EntreLeadership - #327: Simplify Your Life With Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

Have you ever wondered if you are addicted to Instagram? How about Facebook? Take a second and think about how many times you mindlessly look at your phone in one day. Although best-selling author Cal Newport says more and more of us are questioning our relationship with personal technology, we’re fighting an uphill battle as tech companies are spending billions of dollars to monopolize our attention. Tune in as Cal breaks down ways to reclaim a more focused and meaningful life in an increasingly noisy world. Trust us—your brain will thank you.   entreleadership.com/podcast Buy the book: Digital Minimalism Get Digital Minimalism with a free trial of Audible Cal Newport's website Episode #182: Cal Newport—Focused Success in a Distracted World Download: EntreLeadership Reading Guide   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You probably signed up for some of these services like most of us, not realizing that hundreds and millions of dollars are being invested to say, how can we transform you into a gadget that's just entering data into the databases where it could be monetized. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders,

four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Here's what we've got coming up on today's program. A return guest and one of the hottest authors out there, he is Cal Newport. And then we have a great resource for you. And it turns out it is one of our most popular resources. Alex Judd will join me in studio to talk about it and give it to you. So let's get to it.

Now, Cal Newport is not a new name to this program. And if you're reading books or paying attention to where the hottest books are, certainly in the business and personal growth space and leadership, space. You've heard of Cal Newport. He is somebody who is focusing clearly on the intersection of technology and culture, and then how does that impact us as leaders and men and women who are on purpose. He was with us on episode 182 talking around his very popular bestseller, Deep Work. And so now he is back with us. This most recent book is a New York Times bestseller, and we are excited about that. It is entitled Digital Minimalism.

Digital minimalism. Now, that's a handful when you kind of check that out. But don't check out of this because this hits every one of us. And I hope you're okay with your toes being stepped on in a very nice professional way, because this is going to do it. Here is my conversation with Cal Newport. Cal, it's always good to have you on the program. I love this book, the follow-up here to deep work. And what a timely message this is. Before we get into a lot of the book, I think it would be great to just let let you weigh in on how we got here. You know, we all know how this digital world has pervaded kind of every corner of our world. That's not a surprise to anybody.

So really interested on your take on that. How did we get to this point where it's just all-consuming? Well, it really snuck up on us. And so something I picked up on is that it wasn't really until the last, let's say, two years before people in general began to get uneasy about their relationship with technology. that, it was more of a period of exuberance. I mean, this tech was interesting. We had these supercomputers in our pocket. They could connect to high-speed internet anywhere in the world. There's all these interesting new services, and people really enjoyed it. The shift seemed to be is that at some point, right around 2016, 2017, people began to get uneasy about not

what they were doing when they were looking at their phones, but how much time they were looking at them. And there was this sort of cultural reawakening. Wait a second. I looked at this thing for six hours today. I looked at this for three hours a day. I'm looking at this when I'm with my friends. I'm looking at us when I'm with my kids. It was this sense of I feel as if I'm losing some autonomy. I'm losing some control over what I spend my time on and what I care about. That began growing in the last couple of years. And I think before that, people were pretty okay with what was going with their tech. After that tipping point, I think people are starting to question, is my relationship actually all that healthy with these devices.

Boy, that's such a powerful, stark example, because when you look at that six hours to use your example, it wasn't coming in large chunks per se. It's these little nicks, which feeds into so much of what you write about. And that is this idea that I'm looking at it for five minutes here, I'm looking at it for 15 minutes over here, two minutes, two minutes, and you look at how unproductive you're becoming.

It's truly shocking, isn't it? Well, it really is. And there's a real cost, first of all, to network switching, which is what neuroscientists call it when you actually take your attention and move it from one target to another. Our brain is not good at doing that. It takes a lot of resources.

We're putting a cognitive drain on ourselves, both in work and outside of work, when we're constantly looking at these things. The other factor that's going on here is that, especially outside of work, this is somewhat new. The way that we used to use social media, the way we used to use our smartphones,

was much more batched. Maybe you would log onto your computer, you would go on the Facebook, So I'm going to go see what my friends are up to. There was actually a great re-engineering that occurred about five or six years ago, where the social media companies in particular were trying to figure out how do we get people to look down at these screens more often. We have to get those numbers up. The only way to get a revenue numbers up is to convince people that they have to look at the screens all the time. And so these services were re-engineered to try to foster this new model of technology use, which I call the constant companion model, a model in which you look at your phone all the time.

