The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 582: Cal Newport - Obsess Over Quality, Create Time Freedom (like Benjamin Franklin), Limit Daily Goals, Work At a Natural Pace, & How To Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/44qxsph The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Notes on this conversation with Cal Newport (Obsess over quality). Jewel obsessed over the quality of her work so much that she turned down a 1m dollar offer (even while living out of her car) because she needed time to make her work excellent. Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term. Benjamin Franklin – He hired David Hall to create time freedom. He needed time to think, time to experiment. He gave up money in the short term to gain time freedom to create something for the future. There's no guarantee that it would pay off, but we all should think about how we can make investments that our future self would thank us for. Have fewer concurrent active projects. Instead of focusing on 10 things, focus on 2 or 3. Make it public. Share with your team. Be known as a leader who focuses on a few important objectives instead of 10 of them.  Match your space to your work – Be in nature, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote Hamilton in the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest surviving house in Manhattan (served as headquarters for George Washington during the Battle of Harlem Heights, and home of Aaron Burr when he was Vice President), Neil Gaiman built a spartan, 8 sided writing shed that sits on low stilts and offers views on all sides of endless trees. Do Fewer Things: Limit Daily Goals – Cal learned this from his doctoral adviser at MIT. She was incredulous about Cal's attempts to switch back and forth between multiple academic papers. She preferred to get lost in a single project at a time. Cal was convinced that the slowness of working on just one important thing per day would hold him back. Work at a Natural Pace Don't rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity over different timescales, and, when possible, executed in settings conducive to brilliance. Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. Grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time, and you should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it. Obsess over Quality By focusing intensely on the small number of activities that matter most to our jobs, you can find both the motivation and justification for slowness. Improve your taste. It's in the uneasy distance between our taste and our ability that improvement happens – aka in our drive to meet our own high standards. To combat the potential paralysis of perfectionism, think about giving yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time–focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of people whose taste you care about but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Gather with people who share similar professional ambitions. When you combine the opinions of multiple practitioners, more possibilities and nuance emerge, and there's a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. It's easy to mistake "do fewer things" for "accomplish fewer things" – but this understanding is backward. We work roughly the same number of hours each week regardless of the size of our task lists. Having more commitments simply increases the hours lost to overhead tax – the coordinating activities, such as meetings and email, needed to manage what's on your plate. The pandemic "zoom apocalypse," in which many knowledge workers found themselves in Zoom meeting all day long, was caused in part by reaching a state in which overhead tax crowded out almost any time to actually complete tasks. Doing fewer things, in other words, makes us better at our jobs–not only psychologically but also economically and creatively.  The Overhead Tax – A key property of overhead tax is that it tends to expand to fill as much time as it's provided. So long as a project is something that you've committed to, and it's not yet complete, it will tend to generate a continual tax in the form of check-in meetings, impromptu email conversations, and plain old mental space. Knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what "productivity" actually means–incredibly unusual compared to other areas of our economy. Lacking a precise definition they defaulted to a crude approximation: pseudo-productivity – using visible activity as a proxy for useful professional accomplishment. Cal argues that the current burnout crisis is due, in part, to the combination of pseudo-productivity with more recent advances in mobile computing and digital communication that made unlimited work available at all times in all places. The result was an impossible internal tug of war, where there was always more to do, and never any hope of catching up. Busy exhaustion itself became your primary signal of usefulness. Slow productivity doesn't ask that you extinguish ambition. Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. Cal revisits the popular narrative of Jane Austen's writing career; a closer look at her life reveals a powerful case study for a slower approach. Busy Jane Austen was neither happy nor producing memorable work, while unburdened Jane Austen, writing contently at a quiet cottage, after her family decided to withdraw from a busy social calendar, transformed English literature. The goal of Slow Productivity is to propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done; to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism, and rebuild it to enable you to create things you're proud of without grinding yourself down along the way; and to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived.

We have this fear of like, well, I'm going to produce less if I'm not at full intensity all the time. But the reality is quality becomes this key engine, this low productivity. If you actually want to be productive, this is a guide on how to do that. Dr. Caldney, Professor and the author, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment. When you obsess over quality, one of the side effects that becomes unavoidable is you have to slow down. If you're doing too much, you can't do anything. Betting on yourself and obsessing over quality. It's not a hack.

