The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 114: Cal Newport – Deep Work Is Your Superpower

Episode Date: April 10, 2016

Episode 114: Cal Newport – Deep Work Is Your Superpower Cal Newport is a remarkably intelligent leader… I am a massive fan of his writing and have been following his work for years.  It was a thrill to speak with him directly.  This conversation went deep on many levels.  The importance of doing deep work is something I've written about for The Huffington Post as one of the core qualities of a leader who has sustained excellence over an extended period of time.   Cal Newport is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. His most recent book, Deep Work, argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the knowledge economy, and that individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. On publication, Deep Work became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller, and received praise in the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Guardian. Newport’s previous book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice. Since its publication, it has been selected for several best business books of the year lists, including those by Inc. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and 800-CEO-Read. Newport’s New York Times op-ed on the book became the paper’s most e-mailed article for over a week. Episode 114: Cal Newport – Deep Work Is Your Superpower Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show “The Ability To Do Deep Work Is A Super Power” In This Episode, You Will Learn: A leader who respects how hard everything is leads to sustained excellence We should all study Teddy Roosevelt Why “follow your passion” is bad advice Passion evolves over time… Developing skills through hard work creates passion Deep Work is an activity The ability to do Deep Work is a Super Power How to schedule Deep Work into your day/week/month Why e-mail can be eliminated The power of rituals and routines in order to do deep work Adam Grant and his 4 days of hibernating deep work Why you must claim YOUR time Productive meditation – what is it? And how it benefits you Why Cal is not on any form of social media Learning Leader – Aggressive self-education  “You Don’t Follow Your Passion, Your Passion Follows You” Continue Learning: Go To: CalNewport.com    Read: So Good They Can't Ignore You Read: Deep Work To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector W/ Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 082: Dan Pink – The Science of Motivation, Legendary Writer & Ted Talk Episode 086: Seth Godin – How To Become Indispensable & Build Your Tribe Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Cal Newport on the show, please don’t hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From CalNewport.com Cal Newport is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age as a professor, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work. His most recent book, Deep Work (Grand Central, 2016), argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the knowledge economy, and that individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. On publication, Deep Work became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller, and received praise in the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Guardian. Newport’s previous book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Grand Central, 2012), argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice. Since its publication, it has been selected for several best business books of the year lists, including those by Inc. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and 800-CEO-Read. Newport’s New York Times op-ed on the book became the paper’s most e-mailed article for over a week. Newport is also the author of three books of unconventional advice for students: How to Be a High School Superstar (Random House, 2010), How to Become a Straight-A Student  (Random House, 2006), and How to Win at College (Random House, 2005). The How To student series has sold over well over 150,000 copies since its inception, and Newport has been invited to speak on these topics at some of the country’s top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Georgetown and Duke. Between books, Newport explores related ideas on his popular Study Hacks blog.

My contention is for almost any knowledge work field, the ability to do deep work is like a superpower. The economists used the phraseology. Deep work is like the killer app for the knowledge economy. I like that phrase. Because doing deep work, this type of very intense unbroken concentration, produces two things you need to really excel in knowledge work. First of all, it allows you to learn complicated things quickly. So if you're good at deep work, if you can give things intense concentration, you can pick up complicated things quickly, which is incredibly valuable right now in our economy. And two, the amount of work you produce and the quality of work you produce per hour spent working is significantly, significantly higher when you're using deep work as opposed to a sort of more distracted flow.

So this has been my answer to that question. If you want to stand down the knowledge economy, if you want to be too good to be ignored, the number one skill that you can, and master and promote in your career's deep work. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk.

Hey, guys, remember episode number 97 with Alejandro Chene? He is the CEO of Ma and Bao. both promise to continue our dialogue as we both progressed on our journeys. And we certainly have, just as I have, with the great people at Mizan and Maine. And Alejandro and his company have decided to sponsor the Learning Leader Show. This episode is brought to you by Motten Bow. I told the story on that episode of why I absolutely love their ridiculously comfortable, handcrafted premium jeans. Also, no ugly back pocket embroidery or weird stitching, just simple, elegant, great-looking jeans.

And Mottenbao has a free try-on program. You get two sizes to try at home with every purchase. Keep the one that fits and send the other one back for free. These jeans are already priced under market because they cut out all the retail markups. But the deal is even better when you go to Motenbow.com and use promo code Ryan Hawk for 20% off. That's M-O-T-T-A-N-D-B-O-W.com promo code Ryan Hawk. Hey, and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk so excited about tonight's featured leader.

I am a massive fan of Cowell Newport. I've studied this work for quite some time and have been heavily affected by it. And so it was a thrill for me to have this conversation directly with him. Cal is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. He's also the best-selling author of five books, including two of my all-time favorites. So Good, They Can't Ignore You and Most Recently, Deep Work. Few of the things we got into during this conversation.

Why is Follow Your Passion Potentially Really Bad. advice. Cal explains further. And then he also defines what deep work is, why it's like a superpower, and how we can all do much more of it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Cal Newport. Cowman, I'm so pumped to have you here in a learning leader show. This one's been a long time in the works because I've actually been speaking a lot about your work with a bunch of other people and other great leaders. And so it's really neat for me to have this opportunity to speak with you on the Learning Leaders Show. I got a quick question, though, to get his rolling, and that's around leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time. You have done some incredible research.

