Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 87: Should I Switch Careers to Pursue my Dream?

Episode Date: April 12, 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.WORK QUESTIONS - What algorithm should I use to implement the Eisenhower Matrix? [6:21] - Should I switch careers to pursue my dream? [9:34] - How did I (Cal) fit research, teaching, and writing into my 9 to 5 graduate student schedule? [20:37]  - What advice should I give students about deep work? [23:55]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Can I succeed in music without social media? [28:06] - How can I avoid social media during Zoom classes? [32:28] - What are my (Cal) favorite sources for book research? [40:03]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I (Cal) decide what books to read? [42:00] - How can I combine deep leisure with an exhausting job? [45:40]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 87. Let's start with quick announcements. First, I made a change to how I collect questions for these main full-length deep questions episodes. So as long-time listeners know, I send out a survey once every two months or so to people who are subscribed to my mailing list at Calnewport.com. The idea is I want to restrict. to ask these questions to people who know my work,

have been receiving my weekly essays, understand the vocabulary and ideas that we talk about so that their questions will be relevant to me and our audience. Well, it came to my attention recently that my survey was set up such that you could only ask one question. If the survey recognized your device and you came back to ask a second question, it wouldn't let you do that.

That was not intentional, so I fixed that. So if you are a subscriber to my mailing list, you can go back to that most recent link I sent in March for the current survey that I'm pulling questions from and you can now go back and you should be able to ask more than one question or add additional questions and I do encourage you to do so. If you're not a subscriber of my mailing list, you should be. Go do it at calnewport.com. You'll get my famed weekly essay that I've been writing since 2007.

Second quick announcement has to do with this idea of the deep reset. Earlier in the pandemic, I did a series of deep dive episodes where I walked through some ideas about how you might institute what I called a deep reset, which was my terminology for making a major change to your life in response to either disruption or stagnation. Now, of course, with the disruption of the pandemic, a lot of people are in a situation where doing something like a deep reset suddenly seems relevant. Well, I want to spend some more time on this topic, and to help me spend some more time on this topic, I want to hear stories from people who have gone through deep resets of their own. Not necessarily in response to this pandemic. This could be a deep reset you did earlier in your life at some point before the pandemic or during the pandemic, but maybe you radically changed where you lived, what your work was, what your lifestyle was like.

In response to some sort of disruption and stagnation, if you have a story like this to share, send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com. I want to hear more of these stories so that I can get a more varied and nuanced understanding of how these deep resets happen and I hope to use this as the foundation for some more content here in the weeks ahead.

Well, speaking of things that are ahead, let's look at the show that's right before us. We have a good collection of questions here. In the work category, we have a question about knowing whether or not to make a big change in your job and the technology. section. We have someone asking about how to avoid checking social media so compulsively during

online classes being taught over Zoom in the Deep Life category. We have a question in here about someone who is burnt out from work, but still wants to do deep leisure, but doesn't have the energy. And a bunch of other really interesting topics. No deep dive. In fact, what you're going to notice is that today's episode is shorter than normal episodes. I know I said that last time, but I ended up doing a full-length episode. In this case, I'm actually on vacation right now as you're hearing this. So I have to record this episode and Thursday's episode more than a week in advance and a week that I have other episodes to record. I also have various people in from out of town on different days, so I'm a little bit crunch for time. So I'm going to

experiment with actually doing a smaller format version of this podcast, trying to get it in non-trivially under one hour. Hey, maybe that's better. If you like the shorter form, let me know and interesting at caldnewport.com, but for now, this is just a quick experiment that is responding to the reality that I just don't have a ton of time this week to record. But short or not, it will be a great episode. Before we get started, however, I want to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Optimize. I think about Optimize as being basically the best way to use the internet to support DeQuest to cultivate a deeper life. Now, here's how I works. Optimize is a subscription network. You sign up with an account at Optimize. You can access it

via the web or with their award-winning app. What do you get when you're a member of Optimized? Well, first you get access to the Philosopher's Notes. These are distillation of wisdom from 600 of the world's best books presented in six-page PDFs. Every one of these philosopher notes was actually pinned by the Mad Monastic Monk CEO himself, Brian Johnson, longtime friend of mine. So they're brilliant. In fact, it was the philosopher notes of one of my early books that first introduced me to Brian because he was so on point with understanding my book and what I was saying. I thought this is someone I have to meet.

You also get when you join Optimize a Daily Plus One is a short video featuring Brian himself that gets you a piece of wisdom to help you get through your day and you get access to 101 classes. These are 60-minute video courses taught by experts to help you master big ideas. I taught one of these courses. I did a digital minimalism 101 for Brian, and I really enjoyed it. This is a great use of the internet to make your life better. It's sort of the opposite of, let's say, I don't know, TikTok.

This is something where you spend time with this network and you are deeper as opposed to feeling that your life is shallower. Now, if you want to get a free 14-day trial of Optimize to try it out, go to optimize.me slash deep and then use the coupon code deep when you check out and that will give you an additional 10% off. So to try optimize, go to optimize. Dot me slash deep

and use that coupon code deep when you check out. And with that, let's get things rolling with some work questions. Our first question comes from Gary. Gary says, since the Eisenhower matrix is really a scatter plot in the real world, what algorithm would best allocate one's time accordingly?

