EntreLeadership - #182: Cal Newport—Focused Success in a Distracted World

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

In today’s world with all of its diversions, it’s harder than ever to concentrate. But don’t give up! It’s still possible to focus intensely on cognitively demanding tasks, says this week’s featured guest, Cal Newport. The author and professor joins us to share his tips on a better way to avoid all those disruptions and transform your mind and habits. entreleadership.com/podcast Goal Tracker Tool Infusionsoft's 2017 Strategy Kit EntreLeadership Summit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation here. Our feature interview is with Cal Newport. If you don't know who Cal is, you're going to be happy to learn who he is. We're going to focus on his new book, Deep Work, Rules,

for focused success in a distracted world. Really, we're going to talk about fighting distractions. This is something we all face. Nobody is immune to distractions. And in a moment, I'm going to share just some personal observations from my life on this idea of distractions and what we can do about it to prepare us for this conversation. But quick question for you. I'm always asking other people questions.

I want to ask you the audience a question. We would love to know if you're using the goal tracking tool that we have been promoting to you and giving to you for free. And the reason is, we want to hear some stories. Has it helped you? How has it helped you? Where did you apply it? What were the results? Those are just some sample questions that we would love answers to. So if it has helped you, we want to share those stories. We always want to keep our finger on the pulse, and that really is focusing on you, the audience. How are you winning? And we ask all the time for these stories. I want to remind you, again, we'd love to hear your stories,

success. That's kind of an additional ask. It's always there. And so you can email us, podcast at Entreeleadership.com. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com, but specifically we would love to know if you are using our goal tracker tool, where, how, why, who's using it? What are the results? We want to hear the success stories because we want to brag on you. It's not about us. It's about you. So, hey, share your stories with us. We'd love to put them on the podcast. Podcast at entreeleadership.com and for some reason you're just now joining us or you said hey I'd like to get that but I haven't done it yet. This has been a wildly popular tool that we give you absolutely free. It's our goal tracker literally walks you through how to use it, gives you tracking devices if you

will so that you can print it out, give it to the whole team, whatever you want to do. It's all encompassing. You can get it by texting the word goals 2017. Goals 2017. You just text it to 33444. That's 33-444. And if you'd rather not text, you just want to go get it. The link to the tool is on this episode's show notes. Very simple, entreeleadership.com slash podcast. Go get it.

And then tell us how it's helping you win. Well, I mentioned that we're going to, I think, continue on a theme from our last episode. Chris Barras Brown came on and we talked about wake up. And you'll remember he discussed this idea of a digital detox. And the challenge was, if you want to get depth and focus to be able to create, you're going to need to have some type of a detox. So this episode, this book is called Deep Work by Cal Newport, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World.

And this is an all-encompassing conversation around deep work, not just about avoiding distractions, but deep work. A word that is very important to me that I sprinkle in time after time after time on this podcast is significance. I think we all want to be significant. And our work is a big part of our significance. Not the whole, but a big part. We want to do work that matters. That's a phrase we use around here at Ramsey Solutions.

And so this book and this conversation is going to help you there. And again, we all struggle with this. for me, I think back to the early days of three kiddos in the Coleman household. And iPhones were relatively new, social media relatively new. I was running my own business. So kind of that one-man band mentality that so many of you are familiar with. This is not a new story. This is not unfamiliar to you, but really the idea of being present in my home when work was done.

And the phone was right there. I had little ones, you know, three under the age of five. And there was some real tension there. And thankfully, Stacey stayed on me about it and in a loving way, reminding me sternly that, hey, when you're with the kiddos, you're with the kiddos. And it's very easy to answer a text, then get an idea and don't want to tweet it, you know, or check social media when the kids run around the corner. And it's sending a message, right?

So there is a distraction there, and that's sending a message to those that are important to you. that's a relationship issue. Then we all struggle with social media maybe during the day or whatever your distraction is. And distractions themselves aren't evil. Neither is social media. But it is the idea of what does it take to stay completely focused when you need to be focused. And let me just say this. Here's the challenge. And I'm speaking to myself right now. But if we're not careful, technology, social media can become a bit of a slave master. It essentially chains us to our devices. We're never free of them.

A ding, a vibration, some type of notification, pulls us out of the moment. And many times, it's moments that we need to stay completely focused in. Our phone calls must take. Our emails must answer. Many of us are truly right now, living and working in captivity. It's just the truth.

We're enslaved to the inbox, the iPhone, the social media app. And while those things aren't bad, they can become bad. When we don't have the discipline to make sure that we don't get too distracted, here's what's happening. And again, I'm speaking to myself. Write this down. Here's a question I want you to consider. as you listen to this conversation and as you move forward after this episode.

