In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Cal Newport: How to eliminate distractions and stay focused

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

What is deep work, and why is it important? Cal Newport is known for his work on productivity and focus, and in this episode, he shares his best advise on how to eliminate distractions and getting things done. Cal and Nicolai also discuss the myths of multitasking, whether four-day work weeks are beneficial and the importance of respecting your attention. Tune in and focus on the valuable insights from computer science professor and best-selling author Cal Newport!The production team for this episode includes PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Arabella Graves and Isabelle Karlsson.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, everybody. We are thrilled to have Cal Newport on the show today, known for his groundbreaking work on deep work and digital minimalism. Now, Cal has revolutionized the way we approach productivity and focus in the digital age. And basically, you are what you focus on, and today we focus on you, Cal, and your work. So, big welcome. Well, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Now, first of all, what is deep work? Well, deep work is the state you're in, in which you are giving full concentration to a cognitively demanding task. So the two aspects to it is what you're doing requires a lot of concentration, and you're giving it concentration without any distraction. So it's actually getting your full attention. Those two things together means you're doing deep work. And why is it important?

Well, this is the number one way you produce valuable things using the human brain. If your goal is, I want to create something valuable using my brain, the most promising cognitive state for accomplishing this goal is one of undistracted focus. Now, in your books, you talk about the fact that we've kind of forgotten to differentiate between deep work and shallow work. Tell us about it. Well, I think what happened is we got the front office IT revolution. So suddenly we have network computers in the office. We have low friction digital communication. It's easier than ever before to move information back and forth. And we accidentally created a

work culture in which we were prioritizing the communication. But by doing so, we were fracturing time into fragments too small to actually give sustained concentration to anything. We devalued unbroken concentration as an activity that mattered in knowledge work. were fracturing time into fragments too small to actually give sustained concentration to anything. We devalued unbroken concentration as an activity that mattered in knowledge work. And by doing so, I think we're greatly reducing the quality of what's being produced, and we're burning out the individuals trying to do the production. And how do you get into that mindset, that deep thinking, deep work mindset? Well, it takes time, first of all, right? I think this is important.

It's also easily subverted. It can take about 10 or 15 minutes to really get a target of your attention completely locked in. You have to inhibit certain neural networks. You have to activate other neural networks. It's why when you sit down to do something hard, it's hard for 10 or 15 minutes, and then you feel like a new gear kicks in like, oh, now I'm actually starting to make some progress. That's because your brain takes time to really lock in. So what happens then if you're trying to work on something hard and you're also doing quick checks of an email inbox or seeing what's going on on your phone, you're breaking that hard one cognitive focus state. And so deep work really requires that you remain focused on one thing without trying to change your cognitive context. How do you build this into your daily routine?

Do you have different times during the day when you do this? Well, I mean, there's answers to this question at all different levels, depending on how systemic you want to get. At the lowest level of just, I'm thinking about my day in front of me. Yeah, you schedule time for deep work and it's on your calendar and you treat it like a meeting, right? This is on my calendar. I'm going to do this thing. I'm not available during that time. And you make a deal with yourself. If I'm in a deep work session, that's what I'm doing. I'm not going to change my cognitive context while I'm working on this. When is, when during the day is the best time?

Well, it depends on the person, but most people earlier in the day is better than later. You still have more cognitive energy. You still have less distractions that have been introduced into your cognitive landscape so far, so your brain has an easier time actually focusing. Hey, I'm a proponent of the idea that meetings should be something that happens in the afternoons. That might be too radical to make that an absolute, but as a thought experiment, it's not a bad one. What's the best way to eliminate distractions?