This sounds like a computer scientist, if I had to guess. Quick update or reminder, I should say, what does Gary mean by the Eisenhower matrix? That's that famed two by two grid, where you have urgent and non-urgent against important and non-important. Each of those four combinations, he recommends that you. tackle differently. Like, for example, make sure that things that are important but non-urgent get regular time. Make sure things that are not important and not urgent get taken off of your plate. Make sure that things that are urgent but not important get delegated. There's these general

heuristics you can use. Once you have roughly placed your work into the Eisenhower matrix to help make sure that you're allocating your time properly. It's called the Eisenhower matrix because supposedly Dwight the Eisenhower used something like this approach. Now, Gary, I think essentially the question you're asking, when you say it's a scatterplot, what you mean is you can be at specific locations around these axes. So you might be right across the boundary of non-important to important, or you could be real far out and important, or you could be real far out and non-important. So how do you actually add nuance to using the Eisenhower matrix that takes into account not just those four categories, but actually where you are in degrees of severity with respect to each

of those categories. Roughly speaking, I would say you're probably overthinking this. There's not a precise time allocation algorithm that you can apply to even the simple Eisenhower matrix. The right way to imagine this is crudely. Are you spending time on things that's important but not urgent? That there's no email asking about. There's no meeting where you have to discuss it on your calendar. There's no deadline looming. Are you still doing work on those things that matter? If you're not, you should. How much time? I don't know. Look at your weekly plan. Build your time block to on what's going on in your life, but you know what you mean. You have a lot of your time being spent by things that you roughly categorize as not important,

not urgent. That's a problem. You need to essentialize. Read Greg McEwen, read essentialism, get that stuff off your plate. Is there a lot of stuff that you are roughly categorizing as important but not urgent? Can we automate that? Can we delegate that? So I think using this as a rough heuristic is useful in helping you make larger changes to

what you're spending time on, how you're spending time, what you're taking out of your plate what you're delegating. To be more discerning than that is probably going to tip you over into productivity prawn territory where you're spending more time on the system than you are getting returns from that investment in terms of actual useful work accomplished. There is no magic system that's going to make it easy for you to figure out what to do next. There is no magic system that it just sets up a bunch of widgets in front of you and all you do is blindly crank and you look up and you're very successful. Work is hard, making decisions about what the work on is hard. There's a lot of ambiguity. No algorithm can make that go away. So let's not waste too much time trying to get a little bit too

precious with how we do this type of organizing. Our next question comes from Max. Max says, I enjoy my current career, but always imagine myself doing something else. How should I decide whether to stick with my current career or go after a dream, which I might regret not attempting? Max then elaborates with some details. He says, I'm 28 and I've been teaching secondary science for six years, and I love my work. However, I've always wanted to become a research professor in geospatial technology and have applied to some graduate programs to consider this path. It would be a very long and costly road to do a PhD in interacademia, but it was a childhood dream of mine, and it feels like I would regret never trying to go after this dream if I do not try. Well, Max, if I had a dollar for everyone who shared your childhood dream of becoming a research professor in geospatial technology, I would have a lot of dollars.

I'm, of course, joking. That is the most specific childhood dream of a career I have ever heard. So, you know, thank you for that, because that's just interesting on its own. Now, in terms of actually answering your question, I want to give two categories of response here. Specific to you, I want to give some response specific to what you're talking about, becoming that type of job from the type of job you have right now. But I also want to give some more general thoughts here that people can apply when they're in a similar situation saying, hmm, am I going to regret not trying going after my dream? We can give some general advice about that as well.

All right. Well, let's look at your specific case. You got to be really careful here, Max. You got to be really careful. When I'm worried, what I'm worried here is that you have a generic idea. that if I get a PhD, then I might be able to be a research professor. You need to make that way more specific. You need to say, I want to become a research professor at this caliber, a school, perhaps in this type of region.

How many people have they hired into that position recently? Let's take all the schools in this region. Maybe you need to stay where you currently live because you know, you're married and you have a family. How many schools are reasonable? How many people have they hired in those positions recently? Who were those people? Where did they get their PhD? what work did they do? Is there anyone of your age in here, right? Anyone who return later? Because I don't know exactly what the pipeline is like for the research professorships you're talking about, but for a lot of science topics. I mean, research professorships are often people coming out of pretty top programs that for whatever reason maybe couldn't quite get a tenure track position or didn't want a tenure track position or there's a two body problem and the research track position was what was available. But it's often not an easy job to get. So my

The concern is you're going to quit your job, you're going to do this big demonstrative move, which in the moment will give you some satisfaction. But then you're going to go off to a PhD program. Maybe they're happy to have you. Maybe it's one where you have to pay tuition. And you come out of this and realize, oh, you know, people going to this local college part-time where I got my PhD actually never get the type of job I'm looking for. It's just not available.

Make sure you have that nailed it. This is just my general advice for PhDs in general. you need to say this is a specific job I want, and for sure, getting a PhD from the school that I am able to get the PhD from makes that job likely. I want you to do that work, right? Okay, so regardless of what you end up deciding, that has to be a precondition before you even consider this as a shift. Never, never, never, never just go to grad school because you think maybe you'll open up an opportunity one day. You got to have that path chiseled deep into stone that is worn smooth from how many people have gone down that path before, before you would risk so much of your time and so much of your livelihood.

