Blinkist onto the stage. Blinkist is a subscription service. If you subscribe the Blinkist, you get access to 15-minute summaries of thousands of non-fiction bestsellers. You can get written summaries. You can get audio summaries.

It works on your phone. It works on your tablet. It works on your browser. Now you can go in and say, these books seem relevant to something I care about. 15 minutes, big idea on this one. 15 minutes, big ideas on this one. 15 minutes, big ideas on this one.

Now, if one of those books really stands out, then you can buy that book and dive deep, but you haven't wasted time diving deep into all of those books. You haven't wasted money on all of those books. You're getting the big ideas out of thousands of books very quickly, triaging the important from the mundane, making yourself smarter, giving you more of that currency that is necessary to really get ahead. It is a great product. That's why there's more than 12 million people who use this service right now. That's why I have been a longtime fan and user of the service. Little known fact, I like Blinkus so much that they actually were one of the first advertisers on my blog. For a little while, I had advertisers on

the study hacks blog. Blinkist was one of the very first advertisers because I thought they were such a great fit for what I do and what I talk about. So with Blinkist, you get unlimited access to reader listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books, all the books you want for one low price. Right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. if you go to blinkist.com slash deep, you can try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial. And you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com slash deep. Now, if you're going to read all of these book summaries and really understand those ideas,

you have to prepare your mind for some depth. That brings us. to 4-Sigmatic mushroom coffee. You've heard me talk about 4-Sigmatic before. This is coffee that has in it, Ground Lions Main and Shaga Mushroom. It's a great tasting coffee. It's a little bit lower caffeine to normal coffee, so you're not too jittery.

Ground mushroom gives it this nutty flavor. I really like it. There's nothing to do with mushrooms. It's really a unique flavor. You don't really need cream because you already have something really interesting going on. But here's the thing. there is neurophysiological impacts of these ground mushrooms.

I don't know all the details because I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's distinctive. Distinctive neurophysiological effects make perfect hooks for deep work. Drink some four-sigmatic coffee before you listen to your blinkest summaries, before you dive into that big book you're trying to understand before you do your productive meditation walks. Your brain will soon learn, oh, this type of coffee means it's time to think.

It's a good ritual. You will then get more out of your sessions. I mean, that's how I use it, but it's also just a great cup of coffee. Now, I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. It's just for my listeners. You can get up to 40% off in free shipping

on mushroom coffee bundles, but to do so, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for deep questions listeners. It is not available on the regular website. You will save up to 40% and get free shipping if you go to F-O-U-U-S-R-E. You are S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep. Get ready for some deep work with some ground mushroom coffee.

All right, let's do one more technology question. This one comes from John. John asks, what are your thoughts about Microsoft Teams? Well, it's a complicated question. There's a couple different ways to think about teams. One way is just it's a Slack competitor. an instant messenger archived instant messenger type tool where you can set up channels and do real-time synchronous interaction. My general idea about those tools is best summed up in my New Yorker

article from this fall that was titled Slack built the right tool for the wrong way of working. I think this move to archivable, highly efficient real-time instant messaging was basically a technological acknowledgement that the hyperactive hive mind is here to stay. So they built tools that were better at doing the hyperactive hive mine. So you enjoy the tools because if you're using the hyperactive hive mind, they're better interfaces, but you dislike the tools because you dislike the hyperactive hive mine. Both are true at the same time. So no, it's not a miracle cure. If you just turn on teams and start chatting back and forth with each other, you're just taking the hyperactive hive mine, making it slicker and more hyperactive. There are some advantages to

that. If you're already doing the hive mind, it's a little bit nicer to use. But the hive mine is now causing even more damage. Now, tools like teams and increasingly Slack and some of these other competitors, they have other features as well. These other features could be useful. Now, I think the key is you have to think about them like you bought a toolbox that has a bunch of tools in them. Those tools are meaningless by themselves. They're only interesting in the fact that you can use them to build a project that you've thought a lot about. So having more communication and collaboration tools available, I think is strictly a good thing. As long as we do not think about the tools themselves as solutions. As long as we don't think about, oh, deploying this tool