So that's actually somewhat new, and it was something that was designed for a very specific goal. Not to make, for example, social media as useful as possible, but instead they get revenue numbers as high as possible for a small number of companies. Okay, so we can't go any further. We've got to understand the rules of the game if we're going to win in this game, and you just laid it out. But let's go deeper. Give me a couple examples of what they did specifically that made us feel like we have to be looking at it. I'm guessing if I'm looking at Instagram or Snapchat, it was all about likes. Is that part of the deal?

That was a big part of the deal. So it used to be with social media that it was a Web 2.0 model, classic Web 2.0 model of I post things, you post things. I occasionally go to see what you have posted. They really changed that. And Facebook took the lead here by introducing likes, because now every time you tapped on that app on, let's say, your phone, you could see social approval indicators waiting for you. And not only would there be social approval indicators waiting for you, but it's intermittent. So sometimes you tap that. no one's thinking about me. Other times you tap that, lots of people are thinking about me.

Sometimes you tap that and people are upset at you. That type of feedback is irresistible, and it got people checking all the time. They didn't also did a lot of attention engineering into the interfaces. So they had experts out there who studied what colors are we using in the palettes. How do we update? Do we click next to go to a next screen of post or is an endless scrolling? And they put a lot of attention in trying to figure out how do we make the interfaces as compelling as possible to try to foster people to use it longer or come back to it more. So it was that combination, transforming the experience to be about social approval indicators incoming about you and changing the interfaces to be as appealing as possible. That combination really changed the whole experience

of us and our phones from this tool that we used occasionally into this companion that we were looking at all the time. Wow. There's a couple of quotes here I want to point out from the book that you talk about. Bill Maher, who's got an unbelievable wit, whether you like the guy or not, whether you like his politics or not, he has a razor wit. You quote him as saying, Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The app store wants your soul. That's a great way of kind of emphasizing what you're saying here. We're playing in a game and we're outnumbered. Well, we really are. Billions of dollars being spent here, it's worth keeping in mind that, just to use Facebook as our primary example, they're worth around $500 billion market cap. That's almost a factor of two

larger than ExxonMobil. So they're worth twice as much as ExxonMobil. And then The main thing that they're extracting, instead of extracting oil and natural gas from the ground, they are extracting attention from your head. And so if you think about all the effort, let's say an oil company goes through to really build new technology to innovate, to try to get as much oil as they can out of the ground, imagine a company twice as large trying to do the same thing with your head. Of course, they're going to be really good at it. This deck is not stacked in your advantage. You probably signed up for some of these services like most of us for somewhat idle or haphazard reasons. This sounds fun. I want to know what my cousins are up to.

I can check in what's going on at high school, not realizing that hundreds and millions of dollars are being invested to say, how can we transform you into a gadget that's just entering data after data after data into the databases where it could be monetized. Not necessarily that's a bad thing, but you have to recognize the force you're up against. Where we get in trouble is not because these services are bad. Where we get in trouble is where we don't pay attention into how we're using them. And that's when we look up and say, where do those six hours go? That's exactly right. Okay, so let's do a little bit of an assessment. I think we are all probably way too distracted and, well, not all of us, but a large portion

of the human race is kind of stuck in this game right now. We're losing the game. What are some questions, some self-assessment questions or things that we can kind of challenge ourselves on to see how far down the rabbit hole we are? Well, so I talked to psychologists about this. And I said, here's the question. Are people addicted? Is that the right word?

I mean, this seems different somehow than a substance addiction. And what I learned is, yes, what's going on with people in the relationships with their phones is different than, say, a substance addiction. Where people have trouble, it's where they fall into what psychologists call a moderate behavioral addiction. And the way you can assess whether or not you fall into a moderate behavioral addiction is if you are using the device more than you know is useful, more than you know is healthy, and to the exclusion of things you know are more important. So it's when it starts to negatively interfere with the quality of your life that you have cross-es. over a boundary from this is something I deploy entirely for my advantage into something that's actually starting to take advantage of me. So if you look up and say, you know what, it was bath time

with my kids and I was looking at my phone and I was sort of ashamed of myself for doing that. Or I'm at dinner with friends I haven't seen in a long time. And yet I have to keep glancing down at the phone to see if there's a message from another friend and you're upset about that. You realize that's really not what you want to be doing. If you look at the screen time report from Apple on your iPhone and you're surprised by, wait a second, I didn't mean to spend that many hours this week on social media. Those are signs that you've crossed over the border into something that you might want to address.

Okay, really good stuff. Right. Now, let's talk about something that you write about in the book. And this is the digital declutter. So already we're going, okay, we know what this is, Cal, we get it. Some people like decluttering. I love throwing stuff away at the house. I love getting rid of junk.