Stuff begins to be finished at a higher level. of quality. You're going to hit your marks better. You're going to gain more leverage in your career, but just give yourself time. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Tech Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader text.

Talk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic work, Cal is a New York Times bestselling author who writes about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. Some of my favorite books that he's written are, so good they can't ignore you. Deep work, and its latest is called Slow Productivity. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into over 40 languages.

During this conversation, we discuss what we can learn from the musician Jewel about obsessing over quality. And then how Benjamin Franklin exemplified the things. thesis of slow productivity and invested money to free up time in his schedule to think. We revisit Cowell's classic 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You and why it's even more relevant today. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Cow Newport. Cowell, man, it's so great to have you back on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Wow, it's good to be back. Let me tell you that this is a true story.

yesterday I was wearing a vintage Learning Leader podcast t-shirt. Really? I mean, from early days, I think one of my early appearances on your show, we're talking many years ago, you sent me a shirt. I still have it. I like it. It's gray. And it has Learning Leader in black. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about.

I do. It's the old school logo that I had made like on Fiverr for six bucks, dude. So like I got to send you the updated updated gear. Oh, I represent. I'm representing. I don't know why I like that shirt so much. I just do. It fits well. It's comfortable. Anyways, I had it on the other day. And then I was like, wait, I'm talking to Ryan tomorrow. Look at this. This is the universe saying, you know, we're ready for some learning leader. Okay. Did not know you're going to say this. But you write about obsessing over quality. Okay, Cal. And one of the things that's important, if you're going to make merch, obsess over the feel of the T-shirt so that a guy like Cal Newport, wants to continue wearing it, I don't know, seven years later or however long it's been since I originally sent you that. So obsess over quality. That's key three and slow productivity, your latest book, man. That's something I really try to aspire to.

I should have used you as an example because I have another shirt. I won't mention names, a really good friend of mine, author friend of mine, sent me a shirt. And the fabric, you can kind of see your skin through it. You know what I mean? Like you can sort of get the, it's a white shirt. I was like, nah, see it matters, right? You got obsessed over the quality, man. I'm real big on that.

Either it's funny I have an event coming up and we're like figuring out what to give to some of the people coming to the event. And I have somebody helping with this and she's sending me these options. I'm like, well, it's either go for the very top, top, top line or we're not doing anything when it comes to whatever that particular thing is. And I think there's something to be said to that for how you live. And I'm curious, again, way not where I thought we were going to start, but let's just do it anyway. When you think about obsessing over quality, and maybe this is some of the Derek Sivers, hell yeah or no, and I'm not sure if I fully believe in that with everything in life. But how do you apply this obsess over quality into your personal and professional life?

Well, I mean, in the end, especially if what you're doing is entrepreneurial, especially if what you're doing, you're a freelance, you're a solopreneur, you run your own shop. in the end what matters is the quality of what you produce, right? Ultimately, that's the thing, not just that makes money, but it's the thing that gives you the freedom to dictate how you want your professional life to unfold, right? It's the things that gives you that leverage. The better you are at something, the more control you have over your professional life and the more opportunity you'll have to slow down, right? the escape busyness to escape overload. Like quality is the way to get out of that.

And then on the flip side, we're just wired for it. Humans are wired to feel good when we do something well. We have this drive that not just do things well, but that recognition that this thing is great is one of the more long-lasting, positive sensations that human psychologically feels because we're wired to actually try to get better to produce stuff, the master.

So, you know, I really think making credit. craft and quality at the center of how you think about your work, especially if you have a lot of autonomy, is the recipe for like a much more meaningful professional life. In this portion of your book, Slow Productivity, when you're writing about obsessing over quality, maybe these two musicians just piqued my curiosity because I'm fans of them. And I very vividly remember being a fan of Alanis Morissette when I was growing up. And you write about Jewel, the musician, as well as Alanis Morissette, when it comes to betting on yourself and obsessing over quality. Can you share more about those two musicians and why you decided to write about them? Well, Jewel's story is particularly interesting because it highlights the double-edged sort of advantage when it comes to obsessing over quality. So there's two different advantages you get from it, and her story shows both.