will fix the way we work. A hammer is not going to build you a house. You still have to make a plan for the house and use the hammer. That's the same thing with workplace collaboration. You have to figure out if we're not going to use the hive mine for this type of thing we do again and again in our company, what are we going to do instead? And when you're thinking about what you want to do instead, having more tools available gives you more options for how you architect, these alternative collaboration processes, these alternatives to the hyperactive hive mine. So I do like that tools like teams and increasingly Slack have more and more features so long as

we keep those features on the shelf and only take them off the shelf after we've drawn up the plans for this metaphorical house, after we know what we're going to do, and then are happy to have the better hammer. So I don't know, these metaphors maybe are getting a little bit too fuzzy here, John, but I hope that makes sense. just to quickly summarize, making the hyperactive hive-mind more hyperactive

with slick chat is not going to get us where we need to get. Having a lot more varied collaboration tools available might be useful but does not replace the need for us to actually have to think through

as humans what is the right way to collaborate for this work and then ask what tools do we have available to help us with that. All right, I think that's enough about technology.

Let us do a couple of questions here about the deep life. Our first question comes from Mike. Mike asks, how do you spend your you time outside of work and family, etc? Well, Mike, as long-time listeners know, I have fixed schedules for my work, I really try and am usually successful keeping my work confined to roughly 9 to 530 and almost not at all in weekends. Most weekends no work at all. So that's good. It takes a lot of essentialism, takes a lot of productivity, takes a lot of organization, takes a lot of people getting mad at me, but I can

usually pull that off. So you would think that would leave a lot of time. The reason I do that, though, is because I have a bunch of kids and we got a bunch to do with them. And I want to be around when the work hours are over. So if you throw in family to the picture, work and family, take both those things out. I don't have much time beyond that. I don't have much time beyond that. So that'll change. My kids are young right now. When I do have free time, I mean, it's most of my free time doing family stuff. I go for a long walk every morning. I exercise every night,

but very intensely because it doesn't take up much time. My exercise plan is, at the very least, if you do a thousand pull-ups a month, you're probably not going to waste, your muscles aren't going to waste away. So a thousand pull-ups a month works out.

I do 36 a day. And you can do that pretty quick. Do it in a few batches real quick, different grips, do a few dips and some other doing 30 push-ups just to get things warmed up. But so that doesn't take up much time.

I read. I do read a lot of books when I can. What else do I have time for? I don't really, you know, I like seeing, when I have a chance to see friends, you know, typically a lot of my friends are actually connected to my work. So they'll be in town. Maybe we'll podcast together and then we'll grab a drink. So I do enjoy that.

But I don't have a ton of time that's not actually doing things with my family because that's really my preferred, I prefer things to do. I'd rather be doing things with my wife or my kids or everyone all together. And that's most of my time outside of work. And that's what I enjoy doing. So that's basically my free time right now. No giant hobbies.

No passion projects that take up all my time. No woodshed that has the bookcase in it. No model train set that goes all the way around my property. I am sure this will all change as my kids get older and want to spend less time with me. But for now, I have enough on my plate. All right, we're just over the hour mark here. But let's put in another deep life question before we wrap up. Amelia asks, how do you shut off the productivity machine and just enjoy a moment of relaxation and not feel guilty?

I've been reading and practicing the deep life strategies for a while now, implementing with success, time block planning and weekly and quarterly planning. While I am vastly more productive than my peers and have more quality leisure time, I am faced with the problem of overthinking my actions, especially my recharging or relaxation time. I am constantly feeling like I could do more. than I do with my time, e.g. plan to read a book? Why not read a book? That is one of your friend's favorites. You can add to the community bucket while getting some walking in at the same time to increase constitution and so on. How do you cultivate the mindset of enough is enough? Well, Amelia, this is a good question. It's also a common one. Now, there's two types of answers here. There's a wide-ranging philosophical political answer, and then there's the pragmatic

answer, which is probably not as exciting, but also probably closer to what most people need. So if you want the exciting philosophical pragmatic answer, you can read books like Ginny Odell's 2019 title, How to Do Nothing. It's an interesting book. It came out the same week as digital minimalism. And so we were featured two or three times, you know, in the same article, since we had books who came out at the same time, very roughly speaking about the same type of We were reviewed together in the New Yorker. We were featured together in a New York Times book review. Article.