My wife likes to hold on to everything. So let's take this into context of some people. This idea of decluttering is not fun for others. They go, man, this is great. great, can't wait. How do we do or how do we make the digital declutter happen? Well, first, just to motivate the clutter, the underlying motivation is that small changes don't seem to be working with this issue. So just like when you face a closet that has too much stuff in it, just to occasionally take something out or to bring in a new organizer usually doesn't

solve the problem. The closet's still really overstuffed. It's the same thing with what's going on in our digital lives. The forces are so powerful that it's very difficult to just tweet. let's say notifications or to have some sort of rules like I try to take Friday night off from using my phone something more substantial needs to be done so in the closet analogy that substantial thing is empty the whole thing out and say what do I really want to put back in there and I'm saying we have to do something similar with our digital lives we essentially have to clear out all of these apps and services that we've haphazardly brought into our life and really say what do I need to be using this for and very carefully rebuild that digital life from scratch but do you

do so this time with a lot more more intention. So when I say declutter, that's more or less what I have in mind. It's wiping the slate clean and then rebuilding your digital life, but much more carefully than the first time around. Okay. All right. Let's play devil's advocate here. Cal, I get it.

But if I'm going to take a certain amount of time, a prolonged time and completely check out, get off of these services or these sites, or whatever it is, I'm going to do something serious. It's a serious cleanup. I'm going to start over. What about my brand? What about my business? I got to do this.

I got to do that. And if I disappear on social media, I'm losing my competitive advantage. Something like that. I can hear that thought. Yeah, I mean, and it's a good thought. So what I actually recommend at the broad level is to actually take 30 days. Because I think people actually need some space to get back in touch with what's important and what they really want to spend their time on. So how do you decide what to take the break from in those 30 days?

Well, I use the term optional in the book, which I define as meaning things that you can step away from without it causing trouble. trouble. So it's sort of a self-referential definition. Now, what about the things that you use occasionally, or in some ways, very importantly, but a lot of ways that are not? So maybe your business requires you to do some regular posting on Facebook, but you're also spending hours a day idly just looking on there unrelated to your business. In those cases, when you're going through this process, you put up fences. You say, okay, for these 30 days, here's when and how I'm going to do this particular behavior. And so a lot of the people who went through this process as part of the research for my book, when they had, for example, social media overlap their business life,

they typically took it off their phone, they kept it just on their desktop computer, and they had a bit of a schedule. At these times, I go on to do these things. And over a 30-day period, you're not missing out of that much. They're still doing most of what they need to do, but they're also getting a sort of vastly different engagement with their device. So a little common sense goes a long way here. You don't have to put the phone in the dumpster or get rid of your microwave, But it's about taking optional technologies, taking a break for 30 days, get back in touch with what really matters. And where something is important, well, you can still keep it, but maybe put up some fences so that its footprints not so big in your life. Okay. Now, when we take this time off, let's take your 30-day construct here.

What are some positive things we need to be doing when we're kind of taking the sabbatical, if you will, or greatly restraining what we have been doing on social or digital? Well, it's exactly the right question because I ran 1,600 people through this. process when I was working on the book. And one of the number one factors that differentiated who made substantial sustainable change and who ended up just going back to their normal habits, the big differentiating factors what they did during those 30 days. So the group that had a lot of success with sustainable change were very active in those 30 days, doing both reflection and experimentation. So actually reflecting, hey, what's important to me? What am I trying to do with my life, especially with my time outside of work, how do I want to be spending my time? What are the

activities I value? And with self-experimentation, actually going out there and trying things, signing up for things, joining things, doing things, and trying to get a sense, what do I actually care about? What do I actually like? Trying to fill in the blanks on the question of what they want to be doing instead of just looking at their phone. Because as it turns out, for a lot of people, the phone became an escape. At first, it's something you looked at during purely idle moments. You know, I'm bored. I'm waiting in line, I get a bit of distraction. That was good. But for a lot of people, it grew beyond that. And it began to push out of their life other types of activities. And this is especially true

among young people who have grown up with these phones. It has taken over their leisure life, to the point where they don't really have high quality, sustainable, satisfying life sustaining type activities or nearly as much as we might have had in generations past. So to actually get out there and answer the question of what is important, that's the crucial thing to do. And that's why I think you need this 30 days, as opposed to just as you would do the closet, just take an afternoon and make some changes. Yeah, you mentioned a word there in that answer that I want to kind of segue into the rest of our conversation or the next part of our conversation.

And that was the word reflection. I believe in the power reflection. I think it's huge. I just don't know how you can be your best if you don't have some type of regular rhythm of reflection. That's just my personal opinion. But in order to do that, you got to be alone. And you write a lot about this.