So the key thing I focused in on the book was really early Jewel. So she's in San Diego. She's living out of her car. But she's also this very talented musician because people don't know this about her, but she grew up in Alaska, rural Alaska, Homer Alaska, but her family was traveling. They were traveling family musicians. So they would travel Alaska.

She knew how to yodel. She was from Swiss heritage. So they had a yodeling part of their act, which actually gives you a lot of cool vocal control. She was plucked out. of obscurity to go attend a really prestigious arts high school essentially in Michigan, interlocking. So she was trained and had all this talent, but ended up essentially wandering and was living

out of her car. And she starts performing at this coffee house. It's kind of like her last ditch thing. She's like, let me just perform. We'll split the door. I just feel like my music's going to do something. And it did. So they get this exponential growth thing happening.

As Jule is playing at this coffee house in San Diego living out of her car, it's, you know, two surfers the first week. Then it's four. Those two surfers and their two friends. Then it's eight. Then it's 16. And like a six month period, they're overflowing this coffee house.

They have to put speakers outside. So you can sort of look through the window of the coffee house and still hear the performance going on because he has this super raw interesting thing going on. So the record executives arrive. Like, okay, this is special. We want this.

They start fighting over, you know, flying her out, fighting over trying to get her to sign. And finally, one of the companies puts a million dollars on the table. a million dollar signing bonus and she turns that down

she says actually don't give me that bonus sign me I don't want the big I don't want the big bonus right all right so this is where I kind of pick up the story because here's what was going on is sort of the first advantage I think of such a quality is shown in this story the reason why she turned it down

is she realized she wasn't ready yet to have a huge hit record right she'd been playing in this coffee house for six months but she didn't have it together yet to have a huge hit record. But if she took a million dollar signing bonus, they were going to expect her to make that back right away.

Let's get that record out, biggest pop producers, and if they did it, they were going to drop her. I was given to you for fun. The expectation is coming. It's coming. It's coming fast because now you're on the books,

right? And that A&R guy who signs you is going to have to answer to the higher up. So she very sadly actually got more back end, which ended up making her a fortune, no signing bonus of any large size because she wanted to have, time to learn how to do this better. And because they cost her no money, the fact that

she, her first album, it struggled out of the gate. She wasn't really ready yet. She was right. When she was recording the album, she'd never played with a band before. And so now she's recording her first album. She's nervous. She had never played with a band before. That comes through in the music. She wasn't really ready to be on stage. She spent months just learning how to do this. Very cheap, no tour van, driving herself. You know, her. her on stage, moving her own equipment, just performing, performing, figuring out her voice, figuring out how to perform, goes back eventually, re-records what's going to become her big, huge, first big single.

Now she's more confident. She re-records it with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is a friend of hers. It has like a real groove to it. And then finally things take off, right? And that album, pieces of me, goes crazy and she makes a fortune off of it. But the lesson there, so the lesson that was highlighting is that when you obsess over quality, one of the side effects that becomes unavoidable is you have to slow down. Right.

She had to slow down and say, no, no, I don't want the big record deal. Let's try to make this all happen at once. If I really care about doing this well, I have to take my time. It's going to take me, you know, I need to focus on this and just do this. So it's like this first advantage of obsession over quality is that it makes busyness just naturally seem anathema. Like we can't have this in our life. And then the quick second thing that happened, so she blows it.

up. She gets very successful. She goes on this big tour. It's exhausting. She stars a supporting role in an an Eng Lee movie. And her people are like, great, this is the game plan. It's the Taylor Swift game plan. It's you're going to do international tours. You're going to move to LA. In between your international tours, you're going to do movies. And she thinks about this for a second. Says, wait a second. I'm really good at music. I have a lot of money. I have a lot of fans. I don't want to do it. No. And she never did an international tour again. And she stopped doing movies. She's like, I'm just going to record. specifically what I want to record. She moved out the ranch on Texas for a while.