How do you do it? Well, the biggest source of distraction in knowledge work is communication, right? So what happens is we have a mode of collaboration that we implicitly evolved once we got the front office IT revolution. I call it the hyperactive hive mind, where we work things out on the fly with ad hoc back and forth messaging. That's the number one source of distraction. If I have seven different projects I'm working on, and each of them have generated these sort of unscheduled back and forth conversations that's required for these projects to make progress, that's seven projects generating messages that

need to be seen and replied to relatively promptly. That creates an projects generating messages that need to be seen and replied to relatively promptly. That creates an atmosphere in which I have to continually check communication channels and inboxes. So if you want to solve this problem of being distracted, we actually have to solve the problem of the hyperactive hive mind. We have to find alternative ways to collaborate that don't just depend on unscheduled messages arriving that I have to see and respond to throughout the day. What is a hyperactive hive? I mean, this is the collaboration style we use without knowing it, without naming it. So I named it. We just decided once email arrived and followed by chat services, that we can all just

figure things out by talking to each other all the time. That's why I say it's a hive mind. is that we can all just figure things out by talking to each other all the time. That's why I say it's a hive mind. Oh, it's just back and forth communication with anyone. The whole office is interlinked with just these messages going back and forth. And I call it hyperactive because these are going back and forth at a really high rate. But the problem is like this whole sort of cybernetic, noospheric, we're all connected and talking to each other all day.

The problem is, is the human brain can't do it. So I're not a big fan. You're not a big fan of CC all. I'm not a big fan of CC all. I'm not a big fan of, uh, let me just immediately hit you up on Slack when I have a question and you answer me right away. That's useful to you in the moment, but it creates a macro cognitive environment that is intolerable for the human brain. I can't switch back and forth between servicing seven different projects in a 10-minute period. A crowded email inbox is like a minefield for the human brain. It can't do this well. Every message has an entirely different context that the brain has to load up just to answer, but we don't give our time enough time to do that because we have to get through 100 messages. It's exhausting. It can be deranging. enough time to do that because we have to get through 100 messages. It's exhausting. It can be deranging. On paper, it seems very efficient. But the reality of our human neurological hardware

says this way of working is not compatible with humans in the way we actually think and exist. So how should I work through my email backlog? We have to reduce the email. I wake up in the morning. I got loads of stuff, you know, because we're a global company and I get stuff from the US, from Singapore, you know what it's like. What do I do? Well, first of all, we have to get to this problem at the source, right? So wherever we have a source of email where there's another way to do that communication that doesn't require just an unscheduled message arriving in general inbox. Let's put those systems into place. Let's get rid of the idea of having a single email address associated with each person.

Now, maybe what we should have is different communication channels for different types of communication. So when it comes time for me to deal with whatever supply chain issues with international distributors, there's like a place where all that communication is. And there's a time when we look at that. We don't want all of this to arrive unscheduled, all mixed together into one big jumble that I then have to sequentially move through. So we want to reduce the unscheduled messages being generated in the first place. And then we want to pull apart having a just generic everything mixed together inbox and have more specialized communication channels. All this would be better for the human brain.

Well, I mean, talking about being interrupted, smartphones, even worse, right? I read somewhere that on average, people check their phones every seven minutes. What do you think when you hear that? Right. They do. And it was not the original purpose of these phones. I wrote this Times op-ed a few years ago about Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone, which certainly was not, this should be a constant companion that you check every seven minutes. The cause of us checking our phones all the time is actually different than the cause of us checking, for example, our email inbox all the time. The problem with phones in the non-professional context, of course,

is the rise of the professional attention economy when it was discovered around 2012. Oh, if we make these apps sticky, we can get people to look at them all the time. And there's an incredible attention resource we can mine here. So we look at our phones too much because we've put apps on the phones

designed to make us do that. We look at our email inbox too much because we have a mode of collaboration that requires us to do so. Similar sounding problems, different sources of the problem. I read somewhere that even if you hear ping and you know that there is a message on your phone, when you then solve a task, you apply less IQ to it. You become basically less intelligent just by knowing there is something on the phone. Well, we're a social species. And so for good reason, we take very seriously, for good evolutionary reasons, we take very seriously someone in our tribe needs us.

Because we've learned through our long history, if someone in our tribe needs us and we ignore them, we might get a spear in the back. So we really care about this. The problem is that same brain that's been around for a couple hundred thousand years has a hard time then with the idea of an email inbox. Because as far as it's concerned, messages in an email inbox is our tribe members need us. And every moment that we're not checking that inbox and there's messages in there is us ignoring our tribe members.