Now let me go a little bit more general. This idea that I will always regret never pursuing this dream, I think that is in general not very helpful. That is not a helpful way to think about career satisfaction because it is an idea that is grounded in what I call the Passion Hypothesis. As I explained in my 2012 books, so good they can't ignore you, the Passion Hypothesation. hypothesis states, most of us are wired for a particular type of job. If we follow that passion, that is, we match our job to that pre-existing inclination, then we feel great satisfaction in our

work. If we don't, we don't. If you believe in the passion hypothesis, then your claim of, I will always regret not pursuing my dream makes sense, because what you're really saying is there may be significantly more passion available if I had a better match between my job and my pre-existing inclination, and so I'm going to regret not exploring whether this is my strong pre-existing inclination that would unlock that passion. As I argue in that book, this is, for the most part, not where passion comes from. It's not where career satisfaction comes from. It's not a match between this type of work and my personality.

It is how you cultivate your career to have the type of traits that makes great work great. It's building up rare and valuable skills and leveraging those skills to get more autonomy, to get more mastery, to get more impact, to get more creativity, to get more connection to other people. As you get better, you get more leverage. As you get more leverage, you can transform your job into something that is increasingly more satisfying and meaningful for you. So with us in mind, I'm not interested in that frame.

Here's the frame I'm interested in. In the career path I currently am, first of all, are there any disqualifiers? Things about this that are going to make it impossible to be a source of meaning for me. Is there something about the work I hate? Is there something about the people I really dislike? force me to go against my values? Is the time demands, for example, impossible and incompatible with other things that are important to me in my life, like spending time with my family? Okay, let's go through those disqualifiers. If it doesn't hit those disqualifiers, then what you want to be

thinking about is what I would call in so good they can't ignore you, the career capital market in which that job exists. Is there a way for me to get continually better at something that will give me more leverage over my work. As I get better, as I get better, get more leverage, are there interesting options for me to apply that leverage to? That's what you want to assess. When you're thinking about another job, then your question is, okay, does that have different or more opportunities for building up skills that give me more interesting options with leverage? That's what you're looking for. You know, over there, you could become a real hot shot, and then that's going to open up all these really interesting lifestyle opportunities that

here I currently have, my job doesn't have it. Now you're starting to catch my attention. Those are the mechanics of passion for your work, and that's why I want to care about. The second question you have to ask when thinking about transferring your career, however, is how much of your existing career capital will move over there? You have to start from scratch. Now you're really in trouble. Can you catch up if you're starting from scratch to build up rare and valuable skills? How long is it going to take before you could conceivably get those skills to a level where you can actually start to apply them, get some leverage, and make your career something satisfying. If the answer is, well, six to ten years, which might be what you're facing

here, that's probably a bad shift. More productive shifts are shifts that actually keep, they value the skills you've already built up and then give you more options to build more skills and more options for when you actually apply your skills. That's typically what you're looking for when trying to improve your career. That is the frame I would think about career shifts, not the frame of there is a dream. If I match my job to the dream, I'll be happy. If I don't, I won't, so I'll regret it. It's not how it works. Nine out of ten people, career capital that has rare and valuable skills is then invested to get back into your life really interesting traits. That's the analysis you need to put

over here. I mean, again, I don't know much about being a research professor in geospatial technology, but maybe you've seen a path. Like, okay, if I get a PhD here, there's always positions in one of these two schools over here. They're always looking for research scientists. you do this research scientist's job reasonably well, maybe you get a lot of autonomy. Like, you're doing less teaching and more research. You can take the summers off. I can, in the summers off, I can work on this land that I inherited from my family that's over by the lake, and we're going to build out a compound that I'll have a lot more autonomy over my time. I could very much imagine a scenario in which you apply the type of thinking I'm saying to this particular circumstance,

and it looks good. But I can also see a lot of scenarios where you apply the type of thinking I'm talking about and it falls apart. Maybe first you find out there's not really a place I could reasonably get a PhD in time that's going to open up these positions for me. Okay, disqualifier. Or maybe yeah, I could, but I'm looking at these research professor positions and no, there's not a ton of opportunity here to build up skill that gives me more leverage. There's just an opportunity maybe to do a bunch of teaching and no one ever really moves from these positions into a different type of tenure track position. So I don't really have a vision here of getting more capital and more optional for my career captial. So, okay, that would be a disqualifier. Right. So there's a lot of

obstacles here to making this a good idea. They might be surmountable, but you have to think about it the right way. All right, so I just do a lot of words at this. So let me just step back and really quickly summarize my general approach here. The core idea in my book so good they can't ignore you is that for nine out of ten people who end up loving their work, they got there not because they match their work to a pre-existing passion, but instead because they built up rare and valuable skills, what I call career capital, and then used that as leverage.

That is, they invested their career capital to shape their career into something that really resonated. Skills beget passion. Therefore, if you're thinking about switching a job, you have to think about the switch, not between what am I wired to do. You know, Max, there's a lot of different people and a lot of different personalities,

but I do not think that you have a geospatial technology research professor, Gene, that says this is the thing you need to do to be happy. I doubt that. You instead need to think about this in terms of career capital opportunities. If I switch to this job, what would make that compelling? A, I can bring a lot of my capital with me so I don't have to start from scratch. B, there are more opportunities to acquire a lot more career capital here than in my original job. and C, there's better options for investing that capital.