So it was the second observation about why obsessive of her quality is valuable is that it gives you the leverage to dictate the terms of your life. And she did not want to be Taylor Swift. She didn't want to be on the road 350 days a year and be the biggest star in the world. She wanted to produce music that she liked and live and have fans and do it at her own pace. So quality forces you to slow down. Quality gives you the leverage to slow yourself down as well. So quality becomes this key engine, this low productivity because it has the double-edged advantage to it. And getting very clear, especially impressive at a young age that she was able to do this,

getting very clear on what your definition of success is, because society will tell you what it should be. They will tell you what you should do. And I found, Cal, a commonality among leaders who sustain excellence over time, is they are very clear on their definition of success and they're okay with letting people down or even having them be upset with them because they're not willing to go by society's definition of success. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And also knowing even if your measure is the same as other people, so like Jewel might have

said, I want to sell a lot of Alps. Yeah. How you get there matters, right? And, you know, so realizing, like, getting there by doing something that's too good to be ignored, honing my craft until it really is something original, that's very different than, you know, riding a wave. Let's get a big pop producer in here and have like a sort of grunge pop mix. Like, there's a lot of bands like that in the 90s. You know, I grew up in the 90s. That's why I have Jewel, Lance Morris said. I think a lot about that scene. If you think back to the 90s, there were a lot of these bands that were doing this sort of punk, pop, pop. sort of shallow, but like the videos were crazy, getting these sort of burst, these burst of attention and sales and then disappearing. So it matters how you're chasing the success. Like even if you want to sell books, there's a difference between I'm writing something that people just have to keep telling other people about for the next decade versus like we made a big

thing and there's a huge publicity thing or I'm notorious or infamous and people kind of wanted to hear about it. Yeah, so how you get there matters as well. How do you, juxtapose someone like jewel with the ethos of early days at Facebook and mark Zuckerberg move fast and break things because I still feel like there's an obsession over quality but I could be wrong but both of them have ended up doing quite well okay I guess we get we could say from Jewel and Zuckerberg's businesses and his life seems like it's in a good spot right now. Now, different ways to approach it, maybe, or at least that just seems like the ethos.

But if you think about those two different styles, what are your thoughts? Well, but underlying it, there's a commonality. Yeah. Like Zuckerberg was always focused like a laser beam on what mattered. So early on, it was user numbers. This is what matters. We got to get user numbers up. Now, his strategy for how do we do this?

Well, we have to write a new strategy rulebook from scratch because Web 2 at the scale had never been done before. So we're going to have to try a lot of things, but we know exactly what we're trying to do. And then after the mobile revolution, his target changed from user numbers to engagement. So what is the average active user minutes is what matters, right? How do we get people to keep using this? And again, they experimented a lot, but they had their eye on this very specific prize. We want to do this.

This number needs to go up, and they really were focused. You know, I've actually heard reports from inside meta now that there's some issues going on, there now because they maintain the practical strategy of let's try, let's just rock and roll, try things like you're entrepreneurial, right? But they're lacking that laser point target. And so there's a lot of inside meta, a lot of activity going on, but it's not necessarily moving the boat in the same direction, right? Because they sort of lost that early day focus on this is what we're trying to do. Like this number needs to be, we want people to be more engaged. We want more users.

So I'm going to make a strategy tactics differentiation there. Strategies crystal clear. We want to do this as well as possible. It's Silicon Valley. The tactics might involve a lot of we have to figure out how to do this. We're in music. Now, music's been around. There's no mystery.

You need to produce really original, interesting music can be good at performing it. There's no experimentation that needs to be done to figure out what the tactic is there. It's just really hard to do it well. It feels like I keep, coming back when people ask me for advice, usually at the end of keynotes, I mention your name all the time, yours and Steve Martin. Right. And so good they can't ignore you is one of the greatest book titles of all the time comes from the Steve Martin quote when he was with Charlie Rose and

you write about that. And it feels there's a lot of so good they can't ignore you in a lot of what you do, especially when you talk about obsessing over quality. Now that we're revisiting you and I, How has your mind, whether it's evolved or changed or maybe not at all, you're doubling down even more on this idea of being so good they can't ignore you? I mean, I still think that's the number one advice for any creative endeavor, but also really any endeavor where you're producing something that you're trying to convince the world is valuable. Your number one goal is to be good, get better at what you're doing. I still obsess about that. I'm going to do that with my writing right now. Like, it's all I think about in my writing is how do I level up again?