And this is a dangerous thing to do. Alarm bells go off in our brain. The social human brain has a hard time with a modern digital inbox. Now, I'm going to ask you a lame question, given what you already have said, but should we exclude telephones from classrooms? Should we exclude telephones from classrooms? Yes. And in many places, they don't. Tell me what your view is on all this. I think unrestricted internet access, so what you would get, for example, if you just had your own smartphone, the research is becoming increasingly clear that probably 16 is the age when that begins to become safe, psychologically speaking,

post-puberty, right? You should not have unrestricted email access until you have basically gone through puberty, 16 plus. It's very different than what we've tried for the last 10 years. The last 10 years we experimented with, let's just give kids phones and see what happened. A reasonable experiment. I think the results have come back. Terrible things happen. So we need to change the way we think about this culturally. I think that's where we're going to be in two or three years. This idea that a 12-year-old or a 11-year-old be given a phone, we're going to think about that not too far in the future, the way we learn to think about, oh, we shouldn't be giving cigarettes to a teenager. Okay, they need to be older before they can deal with it. That's where I think we are with phones.

When you talk about deep work, what are the similarities to deliberate training, which Erickson is talking about, the 10,000 hours? Just what are the links between the two? Well, you need to be in a state of deep work to do deliberate practice. So it's one of the things you can do. So focus without distraction is the cognitive state required to do deliberate practice and

to get better. So if you are uncomfortable focusing or you never give yourself time during your day to really be focused on something, you'll never be able to fall into a state of deliberate practice at the way that Erickson would have talked about it, which means you're going to pick up new skills very slowly. You're going to learn things very slowly. Not all deep work is deliberate practice. A flow state, which of course is very different, is also something you can't fall into unless you're in a state of deep work. So deep work is like an umbrella. When you give something unbroken concentration, you get these potentialities. You get the potential of deliberate

practice, getting good at hard things fast. You get the potential of flow state, getting lost in your work and having creative insights. But all of these are unified by the need to have unbroken concentration. Can you explain the concept of flow, which is kind of invented by the guy with a very difficult name? Yes, that's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Well, I knew him. I knew him and Anders. Yeah. Good. What do you need to be in a deep work situation in order to be in the flow? And what is being in the flow? Flow state's the psychological state that Mihaly identified decades ago, in which you get lost in what you're doing. The task becomes all encompassing and you have this sensation of

you've lost track. You're not even thinking about the passage of time. So it's characterized. So it's like when you really get lost in something, it's athletes report this all the time. You're just, you're lost in the skiing down, doing your ski run as an Alpine skier. And it just, You're lost in the skiing down, doing your ski run as an Alpine skier. And just the activity becomes your whole world. Artists get into the state a lot. I'm performing on stage and I don't even, I'm not even aware. My fingers are just doing what they're doing.

And I'm just in the music. It could be a very creative and a very pleasurable state. It requires unbroken concentration. You can't be in a flow state while also keeping up with your email inbox. So deep work is a prerequisite for a flow state. How does this tie in with simultaneous capacity? Is that then a fallacy that you can do two things at the same time? Yeah, we know that's a fallacy. We've done this since basically the early 2000s. There's Cliff Nass' research on multitasking. Like we learn pretty quickly, okay, when we literally multitask, like tell ourselves I'm doing these two things concurrently. I'm clearly just switching my attention back and forth between

them really quickly. So nothing is getting my full cognitive attention. And so we do both of them worse. I think there's something even more insidious than multitasking though, because a lot of people now have heard that. So they won't keep two windows open at the same time. They won't try to answer emails concurrently with talking on the phone. But what we do instead, which I think can be almost as bad, is the quick check. but every five minutes, I just check my email real quick because I'm waiting for something. And then I come back to it and we pat ourselves on the back and say, look, I'm single tasking. I'm not doing two things concurrently. But what we leave out is that even the quick checks have a huge, huge price, right? So when I glance at that inbox, my brain sees all of these emotionally salient sort of urgent communications from my tribe members. Even if I then turn my attention immediately back to the memo, it's too late.

My brain has started the process of like, uh-oh, all hands on deck. We got to fire up what we need to deal with these situations. And so the quick checks gives us a situation almost as bad as actual multitasking. Our brain falls into what Linda Stone calls partial continuous attention. It never is fully focused on any one thing. It's always halfway through changing from one context to another. This is the state where most knowledge workers spend their entire day. It's exhausting, and we're producing at significantly reduced cognitive capacity. Are women better at multitasking than men? No human brain can multitask. Every human brain needs 10 to 20 minutes to really lock in on a complicated cognitive context. Every human brain, no matter 20 minutes to really lock in on a complicated cognitive context.