We were featured together. I think the ringer did something where they, so we followed the same path. We followed the same path for a while. And how to do nothing, I think Ginny O'Dell takes what's the more, I would say, popular approach right now. So I try to apply a materialist critique to why maybe you or other people feel this need to I need to, I need to, to constantly be doing things. Like, why not read two books? Why not documented, et cetera? They apply a materialist critique, borrowing a lot from Marx and his antecedents to say, well, it's all capitalist economy. Capitalist economy has constructed these narratives of efficiency. We have

internalized these narratives of efficiency. Usually they will quote Frederick Winslow Taylor, even though I think his impact on the world of work outside of the industrial work was actually quite minor. There was a brief moment in which people tried to apply Winslow-like strategies to the office. I have one of these original manuscripts from the 1920s, and it was stupid and a failure, and people kind of gave up on it. But anyways, right? The idea is these capitalist narratives have trained us, they have trained us to be efficiency obsessed, and that is why you are thinking about how you can do your leisure even better.

This is a really popular narrative right now. There's a lot of anti-productivity thinking going on. And as I've talked about before in the podcast, even though most of the current, the current popular trends in social critique draw more from a postmodern flavor of critical theory, which is often at odds with a more classical Marxist-style materialist critique, for whatever reason when it comes to productivity, a lot of the anti-productivity critiques right now are in this more old-fashioned kind of modern style materialist critique. It's the capitalist, and the capitalist teach us to be cogs, and then we can't excise our yourselves from that mindset. Now, what Ginny suggests is that you purposefully do actions with no

utilitarian motive. This is sort of an Aristotelian argument. If you go back to the Nicomachean ethics, go birdwatching for no other reason than you want to enjoy the birds, go look at flowers, and just enjoy the flowers for no instrumental reason. Certainly don't document it. Certainly don't put up an Instagram post about it. This is really good advice in the sense that this type of mindful appreciation of just the world around you and what you're doing makes us feel really good. You should do it. I think Jenny is right about that. We should all try to spend more time where we're being purposefully non-instrumentalist. That alone, though, I don't think is enough, because here's the thing, if you don't actually break the source of this, what you call the

productivity machine, these acts of resistance are going to generate resistance. And that will reduce the enjoyment you get out of them, and when you're not doing these active resistance, are going to kind of fall back into the old ways, at least until we overthrow all the capitalism, at which point we won't have to worry about any of these problems. But until we get there, I think we need to support these moments of presence with some more pragmatic changes. So the way I often think about these issues, just based on my experience, having written about this type of stuff for a while, and interacting with so many people about these issues, these productivity-related issues,

is that I think that the bigger issue that drives, like the problem that Amelia is talking about here, the bigger issue at stake is more human nature psychological than it is a sort of deterministic impact of techno-narratives generated by capitalism. We have a human nature to want to do things. We have a goal-setting and planning mechanism that here's something we want to do,

do. We set a plan for how to do it. That plan feels good. We execute the plan. We feel good for accomplishing it. That feels good. It's just human nature, right? That can spiral out of control a little bit as we harness that to try to structure our lives. Let's get real intentional about how we're living because the unintentional thing's not working well. Well, you get a lot of that satisfaction. Ooh, here's a plan. Ooh, it succeeded. That feels good. Then you kind of want more and you kind of want more and you can get into the cycle. So in other words, I think when we're talking about especially leisure gone awry, and let's put aside now the influence of social media and I want to document leisure in such a way that makes me look good or gets me followers, let's put that aside

because there is an economic component to that. But let's just think about, you know, like Amelia's talking about here, why read this book, let's read this book, let's read book while I'm walking, let's get more constitution. Again, I don't think this is a capitalist narrative. I think this is human nature. Once you get used to executing and feeling good about getting things done, you want to get that good feeling again and again, and you start trying to pile on too much, and things can kind of spiral out of control. All right. So the pragmatic foundation to this problem is how do we work with that human nature? Now, we could just abandon intention altogether and say, forget this deep life stuff. Let's just rock and roll, see where life takes us,

