Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep.147: Why Did I Never Join Social Media?

Episode Date: November 15, 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 WORK QUESTIONS:- Are some people more suited for deep work than others?  [4:54]- How do I tame post-shutdown excitement?   [8:33]- How to I deal with ambiguous deep work?  [14:41]- Can you  (Cal) elaborate on the Friction/Flow/Finalization project pathway?  [17:41] - How do you time-block plan in a company obsessed with last minute meetings?  [23:21]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- Are you (Cal) a control freak?  [41:16]- What have you (Cal) learned from the pandemic?  [45:07]- Would you (Cal) do your CS research and writing if you couldn’t share it?  [51:54]- How did you (Cal) never get tempted to join a social media platform?  [56:11]- Is the monastic life the ultimate deep life?  [59:24]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 147. Before we dive into the meat of today's episode, I do have a dilemma that I want your opinion on. It's a dilemma that has to do with my reading. So as we talk about on this show quite a bit, I have a real commitment to the reading life. I think it's important to read a lot. My target is typically five books a month.

But there is a subtlety that has arisen with respect to my five books a month. goal, and I would like to hear your feedback on. So here's the situation. Earlier this month, I finished a big epit biography of Stephen Spielberg. So I like to have threads of reading that all connect. So I decided, of course, I should probably read an epic biography next of George Lucas. They were both involved in this key turning point in cinema in the 1970s and 80s. So I'm reading this biography. I really like it of George Lucas. But here's the issue. The format of this book is alternating chapters. So every other chapter is focusing on Lucas, starting from his childhood, up through Star Wars,

and it's a really well-researchival-style TikTok biography where you're really getting a lot of these details about what actually happened. There's some meticulous research that went into this. What were the actual influences? Who did he actually talk to? And I really find it interesting. It's what I wanted to learn. The other chapters, fast forward.

and their profiles of different examples of Star Wars fandom. So it'll be let's spend time with this group that dresses up like stormtroopers. Let's spend a lot of time talking about how the Jedi force has been interpreted as religion. Let's talk about the Star War Kid viral video. I'm not as interested in that. I mean, I'm interested. My interest in this book is Lucas and Lucas's story. And because I'm listening to this on tape, I'm starting to skip.

the fandom chapters and basically extract from the book a just the biography of Lucas. So here's the question. Does that count? Does that still count towards one of the five even though I'm reading a majority of the book but maybe close to just 60%

if I'm largely skimming or skipping the fandom chapters to get out the stuff I really want from it? Do we count that as one of the five? Do we count it as a half book or do we throw up our hands and say that doesn't count as all? So this is my question. I'm not sure what the answer is. Jesse, what do you think?

Thumbs up, thumbs down? What do you give you me here? I'm getting the middle thumb from Jesse. So I don't know. We don't have a good answer here. So send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com and I'll decide whether or not I count this as not. All right.

So let's move on now to some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Brendan. Brendan asks, are you familiar with Patrick Lysione's working genius model and if so how might someone's working geniuses be best

suited to deep work and time block planning and which types may have to work harder at it? Well Brendan I don't know this particular framework from Patrick I have actually met Patrick before we were both speaking at the same conference that was outside of Dallas

this would have been maybe four or five years ago. And we had lunch together. Fascinating guy, great writer. He sells a ton of books, by the way. He really has his finger on the pulse of the business market. I don't know working genius, but I know the general type of book you're talking about here. These are books in which you try to discern something about you as your personality or as a worker.

So you talk about your elaboration here that your quote-unquote geniuses in Leic Leicionni's framework or discernment and tenacity. And you're trying to ask, are there going to be some of these personality or worker types that are better suited for some of this advice than others? And generally what I like to say,

because I encounter this a lot, is that deep work and time block planning are universal. So in other words, regardless of what your personality or genius type is, the fact remains that if your brain is focusing on one thing

at a time without context switching, it's going to produce better output than if it's context switching. Then if you're kind of working and you're kind of distracted. It doesn't matter if your genius is discernment or tenacity or whatever else they are. With time block planning, the same thing holds. If you give every minute of your day a job,

so you are intentional about here's the time that's available, what do I want to do with it, you were going to be better off. You're going to produce more. You're going to be less stressed, less will get forgotten than if you're instead just reactive and say, what do I want to do next? So I don't believe there's a personality type for which deep work is not relevant.

I don't believe there's a personality type for which time block planning is not going to help. Now that being said, how much deep work you do, how much work you have in your life that requires deep work, how you set up and structure that deep work, what blocks you're putting into your time block plan, whether the time block plan is very tight, meaning that you have lots of blocks precisely timed or very loose where you have really large blocks and maybe. be buffer blocks to give yourself room if something takes longer than something else. All of that could be affected by you and your particular personality. So let's make the underlying idea that deep work produces higher quality and quantity than shallow work. Let's take the underlying idea that intention about your time is going to be much better than being random, haphazard, or reactive. And say that's universal. But your style for applying those ideas, I think it's completely fine to think that that style might differ.

And your style might be someone who really needs five hours. in a cave, don't bother me doing deep work, or your style might be, this is like pulling teeth, it's two hours, it has to be first thing in the morning before other things get going, that's fine, that's stylistic. Your style with your time block plan might be very tight. I want to be like an assembly line rolling through a lot of things incredibly effectively, or it might be like we talked about very loose, and I think that's fine too. So we have universal ideas, individualistic, however, applications of those ideas to your working life.

All right, let's move on here. Our next question comes from Currently Overexcited, who asks, How do you tame post shutdown over excitement? All right, so he or she elaborate. Suppose you are working on a problem you really like.