Every human brain, no matter how long you've been doing it, is going to be befuddled by checking an inbox every five minutes or trying to do two things at once. What happens when you are in this state of hyperactivity over a long period of time? What happens to your brain and to your well-being? Well, it's quite literally exhausting, right? It's why by the time you get to the afternoon, you find yourself unable to really do anything hard. You find yourself unable even really to deal with your inbox and you begin picking out just the messages that are easy to respond. That's basically your brain crying, uncle. Like, okay, I've had enough. You've been trying to do this unnatural thing where you've been switching me around. I'm exhausted. So there's a literal

exhaustion to it. You can connect other negative affect like stress or anxiety to it as well. We just feel bad because again, we're doing something that we're not wired to do. And then there's the psychological distress of saying, I know there's these important things I should be doing, that I have a lot of training, that I'm good at, that I could be strategizing or producing stuff, and I'm not getting to it. All I'm doing is talking about work, and I can't keep up with it. So we have neurological discomfort plus this sort of psychological distress of, this can't possibly be the right way to work. Those two things together is a recipe for burnout. Mm-hmm. So as a reaction to this, you wrote another book, Slow Productivity. So what is this about?

So I think right now, our implicit definition of productivity and knowledge work is based on activity. I call it pseudo productivity. It's this notion of activity will be a proxy for useful effort. So the more I see you doing stuff, the better. This does not play well with a world of email and chat where I can show you activity incredibly frantically and in a very fine-grained scale. Slow productivity is a different way of thinking about productivity, which is based much more on results. I want to produce good stuff over time that really matters. And in order to do this, I need to work on less things at the same time. I need to be more realistic about my timeframes. And I need to couple that with really

obsessing over the quality of what I do. That is like the much more natural from a human perspective, the much more natural way of approaching cognitive work, less exhausting, and ultimately much more effective. It's going to produce much better stuff. So we have to slow down from this frantic activity, do less things at once, but do these things really well, move through them at a faster rate. I think this is going to be a much better, this is the recipe, at least I'm pitching this book,

this is going to be much more sustainable for knowledge workers. Is this science or is it philosophy? It's a combination of all these things, right? I mean, we know, for example, some of this is common sense, right? If we work on too many things at the same time, what happens?

Everything we've agreed to is going to generate its own administrative overhead. Every project we're working on generates its own emails and its own meetings. So if I say yes to 10 things, I have 10 projects worth of administrative overhead squatting there in my day on my schedule. And the ability now to actually make progress on any of these 10 things gets greatly reduced.

If I instead say, wait a second, I've agreed to do 10 things, but I'm only going to work on two at a time. Now I only have the administrative overhead of two projects on my schedule at a time. Now I can spend a lot of time working on these two things. I can get these things done fast. I can get these things done at a much higher level of quality and then pull in the next thing. I mean, so some of this is just common sense. Some of this is science. How is the human brain wired? What is our relationship with work over the last 300,000

years? It's not eight-hour days, full intensity all year round. We need more variation. And some of it's philosophical. Humans want to produce stuff that's good. So reorienting work around quality in a way just from activity is something that's going to philosophically resonate with the human spirit. Cal, supposedly we walk and talk 10% faster than we did 30 years ago, and you indeed talk faster than most. I mean, how do you react if these slow dudes come along? Well, I mean, here's the thing about the people who are slowly productive, right? They don't seem slower.

And in fact, when you zoom out, you say, wow, this person's producing, you know, I mean, case after case in this book is you, you zoom out and look at this person's last decade of their career. You're like, my God, this is a super productive person. They did all of these things. These things are really important. But then you zoom in on a particular day and it looks non-frantic, right? So like the interesting thing about slow productivity is the scale you look at matters. If you zoom in on a particular

hour, you might say, wow, this person is slow. Like they're just working on something. They're not running back and forth and jumping on this call or whatever, but you zoom out to the whole year. Like, wow, look at all this stuff they got done. They're really delivering. They're really making a difference. So the perception of slowness depends on what timescale you're looking at. And how do you structure that kind of attitude in the company? I think workload management has to be transparent. I mean, this is one of the number one things a company can do, is we have to move away

from this knowledge work ideal of how you manage your work is up to you. Like everyone is just autonomous about it. We have our KPIs, we have our objectives, but how you manage your work, that's all up to you. The problem about doing it that way, where it's fully just everyone does their own thing, is that workloads get out of control. It's like, I don't know, I have to decide on every single thing, whether I should do it or not.