You talk about solitude. this has become this almost extinct, rare function in our lives, this idea of being alone with our thoughts, just alone, period. Let's talk about the power of solitude, but before we do that, and then we'll get into reflection, just the fact that what we're dealing with, why are we so averse or we're just not putting ourselves in a situation where we can be alone with our thoughts and quiet long enough to actually feel and think something? Well, this is actually really new. the whole history of our species, that we've always had regular bouts of solitude in our daily experience. And solitude, we should be really clear here. People often think about solitude in terms of

isolation. Right. Like, you really need to be far away from other people. You need to be in a cabin in the woods. But actually, the definition of solitude that I care about is one that says you are free from inputs from other minds. So it's not about where you are in physical spaces, about what your mind is doing. And you can really imagine our mind has two modes. There's one mode where it's, okay, I am processing some input that another human produced. So I'm reading something, I'm talking to someone, I'm listening to something. That's a very particular mode.

The other mode is I am observing the world around me and am thinking. And that's solitude. So with that definition, that really lowers the bar. We're not talking about Thoreau here. You're not going to have to climb to the top of the mountain, right? This is something that in a crowded subway car and a crowded, coffee shop, you can very easily be in a state of solitude, just like in the middle of the Appalachian trail, if you have your phone with you, you might not be. So the solitude I'm talking about is just

you alone with your own thoughts, not processing information from another mind. This used to be 100% unavoidable. Just throughout your day, you would have solitude. 15 years ago, this would be unavoidable. I'm doing the laundry. I'm walking to my car. I'm in line at the CVS or something like this. But in the last 15 years, we've invested all this money into building these miraculous inventions, this sort of worldwide high-speed wireless internet that can be accessed by this thing in your pocket with huge data farms full of servers trying to pick with great algorithms just a perfect thing to show you to distract you at any moment. And for the first time in human history, we're experimenting with what happens when you get rid of every last moment of solitude.

You take every moment of time you have that's free and give yourself self. some sort of input that was generated from another mind, typically through your phone or through an earbud. That is unprecedented. We've never tried it before. It's very new in the histories of our species, but the evidence seems to be, and this should not be surprising, I guess, for something so fundamental, the results aren't good. It is not good for the human brain to starve it of complete solitude. It was never designed to be used in that way. Okay, so I'm sitting here listening to you, and I was thinking to myself, okay, I want to get into reflection. And then when you said what you said, this idea that you could be in a coffee shop

and be in solitude. And I agree with you. I think you're absolutely right. However, for me, the ADHD brain, non-medicated, by the way, for me, silence helps me in that way. But you're absolutely right. So you can sit there. And I went to your coffee shop example. And I started thinking, Cal, I was like, okay, the next time I'm in a coffee shop waiting for an order, how about I not get in my phone? Now, I'm talking to myself right now. I'm stepping on my own toes. I keep the phone in the pocket. And I just observe everything in the coffee shop and I look around. And I'm a guy who hosts a radio show nationally every day helping people in their career.

There's a million things that I could observe that could probably turn into something valuable. Maybe not. But if it could also could happen, if I'm just observing. And I got the thought, that's the idea of reflecting. If you think about a mirror, it reflects an image. You know, if you look in the water, clear water, you know, the famous scene from Lion King, you know, he looks in the water. Mufasa has him look in the water, you know, know who you are, this kind of thing. This idea of putting the phones away and actually being in solitude but observing, I don't know, Cal,

that's just the thought I had. I'm going to throw that back at you. If you think it's awful, then you can shoot it down. I won't hurt my feelings. But this idea of what we can learn and observe just by reflecting being a mirror and seeing what we're actually in the midst of. It's a great point. And it's absolutely true.

What we know from the neuroscience is that when your brain is, instead in the mode of, I am processing input that came from another mind, so I'm listening to someone. Your brain doesn't really make a great distinction between the persons in front of you or you're reading or you're listening to them. But when you're processing input from another mind, it's a very specialized mode of the brain and basically nothing else gets done. Including big insight, novel observation, self-reflection, self-development, professional creativity, all of the other things you want your brain to do, essentially that's all put on standby when your brain is in input processing mode.

And so that's one of the huge things you lose when you're doing the solitude deprivation. So that's why it could feel like a novel experience to be in the coffee shop, not looking at your phone, just looking around at you. But you're actually unshackling your brain and allowing your brain to do brain things.