You have a plan to solve it, but it is complicated. So it will take weeks, possibly months. You are optimistic. You may be able to solve it as a big deal because it's important stuff. Does it happen to you that you're not able, really able to shut down?

even to the point where sleeping becomes difficult. He or she adds, I'm fully aware that this is a great problem to have. Yes, this is a problem. I suffer from this problem. When you're working on exciting things, and in particular things that are intellectually demanding, and you're starting to make progress, so you're getting that neurochemical high that comes from some of the pieces starting to click together, which is a very appealing sensation.

It's also something that really can drag your attention towards what you're trying to solve and very hard to rinse your attention away from. It can be hard to say, okay, now I'm going to go do something else. Now I'm going to go just enjoy a quiet evening reading the newspaper. Now I'm going to try to sleep.

It is a problem. Now, for me, it was actually this problem, which I began to experience pretty strongly during graduate school, that led to the innovation of some of the ideas that I still push today. I mean, I've talked about this before, but it's been a while that as I was approaching, my memory is my dissertation. I was starting to have these overexcitement issues because at the time there was some proofs that weren't working.

So it was sort of negative overexcitement. I wasn't like, yeah, making progress. I love it. It's, wait a second, I don't think this proof, this proof might not be working. My whole dissertation needs this to work. And it was very hard to let that go. So I remember that very clearly. The other thing that was happening during grad school, I remember this very clearly, is I was having a lot of ideas about the deep life.

How I wanted to live my life. There was a lot of really fundamental thinking happening. What's important to me? What's not? And I didn't know what to do with those thoughts. That was also a source of overexcitement. It was just always there, always bouncing around. I was worried I would forget them.

I worried there's so much possibility that I was missing options. Both were causing overexcitement. It was in that context that I innovated my shutdown routine. That is where schedule shutdown complete came from. Users of my time block planners, readers of deep work, readers of my newsletter, all know about my shutdown routine, which is pretty rigorous. You really close all the open loops. You make a plan for the next day.

You get everything out of your head. And then you say a phrase to indicate, I am done thinking about work for the day. That was innovated in that grad school context for me. So if I was very worried about a proof for something like this, like during my shutdown routine could capture all my thoughts, here's where I'm stuck. Here's what I'm going to work on tomorrow. I have three angles I'm going to try.

Then I'm going to start at first thing. There's my plan. Shut down complete. My mind could trust. There is a plan. You don't have to think about this now. Progress will happen the next day. This was also when I innovated the moleskin idea notebook that capture mechanism of always

having this moleskin with me that I began to use for formally capturing thoughts about my life and having a set time once a month is what I did back then, which I would review this notebook. So I could capture thoughts in there that arose and release them. That if I was watching a documentary and got really excited about, you know, I just have this insight from this documentary that this is what I need in my life, more of X, more of Y. I could write them in that notebook and know that that notebook was going to be reviewed like clockwork at the end of each month.

I wasn't going to forget that idea. I did not have to expend a lot of energy keeping that in my head or worrying about forgetting it. Those two innovations shut down routine for my work, a capture system for big ideas about my life. Those two systems actually did greatly reduce issues with overexcignment around ideas. All right. All that's still being said, yes, I still suffer from it. When you're working on cool things, it is hard to shut down. It's hard to let things go. I mean, I face this a lot. I think working for the New Yorker, this has become more acute because there's typically a faster pace of things and more going on and things will pop up in the evening.

you hear back from a source for an article or there's feedback on coming back from it or there's a lot of things that happen. Things are coming together and it's hard to shut down. I had this issue last night. We're closing an article. There's just a lot of things happening at night. We're trying to get it together real quick and it's hard to let that go. I get this way with book writing too. When I'm working on proposals, like the proposals I'm working on right now, the idea is fester.

I was like, this isn't quite right because I'm trying to get the ideas just right and I spend months and months working on just the high level framework and ideas that eventually will become the book and that can really stick in my mind and I can't let it go. This happened to me most recently, I think it was on

one of the high holy days, maybe on Yom Kippur. And there's an angle on the Deep Life book I was working on and I couldn't let it go because it wasn't working. And it just was, I was, coming back to it again and again, and it all day long, it was just obsessively festering and I couldn't let it go. So it still happens to me with book ideas, too. If it's not quite right or it's starting to come together, but it doesn't quite work, I have a hard time when it goes.

So we got good news and bad news. Here's my summary. The good news is structure and routine helps. Shut down routines really help. Good capture systems help where you can get the information ideas in a place where you know they will be reviewed. You won't forget them. That helps your mind, forget them. That all helps. The bad news is if you're working on exciting stuff, you're not going to completely get rid of the problem. But as you said, it's not a bad problem to have. So if you can just blunt its impact a little bit, having a few nights where you have a hard time getting to sleep because there's something so cool you're working on, probably is a fair price to pay for working on things that are cool. All right. Let's see what we have here.

Next is a question from Lily. Lily asks, given the nature of deep work, it is often hard to determine the quality of the work produced because it's rather nuanced. How do you deal with such ambiguity? Well, Lily, I would say, maybe look at how your career is going. So what is the non-n nuanced factor here?

Am I getting promoted? Is my salary going up? Am I in more demand? Am I being given more interesting projects? That's a pretty good proxy for am I producing high quality output. So even if you can't look at the thing you just produced in the small scale, the report you just wrote, a strategy memo you just put together and say, hey, this is an A plus or a B plus or whatever,

if over the course of six months or a year, you're getting more interesting work, you're being eyed for advancement, other people are trying to poach you away, that's a pretty good sign that things are going well. I mean, this reminds me of the maxim that I included in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, a maxim that came from the entrepreneur Derek Sivers, where he said when you're working on new things, deep things, money is a good neutral indicator of value. And what he meant by that, and we've mentioned this before on the show,

but what he meant by that was people are reluctant to give other people their money. It's not a big deal to ask me to give you praise. I'm happy to do that. That doesn't cost me much to be, hey, this looks great, you know. Like, hey, Jesse, I really like what you're doing over there. Keep up the good work. It doesn't cost me much to give praise. Ask me for money, though.