You've accomplished some really remarkable things at a relatively young age. I'm curious, from your perspective, what are some of the common characteristics that great leaders who have sustained excellence all seem to share? Well, Ryan, it's a good question. I think the meta-level characteristic that I observe when you really see sustained excellence is this notion that the leader respects how hard everything is that's worth doing. In other words, if I was ever asked to give a commencement address, I think the title would be, everything's harder than you think. This tends to be the reality. And those who recognize it, you recognize that real impactful work is not just going to unfold with a clever combination of systems and life hacks that, you know, impactful

contribution is really hard and prepare themselves for that battle and prepare themselves to get satisfaction out of that craft. They're the ones that I tend to see continue to produce at a really high level as composed of those who maybe have a flash in the pan here and there and then trail off. It's that recognition that real impactful work is really hard. It's not necessarily a scary thing, but it's a reality. Who are the first people that come to mind when you think of sustained excellence? Well, it depends what, I mean, in every field, there's different examples. You know, one of my favorite, one of my favorite examples is Teddy Roosevelt.

Now, if you've read any of his biographies, in particular the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which is my favorite, you see someone who, from a young age through the end of his life, was constantly finding challenges, jumping into the arena, doing intense, incredible work on it, and because of that, having a massive amount of impact. So whenever I feel a little bit fatigued, I mean, I look to him as an example of someone who really embraced life. Really interesting remark. I think a lot of people have heard of the man in the arena quote

that I think is popularized now about the people who actually do the work and the ones that are in there making it happen. And Cal, I'd love to dive into you and your story because you've accomplished, I mentioned this really, you've accomplished quite a bit at a relatively young age and have put out some really impactful work, whether it's from your books or speeches that you've given. Talk to me a little bit about how you've gotten into this line of work of being a best-selling author, but not only that, but the specifics behind, I'm talking of the two most recent ones that have impacted me the most so good they can't ignore you as well as deep work.

What brought you to this field of work? Because I know your day job, you're a professor, but then you're also writing and like I mentioned, impacting all these people from that as well. I'd love to learn more how you've got into this. Those two paths in my life are intertwined. So it's true. My day job is I'm a computer science professor, which has no direct connection to the content of my last two books. In other words, I don't do research as a professor on the topic that my last

two books were about. But it still is quite intricately connected because if you look at the timing of those books, you see they coincide with fortuitous points in my own career path. So two books ago, I wrote this book, so good they can't ignore you. It had to do with how people find workday love or develop work they love. That book was actually pitched and written during a very important transition in my career as a professor. So this was the period where I was leaving my graduate training and making the decision to move to a tenure track professorship-style position. And since that could be a job for life,

and it was possible that I was going to be doing the first and last job interviews in my life, I figured if there was any time that I needed to have an answer to the question, how do people end up finding work they love? It was right then. That was going to give me the biggest leverage on that information. So that book came out of what was going on in my professorship life. And then once I was a professor and looking ahead to how do I do this well, how do I get tenure,

investigating those topics for my own improvement led me into the topics that then became the core of my latest book, deep work. So I don't study the topic those books are about directly in my research, but those books are about my quest to do my day job better. Why is the term follow your passion really dangerous advice? It's inaccurate. It's an inaccurate picture of how most people who are passionate about their work ended up there. And so if you give people an inaccurate idea about how you end up loving your work, you're going to cause confusion. You're going to cause anxiety. You're going to cause self-doubt.

You're going to cause chronic job hopping. So this idea that you should follow your passion is based on the assumptions that most people have a clear pre-existing passion that they can identify and use to make career choices. It's also based on the assumption that if you really like a top of, topic, and then you get a job related to that topic that you'll really like your job. Both of those assumptions are flawed. In both cases, we have a lot of evidence that for most people, they're not actually true. So I like the goal of ending up passionate about your work. I think the specific strategy that identifying pre-existing passions and using them as the

foundation of decisions is a flawed strategy for accomplishing that goal. It could actually steer people away from the ultimate goal of being passionate about their work. What's the right strategy to implement? it. Well, it's interesting. So I, you know, I studied a lot of people who are passionate about their work. And I asked some pretty simple questions, tell me your story. So I've heard a lot of stories from people who are passionate about their work. And there's a lot of different strategies they followed. So there is no one size of it's all, including those people who did have a

preexisting passion and used it to choose their job and then ended up really loving their job. But those people are a lot more rare than you would think, given the ubiquity of that advice for your passion. That's maybe like one out of ten. The most common strategy, I saw was one in which passion evolved over time. So you didn't start with a strong passion. You used to have to select your work and then love your work. Instead, as you crafted your career in the right way, your passion for the career actually grew. And the formula underpending that growth tended to be the following. Someone would pick a field that was interesting to them and had interesting options if they did it well. Then they worked really hard like a craftsman

to get good at what they did, to build up rare and valuable skills. And time and again, what I found is it's the once you have these rare and valuable skills and can start using those as leverage to craft your career, it's really at that point that you start to see real passion arise in people's career paths. So my contention is we get that advice backwards. You don't follow your passion. Passion follows you as you put into work to get good and use those skills as leverage and over time craft a really compelling career.

Interesting. Makes me think a little bit to the beginning of my own career. Right after I got done playing football, that's really the only thing I thought about. My first job I got was in the profession of selling. And I didn't, when I was in college, I did not plan to do that once I was done. I didn't really know what I was going to do, actually. And I realized as I got into that job that I had that I really grew to love doing it. I really grew to love helping customers be aligned with the solutions that I was providing

and how I could differentiate myself. And I could outwork other people. I could outwork the competition. I can learn more. And I could be a better provider to help them in their business and professional life. My customers, that is. And to me, I think that really suited me well because I would have never grown up and said, oh, that's my passion.

That's what I want to do. but then once I started doing it and I developed skill and I became pretty good at it, had some success. You know, you get some of these awards and you make money and things like that happen and you start feeling pretty good about yourself. And all of a sudden you find yourself saying, well, I really like what I'm doing every day. I enjoy this. I'm waking up. I'm helping people and I'm doing incredibly well. That can be, make you, I think, be rewarding work and make you very happy.