I have to navigate the social dynamics. I think workload management should be much more transparent. I push a lot of examples like this in the book where, okay, here's what we need to work on. And we have it listed right here. You don't own it as a person yet. Here's the things our team's working on.

All right, here's the specific things from this list that you're working on now. Here is specifically our idea about how many things each person should be working on at once. It's two, but also I know exactly what you're working on. So are you done with that? Great. Let's get you a new thing. We need to be much more explicit about what needs to be done, who's working on what, how much should people be working on, what's the status of what they're working on. This should not just exist internally to each person. Only they know what they're working on. It's all just sort of spread out over various emails and things they've agreed to on Slack. Explicit workload management is the foundation for having sustainable

workload management. You talk about something called small seasonality. What is that? Well, we need more variation in intensity if we want work to be sustainable. So broad seasonality, the literal seasonality is seasons are different, right? This is the Neolithic revolution. The winter is quieter than the fall. Small seasonality is saying, okay, we can have variations in intensity on smaller scales, right? It might be this week, we're sort of pulling back a little bit to regroup after a hard month. It could be, I'm not putting meetings on Friday.

So like Fridays a day, I can sort of pull back and think deeper about bigger projects. So it's putting variation of intensity into your schedule, not at the scale of whole seasons, but at smaller timescales. Do you think we should go to four-day weeks? but at smaller time scales. Do you think we should go to four-day weeks? To me, I think we need to get to the actual problem before we just treat the symptoms. The problem is overload.

We're working on too many things. Simply reducing the number of days we work doesn't solve that problem. What solves that problem is explicit workload management. We should be working on fewer things at once. To me, that's way more. We can't solve that problem by just trying to reduce the number of days we work. We need to actually reduce the

number of things we're working on. It's not a superficial fix. Let's just change what days we work. We actually have to get down to how do we figure out who's working on what? How much should each person be working on at a time? So I'm a much bigger proponent of getting to the actual systems by which organizations run, the way work is assigned, the way work is done, how collaboration happens. That's where the fixes need to be. Not let's change our schedule. Let's make it hybrid versus not hybrid. That's just dealing with the symptoms. It's not getting to the underlying disease. not getting to the underlying disease. Let's focus in on focus. Now, you say that we must train our mind to be in focus. Just how do you train your mind to be in focus?

Well, it has to get used to it. The state of maintaining your mind's eye internally on some sort of abstract symbolic target is not necessarily that natural for humans. It's just like reading. We have to hijack parts of our brain that evolve for other purposes and teach them how to interpret symbols into meaning like we do when we read. Focusing on abstract ideas, a business strategy, an idea that we're going to write, it's not natural. We have to practice it. And the more you practice it, the more easy it is for you to get in that state and the deeper you can actually push your concentration. But if you don't practice it and then you're like, okay, I'm going to put aside some time for deep work, but you've never really practiced this before. It's not going to go well,

right? It's going to be like, I can't keep my focus. My mind's all over the place. Like nothing's getting done. And so it's really important to remember if it doesn't go well, that doesn't mean you're not wired to focus. It just means you haven't practiced it yet. Does meditation help? It could help, right? But to me, the right practice is practice the actual thing you want to get better at, right?