I'm probably not going to give you money unless the stuff is actually good, unless the work is actually good, unless there's actually value in the product you're selling. There's value in the position you're filling in the company. So it's actually a really great way of getting honest feedback. So if you're getting promotions and raises, if people are trying to hire you away, then you're probably doing better work. And I always make the distinction. Derek was not saying money is what is valuable. So he wasn't saying your goal therefore should be to acquire as much money as possible.

Obviously, he did the opposite. When he sold his company CD Baby for something like $20 million, he gave all the money away. It wasn't about having money. It was about if I'm making money on this, if people are willing to pay for this, if people are willing to hire me for this, and that means this has value. And if they're not, I need to go back to the drawing board. And so keep that in mind. Look at the unambiguous indicators of your career going well.

If those are trending in the right direction, you're probably doing the right amount of deep work and applying it to the right types of things. If those indicators aren't going well, then maybe it's time to rethink things. we now have a question from Laya. So Laya is going all the way back here into the deep cuts of the deep questions podcast archives here and ask about episode number 37. In episode 37, she asks, you talked about friction flow finalization stages of project execution and different rituals to use at those stages.

could you please elaborate on how this approach to project execution on this approach to project execution and give examples of rituals? Well, I like this question because it reminds me of a good idea I had that I forgot about. So I'm basically impressed with myself as I now remember what it was I was talking about. This would have probably been the summer of 2020. So as a reminder, for those who are newer listeners to the podcast, the friction flow finalization stages, I was trying to break down. When you're working on a big project, an important project, there really are three stages you go through.

So the friction stage comes up first. It's where you're trying to get things rolling. I call it friction because this is hard. You have to figure out what's needed for the project. You have to gather resources. You have to get people on board. You have to stare at the metaphorical blank page and write those first words. It is pretty hard to get past that initial.

friction. It's not a fun part of most projects. Ask any book author about what that first week of working on a new book is like. But then you get the stage two, which is flow. Now you're rolling. You know what the project is about. You have the

resources. The first steps have been made. You've got those first indicators of progress and now you can lock in and move that ball forward pretty fast. This is the stage that most people like with projects. It's where the writer now is at their lakehouse and doing 3,000 words a day.

The muse is there. The words are flowing all as well in the world. Then finally you get to this finalization stage. At some point, as you get towards the end of a project, there's a lot involved in bringing this in for a landing. I think my count now is four metaphors so far and talk about projects. So this is good. I can see if I can figure out some more.

But the final stage is, okay, I got to get the manuscript polished. We have to copy it it. I have to go back and, fill in these details. There's fact-checking notes I need to get in there. It can be technical. It can be annoying, but sometimes finalization can be one of the most important stages because it's where you take all this work and you tie the ribbon around that package, metaphor five. You tie the ribbon around that package really nicely, and it makes all the difference about how it's received, regardless of what's inside. So that's also an annoying stage.

So what I was arguing in episode 37 is that you approach each of these stages separately. So when you're in the friction stage, the key thing is you actually have to just put in that brain power because it's a difficult stage. You probably want to break that up into smaller burst that you do regularly. So when you're really trying to get through that friction stage, it's every day this week, one hour, it's just one hour. So painful or not, I know it'll be over in an hour, but every morning, eight to nine before I go to work, I'm spending an hour working on this particular project, right? So that's probably how you want to think about that. Timing matters, location matters.

Here's my cup of coffee. This is all about tricking the brain into actually doing the work. So that's the type of ritual you want to care about. Flow, this is a different ballgame. Now you're enjoying what's going on. So now what you probably want with flow is big sessions, big sessions that are scheduled for you to really get lost in the project and make the really cognitively. demanding high quality contributions.

So now what I want is Friday afternoons for the next month. I'm doing these four-hour sessions where I leave work early and I'm going to whatever, the little cabin I have on this property by the lake and I just get lost at it. So now you're really trying to extract the very highest quality thought from your mind. This is different than the friction stage. The friction stage is there's a lot of annoying stuff I have to do before I can get started. So I just need to make sure that I put into cycles. The flow stage is like now I need to get lost in the thought and produce the best stuff possible.

It has to be enjoyable. It has to be long enough sessions that I can extract real value. So probably there you want rituals built around making this into an almost romantic setup. You're going to a cool place. You're spending a long amount of time. You have the really nice coffee. You end the day with the bourbon. Now it's really about extracting what you can from your brain.

Finalization. We're back to like friction. All right, man, what a pain. So shorter sessions, same time, same place, again and again and again. It's about getting back to the cycles, getting those things done. I don't want the dragging out a finalization to drag out this project much farther than it needs to go. So you're back more towards how do I trick my brain into just do work, just do work. It's only an hour.

We do it every day. Don't even think about it. We have no choices. What we do from eight to nine. You're back to that type of mindset. So, Loya, I like this question because there's a more general point that's being made here, which is how you approach work should depend on what exactly that type of work is, and you should be suiting your habits to what you're trying to do.

So thank you for reminding me about my own genius here. Friction, flow, finalization. Treat those stages differently. All right. Let's see here. Moving on, we have a question from Noah. Noah is asking about time blocking. He says, how do you time block plan within a company culture that's apt to throw a median

on your calendar if it's marked as free. Well, honestly, Noah, what you really need to do here is take all your colleagues in this company, lock them in a room like in the first saw movie, but instead of them having to cut the leg off of someone else to get out of that room, they have to read a world without email before you'll give them any water. And I think then you'll solve your problem because I hate these type of cultures. It's a huge issue and I feel your pain. Let's just start there.

So long-term, that's going to be your solution is, of course, you want to change this culture. This is an ad hoc, on-demand, haphazard approach to work. It's the hyperactive hive mind personified. It's an approach to work where you just rock and roll. Oh, I want to do this. Let's get a meeting on the book. Let's shoot an email to this person. Let's grab this person by Slack.