How do I become, how do I become a better writer? How do I become more original in what I'm doing? What is the move to make that is unmissable, unmistakable, right? So I'm a huge believer. And of course, that heavily influences this idea from the new book of obsessing over quality. You could trace that all the way back to be so good they can't ignore you, right? Because that idea was one of the most formative ideas when I was coming up. Encountering that in my mid-20s remains one of the most formative ideas.

So being so good you can't be ignored is still remains, I think, the number one tactic for building a really cool life. It's really hard. But you probably now as a podcaster, as a writer, get a lot of questions about publishing books, about making a podcast, about all this. And there's a lot of these questions about hacks and about how to get it to grow and how to get people to be aware of it. Have you focused on making the podcast so good that it can't be ignored? That's like the number one question before the hacks or the marketing or the social media strategy. It's like, have you listened to the actual podcast? And is it so good that it can't be ignored?

That trumps everything else. And yet it seems like it's not. the top of the list for people who are making these things, at least the ones that are asking me questions. I try to respond with that every time, but it's not really the most enjoyable answer to receive because it's hard. It's not crystal clear. It's not a hack. It's just what ends up differentiating you from everybody else. Well, I mean, I get this a lot when it comes to social media, right? Because I don't use social media, so people are always asking me. I have a podcast.

I have a book that's coming out or what have you. I have art. How am I going to find an audience without social media? And I always come back like, well, look, I mean, if you want to use social media to help promote something, like, I'm not going to yell at you. It's fine. But it's not the thing that's going to make your audience grow. It's producing something that's awesome.

If it's awesome, people will find it and it will spread. And if it's not, they won't. And everything else is just like the details of how that unfolds or where it unfolds. And it's not so interesting. Like if you produce something awesome and you're a heavy TikTok user, then, okay, people will talk about it a lot on TikTok. If you produce that same awesome thing and you don't use TikTok, but you're a really big on podcast.

And okay, then the podcast will spread. You know, it will find its way. But here's the irony. The book I wrote about this concept, so good they can't ignore you. It came out 2012. I wrote that book. Like, this is a good book. This is an original idea.

I think this is important. When that book came out, it didn't do well. Right? It didn't initially do well? Did not initially do well. That book comes out in 2012. You know, it's a hard book to get your arms around. And also, it's not like I was a brand name, right?

So then I pitched Deep Work was the next book I wrote next. They reduced my advance for Deep Work versus what they gave me for So Good. It's like, well, so good. You know, it didn't really, didn't really click. Fast forward now, we're more than a decade later. So Good They Can Ignore You has sold hundreds of thousands of copy. It found its audience. You know, yeah, out the gate.

People didn't know who I was. There wasn't a lot of publicity around it. It's like, what's going on here? But it was good. And I knew it was good. And I remember telling my agent, my public, I'm like, this is a good book. Trust me. Like, this thing is going to spread.

And for years, I did podcasts like yours. I would just talk about it. And over years, people would hear about it. They tell other people about it. And now it's, you know, three or four hundred thousand, thousand copy selling book. Never being on a bestseller list, never being, you know, featured in some mates. Just, you know, it was too good to be ignored. So it's interesting. The book itself is a case study of I did none of the things you would need to do to spread the word about a book and the book came out slow and no strategy. And yet it's still found, you know, that thing, it found its audience, you know? So it's an example of it itself is an example of what it talks about. Obsessive or quality, man, usually you're going to find a way. I was surprised to read a little bit about in your most recent book, Benjamin Franklin, because you're talking about slow productivity, slowing down. And that's not.

the first phrase I would think of when I think of Benjamin Franklin. How did Benjamin Franklin exemplify the qualities of someone who believes in slow productivity? Well, one of the other big ideas of slow productivity is if you're doing too much, you can't do anything. So if you have a lot of different things going on, you get a log jam effect where the logs going down the river. If there's too many of them, they get stuck in each other and you create a log jam and nothing gets down to river anymore. Right. So we often think, do more things. You have more opportunities, more things will get done. But actually, you have this inverse effect where the things begin to interfere with each other and very little gets done. This is the Franklin story. It's like