That is, there are better options for leveraging my skills if and when I build them in career B than there are in career A. That is the typical frame in which you make a career shift. This idea of dreams and regrets, I think it's just obfuscating the more complex, but I think really more interesting dynamics of how people build career satisfaction. All right, so Max, if you're still with me here,

if you haven't thrown your podcast player away in disgust, check out so good they can't ignore you. It has a lot of useful framing for thinking about these ideas. I think you're going to find it quite useful. Send me a follow-up note. If you do make your decision at interesting at calnewport.com, I'll be interested to hear how you came up with your decision and where you actually ended up.

Our next question comes from Jay. Jay says, you've mentioned in previous blog post that as a PhD student, worked a nine to four weekday schedule. You also mentioned in a recent episode that graduate students do not need to work nine to five. I've always wondered about the specifics of that. Say you're only working six concentrated hours a day, not including lunch. How are you able to fit in your work as a researcher, as a student, and as a writer, all in 30-hour weeks? All right. Well, Jay, first of all, I'm trying to, there's a couple different times in here.

So you talk about both a nine to four and a nine to five work schedule, none of which are 30 hours. So we have three, we have three different suggestions here. So let's try to clarify things. I worked within roughly speaking, a nine to five schedule as a grad student, as I've talked about before, because I like to be matched to my wife's schedule. And that was more than enough time. I also wrote books on the side. Okay, so how did that all fit? Well, I don't think it's actually that much.

I mean, let's stay with the student responsibilities. You mentioned here lectures and P sets. Well, look, as a graduate student at a Tier 1 university like MIT, you take courses basically your first two years and then you're done. It's not really about courses. It's about research. So you're probably doing less research in your first two years than you are in your later years. And if I'm really thinking about it, I finished my second book during my first year.

But then I didn't start my third book until after I'd finish. my courses. And I wrote a lot of my second book before grad school started, so I probably was going lighter on my public-facing writing during those first two years as grad school, because I was focusing on my classes and writing my master's thesis. I think that's probably true. But, okay, beyond that, I mean, I don't know, how much time does it take to write a paper, a couple papers a year like you would early in grad school? Look, if you can give that a lot of days, a couple hours, two and a half hours, like you'll make progress. And then when you get close to the deadline for a couple weeks before, you might give it a lot more time. So let's say you're working two and a half hours a day,

just trying to make progress on a paper you're writing. All right, well, that leaves you, what's that going to be there, five and a half hours, take out a half hour for launch. That leaves you five hours for your coursework and lectures. Well, it doesn't take up five hours most days, right? Like some days it takes up a lot of that time you're working on a problem set, but other days you don't really do much coursework. You go to a 90 minute lecture and that's that. So I think this all fits pretty well. I would write blog post, you know, take an hour, not every day. And again, I was not doing pure weekly, daily planning back then.

I don't think I needed to. The math I'm working out here, Jay, is that if you give me eight hours a day and I'm a grad student, you can fit a lot in there on average. And then it's just, yeah, sometimes right before a test, your whole day is spent on schoolwork. And some days on a right before a paper deadline, your whole whole day is, whole day is spent just on research, but in general, I think things fit just fine. So if you're a grad student, you got a lot of leeway, just be organized by your time, do a little bit of time blocking.

So when you work, you work, when you're not working, you're not working. And I think you will find that the job is not that bad. All right, let's do one more work question. This one is from Kara. It's also academia student related. I didn't mean for that to be a trend today, but, you know, sometimes that just happens. Kara says, I'm a professor at a small state school, and I think my students would benefit from the idea of deep work. I'd love if you did a mini episode that is targeted at undergraduate students to address questions like, why does this apply to them? Why should they care? How will it help them get a job, etc.? Thanks for your consideration. Well, Kara, when we're talking about students, I think the relevant book here is not deep work, but it's more distant predecessor

how to become a straight-A student. A book I wrote my senior year of college. in my first year of grad school. Now, for that book, I interviewed something like 50 straight A students from a variety of different schools, who I felt like were not grinds, who got really good grades, and managed to do so without staying up all night or just outworking their peers. Okay, at the core of that book, very early on in that book, is a crucial equation. And this is the equation that will connect the notion of deep work to student life. It said, work produced equals time spent times, times intensity of focus.

time spent times intensity of focus. What a lot of these really top students did that I interviewed, the students who have fantastic grades but work less than people that have lower grades is they realize that it is easier to increase your intensity of focus than it is to increase your time. So like if I have a paper to write, if I can write that paper in a state of unbroken concentration, so I'm not context shifting which significantly reduces your cognitive capacity. So look, if you're going to glance at your phone every five or five

or six minutes, you're taking 20 to 50 IQ points off. You're just dumber. Things are going to take longer. If I work in unbroken concentration when I work, 20 hours might be enough to get the, on the other side of that equality, paper done. If I instead work with a browser open and my phone open and WhatsApp open and TikTok open, that can significantly reduce my intensity of focus because of the cost of all that context switching. Now I might need 50 hours. 20 hours or 50 hours is a really big deal. It's the difference between all-nighters. It's the difference between an A-plus paper and a paper that you kind of limp across the finish line and hope it doesn't do too poorly. So that's the number one reason why college students should care about deep work is that if you can work with no

context shifts when you're working, you drastically reduce the time required to get your work done. Leaving a lot more time to do other things to make student life fun. So that would be my first argument. You will get much better grades and you'll get it with much less time. Two, if you use your schoolwork as an opportunity to train your ability to focus. So when I work, I work without distraction and I systematically increase how long these durations are that I'm comfortable working without distraction without looking at my phone, without looking at my computer screen. You are training an increasingly rare and valuable skill.