Here's the question. Are you sacrificing the important on the altar of the immediate? That's my question for you. Are you sacrificing the important people, the important things on the altar of the immediate? In other words, distraction. That's the question. I want you to consider it as you look.

listen in, you're going to love this conversation with Cal Newport. He's a thinker. He's going to make you think and hopefully feel differently so that you act differently. Here it is. Well, Cal, this is a thrill to have you because I love the title of the book. Love the cover of the book. Just, you know, big, bold words, deep work. And we're going to talk a lot about the book, but I want to do the contrast question. When you write a book entitled Deep Work, in a form of defining that. What's the difference between deep work and shallow work? It's a key difference, I think, because most people mix them together. And I'm trying to separate the two so we can think a little bit more intelligently about our day-to-day effort. So for me, deep work is when you're in

a state of unbroken concentration on a cognitively demanding task. And then I define shallow work essentially to be everything that's not deep work. So at any one moment at your job, you know, You're either doing deep work trying to push your brain to its limit to produce as much value as you're capable of producing, or you're doing shallow work. Now, let's talk about the differences here in the form of that focus. Why write a book about this? There's clearly a reason. You sense you know that maybe there's an underappreciated value on this idea of focusing into deep work. What led you to this topic?

I think this is an economic trend that has a lot of potential but was being ignored. which is this notion that the ability to focus intensely, that is to do deep work well, to prioritize deep work in your schedule, is actually becoming more valuable, especially in the knowledge economy as the knowledge economy is becoming more complex. But we're also in a moment in our economic history where people are becoming worse at it due to the rise of just not only distractions, but I would say the rise of sort of digital communication as a core activity in the everyday work. People are becoming worse at these work.

So we have this mismatch. Something's becoming more valuable at the exact same time that it's becoming more rare. And to me, that seems like a huge opportunity because the few who recognize that and who prioritize deep work have a huge advantage they could gain. Yeah. You know, I've always been fascinated by the idea of mastery. You know, I just am somebody for whatever reason that really loves craftsmanship, depending on whatever the product is, there's a matter. But somebody who is really in their career become a master craftsman. And of course, you know this, Cal.

Anytime you meet somebody like that or talk to somebody like that, they don't consider themselves masters. They're still trying to master it, and thus they've achieved it in the minds of so many. Is there a tie to deep work and mastery in your mind? Well, I think humans in general have this deep cultural connection to craftsmanship as something that's really desirable. As you say, we crave it. When we see it, we respect it. When we work on our own craft and our own life, we feel really good. good about it. That's the time where we get lost in flow or feel like we're productive or

actually adding something to the world. So we're really attracted to the craftsmanship. And deep work is basically the skill that you need if you want craft. Deep work is craftsmanship. It's actually using your mind as your tool and trying to produce the best possible value. I mean, we just feel good when we've tried to create something that is difficult and that use skills. No one really feels that good. On the other hand, when they say, you know what, I got 25 emails out in the last 10 minutes. There's just a difference. There's craftmanship. then there's everything else. That's so true. Chapter 2 is entitled, Deep Work is Rare. And I want to spend a little bit of time around that idea because it's absolutely true. So I want to start with the

folks who aren't naturally wired to be able to focus as easily. So in other words, folks like me, I mean, I just like, there's just certain people who are wired and they can dive into deep focus a lot easier, whereas you have a more creative type like myself and short attention span. So I have to be very intentional. That's where I want to lead us. For those who don't naturally find it easy to get into that focused area to be able to dive into deep work and create deep work, we've heard a lot about this topic. What would be a couple hacks here, a couple pieces of advice to help us get to that point of focus so that we can actually accomplish deep work? Well, an important. point I want to make about this because it's something that people often get wrong is the notion

that deep work really is a skill that is practicable. And I think a lot of people when they think about deep work or the ability to focus, they think about it more like a habit, like flossing their teeth. You know, something you know how to do, but maybe you should probably make more time or do it more often. But what seemed clear from my research is that it's much more a skill like playing the guitar. something if you haven't really been systematically practicing, you shouldn't expect to be very good at it. So while there are, and I completely agree, some intrinsic or innate differences in sort of comfort with focus, there's a huge amount of this which is actually just training. And the reason why I think that's important to emphasize is a lot of people who maybe have not really set the stage or systematically trained ability to deep work, if they try it and it doesn't go well, they might incorrectly conclude, you know, hey, maybe that's not for me. me and then move on to other things where the right reaction should be like, oh, I'm not,