Yeah. Well, your type of story is common where someone who loves their work today. had no idea when they were getting started that this was the route that was going to generate so much passion. And this is what I think is dangerous about promulgating this idea that the passion exists in advance is imagine if that had been drilled into you. And then in those first few weeks of your job in the sales industry, probably because they're your first few weeks, you weren't good at it yet. You were new. If you really reflected on it, you would say, well, I'm not loving this every day. I'm not good at this yet. This is kind of confusing.

if you had really been told that once you find your passion, you'll know it from day one, you probably would have left that job. And by doing so, you would have been bypassing the possibility that you were able to actually fulfill of building deep passion. So, you know, I think a lot of what happens is when you talk to people who are passionate about their work, and they say casually, yeah, you should follow your passion. What they really mean to say is you should follow the goal of ending up passionate about your work. Don't settle for a job you don't enjoy and there's no prospect of it getting better. But it's interpreted by especially young people as this very specific setup that you should have a passion in advance.

At the age of 1920, you should somehow have some clear vision in advance of what you're meant to do. And if you don't, something's wrong. And so it's good intentions when we're saying, yeah, you should be passionate about your work. But when it's stated with that exact phrasing, follow your passion, I think is where we're start to get trouble. If somebody pulls you aside and said, hey, Cal, how can I, in a practical sense, meaning something I could implement immediately, I'm really big on practicality, how can I be so good that they can't ignore me?

How do you answer that question? I got to believe that you get that question from people, whether it's in class and outside of it now that you've made a name for yourself. What do you say to that question? Well, that was the question was, that question was asked so much of me that in some sense it's what motivated my most recent book. So, you know, I wrote so good they can ignore you. I gave this hypothesis that follow your passion is bad advice. You have to build skills.

So, of course, I should have seen this coming. Of course, the follow up was great. I buy it. How do I do it? Perfect segue, man. In some sense, I said, okay, then I'm going to write a book about just that practical question. Let's get away from, move on from the philosophical issue and the sort of high level. issue of how people build passion. Let's talk about how you do it. So deep work, the book,

is about the skill deep work, which is my answer to that question. This cannot have been segwayed any better because that was my next topic was getting on deep work, so I'll let you keep going. Exactly. Professional segue are here. But it's true because these books were a segue from one to the other. So deep work is an activity that I defined to be where you're concentrating without distraction for a long amount of time on a cognitively demanding task. So it's where you give something hard, your fullest attention, and try to do it as best as you can. My contention is for almost any knowledge work field, the ability to do deep work is like a superpower. The economists used the phraseology.

Deep work is like the killer app for the knowledge economy. I like that phrase. because doing deep work, this type of very intense unbroken concentration, produces two things you need to really excel in knowledge work. First of all, it allows you to learn complicated things quickly. So if you're good at deep work, if you can give things intense concentration, you can pick up complicated things quickly, which is incredibly valuable right now in our economy. And two, the amount of work you produce and the quality of work you produce per hour spent working

is significantly significantly higher when you're using deep work as opposed to a sort of more distracted flow. So this has been my answer to that question. If you want to stand down the knowledge of economy, if you want to be too good to be ignored, the number one skill that you can master and promote in your career's deep work. All right. I'm a huge believer in this. I just gave a talk to a great group of leaders. And literally this was half of the talk. And you and I, hadn't even spoken yet. I was excited to have this conversation, but I read your work, and so I'm a huge believer in this. But I want to get practical now because, for example, I don't know. Do you know Chase Jarvis, the CEO of Creative Live by chance? I know of him. I don't know personally. So Chase and I had a great talk on this podcast, and we talked about deep work and about how he plans and schedules his day. And I've heard you talk about that in the past of how, you know, you've got to own your calendar and how he, and Chase does a fantastic job of planning out so he can make sure he, schedules his deep work time, even though he needs, I mean, he's wanted to be in meetings

literally 12 hours a day every single day, but he blocks his time really well. But most people who are listening are not the CEOs of their company, where they can completely own everything. They're being pulled in many different directions. Let's say they work in a big company between their boss and other teams and other people who need their time where they think they need their time. So people are getting meeting notices. They're having to show up. They're having to be there. in order to keep their job. So from a practical perspective, how can an employee, somebody who works for somebody else,

they're not the boss, schedule and do deep work every single day? So I'm going to give you a short-term practical answer, so like what you can start doing tomorrow, and then I'll give you a long-term practical answer, which is what I think will be the sustainable solution for a lot of people. Good, okay. So the short-term practical answer is plan your week. Look out at your week at the beginning of every week and block off a reasonable amount of time on the calendar like an appointment or meeting and treat it the same that you would treat any other appointment or meeting that would show up on your calendar. We already have a strong social convention in the world of knowledge work around appointment and meetings.

In other words, if someone comes to you and says, Ryan, can you come on hop on this call Wednesday at 12? And you say, oh, I have an appointment from 11 to 1. that's fine. We have the social convention that, okay, you might have some other stuff scheduled. I have to work around it. The fact that what you have scheduled is time for deep work doesn't actually have to enter the conversation. So we have good social conventions. Now, of course, if you say, oh, I have an appointment starting on 9 a.m. Wednesday and until 9 p.m.