When you leave college and go into the world of work, your concentration muscle will be stronger than most other people. If your concentration muscle is stronger than most other people, you will get your work done outside of school, after school, you will get better stuff done faster, which means you are going to have a huge amount of acceleration earlier in your career, which is going to compound as time goes on and really open up a lot of options, get you a lot of career capital with more career capital, as we talked about before, you are going to have more options. You can shape your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

So that's the second benefit you get much more career satisfaction, much easier, and much earlier if you come out of college, go to focusing. All right. So that's the two things I would say. Look at how to become a straight-day student. Intensity of focus is the variable that's most easy to change in the academic work output formula. And once you're training to maximize that formula, as a bonus, when you enter the world

outside of college, you're going to have a huge leg up on everyone else and building a career that you really enjoy. And with that in mind, I think I would enjoy moving on to some technology question. Our first technology question comes from Bboa. He says, Hi, Cal, I'm four weeks away from graduating with a Bachelor of Music. What advice about professional social media use would you give to someone in my position? I understand the harms of social media,

but I'm also being told that the best way to use it is to hustle and spend unimaginable amounts of time on various social media platforms. Well, Biboia, when it comes to professional social media use, so you're in an industry where very clearly social media is used as part of platform building, right? So it's not just this generic idea that I need a brand on social media that's somehow going to help me in my career as a QA system programmer, right? Not just some random thing. You say, no, I want to be a musician. I want to be a musician with a very large consumer base, and I'm being told that social media platforms are a big part of how these contracts are signed that can really help my career.

If that's the case, what you need to do, what you need to do is become professional about it. Just throwing as much time as you can at a bunch of platforms is not a professional way to engage with these tools. You're playing on the grounds of the social media platforms. You're playing by their rules. You're just giving up your time and attention so that some tech billionaires can be richer. You're not being savvy about your career. What you need to do is study, okay, in my genre, is it important, right?

Am I seen consistently? And I have evidence of social media following is how people break. It's how people get contracts. They need to figure out who was successful at that and why and get to the core of what was the thing that broke them out. I'm going to assume in a lot of genres where that type of thing happens. It's usually people with a very distinctive personality, but more importantly, a very distinctive type of music paired with really big skills that are putting performances online.

Okay. So you get to the core. This is what matters. And then work out your schedule. All right. All right. Here's what I'm going to do. I am going to get a good camera.

I'm going to get some good lights. I'm going to record whatever it is. A song once a week. Maybe I'm going to hire someone to help me cut them in a way that looks really good, gets to sound really good. We set that up. We film. I send it to that person.

Spend a little money out of pocket here. right, I'm going to sort of live a little cheaper so I can afford this person. They do the cuts, they post. You know, you don't have social media on your phone. It's not getting the way of you're practicing. It's not something that is getting into your mental space. You're not getting the back and forth with people. You're not getting that anxiety. But you're doing the thing that you think is going to be useful at a high level and systematically, right? That's a professional plan. Now, if there's sort of low benefit things on the margin that seem to have a high cost, Like, well, if I'm really engaging with fans, it might help a little bit, but you know,

it also opens me up to a lot of things that makes me anxious and captures my attention. It makes it hard to be creative. It's not worth it. Look for the big wins. Do the big wins. 20% higher quality than anyone else is doing them. Be very systematic about it. Don't touch these platforms outside of executing that plan, which means it's probably on your

computer. Maybe someone does it for you or you're just posting on your computer. It's not on your phone. And you're not using it for entertainment. You're not using it to numb. you're not using it as an excuse to not confront hard things in your life. It is a job. It is part of your job.

If you approach it that way, so, okay, what really matters here? How can I do what matters 20 to 50% better than most other people who are starting out? Then it can be a big win without really having a big negative footprint on your cognitive space and therefore your ability to keep growing as a musician. If you think on the other hand that just unstructured general use as many things as possible will just in an emergent fashion alchemize some sort of breakthrough success. Now, that's wistful thinking.

That's just you giving your time and attention, turn it into gold, giving that gold to companies where they can then give it to their billionaire CEOs to buy more houses, right? You're playing with their rules. So that would be my advice. It's not an either or it's not social media is good or bad here. It's, am I using it like a pro and trying to get an edge on it? Or is it using me because of this generic idea that I need to be on these platforms?

All right, so that's a good question, and I think this applies for many fields in which there seems to be some clear way in which social media is critical. Our next question comes from Mari, who asks, how can I pay attention and avoid social media during Zoom classes? While I'm in my online classes, I find myself constantly checking Twitter and Instagram and Slack instead of paying attention to the lecture, which is making me miserable. When I was in in-person classes, I never had this problem. What strategies can I take to stay focus on off social media during a Zoom class? Well, all, my advice is don't use social media during Zoom classes. Not at all. Just 0% no.

0% web browser, 0% Slack, 0% phone, 0% social media. You don't want to attend the class, don't attend the class and go do something else, right? That's up to you. But if you want to attend the class, you put aside that time, attend the class. Don't fool yourself. Now, I could give you a long answer with, well, you could use attention blocking tools. You can put plugins on your browser to try to make it difficult to go to these sites. But I think sometimes it's easier just to be given permission, right?

Someone that come up to you and say, is this simple. Don't do that. There's no gray area. There's no give. Let me just do a little bit of it. If you're going to go to class, don't do it. If you're not in class, you can use that stuff. And I think it's really that simple.