Don't like meditation has some muscles in it that's similar to what it's like to actually focus on something. But why not just practice actually focusing? So the exercise I give to people more often, I call it productive meditation. And what I suggest they do is you go for a walk. This helps you with the exercise because the walking silences some of your neural circuits, so it's a little bit easier to concentrate. Go for a walk, have a single professional problem that you're going to try to make progress

on just in your mind. And just like in mindfulness meditation, if your attention wanders from the problem, which it will, you just notice that and bring it back. Nope, come back. We're going to try to solve this problem. And it wanders and thinks about your email like, nope, come back. We're just going to think on this problem. If you do productive meditation on a regular basis, you will actually get much more adept

at sustaining internal concentration on a target. So I'm actually get much more adept at sustaining internal concentration on a target. So I'm a big believer of let's just practice the thing we want to get better at, not adjacent things. Let's just get cut right to the chase of what we want to do better. I walk to work when I work in London and New York. So I should establish one problem before I kick off and then think about it for an hour. establish one problem before I kick off and then think about it for an hour. That's fantastic. Look, I used to walk to work when I was a postdoc at MIT, and I did this every single day. I really could tell a difference. It really was like a superpower. It's just like when you're exercising regularly, you realize like, oh, I can lift heavy things,

or I can run faster. You can feel the same way cognitively if you're doing this on a regular basis. What about somebody like Bill Gates, for instance? So he spends a week a year reading, right? Reading lots of different types of research, spends a week away doing this. What do you think about those kind of activities? Yeah, I think think weeks are a good idea. I mean, I even write about Bill Gates in that book, Deep Work. He would do this. He would get a pile of books and go to, he had a cabin somewhere up there, you know, outside in the countryside beyond Seattle, I suppose.

Though I did hear recently from someone who knows him, he's changed the structure of his think weeks. I forgot exactly how he did it, but he still has a week where he gets away from all stimulus from the outside. So he can let his mind just slowly develop thoughts, take in new information. Famously, it was in one of these think weeks in the nineties that Bill Gates said, oh shoot, the internet, the consumer internet is going to be a really big thing. And he came back and wrote the internet tidal wave memo that came out of a think week. Just having that time for him to sit back and think, he suddenly realized, my God, we're about to miss the most important trend in consumer digital products since the personal computer. The think week is where he got the space to figure that out.

Is serious thinking a lost art? populace, because we are so distracted all the time, we're just out of shape. We're out of cognitive shape. There are still places where it's preserved. Academia, it's preserved in certain fields. I mean, I'm a theoretician. I wrote a New Yorker piece about this recently about my time in the theory group in the computer science lab at MIT and how much I learned there about just thinking about thinking as a tier one skill you want to get better at and care about. There's still pockets like that around. Sports has pockets of this.

Not surprisingly, there's some professional athletes who are big believers in my books. We see that especially in golf. Like Rory McIlroy is a big fan of deep work and digital minimalism because that turns out to be a game where the ability to focus is everything. You lose your focus. That's it. You're out of the tournament. The arts, I think this is still preserved. There's a lot of arts where you can't get better at an instrument without giving it intense focus. So this art still exists, but as a populace, we're worse at thinking probably than we've ever been

in the last 50 years or so. And when you meet people, what distinguish people who are into deep thinking from those who aren't? The clarity and originality of their thoughts, right? This ability, because when you practice that deep thinking, you can hold an idea in your mind, you can hold related ideas in your mind, you can look at them together. Okay, how does this relate to this? They see things and patterns and systems. They find the interesting angles. What's really going on here? How do these pieces fit together? So originality and clarity of thinking, that is the hallmark of someone who is very comfortable just maintaining concentration in their mind's eye. That's very interesting. So when you sit next

to somebody at a dinner and if they have really interesting, clear, different ideas, that's probably because they've done deep thinking on their own. So not swayed by general thinking. Yes. This is probably someone who does not spend a lot of time on TikTok. Like I could just make that, you could usually pick that out that they're, yeah. An originality of thought, definitely. Just they're not, they're just sitting and thinking about things and you come out of left field and you have these interesting ideas. You have these, you know, in academia, you could pick this up right away. Like the deepest thinkers, it's very focused. Like if you're a theoretician like me, it's originality in an algorithm design. It's the, oh, you took in what this person did and what that person did, and you saw that they

were really connected. And here's the thing that really mattered. And if we tweak it this way, we can then do that. And now you have like a new result that's beating what anyone else ever was able to do before. So like in academic circles, if you're a physicist, if you're a theoretical computer scientist, if you're a mathematician, the signature of deep thinking is just incredibly clear. You see it right in the work. Which aspects of life can you improve by doing this, you think? Well, professionally speaking, almost any knowledge work job, you're going to be much better at it.