I'm not that good at this yet. So if this is important to me, I probably have to lay out a training regimen. So that's the way I talk about it with people. I talk about it in terms of how much have you been training your ability to do deep work and how much are you willing to do that training. Yeah, that's really good. That's a great distinction. The meaningfulness of deep work. You know, we all long, certainly I believe this, we all long to be significant. And deep work as you define it, I believe, really is synonymous with that. When we engage in deep work, our significance is really met, in my opinion. Do you agree with that? And if I'm wrong, restate that in the right way? And then is that a huge motivator for folks when they figure it out

what deep work actually brings us? Well, I think you're spot on. And in fact, this was a chapter I added to the book later in the book writing process. It was not in my original proposal to have a chapter about how meaningful people find deep work. But what happened was as I was doing the research and I was studying the science behind it and as I was interviewing sort of expert practitioners of deep work, this idea kept coming up again and again and again, which is that people who do a lot of deep work

or get good at deep work find this huge personal satisfaction in it. So, you know, put aside productivity for now, put aside, you know, you're going to produce more value or you can get more promoted or your business could be more successful. A life that has a lot of deep work, is a good life. And if you look at neuroscience, if you look at psychology, if you look at sociology, you find all these different fields that kind of come to this conclusion from different angles that human beings crave craftsmanship and depth and focus. And if you go back into some more

of the ancient wisdoms, you look at the world religions, this notion that contemplation, putting your mind towards one thing, creating something of value, you know, making something in the world that didn't exist before, that this shows up in all those ancient traditions as well. So, you know, on the surface, we're talking productivity, but you're picking up on a strand here, which I think is so important, which is I really do believe a deep life is a good life. It absolutely is. And I love that you chose, I want to kind of almost go backwards here because I'm loving this conversation. Why the word deep, I mean, we know what the word deep means, but why is that so important to this work and this research? Because I want people to really grasp what depth really means in light of what we just said.

Yeah, with deep work, it's not just the intensity of the focus, but it's that you're really, you're embracing what you're doing completely. You're giving it your full attention. You're diving deep into it. You're pushing your cognitive ability to its limits, right? I mean, you think about your mind like it's any other tool you might use, and you want to use it at its limits. I mean, if you were an expert furniture craftsman, you're really going to want to build and use your skills at building the joints and the shaping of the woods. You would want to use them at the limits of what you're able to do. you wouldn't want to want to produce a sort of cruder table if you knew that you could have built something that was more elegant.

It's the same thing with deep work. It's you're fully embracing what you're doing, pushing your mind to its current limit and therefore producing something that is you're proud of. This is the best type of thing I could have produced at my current level of skill. And I'm assuming, I want to ask this for you to clarify from your research, if you found that when we engage in deep work, it promotes longevity. Is that a fair assumption? I would assume that deep work allows us to stay at it longer. I assume it's true. Now, you know, we don't have studies that, you know, may directly look at deep work as an activity and its effects on these various type of attributes or health attributes, but we have a lot of proxies for it. So we do have a lot of studies for things that require concentration, let's say like reading hard books and that people who do that more regularly get all these other benefits in their life. So I think it's a fair hypothesis to say that there's a lot of sort of positive benefits in different parts of your life that come once you're spending more time focusing intensely. Yeah, and I was specifically, I didn't ask it well, but specifically thinking professionally.

Because if I look at people that I admire that have had long-term success professionally, it seems to me they're doing deep work. You know, it's not a fly-by-night thing that they've lasted as long as they have at the top of their game. Fair? It's completely fair. And, you know, this is basic market mechanics in a free market. What's going to be rewarded are things that are rare and valuable. Deep work is how you produce things that are rare and valuable. Shallow work by definition almost never is actually producing something rare and valuable.

I mean, there's nothing that rare valuable about answering emails or attending meetings or making PowerPoint slides. So the people who are really valued by the marketplace and therefore have these long careers and produce a body of work that people respect and have a lot of options in their life, it's almost always because they know that it's the deep work that produces the stuff that matters. They do a lot of it. All right, folks, we've kind of summarized really well this idea that Cal writes about in this book. And part two of the book is made up of the rules. And I love this, very simple, just four rules. And so Cal, what I'd like to do is just tee you up on the rules and give us a summary on these

because this begins to allow us to figure out, okay, how is it that we achieve deep work? So rule number one, simply, work deeply. What's the challenge there? So work deeply is about setting up the right sort of systems, habits, and rituals in your everyday work day to help support deep work. To help you succeed more often with actually doing deep work and achieving relatively deep levels of depth. So for example, the type of things you might cover under that topic includes maybe you want to have a regular schedule of when the deep work is going to happen. opposed to just hoping that you'll be going along throughout your day and then just say, you know, I don't have much to do and I'm sort of in the mood to focus.