but that never ends up. People don't end up happy that way. Because our human nature, you need some of this, right? That's why it's so appealing. That's why we're over-planning our leisure is because we really want to have a plan to we execute and feel good about actually accomplishing. So we can't just go to Hammock on the beach. Let's look at the flowers all day. So what helps here? Well, this is where I get intensely pragmatic. You want to be very intentional in the sense that you think through your buckets and what you want to do in these buckets. But then you want to have, perhaps, especially outside of the professional bucket, a lighter touch. Have a couple keystone habits, these things you always do and come back to that keep that keep that thing you care of

about in your life on a regular basis, perhaps have a code of conduct in each of these buckets as well. Here's the things I don't do. In community, I don't gossip. Even if it would be tempting, I just don't do it. I don't speak ill at people. I don't, whatever it is, right? You have these, I don't, I don't lie for my advantage. I keep to my word, what do you have these codes of conduct? So you're not doing the things that you don't value. You have some background habits to make sure that you're always doing something towards the things you value, right? And they kind of let that do a lot of work. You want that to become an background process.

You don't think about it. You're not racking. I mean, you mark it in your planner. I did these things. Fine, but it's just something that kind of happens in the background. It's like my pull-up routine I do every night. It takes six minutes.

It doesn't take a lot of time. But it's good that I do it every night because it shows that, like, I care about that piece of my constitution or this or that. And just let that be in the background. And now you have a framework, a structure for your life that keeps those values there and keeps the things that sap these values away, but you're not in a situation where, like, let me add more, let me add more, let me add more.

So you might want to just start there, Amelia. Here's a couple automatic things I do, a code of conduct about things I never do, and then that leaves me a lot of freedom with the rest of my time, and I'm not thinking that instrumentally about that time. I'm thinking about my values, and, you know, hey, I care about my community, so let me focus on that this week. But I would start there.

The second thing I would add is, I call it a value plan. I do this. Each week, you kind of look at your buckets of things you care about. You say, where am I falling short? Where would I like to maybe plus things up? All right, so what am I going to do this week? Well, this week I'm going to call someone every day. This week, I'm going to take the first hour every day or read a book, right?

So you kind of have one thing you're doing above and beyond that week that you find to be important. Not every day. How can I get as many things in it as possible? So all of these solutions, these pragmatic solutions, Amelia, all come back to a similar idea. And when building out a life around the buckets, the deep life buckets, you want to have these good frameworks in there, these scaffolding, things you do every day that helps keep those buckets alive, things you never do to help keep you from violating those values. You maybe have a each week one thing you're doing extra over and above to work on a particular one of these buckets, like I'm going to read every night, like something like that. You can feel good about it. It's a goal.

You get satisfaction out of it. That's just the one thing. So you're not trying to add as much as possible. And then for the rest of your time, when you're not working, you can Ginny Odell it a little bit. You know, doing your keystone habits, you're following your code, you have your value plans. It's good. You just kind of, Ginio Del. I'm going to go look at the flowers.

I'm going to go hang out with this friend. You don't overthink it. Because when you're doing these keystone habits, you're following these codes of conduct, you're doing these value plans. You're going to internalize the things you care about, the things you don't care about. You don't need to reference things to be systematic and how you figure out what to do with the rest of your time. you're going to drift towards the things that are valuable to you because it feels good. You like those values and away from the things you won't.

And you're still going to be a little bit of competition. If you're like me, you might say, I have too many metrics. Yikes. You might want to pull that back. You might get too over-anxious with your value plan. But I think that's kind of okay. Better to be a little bit too overzealous in your quest to be intentional and get value out of your life than it is to be the other way, not giving it enough time. So anyways, a few thoughts.

I hope that helps Amelia. this is a very common issue. You're on the good side of this issue. It's much better to be here than to be apathetic. Take my slightly hands-off approach. Read a little Ginny O'Dell. Call me in the morning. I think you will be okay.

And I'll be okay if we wrap up this episode here. Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to figure out how you can submit questions. I'll be back on Thursday with our next listener call mini episode and until then as always stay deep.