And sometimes just having this extreme clarity. Someone comes up and say, that's not attending class. That's doing something else, and that something else is not very useful. If you want to go be on Slack and you want to be on social media, go be on Slack me on social media. Why do it while you're also kind of trying to hear a lecture? You can't process information if your context switching during a lecture. It's impossible. Lectures are difficult.

If you're doing little quick glances at things, you're in a constant state of collapsed and colliding cognitive contact shifts. Your brain is a mess. You're not going to get any information out of that. So either attend classes or don't. But if you do, do zero percent of that other distraction. And I think honestly, and this is based on experience working with a lot of people, Ari, I think sometimes people just need that clarity. Someone just to look at them and say, stop it. That is stupid.

Don't do it. And then it just kind of becomes clear. You're like, yeah, you know what? I just don't do that anymore. All right. So I'm giving you permission to say classes have nothing to do with the web. They have nothing to do with social media and Slack. Don't do those two things at the same time.

I do not think it is some act of giant willpower to do that. Just like it's not an act of giant willpower if I tell you, when an input, person class, do not stand up and take your pants off. You know, like, okay, yeah, I'm not going to do that. That's stupid. I don't want to do that. It's going to make me miserable. Well, same thing. Don't log, log on to Slack while you're trying to do a class. Do it afterwards. All right. So I believe in you, Ari, and keep those metaphorical pants on. So I want to take a moment to talk about Express VPN. So here's how a VPN works. Let's say you on your, your phone or your computer want to connect to another computer over the internet.

The normal thing to do would be to just directly connect to that computer, and then it knows who you are and where you are. If you use a VPN, what happens instead is that you first connect to an intermediary server owned by the VPN. You have a secure private pipe to that intermediary server. That server then connects to the destination computer on your behalf. So the destination computer doesn't know who you are or where you are. ExpressVPN is one of these VPN services

and it is a leader in the field and the one I like the best because A, it is the fastest. B, it is incredibly easy to set up. Once you configure it, it just works. You just think you're using the internet like normal, but you are actually going through one of these intermediary servers and they have one of the largest collections of countries in which intermediary servers are available for you to connect through.

Now, why would you use a VPN? Well, one of the obvious reasons is to protect your privacy, to protect your data, you don't want the server you're talking to to know who you are, where you are, and a VPN gives you that protection. But here's another cool reason why you might like having a VPN like ExpressVPN. You can get around country access controls for streaming services. So let's say, for example, you want to watch a show on Netflix

that is only available in Japan, even though you live in the U.S., If you use ExpressVPN, you can connect to an ExpressVPN server in Japan. And that server will then connect Netflix on your behalf. Netflix thinks you're in Japan shows you the Japanese content. The way I've often used ExpressVPN is that I've been traveling overseas and I'm exhausted from, you know, an international flight. I want to just watch some of the comfort shows on American Netflix. But in the country I'm at, I can't actually get access to American Netflix show.

I will connect to a VPN server in the U.S. and boom, now I can watch arrested development or whatever the show is that's going to give me a little bit of comfort. So that's just one of the many reasons or ways you can use a VPN and a service like ExpressVPN in particular, but it's one that I wanted to point out because it's kind of a neat one.

So be smart. Stop paying for these streaming services and only get access to a fraction of their content. Get your money's worth at ExpressVPN.com slash deep. Don't forget to use my link so you can get three extra months free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-N.com-S-V-N-D-C-D-N-L-D-E-T-T-E-T-T-L-E-T to learn more. I also want to talk about Magic Spoon.

You know, growing up, eating treat cereal was one of those escapes that I always appreciated. I look back on that nostalgically as an adult who feels like I can't eat that type of stuff anymore. Enter Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon found a way to create those treat-style cereals that we loved as children, but to do so without all of the junk. Magic Spoon cereal has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four net grams of carbs in each serving. Also only has 140 calories in a serving.

It's keto-friendly, it's gluten-free, is grain-free, it's soy-free, it's low-carb, and it's GMO-free. here's the exciting news I wanted to add today. They are relaunching their blueberry flavor. This was one of the favorite flavors that was sold out and has been out of stock. It is now back in stock. So you can now get some blueberry magic spoon or build your own box, your own box with a variety of flavors,

a custom bundle where you draw from the cocoa, the fruity, the frosted, the peanut butter, and the cinnamon flavors that are also always available. Pro tip, if you mix the cocoa with the peanut butter, you're now eating a peanut butter cup as a snack, except for it is not bad for you. Also, if you live in Canada, good news, MagicSpoon now ships there as well.

So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab some blueberry or a custom bundle of cereal to try today. And be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. This offer is now good anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, but only when you use that code cow at checkout. MagicSpoon is so confident in their project that it is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee,

so if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. So remember to get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code cow to save $5. All right, let's do one more technology question. This one comes from Aaron. Aaron says, hi, Cal.

I'd love to know if you have any favorite or go-to sources for research for your writing. While, of course, research is a subject-specific exercise. Are there any meta-sources? For example, Pew or Google Scholar or Microsoft Academy that you lean on as a launch point for research-driven writing? Well, Aaron, I'm very partial towards books. I think by the time an author is able to pull together a book, they are usually synthesizing a pretty sophisticated grasp of the relevant literature and ideas.