What about that? I don't know. Let's just jump on and have a meeting. Let's do a call. Let's circle around on this. Let's circle back. Let's jump on. Whatever the different terminology is, right?

Just grabbing time and attention on-demand haphazardly as needed. to advance whatever it is that you're working on or interested in with the minimal amount of overhead for you. We know that this does not scale when you apply this approach to a whole organization. What you get out of it is a fraction of the potential output. It is the knowledge work equivalent of running a car factory where you say, look, guys,

I don't want to tell you how to do your job. So everyone just rock and roll, is try to get some cars built. If you need someone to help you with whatever you're working on, just grab them. Yeah, you would produce some cars. But Henry Ford is going to outproduce you a thousand times. All right.

So that's long-term solution. Short-term, there are some hacks, we can call them, that help you get a little bit more breathing room in this culture while you're still waiting for the culture itself to change. Both of the hacks I'm going to suggest for you revolve around protecting time on your shared calendar so that it can't be grabbed for meetings. and there is a proactive and reactive way to doing this because you can't, you can't just block off all your free time. So the proactive approach is block off sometime to protect yourself.

You can't block off all your free time. If you block off all your free time, there's no time left for any meetings in a work culture like you work and people aren't going to tolerate that. So I don't want to give you this false hope of like, just take all your time and block it off so people can't bother you with me. meetings. So block off some. Okay, I know I have this hour and these two hours. I know what I'm doing in those two hours and it's protected. So at least my biggest deep work priorities get progress made up. But you also have to leave a lot of time free for the meetings that still have to happen. Now, here's where things get tricky. You can't simply say, this is the ideal amount of time I want to spend on meetings each week and then leave exactly that much time free because you have to give flexibility to your colleagues.

they need to have options because their schedule is different than yours and you have to find times that works for everyone. So yes, you can proactively block off some blocks. This is busy time. You focus on deep work in that time. At the very least, you know that time will be spent with deep work, but you probably has to leave a substantial amount of your time free, not that you want to fill all that time with meetings,

but you need to give enough options that you can actually find meeting times that work with other people. Again, if you have one hour free each day, people aren't going to tolerate this because that is effective. no time for each day because it's not going to align with two or three people's other schedule. This then puts us into a tragedy of the common situation, though, where you're now leaving, let's say, half your day free so that there's flexibility for scheduling the meetings that have to happen.

But when everyone sees half your day is free, now everyone's going to come and try to grab as much of that time as possible, and you have too many meetings on the books. So the second hack I'm going to give here is reactive time protection. And the way I work with reactive time protection is in response to every meeting that gets scheduled on a day, immediately go and block off and protect an equal duration meeting for just your own time. So if someone comes in on Tuesday, let's say you have, you've proactively protected about half your day on Tuesdays, half your day free. And someone comes in like, okay, we need to use some terrible phrase. Like we need to circle back on a call that we jump on to go over.

the Q4 deck on our quarterly objectives, right? Or whatever the terrible thing is. All right. You have the whole afternoon free so that there's flexibility here and pretty easily the people involved in this meeting find a time. They find like three o'clock free. And so you're not the jerk that has no time free. Great.

So now you have an hour, 3 to 4 p.m. for that meeting. Immediately block off another hour that afternoon just for you. So maybe four to five. All right. Now let's say someone else comes along and, you know, whatever they need to work on. on their whatever it is. We need to slack on the client Q4 agenda. When are you free on Tuesday?

They look at the available time and they block from 12 to 1 to do that call. And again, you have some good flexibility here. That's fine. You say, great, I'm going to now take another hour, maybe two to three. Boom, and that's for me. I'm going to make that protected time. Now, if someone else wants to meet on Tuesday, there is a little bit of time free, but it might not work and they're going to have to move that meeting to another day.

What you have effectively done here has implemented a dynamic system that set I'm willing to have a couple hours of meetings in this afternoon. And I want to have flexibility of windows can fall so that people won't think I'm a jerk. I don't want to be the roadblock to figuring out times that work, but I only want two hours of meetings. This reactive scheduling hack basically implemented that system. Two meetings fit. You were very flexible about where they went, but the rest of the time ended up protected. And so I think this is a way that you can deal with shared work cultures without the unsustainable approach of,

let me block most of my time off in advance. And so you can give that a try. But again, your ultimate solution is going to be locking your colleagues in a room, chain them to the wall. They have to answer a 10 question, detailed quiz correctly about a world without email before you're going to turn on the light and let them out. I think we have time for one more deep work question. And this one comes from Michael 1729. I always like when people use their birth year as part of their name. So it's good to see you here, Michael.

He asked about the importance of Plan B rather than focusing all efforts on one career path. There's a detailed elaboration here that I think is kind of important. Let's get some context. Michael is from South Africa. He's an undergrad. So he's studying mathematics at a quote, unquote, little known university with no option to do undergrad researcher take advanced courses.

He loves peer maths. I love how UK and other places, other English-speaking places, it's maths, by the way, not math. And I fantasized about doing research one day. So he's identified a career path of being a maths professor at a research university to be their ideal pursuit. By the way, if you apply it American university, don't call it maths professor. We don't use that terminology. He has a lot of pressures on himself to get top grades, but anyways, he's worried. Here's the crux of his elaboration.

He's worried that this particular plan he's hatching for somehow escaping from this little-known university in South Africa and making it to a top university and being a math professor is not going to work out. And he's saying, should I have a plan B? You know, he feels that having a plan B might lead him to slack off his ambitious vision of being a math professor, but also he's very worried that that might not happen. And then is he going to just be stuck? All right. And then he says at the end, your books have changed my life and you're the reason I got into my degree from failing in high school. Thank you for everything you've done for students around the world.