It's much smarter to say, no, no, no, I have a scheduling philosophy about when I do deep work. It also covers things like depth rituals. So when you actually sit down to do deep work, if you have a set ritual you do every time you enter a deep work session, that can really help your mind slip into that deep work mode much more frictionlessly than if you're hoping to just sort of wrench your attention. away from whatever you're doing and just white knuckle it and say, oh, I got to start concentrating now. So work deeply is about setting up these rituals, routines, and habits in your work life so that you have the best chance of succeeding with deep work. Yeah, and one of the

examples you give on page 110 of the book. I'd love for you to share about this is Jerry Seinfeld. And I don't think many people think, you know, comedians as being maybe disciplined, but that's so not true with him and the brilliance because of his scheduling. I've heard about this before, but then I loved rereading about it in your book. So give us that example. Yeah, Seinfeld was an incredibly disciplined practitioner of deep work. It turns out it's really hard to craft jokes. It takes quite a bit of focus.

So he had this great hack that he used, which he called Don't Break the Chain. And he actually would hang one of those old-fashioned calendars on your wall where you have the whole month worth of days. And every day that he worked deeply on its comedy routine, he would cross out that day with a big red X. And the idea was after you've been doing this for a while, you sort of have a chain of these X's day after day after day. And this puts this pressure on you that you don't want to break that chain. That, you know, if he skipped working on his jokes one day, there'd be a break in the chain. There'd be a day without the red X. And that sort of simple visual heuristic helped him maintain a discipline of returning to his deep work day after day.

I love that. Okay, let's go into rule number two. And this one hit me in the head because of my attention span issues. and Cal the audience knows. I'm a very open and honest about my weaknesses so maybe they can learn from me. But embracing boredom, this is difficult for me. How do we do this?

And why should we embrace boredom? Yeah, it's not just difficult for you. I can report that of the different rules in this book, my reader's feedback says that this one has been the most difficult. Okay, that makes me feel a little bit better. Okay, good. Interestingly, it's not the one they think was going to be most difficult, which we'll get to a little bit,

but it's the one that actually ends up. being the most difficult for him. But here's the underlying idea. If your brain has an addiction to distraction, that is, if your brain has been taught that at the first hint of boredom, which I define to mean lack of novel stimuli, that if at the first hint of boredom, it gets a quick treat. You know, the phone comes out and it gets a quick hit on Twitter or a quick kid on Facebook or a quick hit on Instagram or, you know, a quick hit on the latest news site or the ESPN and there'll be trade rumors or whatever it is. But if it's been trained that I get stimuli when on board,

you get this Pavlovian connection that means when it comes time to do deep work, you're in trouble. Because deep work by definition, or at least my definition of boredom, is boring. You're focusing on one thing, so you don't have a lot of novel stimuli popping up. So if your brain expects novel stimuli to slice into boredom, it simply won't tolerate deep work. You get 10 minutes into it and it says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, where's my treat? I need my stimuli.

I've been expected. So this whole rule, Embrace Boredom, is essentially a bunch of ideas for how you can break that addiction. And build your brain's comfort with sometimes I'm bored and I'm okay with it. Because breaking that addiction is more or less going to be a foundational step required if you really want to develop a pretty well-developed deep. work habit. Yeah, one of the callouts is so good. It's worth re-hitting to really kind of put a bow on what you just said, and you challenge us on page 159. Don't take breaks from distraction. Take breaks from focus. That is a nice shift, and I think that's very helpful. Don't take breaks from distraction instead. Take breaks from focus, okay? Keeping moving here. I'm guessing here. I'm guessing

that rule number three was what your audience said they thought was going to be the most difficult rule. Is that true? That's exactly right. All right. So it's quit social media and I can hear the collective groan. Yeah, yeah. We're hearing that worldwide, 1.5 billion people. Right, right. Facebook users just groaned. That's true.