So a book is a fantastic way to very quickly learn about a subject. You can then cannibalize the notes and the citations in that book to find primary sources that seem relevant. So to me, books are the best way to get the lay of the land when it comes to a new subject and then figure out the primary. sources you need to follow. Now, that's not always the case. There is a project I'm working on right now, for example, where I have to understand a pretty complex literature. And I discovered that two professors who work in this particular topic have been building out this annotated

bibliography of all the main papers in the field. And one of these professors gave me access to it. And so in this case, I'm not starting with a book because there really isn't a great book on this research yet. I'm using this annotated bibliography. Sometimes, if you're not a very book, If that doesn't exist, I'll start with an interview of an academic and have them basically give me the lay of the land in real time during the interview and then point me towards the sources. But if there is books available on a topic, that's the way to go. Most books I write or most long-form articles I write, start with me buying four or five books. That is my entryway into a much more complex and broader world of relevant information. All right, let's do a couple of questions here about the deep life.

All right, our first question is actually quite relevant to the question we just answered. So the question we just answered came from Aaron, and it was about how I researched and I said I like to use books. This new question is from Adam, a suspiciously similar name, who asks, how do you decide on what books to read next? I have a good reads list with tons of books ranging from science to philosophy, fantasy, history. I feel as though my good reads list is a to-do list, and I get decision fatigue choosing the next book to read. Well, Adam, it really depends on the purpose.

I mean, again, if I'm doing research, I'm trying to choose what I think are going to be the right books to learn about a particular topic area. You see which books are often cited. You look at the credentials of the authors of the book. Oh, this is a world-class scholar on this topic. I'm more interested in that than a book written by an arbitrary person. Services like Blinkets could be helpful as well.

If the subject matter you're interested in falls under their subject matter, you can get these quick summaries. Or if you use Optimize, and these are sort of the right type of nonfiction books that have philosopher notes written about them and optimize, you can get these good six-page summaries and figure out which books you need to dive deeper into. But when it comes to reading for pleasure,

I think life's too short to think too much about what you read. It's better just to read a lot and read widely. That's what I do. I'm constantly getting new books, switching back and forth between them. A lot of them I finish, some of them I abort. I just like to always be reading interesting things. Like, let me give you an example of one of probably six or seven books I'm reading right now.

Concurrently, I found a paperback of a book from 1971. It's a nonfiction book about the expedition to shoot the documentary Blue Water White Death, which was, I think, the first real nature documentary to feature the Great White Shark. All right, so I don't know why I'm reading this. I mean, and I might not finish it. I'm about halfway through, but it's really interesting. So they're with, the way they did this is they're with a whaling fleet because they're looking for the sharks that attack, they're in cages,

and they're looking for sharks attacking the whale carcasses. So they're using the whaling fleet is how they're trying to find a great white shark. So you learn about how whaling worked. This is off the coast of East Africa in the late 1960s. There's still some whaling going on there, but already at this point, it was a dying industry. So the whaling was just happening to, they knew the industry was dying, but they were trying to get a return on their investment in their boats. So it was, let's just try to get as much whales as we can under the new restrictions that were getting increasingly restrictive at this time. So they're out there, it's like Moby Dick, but with exploding tip harpoons catching sperm whales, that's interesting.

I didn't know anything about how that worked. Shark cages are brand new. So you get this treatment of shark cages from the perspective of the people who invented them and the complexities are trying to figure out how to keep them buoyant and make them go. up and down. That's interesting. I was really surprised to discover how little we knew about sharks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I mean, this book posits seriously that, yeah, there's plenty of researchers who think megalodons might still exist. We just haven't come across them. And the great white sharks are sort of like small megalodons. There's probably 70, 80 foot megadons still kind of out there in the ocean we haven't come across. It's crazy, right? Anyways, I don't know why I'm

reading that book. I just found it. I grabbed it. Seems interesting. All right. So what I'm trying to say here is when it comes to read for pleasure, the key thing is you're reading all the time and reading interesting things. Don't overthink exactly what you're reading or even if you finish the things that you set out to read. Our next question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo says, I work as a financial officer in a large company and I use my very little free time to practice painting watercolors as my high-quality leisure activity. I aspire to become a proficient watercolorist and perhaps even start a business selling some of my artworks, but the work pace, the amount of concentration, and the long hours required to do my day job leave me drained

in the end of each day, and makes it very difficult to pick up my brushes and make more demanding cognitive work, such as deliberately practicing watercolors. Knowing that achieving some degree of proficiency in painting can take years or even decades, the process of dedicating time and effort to practicing my craft sometimes feel more like a chore than a pleasurable leisure activity. Well, Ricardo, I have three points here. One, I would be wary about using the term pleasurable as something you're looking for in leisure. A lot of the most satisfying and meaningful deep leisure activities aren't satisfying or pleasurable necessarily in the moment, but in the long run give you a lot of satisfaction and give you a lot of satisfaction and

give you a lot of meaning. So let's say, for example, you're a dedicated scholar. In the moment, you might be doing yet another set of pliometrics on a wood box in the boathouse. In the moment, you might be on a concept two at six in the morning before your job starts. It's not pleasurable in the sense of, I don't know, I'm having a drink on a sunny day as pleasurable. And that's okay because the fact that you're someone who disciplines your body and you see your times improve and you can you can row a pretty fast 2K and you do some regattas and you're part of the boathouse culture is a big part of your identity and it's meaningful and it's satisfying even if in the moment your legs hurt you're tired of pulling on that on that stupid concept two handle all right so pleasurable

might not be what we're looking for two we should keep in mind here the arnold bennett effect the arnold bennett effect from his book how to live on 24 hours a day is this idea that we think when we're exhausted we need to do non mentally demanding activities but often a mentally demand an activity if it's of a different type and for a different motivation than your work, so you're doing it just for the intrinsic satisfaction of it and it's very different than your work can actually energize you. Watching Netflix on the couch with a beer might end up being less energizing. Take your energy away in the way that if you say, no, now I'm going to go to my studio and paint, it might be hard at first, but 20 minutes later energizes you.