So I just threw that in to make myself feel better. All right, Michael, this is a good question. And I think one way to approach it is to go back to my book so good they can't ignore you and extract out of there the main framework I give for thinking about careers. Because the whole point about the framework I give in that book is to move you conceptually away from thinking in terms of specific jobs as the primary unit that you're dealing with in your planning. This is how most people think about careers, is how you're thinking about career. you're saying, okay, I'm looking at this option, which is being a math professor at this type of school. Is that the wrong option? Should I have a second option that I'm working on?

The framework in my book says that's not the right way to think about career satisfaction. The things that make up career satisfaction, that meaning, passion for your work, that's going to come from elements of your job, attributes, things like autonomy and impact and mastery, connection to other people, impact on the world, the exact mix of attributes that would be. make a particular career really meaningful for you could be quite specific to you, but it's not specific to a particular job. These are non-job-specific career attributes. How do you get these attributes? Well, you have to think about them in a financial market metaphorical sense, that they are valuable attributes.

Lots of people want them in their job, so you have to have something valuable to offer in return. And so the idea I've given that book is that you want to acquire what I call career capital, which is my term for rare and valuable skills. So as you develop skills that are valuable to the marketplace, you can then, in essence, exchange that career capital for attributes in your working life that make that working life something that resonates more, that makes it something that's more enjoyable and satisfying.

So the whole game in this framework is acquiring as much career capital as possible in strategic way, so it's as valuable as possible, and then having the courage and foresight to invest that capital to keep taking control of your career, moving it towards what resonates and away from what doesn't. That's what you're focusing on. Now, in that particular approach, the actual job you end up doing or how that unfolds could change. Maybe this doesn't work out.

That works out better. You see a better opportunity over here. And in some sense, that's not the point, because your focus is on the, the These are the attributes I want in my career. And what is my current levels of career capital I can apply towards that? How do I get more? So when you think about it that way, what you're doing now at your university, where you're trying to get top grades, you're trying to specialize and be a star student in your program,

don't think about it as this is my swing to get this one particular job. Think about it instead as I am trying to acquire as much career capital as I can at this early stage in my career. Now, one of the things I might be able to invest this in is in getting a, a graduate student position at a really good university, and that's going to be, again, that's going to be interesting job. It's going to be intellectually demanding of autonomy. And if I can really stand out there, then maybe I'll have enough capital to get a professor job. But you know what?

Maybe that doesn't happen. But then you can apply the capital you have towards something else that resonates and move away from things that don't. You're going to have unpredictability on how this path unfolds. But if you keep coming at it from the perspective of I know what resonates with me and what I don't like. And I'm constantly trying to get more of the good stuff in my career and less of the stuff I don't like in my career.

If I hate the idea of having a boss telling me what to do and deadlines, then all of my focus is going to be on how do I build up skills that I can keep leveraging to get away from that environment? Or maybe if what you want is high excitement and to be involved in big deals and to have high stakes money on the line and you don't care about deadlines, you like that, then you're building up skills and applying them somewhere differently. How do I, you know, what type of job can I get with my current skills that gets me closer to that. How do we build up more skills there to move to something even better?

But the key thing that unifies all these approaches is you're looking at the attributes you want, you're building up skills, you're leveraging the skills. It's fine to have particular ideas in mind, like, well, why don't I aim in a professorship type direction? But then if that doesn't work, it's not a failure. You're building up capital. Oh, that particular investment opportunity to invest it in a professorship career is no longer available, but I still have the capital. So why don't I take it to go over here and do a start. up where we're doing whatever, I don't know, hedge fund analysis or something like that, and go live somewhere interesting and make a lot of money by the time on 27 and then, you know,

open a surf shop. You have all these different options. And they will present themselves as you get better at things are valuable and as you continue to reflect and be clear about what it is that resonates with you, what you actually in your life, what attributes you really want in a job. So don't be so specific about this is the job. And what if that job doesn't happen? Instead, these are the things I want in my life.

What skills am I building now that might help me get closer to them? What next steps are open to me right now? Great, let me take the best one that's open to me right now. Build more skills and repeat. Build more skills than repeat. I can't tell you where you're going to be in 10 years specifically. But if you follow this path, I can be pretty confident that wherever it is, it'll be a place that's pretty cool.

All right. With that, let's move on now to some questions about the deep life. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Now, if you are using the internet in public without a VPN, you are tempting fate. This is what happens when you connect to that hot spot at a coffee shop or an airport. Your computer or phone or tablet is sending little messages to the website you want to talk to in bundles called packets. Anyone else connected to that same hotspot can see those packets you're sending. They can see what website you're talking to, what you're sending to that website.

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She then elaborates. Is it possible at trying to be on top? top of everything is a way to tame the anxiety of the uncertainty of our human condition. Well, Molly, I think what we all probably agree on is that having no organization is stressful. So if I'm entirely reactive, if I entirely exist from moment to moment, hey, what should I do next? What do I feel like? What's urgent? What am I laid on?

This is not a great way to live as a human, especially in the modern. context where we have such a high cognitive load of various obligations and ongoing task. It's a complicated productivity landscape that the modern human exists in. And if you try to wander haphazardly through that landscape, you are going to get caught on a lot of dead ends. You're going to twist your metaphorical ankle in a lot of potholes. So you have to have some organization. How much is too much? I would say when you feel like the organization is causing more stress than it's helping. It's a pretty simple heuristic, right? So you start putting in place some sort of structure so that you have some sense of what you're trying to do and when you're trying to get it done.