Because your brain can't be in both modes at the same time. And so I think there's any number of great insights both professionally and personally that have come out of looking at the crowd, the proverbial crowd. You know, you're at the cafe in Paris is in the 19th century and you're looking at the crowd walking by or you're Proust

and you have your matalines and you have this idea of, you know, I'm going to write a whole book and it's going to change the way we understand memory and life and Nietzsche walking the mountains. It's classic. Big thoughts, self-reflection, self-development professional insight happens.

Once your brain is free, to start just looking at things, thinking about things, reassociating. You know, it should be pointed out, Cal. Some of these people are listening to me right now going, Ken, that's all really nice. But I'm going to look like a weirdo standing in the coffee shop or the restaurant, standing there, scanning the world and scanning the room.

I'm going to look like a weirdo looking at people. And it occurs to me that no one's going to even notice that you're looking at them because they're all on their devices. That's true. I get this from my readers a lot who have gone through the processes I talk about, is they talk about, they often use the word surreal. Yeah. It's surreal to be in these circumstances.

One dad was telling me about the first time he went to the playground with his kids once he started the 30-day process. And he said, I was the only parent there not looking down. And it feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone, right? Once you actually look up. And the weird thing about this is, you know, we're worried that people are going to think we're weird if we're not looking at the phone. Like that's somehow a radical thing to do. But you only have to go back in time, let's say, 10 years. If you went back in time just 10 years, you wanted to see that behavior.

So if you took a time traveler from just 10 years ago and brought until today, they would immediately notice why is everyone looking down. I mean, it would catch their attention immediately. They would say, this is very unusual. The first thing I've noticed after I get out of my time machine from 2005 or something, the first thing I notice is everyone's looking down at their hand. And so it's an incredibly recent behavior that's become ubiquitous very fast. It's so true. You know what? It was a nicer place back then, too.

I was just thinking the last time I was in an elevator, you know, in the 10 years, 15 years ago, you got in the elevator, you'd make eye contact with somebody and you either chose to be a jerk or you'd go, hi, how are you? Good to see you. Now, you're not going to make high contact with anybody. Everybody in the elevator is keenly aware of the spatial, you know, situation, but you're all looking at your phone. Nobody's talking anybody anymore. Yeah. Well, and the other cause, so solitude was something I didn't know a lot about, but I really went down this rabbit hole when I was working on the book. The other costs, so you lose out on these positive opportunities to meet people, have insights, have self-development. But then there's the negative cost, which is our brains were not designed to constantly be devoid of solitude. So what happens when you take it away? Anxiety seems to be the answer. And so we have also afflicted upon our culture this persistent, low-grade background anxiety that people now just think this is just part of the human condition. I guess we should always just feel a little bit anxious.

And this is especially pronounced among young people who have banished solitude to an extreme that is sort of hard to imagine. I mean, they're essentially looking at these things as they fall asleep and as they wake up. Anxiety is jumping up. This is actually a neurological artifact. You're taking this brain computer and you're sticking at an input processing mode and you're never giving it a chance to breathe or do maintenance. It's not natural for the brain. And so the consequences, we feel bad. So we're missing out positively on interesting.

insights and connections. And on the negative front, we're just making our actual affect worse, the way we feel gets worse, much in the way that if you don't use their muscles, they're going to atrophy. You can't take a brain and starve it of solitude and expect it to function normally or expect yourself to feel normal. Yeah, it's an incredible insight, folks. Let me tell you, if you're a parent right now, you didn't tune in to listen to parenting, but I'm telling you that right there goes both ways. I'm going to tell you right now, we've already decided, and we've told some friends that they think we're nuts. They don't think I'll stick with it.

They have no idea how not worried I am about embarrassing my kid. But we're not doing social media at all until the kids graduate high school. I've already told them. The day you graduate high school, go nuts. Go get your whatever accounts are going to be there five years from now. I got a 13-year-old. But these kids, Cal, I'm going to tell you something. It is destroying the psychological makeup of these young people who are in the very early.

in developmental stages, middle school kids are already going through physiological changes and hormone changes. And then, as you said, the psyche and they're retraining the brains. Anyway, I'm just telling you, you need to go back and listen to that with your wife or ladies, if you're listening, listen to your husband, because Cal just dropped it out there. We're talking about real brain development. This is neuroscience stuff. Great stuff. Okay, sorry, I just wanted to rubber stamp everything you said, Cal, because I think it's really important. Well, and I'd say I'm just, I'm glad to hear what you said about your kids because I think that's the absolute right thing to do.

People don't seem quite ready to do it yet, so I'm very happy to hear you say that you are. I've seen the data. It's very scary for teenagers, especially teenage girls. Absolutely. You look at these charts on self-harm and hospitalizations for self-harm and suicide attempts, and you look at it plotted over age, and as soon as you get to the cohort that had smartphones and social media and adolescents, it rises at a rate faster than any trend that demographers have ever seen change before between generations.