The human brain doesn't need to have long periods of complete inactivity to compensate for activity. It just can't do really intense concentration too much during the day. But if you vary your activities, there's more you can do. So those are the two sort of standard things. I would modify. I would add sort of a 2B here as well that says, okay, when it comes to deep leisure and busy schedules, don't do a lot. It's going to feel like a chore if you feel like you're trying to fit in a lot of things. You should really just have very few things and be very flexible.

You know, if I don't do this for a while, I don't do this for a while. You want to train yourself to think about some of these activities as something that's meaningful that you, you enjoy doing. If you have a busy period at work, then maybe you don't paint. But then the next weekend, you're able to really spend a long time doing it and get some satisfaction. Maybe you have something else you do. You like to cook. And sometimes you get to and sometimes you don't. And not to get too caught up in how much you do and when you schedule it and not to have too many things you're trying to fit in. And let me have seven different things I do. Small number of things that you really like, small number of things you really like. You fit them in as you can. And it's a pleasure when you can.

it's not a big deal when you can't. This is like the standard. These two or two and a half points are like the standard advice about deep leisure when you're somewhat busy. My third point, however, and this is a much more general point,

doesn't just apply to you, Ricardo, is that also maybe your job's too hard. This idea that it is now commonplace to have these jobs that are all consuming of your time and that this is just persistently the property of this job, is not healthy.

And I think for most people, it's not a great way to live. I mean, I'm thinking about Winston Churchill here. Like, clearly Winston Churchill had periods of his life that were incredibly stressful and busy. I'm thinking about the Blitz. I'm thinking about the early days of the invasion of Europe.

He was also, however, a pretty accomplished watercolor painter. I don't think he was doing a ton of watercolor painting, you know, during the Blitz. So he did because they would go out to the prime minister's residence he got the checkers and the weekends, and maybe he got some painting done, but in other periods of his life,

he had a lot more free time. He had a lot more flexibility, and it was seasonal and was up and down, and he would step up to help his country, and then take a break, and then be prime minister, but then take time off. And there's a lot of these jobs today,

these corporate jobs, it's just relentless. It's relentless in part because the demands are high. It's relentless in part because we're bad at working, so you're plugged into a hyperactive hive mind, which means even beyond where you are usefully applying your brain are producing value. You now have to spend many more hours just ping pong balling

these metaphorical ping pong balls that arrive in Slack and in teams and an email back across the net. Another one comes back and you're hitting them back and forth and it's exhausting and I think it's emiserating and most people hate it.

Some people, okay, it's okay. I run a company and it's very stressful but it's incredibly important and I feel very influential and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it but I think for most people they really hate it and maybe the tail end

of a disruptive pandemic is the right time to say if you hate it then that's okay. that's okay, maybe that means you should do something else. So, Ricardo, I don't know that this is your case. I'm just using you not having time to paint your watercolor as a metaphor for a job that has taken that bucket in your deep life and had it knock over all the other buckets and then spill carershing on top of those buckets and then lit those other buckets on fire. So yes, we're talking about a sentient, malevolent animated bucket here.

So that's my more general point. And again, you know, who am I? I don't know what your situation here, Ricardo. But I just want to put that out there for more people who feel this way. Some people maybe are just looking for permission for someone to come up and say, that sounds terrible. I would not do that if I was you. And again, I don't know if this is the case with your job, but I know people in those type of jobs.

Now is probably the time. You can use the pandemic as an excuse to start thinking, huh, can I pack up my career capital? take it over here to a place that will respect that career capital, but will allow me to invest it right away and get all sorts of things out of it, all sorts of leverage out of it that's going to make my life better, more autonomy, more impact, more create, whatever it is you're looking for, and give me more options, then I can then build up this skill over here, and that's going to give me even more autonomy. Like, I'm going over into the startup, and then the startup, we can build it to this level of profitability, and because I run it, then we can switch it so that I work six months a year and take the other six months off,

or I'll do the Paul Jarvis company a one thing, or it's whatever it is, right? I just want to give permission generally out here that if you suspect that your job is deadening your soul, it is stressing you out, you have no time for anything else in life, the question is why? If you can't do your metaphorical watercolor painting, what's the point of putting in those long hours in the first place? A very cliche thing to say, but you know what? We started this episode with a more sophisticated look at how you make decisions about shifting jobs. So this might be an application of some of that thinking. All right. So a broad answer to a simple question.

Ricardo, thanks for letting me use you as just a generic abstraction against which I can make this broader point. But now is the time to probably make that point. Now is probably the time for a lot of people to think what their answer is to that question. And for me, the time has come to wrap up this semi-condensed episode. I mean, it is under an hour, but actually longer than I thought it actually would end up being. but anyways it's now in the books go to caldneynuport.com slash podcast to learn how to spit your own questions i'll be back as always on thursday with a listener calls mini episode and until then as always stay deep