You're basically in our metaphor drawing a map for this complex landscape. But if you get to a point where you find that you're spending too much time on that map or the details of the map itself is starting to stress you out and pull back. Use yourself as the thermostat here. What I would caution you about is the, I would say, messy sopholism of just saying, don't be obsessed with everyone's obsessed with productivity and being organized and you know the human condition is messy and I'm just vaguely speaking feel some superiority because I can understand that that's all sort of bougie and I'm much more enlightened. That's just a sort of tonologically true like yeah you shouldn't be too obsessed with being

organized. It doesn't really add anything to the conversation like you can't run your life chaotically in the modern world. You need some organization. I can't tell you how much you you should have or not figure that out based on how you feel, but let me give you some tools to draw from. I do think you're right that anxiety levels probably play a role in exactly where that set point lands. I have quite a bit of structure because I think I would be anxious without it. I don't actually get a lot of anxiety in the classical sense.

I don't I don't ruminate on the future or worry about bad things that could happen. For me, and I've talked about this before, the omnipresent anxieties of the type of big stakes things I've been doing my entire life tend to manifest themselves in sleep issues. So mentally I feel fine. Like, okay, yeah, I guess I'm going on that TV show tomorrow. I guess we just signed that deal. But then I don't sleep. And so I use that as my barometer.

And I find when I have some more structure about things are off my mind, I know what I'm working on, my plans are at multiple scales. Here's my vision, which fuels my quarterly, which feels my weekly, which feels my daily time block planning. The relief of having to continually worry about do I have the right plan in my missing something, am I forgetting something, am I making progress on things that matter? That relief is helpful. And actually, I typically find it helps my sleep.

And then I know that's probably about right. If I got even more obsessive about it, then probably would start to have negative impacts. I would have to rain in. For someone else, and I know people like this, they're at a different set point of anxiety, maybe much less structure and organization would get them to where they need to be. And having something like my multi-scale planning maybe would feel like is too much. I don't know. I think that's possible.

So I would say you have to control for yourself exactly how much structure you want in your life. But the only thing I know for sure is that no structure is never going to be the right answer. All right, let's move on here. Our next question is from Positive. Positive says, what have you learnt during this pandemic? That's a good question. I've definitely learned some lessons. There are some predictions I may.

made early in the pandemic in writing, so I should maybe go back and revisit those and see what I learned. So I made a prediction early in the pandemic. This was in GQ, I believe. This was probably in a Clay Skipper interview for GQ. We're early on in the pandemic, I made the claim that probably one of the number one public health measures that we could make, if we wanted to just objectively measure, especially mental health, the number one public health measures. that we could probably have taken at the beginning of the pandemic was to shut down Twitter. I was seeing the writing on the wall, and I said, this is not going to be a source for good in the months ahead. That was prediction number one.

Prediction number two, I made in the pages of the New Yorker in May of 2020. So again, real early in the pandemic. And I said, look, there's going to be a lot of pain felt by suddenly remote knowledge workers. Because we have been working with this hyperactive hive mind style of ad hoc on demand work, which is, Kind of works when we're all in the same place, but can go haywire if we're all spread out and distributed. So I think people are going to feel a lot of pain. The hyperactive hive mind is going to spin out of control when we all go remote.

And this is going to inspire us to say, okay, once and for all, we have to structure how we work more as knowledge workers. We can't just rock and roll on email and Zoom and Slack. We have to have more structured processes. We have to do more Cal Newport-style world without email ideas. All right. So let's revisit those predictions. Twitter being a force of negativity,

100% correct. If you had any fondness for social media pre-pandemic, you probably have lost it all now that we're in the final stages of the pandemic. It was a injection straight to the veins of poison for so much of the population during the pandemic. I think we also learned nuance about technology, right? I think we would, early in the pandemic, lump all of these different technologies together and be like, I don't know, technology. I need it to talk to my family because we can't visit them because of a lockdown.

But we gained nuance as the pandemic unfolded that, wait a second, there's a difference between I can text message my siblings. There's a difference between I can set up a Zoom meeting with my parents so that we can talk when we can't visit each other in person. There's a difference between that. and I'm having a drag out fight on Twitter with someone I've never met in Alabama and I'm literally shaking with rage. You know, there's a difference between Twitter and texting. There's a difference between Facebook and zooming.

There's communicating with digital technology, thumbs up. We love that during the pandemic. We were glad we have it. And there's social media platforms, thumbs down. I think it made us all into maniacs. So I think that prediction was right. Social media became much more poisonous and we realized we can embrace digital communication without having to embrace yelling at people over Twitter windows.

All right. So that was a good prediction. Second prediction, I was kind of wrong. I was right in the first part. I was right about the part that the remote work was going to spiral out of control because we have no structure on how we work and going remote is going to make it worse. That was right. It did spiral out of control.

So many knowledge workers fell into. an existence where they just went from Zoom to Zoom to Zoom, the Zoom, the Zoom. It was absurd. It was like we were in a Kafka play doing some sort of absurdist satire about the modern working life where we just did meetings all day long and never actually got to doing work. I was wrong about the second piece of that prediction, which was, and this will lead us to make major changes in how we work. And that didn't happen.

Basically, the companies just waited it out and now are saying, okay, let's just get back to the office and get back to what we were doing before. What I underestimated was, yes, that was painful. these eight or nine hour in a row Zoom marathons that worked evolved into really was pretty terrible. But there's lots of terrible things going on last year. So we were willing the pain of this one thing. We just chalked up to everything stinks in a pandemic year. Everything's terrible.