It's scary. It's public health. The teens yell about it. I have to have it. But I don't know. I remember saying that about a lot of things when I was growing up to and it didn't make a lick of difference to my parents. They say, I don't care if you have to have it. You don't get it. I think that needs to be the standard. And I got to tell you, I meet a lot of teens on the road working on this book. They're self-reporting the same things. This is not a case of, you know, adults are saying kids these days and kids are saying the adults are just out of it. The teenagers themselves are saying this is tearing me apart. It's taking over. It's taking over. my life. It's ruining my mental health. They are looking for an excuse not to have to be shackled to these social devices. So anyways, I second Ken's plan that he's doing here. And you can point your kids towards me and I say, no, your dad's right. Yeah, well, I've already told them and they don't get it. Like, I don't care. I really don't care what they think, you know, because you and I, listen, I grew up in the 80s, okay? So I didn't have a cell phone, okay? I didn't have a cell phone in college for crying out loud. They still had those flip motorola phones. I think were just coming out when I was finishing college.

You know, I remember having plenty of anxiety and angst, just normal stuff, you know, just dealing with girls, for heaven's sake. Can you imagine all the stuff these kids are putting up with? And it's absolutely insane. And, you know, Cal, you've seen the future. Just one final point on this because, well, I'm the host and I'm on the mic. One final thing here to you parents, and I'll say it, I don't mind being the bad guy. Cal, you've seen this.

And I'll let you get the last word on this. we are going to see some data in five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now, that we have no idea what that data is going to tell us about all this crap, about social media, the phones, the devices, the nonstop engagement. We're too early in to know what the real effects are. We have some signs like you just mentioned. And kids, for heaven's sakes, if kids are self-selecting and telling Cal this, what else do you need to hear?

But I'm just telling you, and I'm the most positive guy there is. I believe in always a better day, but we don't know the impact on our kids and us as adults. I think it's going to be another decade or so before we see this. Well, I think within a decade, we're going to see a huge change. I gave this quote to GQ Magazine earlier this year, and it created a bit of a stir, but I sort of stand by it. I said, 10 years from now, we're going to look back at social media and teenagers and think of it as being equivalent to giving a 13-year-old cigarettes. I think you're absolutely right. We're going to get to the point just with cigarettes and just like with alcohol.

we've realized that teenage brain is different than the adult brain. It is much more susceptible to certain things. If you give a cigarette to a 13 year old, that's a very different proposition to giving it to a 21 year old. If you give a drink to a 21 year old, it's going to have a much bigger impact. You're here. Give a drink to a 25 year old. I think that's where we're going to end up. I think my oldest kid, I have three. My oldest is six. My prediction that I've been saying throughout this tour is that by the time this becomes relevant for him, I don't think the type of thing you're talking about is going to be unusual anymore. I think it's going to be the Well, that's good. I hope so. Well, I'm about ready to really be a weirdo, but I'm okay with it. All right. Getting into some tactical things here that will help us. I love this. Of course, you talk about leaving the phone at home for certain things. You know, Simon Seneca was a good friend, but on this program multiple times, you know, he talks about just don't even take it to dinner, all that. I want to move into taking long walks. I'm going to combine these cow and let you teach on them because I got off on a tangent. Taking long walks and writing letters to yourself, otherwise known as maybe journaling. I think these are so good. And again, we're talking about solitude here and the value it brings. Teach us on the virtue of those two disciplines. Well, long walks is something that comes up again and again and again when you study interesting thinkers throughout history. They all seem to deploy the same strategy, which is they walk and they walk for a long time and if possible, they walk in nature. And we don't have all of the neuroscience or psychology worked out for why this works, but whatever it is, there's something about the movement, locomotion versus just sitting

still and something about being in nature versus, let's say, being around other people, that just opens up pathways in the brain that are otherwise hard to access. And so countless big insights, novel ideas at the large scale, at the personal scale, have come out of just walking and being alone with your thoughts. And so I can tell you, in the small town where I live, we moved here about a year ago, and I'm already known as the eccentric professor because I walked the same paths through the town. And they'll say, well, I don't understand. I just saw you 20 minutes ago. Are you lost? Because why are you walking by my house again? But it's because I fully embrace this timeless wisdom that walks are important. And then writing to yourself is another way of unlocking

the type of self-reflection that is really atrophied in an age in which we're constantly distracting ourselves with inputs from other minds. And so this is something Dwight Eisenhower did a lot of, for example. When he needed the work through complicated issues, especially when he was a Supreme Allied commander during the invasion of Europe, during World War II, he would write himself letters, because it turns out