Friday, you might have a hard time getting away with that. Yeah. But if you have a reasonable amount of time and you look at your week and you get a sense of when time is less contested and when it makes sense for you to block off this time, that will immediately start protecting you some deep work time. The long-term solution that I advocate is that you have a conversation with whoever your supervisor is, so whoever is above you in organization, and if you work for yourself, have this conversation with yourself, where what you say is, here's what deep work is, here's what shallow work is,

that is work that doesn't require you to concentrate intentionally and use your skills to their fullest. you acknowledge that both are important. Your job almost certainly needs you to do shallow work just to keep things organized and moving. And if it's not entry level, almost certainly requires deep work because that's how you actually use your brain and produce value. That's how they will get their most out of the capital investment they've made in your brain. And you say, my simple question is, what should be the ratio of deep to shallow work hours that I should be aiming for in the typical week? And you really have a serious conversation that try to pin this down for my job, for my level of skills, the amount of value I can produce with my brain, but also where I fit into the logistics

and the meshing gears of the organization, what's the ratio I should be going for? And if you work for yourself, you should figure out this ratio for yourself. Once you've actually had this conversation, start measuring and continue to discuss it. So you can come back a few weeks later and said, you know, we were going for 50-50, but I'm really only getting 10% deep hours to 90% shallow hours. What should we do here? Should we rethink my role in the company, or should we make some changes to how we do scheduling of the company culture. The evidence suggests having clear numbers, having a clear

discussion, and having a continued ongoing dialogue about this issue can lead to significant changes to the culture of your organization or team in such a way that deep work becomes over time more protected and more valued. And it does so in a gentle way without you having to be sort of a pompous jerk and say, I'm too important for this meeting. I want to do my deep work. So that's my long-term suggestion. And my short-term is you start right away getting some deep work appointments on your calendar. It's great practical advice, which is, which is, I'm all about that in addition to the overall philosophy. I think both are so important. I recently, this morning, I actually read a study. There was a group of 12 people in different roles in a company who they all

decided that they were going to never open up their email for one week, only seven days, just simply weren't going to open it up. And to see, all of them were extremely nervous. They thought they get left behind. They thought, oh, this is like, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm not going to be there for the people that I work with. And they also felt, oh, when I get back on it, so I'm just going to be just bombarded with so much junk that I'm going to have to deal with it. It's not even going to be worth it.

And as you can probably guess why I'm bringing this up, that the opposite happened. The people were incredibly more happy, less stressed, and got so much. more quality, deep work done, that it was something that they started to then implement throughout the company on a regular basis. Talk to me about that specific thing. I know Tim Ferriss has said, you know, answering emails and getting back to people is one of the greatest fears of human beings on Earth today. What's your thoughts around emails and the culture around it today in our society? Right. Well, that was an amazing study. I read the paper. And the other key part of that study was nothing bad happened.

Right. So one of the big fears is if I'm not reachable, I'm going to miss out on important things, bad things will happen. The company, there'll be a disaster. Nothing bad happened. They got their work, got them more productively. So I have some strong thoughts on email. I'll start by noting this is why I think it's important to have this dichotomy between deep

and shallow work, to take the work that's on your plate and divide it into these two categories. Because otherwise, if you have these all mixed together and it's all work and it all has the same definition, it's the easiest thing in the world to basically spend your whole day in that inbox moving messages in and out and end your day and say, man, I was working hard all day long. It was very productive. I was very busy. And be satisfied with it. Yet have gotten no deep work done, which means your skills aren't growing.

So you're going to stagnate. Your skills will plateau. And you're producing well below your capacity. So you're just giving yourselves these huge impairments. if you're not doing deep work. When you separate deep from shallow work, then it's easier to say, ah, both are necessary. I have to do shallow work to stop from getting fired, but deep work is what's going to get be promoted.

It's only when you see that separation that you can actually start promoting deep work. But if we dive deeper in the email, you know, I wrote an article a few weeks ago for the Harvard Business Reviews website, and you can find it on there. But the title was, eliminate email, which would give you some sense of where I stand on that. I think that the presence of email, and this is kind of a strong stance, but let's throw it out there just for the sake of being provoking. I think that the presence of email in knowledge work has changed the way that people approach work. And now people tackle their work with a very unstructured workflow where since every individual has an email address associated with their own name, any work task you have, you just jump into, let's just start sending emails, we'll figure it out on the fly.

everything, all discussion, all planning, all coordination, it just happens in an ad hoc manner, unstructured manner, through email inboxes. And it necessitates this constant checking and sending of emails to keep the wheels of progress going. My argument is that's an incredibly unproductive workflow. It means that you're getting a minimum of the capacity out of your brain, which is the main capital investment in knowledge work. It would be like running an expensive piece of machinery in a factory, but not oiling to gears and having it produce at a fraction of its potential. rate. And I think the only way to combat this is that we have to have new workflows designed that are designed to get the most out of our brain. And probably in order to design those workflows, we're going to have to severely limit, if not eliminate altogether the

role email currently plays in our work life. Interesting. I'm just pulled up the article now. I'd urge people to go read it. It's really, really well done. And I'm fascinated by unconventional methods to do things better, to get more work done. That's why I'm so big in the deep work, and it's interesting. So, Cal, when I was getting ready to read deep work, I'd read a lot of articles about it, and people had given a huge praise, people that I really respect. So I said, I'm going to read this book, and not only that, but I want to be deep into it, really meta, when I'm reading it.

And so I actually, Ryan Holliday said when he writes, he wrote a great article about, I would imagine you've seen it around deep work. And he likes to listen to the same song over and over. And so I did that while reading your entire book and writing a few posts that I published on the Huffington Post, a song called So Flows the Current by Patrick O'Hern. There's no words, which is good for me when I'm writing and reading because it doesn't confuse my brain. I'm able to really go deep. and it's a really interesting kind of self study I did and how I felt like I was really able to digest what you wrote. And then when I then opened up a blank, you know, word document that I needed to publish something for the Huffington Post, it flowed a lot better. And I don't know, I think there's a correlation there from, I went directly from reading your book, listening to this music, to then directly writing, listening to the same music.

and it flowed really well. I think it's some of the best writing I've done recently. And even the people who have helped edit it for me say this is much better than it normally is before I see it, which makes me feel good. And so it's just interesting to see all the different experiments you could do in order to go deep. And for me, it specifically was around the combination of music and reading and then going from reading to writing. Right. Well, routine and ritual is very important for getting the most depth out of deep work.