Well, so here's the idea behind that rule, which is actually a little bit more nuanced, which is this notion that you need to treat your attention with respect. So when it comes to the tools that you let into your life, the tools that you let into your life that are going to lay some claim, to your time and attention, you should be more picky than most people are. And the division I drew in that chapter is that most people use what I call the any benefit mindset when they're thinking about tools like social media or the latest app, which is, hey, if I could think of some benefit that this thing might give me, that is enough rationale

for me to put this in my life. And then you end up with 19 different social media services and your concentration is turned up like it's in a blender. I propose what I call instead the craftsmanship approach to tool selection, which says, okay, in order for me to allow one of these products to lay claim to my time and attention, I have to see that there's some significant positive advantage to my life from this tool that's going to outweigh the negative advantages that this tool brings to me. Now, that calculus is going to be different for different people, but my argument was if people were honestly doing that calculus, it's not that, for example, you'd have no one using social media, but you probably wouldn't have a state like we have now

where everyone uses social media. So when I told people to quit social media, I was really saying, I want you to be much more careful about which of these tools you allow in your life. And in fact, the title comes from an experiment I suggested, which was, if you're not sure, take 30 days break from these tools. Don't tell anyone, don't quit, don't deactivate, just take a 30 days break and say, did it really make my life worse? And more importantly, did anyone really notice? Because I think for a lot of people, that simple experiment would have them coming back and say, oh, I was spending a lot of time on this thing, and I'm not getting nearly as much value as I think out of it. So give me an example.

I know there's one in the chapter about somebody who did what you said to do. What was the result? How did it play out? Well, a lot of what happens, the type of, you know, case study I hear again and again when people email me is that they would, let's say, you know, quit Twitter. And they had this thought before that people are going to be upset, right? My followers were interested in what I had to say. They're going to miss me. And the 30 days go by, no one even notices they were gone.

And they realized, wait a second, I'm not a media personality. I'm not a professional entertainer. I was spending all this time on Twitter with this idea that, you know, I have this audience that's really interested in me. But really, no one was paying that close attention. And think about all the sort of time and energy I was devoting trying to craft the perfect hashtag or the funniest tweet. Maybe I don't really need to be on there spending that much time anymore. And that's the type of story I hear again and again, people thinking, uh-oh, it's going to be disastrous. People aren't going to tolerate it. I'm going to lose my news. I'll not going to know what's going on.

And they try it. And they come away and say, actually, nothing bad happened. Hey, folks, I've done that before where I've just taken two weeks or 10 days, whatever, maybe a summer vacation off on social media. And what I've learned is the world has kept spinning. I'm able to re-enter, and my life is not the worse for it. So just try it. really does work and you'll be surprised. The world keeps spinning. It's going to be fine without you reading and contributing to social media. Hey, we're going to get right back to Cal for the fourth rule in just a moment. But here's the thing. A personal challenge. This podcast exists to help

you grow yourself, your team, and your profits. But I don't think it's the whole enchilada. Really appreciate you of listening. But I want you to consider in 2017 coming to an entree leadership event. I know what I'm talking about on this because I'm the host of these events. I'm out there in the lobby, in the audience during breaks, meeting people like you, many women who want to win and winning is something they're doing. And a live event takes learning to a whole other level. You know, if I could prescribe to a leader a formula for growth, it would be reading, listening, like in podcast, and participating. And when I say participating, that's going to an event because it's a different vibe.

It's a different vibe. It's learning, but it's a whole different engagement. The Entree Leadership Summit event is the best business leadership event in America. I've hosted many of the top events. I've been to some of the top events. And I'm telling you it's an unbelievable format. It's a deep dive. is high end, and it's going to yield big-time results. Simon Sinek, Robert Hershevec, from the

Shark Tank, legendary head coach of Notre Dame and South Carolina and Minnesota and beyond. Lou Holtz, the guy is a leadership master, leading young men. He's going to be fantastic. So unique, of course, Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan, Christy Wright, myself will all be there. It's only four months away, May 21 through 24 in Orlando, Florida. I think it's an event that everyone listening to me should at least consider. Just consider. That's all I'm asking you to do because I think it's breakthrough stuff. Registration is close to sold out. So go check it out. Entreeleadership.com slash summit. I think it'll be worth your while to at least consider it. So go do it. Let's get back to Cal Newport right now as he explains the fourth rule in achieving

deep work. All right. So rule number four. Trump has promised to drain the swamp in your city where you live, Washington, D.C., you tell us to drain the shallows, which, by the way, love the usage of that word. That's not a word we hear very often. The shallows. Explain rule number four. That's right. I think we have the easier task here than Donald Trump probably. I promise you, yes. So, yeah, drain the shallows. The idea here is that non-deep work in your professional life. So, you know, the shallow work, the emails, the organizations, the meetings, the paperwork. works, the reimbursement forms, it's not going to all go away. I mean, part of that is necessary.