that writing imposes a structure onto your thoughts that is otherwise hard to maintain if something's just in your head, because when you write, you're in essence, you're extending your working memory so you can record ideas, not have to keep it just in your brain, and you can go back to those ideas and reference them again, and you can think

much more complicated and nuanced structures when you write things down. And so writing a letter to yourself, it doesn't have to be a letter. I use journals. It's not in letter format. But just writing through your thoughts and trying to record them in a sophisticated prose is a superpower boost to your ability to self-reflect. It allows you to actually construct much more subtle and nuanced insights into issues you care about, be them professional or personal, than if you're just trying to think on your own. All right.

Good stuff. Now, before we let you go, I want to focus a little bit. bit on reclaiming leisure. When I first read this, I thought to myself, I hope this doesn't mean we get leisure suits back, for those of you who are old enough to know what a leisure suit is. None of the guys behind the glass here have any idea what I'm talking about, Cal. I'm surrounded by millennials. They don't even know what a leisure suit is. But I think there's something great here, this idea of reclaiming leisure. I'm going to just tee you up real quick, let you teach quickly on each of these. One leisure lesson is prioritized demanding activity over passive consumption.

What does that look like? Well, we get great value out of actually going out there and doing things, especially with our hands. And so, like, the official terminology would be taking an intention from your mind and making it manifest in the world. We're evolved to really crave this. This is the fundamental drive that got us to discover fire and build spears and build buildings. We want to actually go out there and do things. They go out there in the real world and build something or get the ball into the net or hit the fastball or make the music come out of this instrument in the way that we want it to come out of.

We're wired for that to be very fulfilling, and it's fundamentally different than just passively consuming information that algorithms have selected to be highly palatable. You've got to get out there and do things as opposed to just consuming things if you want to get the full benefits of leisure. Love it. Okay. Use your skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. So skills are important.

We get much more value out of activities that require us to build a skill. and where we can see the results improve as our skill gets better. So you learn how to build something. As you can become a better woodworker, you can see I created this, and the thing I created this time was better than the thing I created a week ago.

That's highly fulfilling. And the physical world aspect, that's this whole notion that I was just talking about, that we're wired, that we want to see intention made manifest in a concrete world. It's that fundamental human drive, which is why we build things

and we develop and we innovate and we're not just happy, like other animals just going around our day-to-day life, just running our routine. It is a fundamental drive that has been crucial to our success, but it's also something that becomes impoverished when we can fill every minute of our leisure time with this sort of passive activity. All right. And then finally, seek activities that require real world, structured social interactions.

Well, one of the other great benefits of high-quality leisure activities is that those activities that require you to do things with other people can be intensely socially satisfying. And so I talk in the book, for example, about something as simple as playing a board game, or I'll say a poker game with other people. It seems simple, but when you're sitting there, let's say, playing poker with some other dads like I do on a regular basis, it gives you a structure in which you can let loose in some sense, right? It breaks down some barriers, you can rib each other, you can have fun, you can make fun, you can laugh uproariously, things that you're not normally going to do, let's say, just during the normal workday or when you're in line at the store,

structured social interaction, social leisure activities, give you the ability to actually tap into some of these more extreme socializing behaviors that are really satisfying and that our body actually craves. Team athletics is another one. I mean, you're slapping five and doing what you need to do. If you're playing baseball, you're hitting the player on the rear, right? That would be weird if you did that in the store. But when you're in the context of a game, there's a sort of joyousness,

there's a sort of connection that's deeper than we normally get. And so that's a highly satisfying thing to do. do and you can't replicate it looking at a screen. Although I must say if we slapped a fellow guy coworker on the rear in the office, it'd be kind of funny. Maybe even the chest bump when he did something well. A little over the top, yes, but, you know, still somewhat safe in today's world. So how funny is that?

And if you had a leisure suit on at the same time. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you very much. The guys, by the way, Cal, so I got into that question. They immediately pulled up on their phone. Both these guys are in their 20s, pulled up leisure suits, and we were. We're doubled over behind the glass. It's a good thing I'm a professional and could keep focus.

By the way, before we go any further, I need to make a note to talk to Stacey. Cal Newport said that I need to be playing poker more often. Okay, great. We got that. For your cognitive health. For your cognitive health. Thank you, Cal. That's a key point.

For my cognitive health, actually. That's very good. Well, folks, he is Cal Newport. You've heard him before. The guy's one of the great thinkers. His work is so thorough. That's why I love it. It's not a bunch of theory.