So what you had with the music is an example of a deep work ritual. So it's something that tells your brain, we're doing deep work now. And it allows it to get deeper. Having a routine about when you schedule deep work can be useful. Having a set location you go to can be useful. I know people who just change the configuration of their office before doing deep work, just the lighting, or they'll put a do not disturb sign on the door. Other people have more elaborate routines, usually involving walking outside, usually in nature. you do 20 minutes to clear your head.

All of this helps you get more out of deep work. But I think there's an even, to use the term, again, a deeper point lurking in what you were just saying there, which is a point I want to emphasize to your listeners, which is that when we're talking about deep work, it's easy to be undersold and to think, yeah, I'm a little bit too distracted. It'd be nicer if I was less distracted. And what I want to emphasize is that the productivity you get out of deep work is massively increased and the quality is massively increased. It's sort of hard to explain until

you've actually tried it, but once you've really developed the ability to concentrate, your experience of doing work, what it feels like, what you produce, how good it is, is majorly transformed. I can give you some concrete examples. For example, when I was writing the book, you would imagine that this was a time where my productivity as a professor would go down. So our main productivity metric is peer-reviewed publications. Really hard to do. You have to write solve math proofs. I'm a theoretician and get them accepted in these very competitive venues.

So you would think my productivity would go down because I had to spend a lot of time writing a book at the same time. But because I was writing a book about deep work, it really got me tightening down the hatches at all my deep work rituals, routines, and really taking it very, very seriously. And because of that, my output during that year was double my academic output on any previous year. That's the type of thing I'm talking about when I talk about it's a huge productivity gain. I profiled Adam Grant, who I think has been on your, potentially has been on your show before. He's probably my in the top three favorite writers.

So he's also a professor. He's at Wharton, and he is an incredibly successful professor. He's the youngest full professor at Wharton. He's only a year older than me, and he's a full professor at Wharton. I talked to him about his work habits. His secret was also deep work. He builds these deep work dashes into a schedule where he'll go like four days at a time where you just can't reach him and he's just working deeply. So he only works on his academic work in a state of true depth. And he publishes on average about twice the number of competitive journal articles as other elite professors at elite business school. So this is the type of productivity gain I'm talking about. It's not, I feel a little bit better. I'm a little less distracted. It's, I'm getting

orders of magnitude more stuff done. And that's sort of the experience you had when you were doing writing in a state of true depth. It's very, very hard to compare to what people are used to until you actually try it. And it really got my brain primed, I believe, reading great text while listening to music. It's like, oh, there's the music. It's like, it just primed it to say I was ready. So as you mentioned, it was like my ritual. And I happen to read a lot actually on the elliptical machine. People have made funny about that. But for some reason, I like to be moving. And I don't know if that's just part of my ritual. And it doesn't, some people say it hurts their eyes three that way. It doesn't for me. I like to somehow have my legs moving. And then I,

if I need to take notes, I can, I can still do that. But for me, and then I can go directly to writing. And for me, it's, it's early in the morning. I'm curious, what is your writing process like? Specifically, I love the details here if you could share. Yeah. So, I mean, what's important here is that There's different ways that people regularly schedule deep work. So the method you were just talking about, I call the rhythmic philosophy of scheduling deep work, which is where you have a set time on the same days every week. You don't even think about it. This is when I do my deep work.

Adam Grant, who I just mentioned, uses a philosophy that I call the bimodal philosophy, which is where you're doing no deep work at all, and then you'll have a multi-day period where you're a hermit, and you're just doing deep work. And then you come out of it and are doing no deep work at all. My philosophy, I use what I call the journalistic method, and that's where I really look at the landscape of my week ahead. I see what's on there, where are my classes, where are my meetings, which days are lighter or not lighter than others. And I go in and I claim the time. I sort of set up my deep work schedule for the week.

So it can look different from week to week. I sort of work with the reality of what do I have available and how can I get the most deep work out of it. So where I do my deep work, where I do my math work, where I do my writing can be really. really different from week to week, but the core thing is I give it a lot of thought. You know, I just did my weekly plan earlier this morning, and my weekly plans always have a large paragraph at the top called my deep work plan, where in narrative form, I actually write out, here's my what I want to do deep work on this week, here's my plan for how I'm going to do it, where I'm going to fit it in, what notes I want to keep to myself about getting more

depth, what can I do to my rituals? So I give it a lot of thought and respect every week, how deep work's going to fit into my schedule and how I'm going to get the most out of it. Is there a specific place you go to write? There's several places. I work in a lot of different locations. So I have a home office. I like to write outside in my yard when I can. If it's off semester, so if we're in the summer or on a break,

there's some great libraries here on campus where I teach that are incredibly conducive to deep work. During the semester, they're too crowded. There's also places in the town next to where I, next to where I live, a particular coffee shop and a particular area of the library. So I probably have a half dozen different locations that I associate with doing a deep writing. And I, you know, I vary them up. I find varying it up helps me switch into the deep work mode.

Like I'm going to this location just to do writing. Help switch me into that mindset. There's another part of Ryan Holiday's note. He mentioned a previous guest on this podcast, who I'm fortunate to call a friend. and he mentioned that for him when he started commuting to an office, he previously worked only out of a home office and he has a home office, but when he started commuting to an office, he found himself doing more deep work and getting more things done

just because there was the act of going to say, and again, you're telling your brain, like, I'm getting ready to go do work, and he found that that helped him. Yeah, any sort of ritual or routine you have surrounding it, it does make a big difference. I get into the science of it a little bit in the book, but the short answer to why it matters is because it really reduces the amount of willpower you have to expend to switch into a deep work mode.

And if you're instead dependent on just straight up willpower to wrench your attention away from distraction and start deep working, you're going to have a lot more spotty success. Because it's going to depend on how much willpower do you have left that part of the day. Are you hungry? Did you have a hard morning? And it's going to be spotty whether or not you succeed. These rituals can help slip you into the deep work mode. without you having to expend too much willpower, so you're not so dependent on the sort of fluctuating levels of your energy.