They keep the wheels of commerce going and they keep the sort of local bureaucracy of your business functioning. But if you let it get out of control, which is very, very easy to do, if you let the shallows metastasize until your whole day is spent dealing with shallow work, then you're never going to succeed with deep work. You're just never going to have the time for it. So this chapter was really about how can you get a handle on the shallow work in your life, ruthlessly eliminating the shallow work you don't really need to be doing. And then with what remains, being sort of relentlessly organized about it so that you can minimize the footprint of these necessary activities in your life. And it's not that shallow work is intrinsically bad or that it's evil. It's just that

it's not creating the value that's going to get you noticed, that's going to get you promoted, that's going to increase the revenue of your company. So it's something that we really want to have a sort of respectful distrust of. All right, I know I have to do some of this, but I really have to be careful that this doesn't take over my whole professional life. Yeah, and one of the things I love, love, love, love. You begin to address it on page 236 in this chapter during the shallows. You introduced this idea, of course, fixed, scheduled productivity.

And one of the things you say is that very rarely do you send an email after 530 at night and in your entire time at Georgetown as an academic, you have published, I can't remember, I think you said 20-some different articles, obviously you've written books, you've done so many things, and you've done that without working at night or on the weekends regularly. Now, rarely you have done that, and that happens. We all understand that. But by and large, you have not done what a lot of people do, which is work at night, work weekends. First of all, I, I just want to say I admire that. It is doable.

I've said this on the podcast before. I'm that way. I don't send emails on the weekend and at night at all because I'm training people. Just they don't expect anything for me unless the house is burning down situation. I want you to talk about that a little bit because I think that is a clarion call for proper work, proper balance. If imbalance is never really truly there. But I just admire that. And I love that you wrote about it.

I want you to challenge our listeners on that concept. Well, we have a lot more give in our time demands than we realize. I mean, we think about our day as, look, I had no control over this. This is just what I had to do. But if you actually had, say, a social scientist sit there and look over your shoulder, they'd be like, well, wait a second. I mean, you kept breaking the check email here, and then there was the 45-minute break over there. We are kind of on the Internet, and you spent three hours writing this thing that you probably could have done in one if you were more focused.

So there's this hack that I found other people do and has been incredibly successful in my life, which is the best way to tame this is start by just putting a limit. So fixed schedule productivity just says, this is when I work, and that is essentially non-negotiable. And then you do whatever you have to do working backwards from that fixed schedule to make it fit. And so for my own life, the way I'm able to end work by 530, which is unheard of among academics, is when I work, for example, sort of 9 to 5 or 9 to 530, I'm really working. I mean, I don't web surf, I don't sit around, sort of sending emails back and forth sort of casually. It's focus because I know I have this limit.

I have to make it there. I'm also, it forced me to be more ruthless about what I agree to, what I don't agree to. So I say no to a lot more things, and I'm a lot more careful about my schedule. I'm also much more aware of deadlines because the easiest way to break a fixed schedule is if you have something do the next day and you haven't started, then you really might run out of time. So this one meta decision, I don't want to work past 530 no matter what happens, inspired a lot of these sort of low-level productivity changes, and the effect of it was a sort of much more balanced or efficient approach to my work. So it's a hack that I love and one that I highly recommend.

Yeah, and you mentioned in the book, the 2009 book written by John Freeman, The Tyranny of Email, I think everybody should read that. I read it and I got it. I got to tell you, it was a real eye-opener for me and really formulated how I set my habits. What are some other resources you'd recommend beyond that for folks to maybe get some habits started or some guardrails? Right. Well, I mean, there's a couple simple tips I like to recommend when someone is just new or getting new to deep work. And a couple things I think are useful is one, make a habit or a commitment for, let's say, the next month of just putting some deep work on your calendar where you treat it like. a meeting or appointment. So if someone tries to schedule something else in that time, you just say, oh, I have a thing. And this is when I'll be free next. People understand means appointments.

People understand that you sometimes are booked. So it's the easiest way to get it in there. I would also recommend in those initial deep work sessions really practice the discipline of a single glance at a phone, a single glance at an inbox, a single glance at a website invalidates the whole deep work session. You don't get to put the big Seinfeld red X on the calendar for that day, it doesn't count. So really build that discipline that it's either 100% focus or nothing. You do those two things for a month. Small commitment, but I think you'll see pretty big impact not only to your productivity, but your happiness will also show you the potential lurking and focusing on your focus. All right, Cal, I want to set you up to essentially

summarize the last couple pages of your book, where you walk us through in great detail what it look like when you took your own experiment here in your own writing and your own research and applied it to your life. And I think you used the word maniacal. That's essentially what you did. I want you to tell us what it looked like. I want you to tell us the positives and the negatives to that because you really do unpack that well in the conclusion of the book. Yeah, deep work, it can be a double ed sort. So what happened to me and what I talked about on this conclusion is that, you know, I'm someone who's always prioritized and understood deep work because I come from a field theoretical computer science where people still talk about it, where people still brag about