This is really proven stuff based on tons and tons of research. The book is Digital Minimalism, Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Cal always a thrill to have you on the program. Love what you're doing. It's really valuable. And we know your time is as well. And for that, we're really grateful for having you. Well, thanks, Kane.

It was my pleasure. Hope you enjoyed our conversation with Cal. Again, the book is Digital Minimalism. And so if you're interested in getting that book or getting the free audio book, you can find the link in this episode's show notes. Well, we talked about this at the top of the program. We said we're going to bring you one of our most popular free resources. And I'm a man of the people. And when I find out that it's popular, we're going to bring it back.

So the production team done a great job here. This is a great resource. A hundred books every leader needs to read. Now imagine if you've just processed everything that Cal told us, and you said, you know what, I'm going to try to get quieter. I'm going to try to put some stuff into my brain that's not digital. It's not comparison garbage. It's just good content. Well, one of the best ways you could do that would be to read.

And we've said this 100 times from our stages and from this program that readers are leaders and leaders are readers. Speaking of leaders, how about Alex Judd, one of our entree leadership coaches? He joins me in studio to talk about this idea. I know for a fact, Alex, that you are a voracious reader, which means you are a ferocious leader. You're a great leader in our organization. You're coaching leaders. Let's just talk for a moment about the impact of books on your life and your development. Yeah, it's so fascinating.

For me, and I honestly think this is the case for most highly driven growth-oriented, leadership-oriented people, is we love the idea of reading. We aspire to be readers, but so many of us don't take the time. to sit down, buy a book, and actually read. So when we're coaching business leaders around the country, we always walk through the idea that small choices make a big impact. And so we say there's three choices you need to make. First, you need to choose a book. Like, just choosing the book you're going to read next,

that's choice number one. Then you need to choose someone to hold you accountable. Maybe that's a coach. Maybe that's a friend. Maybe that's someone in your business. Maybe it's a colleague. Maybe it's your leader. Someone that's going to say, hey, did you read your chapter this morning?

and then finally choose a deadline. It's so funny when you choose those three things. Choose the book, choose the accountability person, and then choose the deadline. You set yourself up to be a reader, whether you like it or not. And that's what our team did, is they created this list.

It's of 100 books that we think every person that is interested in leadership needs to read. There's everything from biographies to communication, some incredible goals and productivity and culture books. This list is comprehensive. I help the team create it, And we're so excited to share that with the listeners today. So text 100 books to 33444.

Again, 100 books to 33444. That list is going to help you make the choice of the book you're going to read. Then you just need to find some accountability and choose a deadline and you'll be good to go. All right. Good stuff. Now, do you have a favorite out of these 100? Oh, man. The book's Shoe Dog, the story of how Nike was built.

Unbelievable. It is so good. If y'all read that, send me a tweet or something because that book, will blow your mind. All right, there it is. So, a hundred books. Now, what I like about the girth of this list, it's going to take you a while to read 100 books. So we've gone ahead and done the work.

We've got the list. Just don't get intimidated by it. Get a book. Go for it. Such good stuff here. And I'm going to tell you something, if you can develop a habit of actually consuming good thoughts on an intentional and very consistent basis. it's a game changer for you.

And I do love Alex, as you point out. We've got such a nice grouping of content. You want to be a balanced learner? Look no further than this list. What's crazy is so often I read things that I'm passionate about that I love that are associated with my strengths. And that's really good. And you should be doing that. But this list encourages me to read in areas that I need to improve that I may not be passionate about and that I need to get better at.

So it's like you said, holistic, comprehensive. let's get after it, folks. All right. Well, thanks for joining us in studio and helping put the list together. I tried to put one scratch and sniff in there, and it didn't make it. So there's always next year. We'll try to get in the editorial meeting. One more time, you can text the phrase 100. That's 100-0-0-0 books.

1-0-0 books. Text at the 3-34-4-4. That's 3-4-4-4. Or, of course, we've got the link in the show notes. All right, big thanks to Cal for hanging out with us, and thanks to Alex, as always, for joining us here. And I think that's going to do it for this episode, so as we always say, but we certainly mean,

on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of the Ken Coleman show. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly 70% of Americans are disengaged at work.

If you dread going into work every Monday morning and you're just trying to make it to the weekend, the Ken Coleman show is for you. Everyone has a sweet spot. Your sweet spot is at the intersection of your greatest talent and greatest passion. We will help you discover what it is you were born to do and then will help you create a plan to make your dream job a reality. You matter and you have what it takes. Join the conversation on the Ken Coleman Show. To hear full episodes, just search Ken Coleman.

Coleman in iTunes or go to Ken Coleman Show.com.