What do you think about meditating? I think meditating can be good training, and I talk about a particular type of meditation called productive meditation as a tool for training your ability to concentrate harder. And the basic idea is you take a concrete problem, so a concrete professional problem. And I like to do it while walking. So as you move, you try to hold the way. this problem in your head and just make progress on it in your head. And just like in mindfulness meditation, when you notice that your attention wanders from the

problem that you're trying to solve to something else, you just notice that and then bring the attention back to the problem and try to push deeper. So for me, it could be solving a math proof, but it could also be trying to figure out what's the right structure for an article I want to write or, you know, how am I going to figure out some complicated logistical task? That type of productive meditation. I found in my own experience when I deployed it in two or three months, you can significantly increase the level of depth you can get when you concentrate. You can get the intensity of your concentration up to a much higher level. Wow, really interesting. Another thing that caught my eye when reading your work, you spoke about David Duane. Am I pronouncing

that right? Yeah, that's right. The architect. And he had this plan for what is called a eudaimonia. Am I pronouncing that right as well? Udemeania machine, which is, I was fascinated by this, and I loved it. And I was thinking, and I'll let you describe exactly what that is, because people are probably saying, if they haven't read your book, they're saying what in the world are you talking about? But I was thinking about, I'm like, why don't the most innovative companies hire him to put this in their buildings? But could you explain more about that meeting and then talking to him as well as what his eudaimonia machine is? Yeah.

Well, David's a big proponent of deep work. but he's also an architect. So he likes to think about how you can capture ideas with building. So he had this notion. He showed me this design for what he called the eudamonia machine. Based off the term eutamonia, this was Aristotle's notion of to live a flourishing life. And it's really dependent on this notion that you're taking your skills and you're applying them to its fullest as a craftsman to create things of value, that this is at the core of a flourishing life. So he designed, David designed, what would be the ideal layout of an office?

to essentially promote really effective and satisfying deep work so that you could reach the state of eudamonia. And he had this cool design where it's a linear series of rooms. So it's not a hallway we can go into rooms. You'd have to pass through one room to get to the next. And he designed these rooms so that from each room to the next, you're getting more and more prepared to do deep work. And in the very final room, you actually go into these chambers

of soundproof walls and actually do your, your deepest concentration. And so you had this whole building built around how do you maximize it. But I think your question there is a key fascinating question. Deep work is like the killer app for the knowledge economy, right? The economist saying so. But you were right, big companies and organizations are doing nothing to promote it. And not only are they doing nothing to promote it,

most of the trends in the workplace culture right now are actively antagonistic to deep work. they make it harder to do deep work. So we really have this paradox going on that this thing that allows us to get the most out of our brains and get the most out of our knowledge workers is not just being neglected by a lot of organizations. It's actually being squashed. They're actually putting in place habits and rituals

like open offices and slack that are making it even harder to do this type of deep work. So there's a really interesting tension right now, I think, in our workplace culture. Why? Well, it's a hard question. The best answer I could give is that it's hard in the knowledge work context

to directly measure the positive impact of deep work. So unlike in a factory where you can adjust something to the workflow and count the number of widgets produced per hour, it's much more difficult to measure the impact of things like deep work in a knowledge workplace. So my argument is in the absence of these clear metrics that are pushing back and telling you what's producing more value and what's not, the type of trends that are going to dominate are those that make people's life

easier in the moment. And I think a lot of the culture we see around, for example, constant communication is in place because it makes everyone's life easier in the moment. It might make them more miserable in the long term and significantly less satisfying and productive than more deep work style workflows. But in the moment, it's just easier. If you can reach anyone at any time, it just makes your life easier. You don't have to plan as much.

You don't have to have workflows. You can really just sort of tackle things in ad hoc manner. You're never going to get stuck. You can always get an answer to things. And also it gives you a way to feel busy and productive. I don't have to think too hard about what am I doing today for work. You can just jump in your inbox and that'll take you to lunchtime and you can feel productive. So this is my theory is that in the absence of clear metrics, stuff that makes your life easier is what arises.

But what makes your life easier is not necessarily what makes your life better. It's not necessarily what makes an organization more productive. I would think a company like Google or Facebook would at minimum would test one of David Duane's, you know, his architectural of from a eunemoneum machine. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, because they're the ones that they're forefront of innovation. They're creating, you know, so it just surprised me to hear that as I read on like, oh, I'm sure this is all over Silicon Valley, even though they have open offices and all that. And you read the articles about that.

David Burkett's also great new book under new management. I just had him on. He talked a lot about the open offices and why they need to be stopped, which is, which is, I'm a, as a guy who's typically an introvert, I'm really, and that I need the space and sometimes the door shut to get the work done. So that's, that's, that's why I was just surprised to hear that this has not been implemented anywhere yet. I got to believe at some point it will be.

I think it will. I mean, just me alone, if I'm just looking at my schedule of meetings and talks in the next six months, I'm out there and I'm over there and I'm talking to people about this. And so it's starting to resonate. I love it. I think there'll be some changes. We'll see. You know, another aspect of you, one of my pre-conversation routines for this podcast is going on social media and looking up some recent things that my guests have tweeted or put on any social network. And so I did the same for you, even though I knew going in, but I just forgot, I guess, that you're not active or even on Twitter or other social media platforms. And I found it interesting, specifically Twitter, because I want to ask you about this. For me, I think Twitter has helped me do deep work. And that's because I've been able to find interesting research done by others. and then I can shut it down and then go and dive deeper into it.