their ability to concentrate, where people are still pretty skeptical about newfangled technologies like email or web browsers. It's a place where people like to focus. That being said, when it came time to write a book about deep work, I thought I really got to be eating all of my dog food. So the year in which I was writing deep work was a year in which I was really tuning and polishing my deep work habits and really prioritizing how often I do deep work and practicing how deep I could get in my deep work sessions. And the result was surprising even to me because during that year, you would expect that my output as an academic as measured by publications of competitive peer reviewed papers

should have gone down because I was taking a lot of time away from that and putting it towards writing a book. So I had net significantly less time to spend. but because I was also prioritizing and honing my ability to do deep work, in that year, I published a factor of two more peer-reviewed academic papers than any previous year in my academic career. I tell that story because I think it emphasizes that we're not talking here about, you know, little tweaks on the borders. It's good to be a little bit more focus, or if you're a little less distracted, you might get a little bit more done.

Deep work is like a superpower. The phrase the economists use when they were talking about the book is that deep work is to killer app of the knowledge economy. It's not about you got a little bit more done today. It's about you got a factor of two more done. So that was the good. The bad was deep work is very draining. And I think I probably pushed it to an extreme during that period. I mean, I was depth, depth, depth, depth, depth. And one of the other terms I used to describe that period is also exhausting. So that's sort of the double ed sort of deep work is that, you know, it's a, With great power comes great responsibility. If you push it, you can produce phenomenal results and get phenomenal productivity. But it is also draining. So you kind of have to be careful that you give yourself the time to recharge as well.

Great words there. Okay. So we've been talking about the book, Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. But Cal is also the author of a book, and this is my favorite work of yours. I love Deep Work. It's absolutely going to have prime space on my shelf. tore it up, a lot of notes. But so good they can't ignore you, Cal, in my mind was an absolutely, I think it's mandatory reading. And so switching gears here, because I've got you, this is so important for our audience. You know, we've got a mixture of people, Cal, that are running small businesses. We've got personal growth junkies that are winning but want to win bigger. We've got younger people who are just starting out in that phase one journey.

But the thing that unites all of us that are listening in today is we want to reach full significance, full fulfillment. We want to win. And that message in the book, so good they can't ignore you, I think is just phenomenal. So this is sort of unfair. But I want you to summarize that because these small businesses, they're fighting tooth and nail. And I think the content in that book, the main idea, is a game changer. How would you summarize it for that audience that I just? described. Yeah, this book was so much fun because I got yelled at so much. Why is that? I got to know why. Why is that?

Well, because here's the shortest possible summary of the book is to say, follow your passion is bad advice. Right. And if you say that, I'll tell you, there's a lot of people who are going to start yelling right back at you. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's the worst thing you can say. That's the opposite of what's true. But then I can usually subdue that yelling if I'm allowed to give the second part of the explanation, which is that the goal of ending up passionate about what you do is good. And in fact, this book was about how do people actually in the real world of real people in the real marketplace end up passionate about their work. And what doesn't work, the strategy that does not help you accomplish that goal for most people is trying to start with a pre-existing

passion. They try to figure out in advance before you do anything else, oh, this is what I'm passionate about, and then use that as the foundation of making your career choices. That idea that you start with the passion, and then you use that to figure out what to do. That's actually the idea I was attacking, because if you study people who do love what they do, most of them didn't get there that way. Right. Well, it's an incomplete formula. I've talked about this. I'll give talks on this very issue. So I'll pick on me. I'm passionate. Cal about the game of basketball. But the reality is I'm a five foot nine white guy who can't jump, right? So if I just decided that I was going to pursue a career in basketball on passion alone,

it's so misguided. It creates so much frustration and beyond. I mean, you're absolutely spot on. It's the wrong one, it's just the wrong theory. Like, that's not the only part of it. There's this whole strengths equation in there. I want you to keep talking about that because I think you're absolutely right. And how does that fit in then? Because somebody out there maybe starting a business, passion about, and that's misguided. Yeah, it is. Maybe the problem here is that we use this one word passion for way too many things. Yes. And then we

get complicated because, you know, I'm passionate about baseball, but that's a different type of passion I would use to describe my relationship with my wife. And it's a different type of passion I would use to describe my relationship with my work. And it all gets muddled up, especially for the young generation.