We're used to things being terrible. So it didn't motivate us to take action. So I was wrong about that. So that's one thing I learned. Moving away from these type of tech or work predictions, I think there's a bigger picture message that I came to grips with during the pandemic that's probably more important in the long term. And I think a lot of people encountered this message as well, which is the value of slowness. So the disruption for knowledge workers, for what they would call non-essential workers, you said,

great, I guess I'm just at home and I'm doing some Zoom and I'm not commuting to the work and I'm not traveling. There's a certain level of busyness that disappeared. There's a much bigger injection of just, I'm here now, I'm home. for some god awful reason my kids are here too they're not in school and it was a different type of lifestyle that we were being exposed to and a lot of people were extracting

out of that disruption that there's value there is appeal in the human condition to slowing things down spending more time with people that you are close to spending more time just walking those same trails in your neighborhood

because there's nowhere else to go talking to your neighbors over the fence or long periods of time because what else are you going to do in the afternoon in March of 2020? And of course, the right answer to that question is drink. But, you know, you can drink and talk to your neighbors over the fence and spend time with your kids. Slowness emerged as something that's important. And so my whole very nascent ideas about slow productivity, about rebuilding work life, about doing less things and doing those things better, about more sequentiality. one thing after another, not a lot of things at the same time, moving from a push model of work where everyone who needs you put stuff on your plate

to a pull model where you pull things from people when you're ready for it. I think there's something here that's really important. There's something in here that could better align how we live our professional lives with the reality of the human condition. And I don't quite know how all this works yet, but it's the pandemic that got me thinking about it. And I think a lot of people got thinking about this as well because of their experiences with the pandemic. So stay tuned for that. slowness is my theme for 2020

and hopefully it's something will develop a little bit more. All right. We got another question here from tree falling in a forest who asks would you do your CS researcher writing if you could not share it?

Probably not. I mean, I think impact is an important property of satisfying and meaningful career knowing that your writing is being read by people, I think is really valuable and it's fine to prioritize that.

Knowing that your computer science paper is cited and other people are building on it is a real source of satisfaction and is important. So I'm not a big believer in this fortune cookie wisdom around careers that it should just be the thing you would do if no one was watching. Well, I don't think that actually really holds, right? Because it's way too narrow of a view of what a satisfying career is. It's a, it's a, it narrows down to the actual activity that you're doing. You know, it's, okay, is the activity you're doing in the moment something that's,

feels good or something like this? And career satisfaction is a much more complicated and rich tapestry. So I talk about it's so good they can't ignore you. So things like connection to other people, impact on the world, uh, mastery. So having an objective measure of you getting better at something. These, these are all part of the tapestry that all weaves together to, build a satisfying career. So I don't think it's useful to try to separate work from all of that and become obsessively activity focused. Is the actual activity you're doing?

You just enjoy doing the activity. And that's the only measure. I think that's going to be probably way too myopic. It's why, for example, sports stars obsessed so much about their contract size. Now, just use this as a quick case study. Again and again, the casual fan will say, I don't understand. This player likes it here. the hometown crowd loves them.

They're being offered more money than they'll ever know what to do with in their life. So why throw that all away to go somewhere completely new and to get all of the ire of their fans for a little bit more money on top of an amount of money that they would never know how to spend in all of their life? I mean, in other words, what I'm saying is why Bryce Harper? Why? Come on. but if you talk to the more serious sports fan to the athletes themselves, mastery is important. I mean,

what else was going to get someone to that top level in something as competitive as sports, then a real desire to get better and better to push themselves to revel in the unambiguous mastery that they have developed? One of the ways you measure that mastery is to contract size. And so they care about these epsulons. you know, Bryce Harper cared about the 330 million that the Phillies were offering versus the 300 million that the nationals were offering. And this is exactly the type of conversation with similar numbers I have with my publisher, very similar numbers. He cared about that difference because $330 million would have been, it was at that point, I believe, the largest contract that had been given to an individual ball player. Like that really matters, right?

When you're really the epilons of mastery, when you're at that level of the game, at an MVP caliber, that really matters. If you just think about it the way we do is like, $300 million seems good to me. It doesn't make sense. So this whole divergence, me excising my baseball demons, is really about getting back to this main point, which is there's a lot of different attributes that come into making work satisfying. And some of those attributes include other people, other people recognizing you, you're getting unambiguous indicators of master. you make an impact on the world. That all matters. We can't just think about work in a myopic activity focused manner.

We can't just say, if you would do this when no one's watching, then that's what you're meant to do. Nonsense. Professional life is complicated and it's social and there's community aspects to it and there's a lot of interesting, complicated stuff in it. So that is why Bryce Harper left and it's why we should, you know, care about how many people actually read what we write. All right, we're making good progress here. We've got a quick one here. This one comes from Ryan. Ryan asked Cal, how did you never get tempted to join any social media platform?

You know, I get asked that a lot. I don't completely remember is the honest answer. What I can piece together is 2004. It was a senior at Dartmouth. Facebook at the time was marching from campus to campus, right? they had a strategy back then of opening it up to specific universities at a time. And it arrived at Dartmouth in 2004. I went back and confirmed this with various people who were there.

I do remember there was a lot of excitement around it. It might have even been called the Facebook back then. And my vague memory is the two things that turned me off about. It was number one, back then your Facebook profile was all about favorite list, favorite books, favorite songs. you had to basically carefully curate these lists of things that your favorites and it didn't matter if they were favorites or not

this was all about Irvin Goffman's presentation of self to others you were trying to very carefully craft your public persona by selecting a quirky mix of a little bit indie but then you throw in like a big genre book the show that you're of the people but then you put in a portrait of the artist

as a young man the show you're sophisticated it just seemed very artificial and I hate doing list everyone who knows me knows this if you say, what's your favorite book? What's your favorite movie? I can't do it. I literally can't do it.

I don't know why. The ordering function of my brain is broken. So I really didn't like this idea of having to come up with these lists. It felt artificial and I'm really bad at it. It really does make me feel upset. So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to join. The second reason I vaguely remember, it's such a long time ago, but I'm a contemporary of Zuckerberg.

We're both computer science students, both at Ivy League universities. I had had a dot-com startup that I closed down a couple of years before Facebook got started. And so there was probably some inter-Ivy jealousy there. Like, okay, why is this fellow nerd who's very similar to me? You know, why is everyone excited about his company? And so there's probably a little bit of jealousy of like, I don't want to pump up this guy's ego. And, you know, that worked.