So without it, I don't think I would have learned nearly as much. And I'd love to hear your take on that since I know getting rid of social media is one of the ways to do deep work. Right. So it's true. I've never had a social media account. And I advocate that many more people should not be on social media. Right. And the foundation of the idea is if you're in a job where,

you want to take your mind, your ability to concentrate seriously. If you want to take your ability to produce value out of your mind really seriously, you have to treat your mind with respect. And I like the analogy to athletic. So if you think about your time, for example, as a football player, I'm sure there's a lot of things you did in your life that showed respect to your body and your athletic health. So you weren't going to smoke, you weren't going to eat junk food, you know, you were going to try to get a good amount of sleep.

You had to have this R, I want to respect my body because this is how I make a living. So when I look at knowledge work, social media is designed by attention engineers, people who are professionals at this, to capture your attention, to distract your attention, to fragment your attention. That's how these media companies make money. Just like junk food is built now to be maximally palatable so that you can't just eat one Dorito. You have one. It hits every sinner in your brain. I have to eat a lot more of these. So to me, the reason I don't use social media is the same reason why if I was an athlete,

I want to eat junk food. I think it's not showing respect to my brain, to my attention, to my ability to concentrate. And I think what these companies have done very well is that they've positioned themselves from a marketing perspective as sort of a public utility or a public good, as like this is just a generic technology that's out there and it has some good and bad, but it has some advantages so we should use it. But the reality is that they're products that are being designed by these companies to grab and hold on to as much of your attention as possible. So I don't use the services because I feel superior to them. I use the services because I'm scared of them. I'm scared of

the impact they would have on my time and attention. I'm scared that the attention engineers are better at this than I am at resisting. That the human brain, they're using the same principles that Las Vegas figured out a couple decades ago to make slot machines and gambling games more more sticky. That's scary because they're pretty good at this. They've been doing it longer than I've been trying to resist it. So I don't doubt the premise that any social media service has some benefits it could bring. But the criteria I talked about in the book was some benefits is not enough. What it has to be is I will use this tool if it gives me significant more benefits to harm to one of the small number of things that I think are at the core of my mission in my professional life.

So if this social media tool brings to my professional life significant value to something that's at the core of my professional life, then it's worth using, otherwise it's not. So for someone in your position, for example, that actually runs a media property, probably you're going to find something like Twitter passes that criteria. Because probably one of the core things is actually being a core thing to your professional success is probably like connection to your audience and also exposure to what the very latest trends and ideas are. and it makes sense. But for someone like me, for example, well, I don't run a media property. It's not so important that I'm connected to people. It's not that important that I'm on top of things.

It's better for me, the steal a quote from Donald Canoeh to be on the bottom of things, to spend a long time with one idea. That's kind of what I do. So for me, when I do that analysis, the benefits are not significant enough to outweigh the harm to my attention.

So that's basically my pitch, is that people should be making this much higher threshold for accepting social media, which I think would greatly reduce, reduced the number of people of using it. But of course, we're not eliminated, and there would still be a lot of people that would use it, but it wouldn't be so ubiquitous as it is today. Very interesting.

I like the way you put that because I think certain – and also I think it depends on the platform. Facebook, for me, the majority of time, I delete the app from my phone. Now, I do use it to promote the show. I do use it to occasionally have conversations via the messaging feature with – guest, people that I've connected with on there. People like you, but you and I connected via email. Sometimes I've connected there. Twitter is a little bit different for me.

Like you mentioned, I promote on Twitter, but I also learn a lot from articles, and you probably had different methods for doing that. So I think it makes a lot of sense that I do think I would imagine there's an immense amount of time wasted scrolling on a Facebook feed with stuff that literally does nothing for you. And we've all, well, most of us have been there. And so that's why for me, deleting that app from my phone, and I do have it on there at times when I'm in kind of promotion mode or trying to connect. But other than that, because it's, I mean, it's easy to download it again if you need it. I think it makes a lot of sense to go several days or even weeks with just deleting it off of your phone.

Yeah. And I think there's a related point here, too, which is how people use these services. So, you know, something that I emphasize is that if your mind, has lost all tolerance for boredom. So if, like a lot of people, at the slightest hint of boredom, you pull out your phone, so you can look at something that's novel and something that's stimulating. Let me just quickly look at Facebook and a quick look at Twitter. Let me quickly jump on one of these algorithmic content sites.

What's the latest, like, interesting headline? If you do that all the time, your brain is going to lose its tolerance for not having novel stimuli. It will lose its tolerance for boredom. And if you lose your tolerance for boredom, you're going to find it incredibly difficult to concentrate for a long amount of time on a single thing. So some of the advice I give is actually, if you want to do deep work really well and get these massive productivity benefits, you have to re-embrace boredom. You have to retrain your mind that there's going to be long periods of time every single day where I might be craving novel stimuli and I don't give it to my brain. And so that even if you're using some of these services, for example, certainly if you want to take deep work seriously, you have to really constrain when you use them and make sure that you don't use them as just a reaction to boredom. That you should be bored in the sense of not having novel stimuli significant portions of every single day.

That's as important as rest in your muscles if you're in an important weightlifting routine or training for an athletic event. So that, even if you use these services, then that's my point would be you have to moderate. their influence on your brain and how your brain operates. What do you do when you're standing in a really long line at Chipotle? You think. You think. I mean, you can be a little bored. I'm asking you, like specifically.

Is that what you do? Okay. Yeah. I just, yeah, okay. So you're the only guy in line, not without his phone out? I am often the only person in various circumstances that I don't have his phone out. It's true. This is the easy way to define what my life is like is that I'll be in some setting,

like at the post office or Chipotle. and everyone brings out the phone and I'm the one guy who does it. I'm saying, why don't I just take a thought and work on it and be a little bored? Because I'm telling you, if your mind is addicted to, I'm going to get stimuli, it's not going to be able to focus when it comes time to focus. Like Seth Godin would say you notice things during those times when everyone else is glued to their phone. Yeah, it's interesting. The other thing, I wasn't going to go here, but since you mentioned the stimuli needed and people just will not be bored. And that's why I thought of being in a line of Chipotle listening.