So I'm 34, so I'm sort of right at the oldest edge of the millennials. This millennial generation, This is something I uncovered in my research is the first generation to grow up hearing this advice, follow your passion consistently. We think about that as sort of an age-old thing, but this phrase, follow your passion, didn't even really enter our lexicon until the late 1980s, early 1990s. And so they mix up all these definitions of the word passion, and their conclusion is that there should be something that they have this strong, unassailable feeling of this is what I need to do, that they find through introspection. and then when they match that to a job, they love their job. And that's just not the way the formula works.

We know a lot about what leads people to great satisfaction in their work, and it has very little to do with matching the subject of that work to some sort of pre-existing inclination for one field or another. True satisfaction and passion and work comes from much more complicated factors, such as a sense of mastery, a sense of impact on the world, a sense of connection to other people, a sense of creative expression. And these are traits that really have nothing to do with very specific types of work. It's sort of an approach to work. It's general goals that you can get out

of many different fields. And it's hard work to get there. I mean, passion is something that I always say that comes after time. You don't start with the passion. Your goal should be to cultivate passion for what you do. Yes. And essentially, passion is just a fuel that you burn over time. That's really well stated. What would you say, Cal, to this audience? if you could challenge them with one thing. I'd like to ask this question from time to time. So assuming we could just transport our very large audience to Washington, D.C., and one by one, they could sit down with you over coffee, and you would share one thought with them.

What would it be to encourage them? Well, I mean, especially with this topic and especially with talking to entrepreneurs, you know, I would tell them satisfaction, love of your work, you know, passion for your work. this is a complicated thing that arises over time. So don't look at sort of your day-to-day feelings, like am I happy today or not happy today, am I engaged today, are I feeling overwhelmed today, as some sort of really important indicator of are you doing the right thing, are you doing the right business? You need to take the long view. Am I building towards something I think is important?

Do I feel like I'm doing something of value? Do I feel like I'm going to have impact on the world? I'll tell you who gets this right, is actually Christian theology gets this right, especially Catholic theology, has a very complicated theology surrounding meaningful work. You know, you're a steward on earth of the gifts you were given, and meaning is putting those into action and being a good steward of your time on earth. And I think there's a lot that can be learned from that philosophy. It's not about, was I thrilled today about what I was doing?

It's more, am I deeply satisfied about my career as a whole? Mm-hmm. Good stuff. He is Cal Newport, the book we have been discussing at, Length is deep work rules for focus success in a distracted world. And again, folks, I'm not just saying this to make him feel good. I really believe you should run out and get so good. They can't ignore you. Both of these are great reads. Read them. Back to back, dive into them, digest them, and most importantly, apply them. Cal, we appreciate you here at the Entry Leadership Podcast. We'd love to have you back sometime, and we're better for this conversation. And we thank you. Well, thank you. Ken. I enjoyed it.

So, folks, I'm doing some research on Cal, beyond the book. And I saw this quote on his website and I want to share it with you because I think it's like an extra little nugget and I'm going to say it slow and you can go back and listen to it because I think you need to write it down and I think this needs to be a mantra for all of us this year. Here's what he said. Focus is the new IQ and the knowledge economy. Individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. Boom. Boom. rewind it, listen to it again, write it down, put it somewhere inside your closet, next to your mirror, get it somewhere where you see it, I think, every morning, maybe every night too.

This theme that focus is my new IQ. That's good stuff. Hey, I want to tell you about InfusionSoft and their 2017 strategic planning kit. It's not too late to get this. Let me just tell you something. It's entitled the 2017 Strategic Planning Kit, but this is good, no matter what year

you live in, and it's good at any time. This is five steps to create a strategy. Your strategy. It's going to help you identify the purpose of what you're going after. Maybe you need help identifying the purpose of your business.

Go back. If you haven't done that, go back and do it. And any time you move forward on something big, what's the purpose. It's going to help you analyze results so that you can continue to improve. This is the idea of a scoreboard. I think scoreboard is huge. Everybody's got to know what score is. It's going to help you understand how strategy guides your planning. This is important. Sometimes people will do a strategy session and then forget to apply it to the plans. It'll help you establish a meeting rhythm for success and it will involve and motivate your employees. That's the biggest part. It gets them into the process.

The phrase I love so much is skin in the game. So, that's just a overview, brief snapshot of what Infusionsoft is providing you. The PDF is absolutely free and you can get it at infusionsoft.com slash 2017

Planning Kit or we have the link for you in the show notes. Don't forget to download our goal tracker and hey, we want to hear how it's helping you because we want to hear your success stories. We want to brag on you. So send us those stories, podcast at Entreeleadership.com.

On behalf of Eric, the producer and the entire Entre leadership team, thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.