And that worked. And no one ever thought about him again. But no. So I don't know. Those are the two things I remember. And then once I had some separation from social media, I begin to observe, wait a second, people have kind of a weird relationship to this. So I had that Margaret Mead anthropological separation from what was going on around me.

And I was like, this seems a little bit weird. The more I watch this from the outside, the more it seems like I'm looking at a weird tribal ritual here. And I got more and more turned off about it. Like, I really don't know about this. And over time, my distaste for it kind of grew. The skepticism grew. And then, and again, I always say this. I got very public about my skepticism about it.

And everyone said I was crazy. until about 2016 and then suddenly everyone was on board. So that was a weird experience in itself. But that's my vague memory, Ryan. I don't know. There might have been other factors involved.

But that's it. That's why I remember. All right. Let's see if we have time for, let's do one more question here. This one comes from EA. EA says, is the monastic life

the ultimate deep life? And what can we learn and implement from it. EA elaborates, lately I have been studying monasticism, especially the Benedictine order, and their rule. Their motto is

aura a laborer, pray and work. Traditionally, they focus on everything they do, often in silence and utilize the lessons learned in the 1500 plus years of their existence. And so she elaborates, is the need for deep work so old, and can we learn from these traditions in a way that is useful to us,

in the outside world. I think we can, EA. This is an idea that I have been developing recently. When there are work-related fantasies or stories, specific stories of, yeah, here's a monk in the Benedictine order in a monastery, or here's this person I knew who moved to Maine and they built this cabin by a lake and they just ride all day, or whatever it is. When we come across these concrete instantiations, of a working life that really resonates with us,

these escape fantasies. What do we do with that? And the theory that I'm working on right now is that they're not meant to be taken literally, right? In the sense that this is not a roadmap that you are now considering, should I follow this path or not. Oh, maybe I should become a monk.

Maybe I should move to a cabin inmate. In fact, I opened my book, so good they can't ignore you, with the story of someone who actually did that. a story of someone who had become so attached to the fantasy of becoming a monk that he actually went to this monastic sinner where he got accepted in it, you lived the simple life, you, I think it was a Buddhist sinner, and you meditate, and you have these sort of simple jobs, through the repetition, you gain insight.

I mean, he had built this up in his head so long. These images of these monks had resonated so much that it just became in his mind. this must be the path to having meaning in life. So you can imagine how the story unfolded in that opening chapter so good. He went, he joined, and within a few weeks he broke down because he realized this wasn't a magic transformation. And that there was still stuff that was annoying and he still had the same anxieties and it had failed to transform his life. So the things that resonate aren't necessarily meant to be roadmaps. So what should we do with them?

Well, I think we should take a mythological approach to understanding these professional work fantasies that resonate so much. And by mythological, I mean in a Jungian framework, right? We should actually come at this and try to understand what are the archetypical elements of this story that are creating that resonance? We isolate those from the actual details of the story. So when we look at the monks, what is it about this order that I just get that. that information that there's something right or appealing or aspirational about what they're doing, you strip away a fact that there are a benedictine order and it's a Christian order and they go to these type of buildings and they pray every morning and you extract from it, what is the underlying

element here that's really catching my attention? In this case, maybe it's the slowness, the not having a really big load of things that you have to do, that your life is simpler and you can move from one thing to another and there's presence. You pull out the non- work content specific underlying archetypical elements. And you isolate them and you clarify them. And you realize these deep elements, which could apply to any different type of field, it can apply to many different types of jobs, this is what really resonates to me. All right.

So once you pulled out, these are the deeper elements that resonate with me. Now you can actually start to do some blueprinting. Now you can start to say, okay, given my context, my circumstances, what opportunities are available to me. What are my constraints? What are my abilities? What is the landscape surrounding me of where I could feasibly get in my career and start using these isolated elements as the lodestone that guides you?

All right. If slowness, having less to do, moving from one thing to another presence with each type, if this is what's really important to me, and yet I am a, you know, I work for a think tank in Washington, D.C. or something. You look around, okay, given my career capital, given my skills, given the different possibilities here, how could I craft a career that gets that thing in it? And the career you craft might have nothing to do with being a monk, but everything to do with what it was about the monks that appealed to you. And maybe as that think tank director in D.C., you end up shifting to, let me use the capital I had developed there to do a consultant-based work. And I'm really just thinking of the top of my head here, but consultant-based work where I helped.

put together white papers and I do it six months out of the year and I can do it remote. I'm going to move to this different location where life is a little bit slower. I'm going to move out of D.C. And I'm moving to wherever, Chestertown on the eastern shore or something like that. And I'm going to have a slower life out there and I'm going to buy some property. It's cheaper out there. I'm going to have a huge garden that I'm going to work on. And really the work I do, they're doing six months a year.

and I do it in my gazebo. I do it during the warmer months, and I do it in the morning. And you can kind of craft the whole life that has that element that you care about. The content of this life may have nothing to do with the content of the story that first told you about this element.

So I'm a big believer in this now, a mythological interpretation of career fantasies. Extrap the underlying archetypical elements that are driving your aspiration, purify them, isolate them from the specifics of that job, and then look at your landscape. and say, what could I feasibly do that is going to give me more of this thing that's really resonating with me? And I think people have a lot of options.

In other words, you can get a lot of guidance from these concrete stories, just like you can get a lot of guidance from the great myths of the past, without actually having to take them literally, without having to say, I guess I have to go into Grindel's den to find meaning of my life. I guess I have to kill a literal dragon and save the Virgin Princess in order to find drive in my life. We don't actually have to take the myths literally to extract a lot of high impact value into our life. Let's treat these career stories that resonate the same way. At least that's the idea that I'm working on recently.

All right. Well, we've gone a little long today, so I should probably wrap it up. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode, and until then, as always, stay deep.