I'm sorry, look at my phone or listening to a podcast. I usually listen to a podcast from in line there. But I think of my children, I feel like this is an area where a lot of us have failed, and that's because we have iPads and phones that we let them borrow, and they're watching YouTube or Netflix on those devices. Because, you know, when we were growing up, we had moments of boredom where we just go outside and create games. And I'm not sure that happens as much.

Now, we try to promote that to say, okay, it's the weather. It's not pouring down rain or it's not freezing cold. Now it's time to go outside with obviously no devices and play. But for those moments when it's not, there is a lot of usage of iPads and things like that. What would you say from a parental perspective to kids to promote this lifelong thought process around getting them to be creative and to do deep work when now everyone, it seems like, are using electronic devices. It's something that I'm concerned with. You know, and I wrote an article in this exact topic about deep work and its intersection

with children and education. I think it was called Focus is the New IQ, and it was on Time.com. And essentially, the point I made is that you have to see the ability to focus without distraction to do deep work like we used to think about IQ. This is going to be an ability that's going to open up great doors if you're good at it. Unlike IQ, however, this is something that can be absolutely trained and improved. It's not just something that, well, do you have a high IQ or not? And so we have to see it with similar importance, especially when it comes to raising and educating kids.

I think right now people are too quick to say, well, that's just kids these days. They're born with a device. What can we do about it? And sort of throw up your hands and make the observation, man, my kid texts so much. And I think that's abdicating responsibility, that when we think about the ability to focus as a tier one skill that can be developed and maintained, as opposed to just as abstract, hey, are we too distracted? What does that mean? I think it's easier to say this is an ethic in our families. This is an ethic in our institution that this ability needs to be respected. It needs to be trained. It needs to be promoted. Now, I don't quite know what that means. My kids are too young right now for this to be relevant. They're three and one. So they're not spending a lot of time texting yet.

Well, three-year-olds are on iPads now. Yeah, this is true. And, you know, I think it's not just a worry for young kids. I'm thinking about at the college level as well. Yeah. So I'm thinking about my own college experience. I'm 33 years old, which meant that I was the sort of last group of student to go through college before cell phones or laptops were really ubiquitous. Yeah, same, same time.

Same, right? We're a similar age. So we had that experience then at the college level of I'm going to sit here in a library carol and when I'm reading a book or trying to write a paper, I'm really just reading a book or writing a paper. Like there's no convenient way to, I can't quickly distract. To distract myself, I have to actually get up and go find a friend or go back to the dorm room or go find one of the public computers. And so. Yeah, I'd handwrite and then have to go to a public computer and then type it out. Like I literally handwrite the paper.

I mean, it sounds crazy actually now I'm thinking. I never really thought of it. But now that you mentioned I'm envisioning my freshman year, handwriting papers when I'm in the athletic study hall, and then finding a computer and going back and typing it out, because I didn't have a laptop. Yeah, I didn't have a laptop either. So if I was in the library, all I could do is read the book or take the notes. And so the point is we got, we just got this extensive training. We didn't use this terminology, but we were getting extensive training in deep work, which is a great preparation for the knowledge economy, that we had to spend hours doing cognitively demanding tasks without distractions. So we got better at it.

now at the college level, no one goes more than 45 seconds without some sort of quick distraction, some sort of quick check of the phone, some sort of quick check of Facebook, some sort of quick check of the email inbox. So we have a generation coming through an educational system that has no experience or training in deep work. And I think that's not just a personal issue or a parenting issue, but also sort of a competitive issue for our economy in general. Do you speak on college campuses to kids, to students outside of teaching?

I used to. Yeah. I used to do a lot of talks on college campus. It feels like your message would be sorely needed and hopefully to get through to kids. I've done a little bit of that and mainly the college athletes, but I think that would be a great sweet spot in addition to your daily teaching. Cal, this has been incredible, man. It won't longer than I expected, but that's because so many questions popped in my mind. I definitely, if you're up for, I would love to do this again at some point.

Maybe depending on what your next piece of work is, we could talk more about that as well. But this has been fantastic. Where would you, I know, I know we're not going to send anybody to Twitter, but where would you send people to find more about you online? Well, Calnewport.com has my blog where I write about all these issues. So you can just jump right into those thoughts. And you can find the books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere people sell books. Perfect.

The one final question I have, again, I talked to you briefly about this before we recorded. but I'm curious, when you hear the phrase, learning leader, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Yeah, so when I first, you know, heard, it's all the title of your show, Learning Leader, I think the first thing that came to mind was aggressive self-education on maximizing efficacy. Hmm. So, learning leader to me, I assume this was someone who is aggressively, trying to keep honing the tools that they use. I love it. Absolutely, man.

That's exactly what this is all about is being intentional and consistent and regularly doing it to be thoughtful in your approach. Because I think too many times that that's why I love your work and what you stand for because I think it takes deep work in order to make big things happen in order to sustain excellence. And if there's something that's very common amongst all. of the high performers I've been fortunate to meet and speak with is they are fantastic at finding, at creating, at blocking out time, regardless of how busy they are or they should be, but they're fantastic at making sure they have that time to do it, to do that work.

And that's why I think your book and your work resonates with so many high-level people. Yeah. Well, you know, a deep life is, it's a hard life. It takes a lot of energy and effort to craft a deep life in today's culture. But it's not just an incredibly productive life. It really is an incredibly satisfying, meaningful life. It's just a good way to approach your professional life. It's hard, but it's meaningful.

And so I'm not at all surprised that the top performers and people you admire that you talk to understand that. Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, thanks again, Cal. Look forward to us continuing our dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, thanks, right. I'm doing it. All right, next time. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world class athlete,

or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.