Knowledge work is the human brain being monetized. So if you are really good at focusing that human brain, you are really valuable in that marketplace. Outside of work, it's fantastic for introspection, for trying to understand who you are and how you fit into a larger understanding of the world because you're able to take in information, build up this internal schema about what matters, what doesn't, value structures, idea structures. You can understand your relationship to these pieces. So you're going to have a much more sophisticated understanding of yourself and your world.

So there's a great introspective advantage as well. Enjoyment of arts is another thing, I think, right? I mean, if you see like a great filmmaker or movie critic, for example, that requires the ability to really concentrate on what's happening in the art and understand what, why these pieces fit together. Why is this so affecting? Well, it's, it's, they're doing this and that with the cinematography, but also with what they're doing with the cuts, you know, so you can appreciate arts at a higher level as well. So there's a lot of areas where, you know, I say this in one of my books that sort of a deep life is a good life, because I really believe, and this goes all the way back to Aristotle, right? This is the

Nicomachean Ethics, he talks about this. But humans are distinguished by this ability to give sustained abstract attention that no one else, no other animal does. And so it's in our sort of intrinsic nature that we should be doing this. What makes us most human, we should really embrace. It does make our life, I think, richer. So you say a deep life is a good life. So what do you do when you have a bad life, when you are relaxing and not going deep? How do you relax? What do I do personally? All I do is sit around and do focus exercises. I have three kids who are young, so this word relax you speak of is odd

to me. So we have, we have a, I have a lot going on with my family life. Um, I do like my one hobby outside of just, you know, I read a lot and write a lot is I do like movies. And so, so to me, uh, I love going to the movies. I love watching movies. I love reading about movies. I love that it has nothing to do with what I do professionally.

I love reading about movies. I love that it has nothing to do with what I do professionally. So I can just enjoy that art without having to worry about all of the stuff that goes behind the other types of art I'm involved in. But what kind of state of mind are you in when you watch a movie? I'm really engaged. I mean, I'm really interested in, I mean, I often have to, my second viewing of a movie is when I really start to like a movie. I really like the second viewing. I usually like a movie a lot better. The first viewing, I'm taking it in

and noticing myself, like, how am I reacting to this? My second viewing, I'm looking at the filmmaking. Like what did the, what did the director do to generate this? And I begin to notice, you know, it's just the, the, the things that sort of matter, like what are they doing with the editing? What are they doing with the cinematography? What are they doing with the acting here? What's happening in this screenplay? Like why? And I really love like interesting auteur voices and people who take interesting chances. I just, I find it like creatively exhilarating to see the creative risks and experimentation that happen in that field, because we don't have as much of that. Like I'm a nonfiction writer in addition to being a professor. Nonfiction writing,

we don't have as much experimentation to the way you would see in the movies. The people do interesting stuff with a huge amount of money on the line too. I think it's just a fascinating corner of the arts. Kel, we got tens of thousands of young people listening to this. You're a young person. How do you attack this thing? What do you do? First of all, I'd say respect your attention. Your most important resource in a cognitive culture and economy like we have now is your attention. What you pay attention to, what you do with that attention.

Respect your attention. So don't just rent it out to the first company that comes along and says, we want to rent out your attention and monetize it. Look at our video, scroll this thing. Here's a TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. Have more respect for your attention than that. Like, what do I really want to pay attention to? I want to like read something good. I want to watch something interesting.

I want to connect deeply with a real person who's in front of me. I want to do this thing in my job really well. So just treating your attention as something that deserves your respect and not something that can just be abused and monetized by everyone trying to make a dime off of minutes of your active user minutes. It's a completely different way of living when you're not just constantly distracted. I've had readers tell me it's like your life goes from black and white to technicolor. You're noticing things, you're understanding things, you're thinking about things. And so I don't know, that's how maybe that would be my summary for a young person. If you respect your attention, it will do wonderful things for you. If you don't,

there is many people, many corporations, many apps that are looking to just take advantage of your attention and your life is going to be impoverished because of it. So be deliberate about how you spend your time. Now, one of the things you should do is to read, of course, Deep Work by Cal Newport. Fantastic book. Really, really important. I absolutely loved it. And Cal, it's been fantastic you have your own big thanks well thank you i enjoyed it that was really good