Franklin is a very successful entrepreneur. When he's coming up, he's a very successful printer, and he's good, and he hustles, and he figures out that industry, and he begins franchising, and he has printer, print shops in different cities, and he's making a lot of money at this, but he's frustrated because he also has these other things he wants he wants to work on things of great importance long term ideas science philosophy and he has all the stuff going on trying to run all these businesses so what he does and this is like a forgotten part of the franklin story is he hires someone called david hall to be an assistant and like originally the idea was david hall came over from england he was just going to open one of franklin's multiple franchises

He was going to send them down to the Carolinas to open a franchise. But Hall got sick on the ship ride over on the Atlantic, and they kind of put that plan on hold. So Hall was just sort of hanging around at Franklin's shop in Philadelphia. And Franklin's like, you know what? This guy's really competent. Here's what I'm going to do. He's going to take over all the day to day of all my businesses. And I am going to give him half of the profits.

He gets half the profits. I'll get the other half. So Franklin is, yes, he's slashing his income by at least a half. Like immediately by a half, long term by a lot more, because of course, if Franklin is actively running this business, it's going to keep growing. But he writes these letters, I write about it in the book, you can find these letters he writes at this time where he's saying, my time is mine again, right? I have freedom to actually pursue or think things through. And he immediately puts this newfound freedom to effect. The first thing he does is he essentially discovers the major laws of electricity, right?

just because he could just sit and do experiments and think. Like all of this was very new right now. He works out. He coins the term battery. He figures out about voltage and positive and negative. Like huge insights. Figures out the lightning rod, which was like a massive thing, right? He was like, wait a second.

I think lightning is electrical discharge between the ground and the cloud. So we could actually discharge that charge before we have a bolt with a lightning. It works. This is like saving lives. He's like a hero. He gets the Kopply medal in England. Right. Then he starts the American philosophical.

society basically builds the framework for intellectual life in the Americas, then gets into politics, and of course we know what happens next. All of the cool things he did that left the legacy was after he found the way to significantly reduce the amount of things going on. And he was willing to give up. He's like, I have enough money. And that's the way he, I love the way he thought about it, by the way. Because he came from nothing, right?

He fled an apprenticeship illegally in Boston and made his way down the Philadelphia with nothing in his pocket, right? So, you know, he thought a lot about money, but the way he thought about it was, how much do I need to be comfortable on? Okay, that's my number. Great. I can get that now. If someone takes this over, I have enough sources of revenue here, I'll be fine. I'll be able to live. Fine. Now let me focus on what else I want to do. So he was not trying to maximize wealth. He was trying to maximize his ability to do cool things. So I think he's a great exemplar of slow productivity, even though we think of him as Mr. industrial checklist virtue guy. He took a lot off of his plate. And when he did, he started

getting things done. He created freedom for himself to think, right? Morgan Housel and I talked about this recently. I know you and Morgan have talked, another great writer that he says, sometimes my work is me sitting on the couch thinking for hours, but that doesn't look like work. And sometimes you even feel guilty doing it or just going for a long walk. And it feels like Benjamin Franklin well ahead of his time of saying, I'm going to give up some money in the short term by hiring out this work to create freedom for myself to think, to be reflective, to come up with ideas with no guarantee that that would pay off. And I think that is inspiring to me as, I'm sure you, when you're working to build, whatever you're working to build of make investments that your future

self will thank you for. And I'm betting most people's future self would thank them for creating time freedom. Now, I do think you've got to be pretty intentional about how you spend the time. If you do it to watch Netflix or eat bad food and just do nothing, that's probably not right. But to create opportunities for you to think and reflect and to work out and to do the things that help generate ideas. That's what I take from this story. Yeah. So I think it's useful to be,

you want to be frustrated before you make a change like this. Okay. So you want to start pursuing these other things that are important to you and be frustrated that you don't have enough time. But you want to be specifically frustrated of like, I'm trying to learn about produce the laws of electricity. I'm trying to get in better shape. I'm trying to write these novels.

I really want to do this and I'm trying to do it. And I just don't have enough time because all these other things going on. So like if you have that frustration before you make the simplification, then you know you're in the right place. If you're not frustrated at all, you're just like, I don't know. Why not? Why not reduce work? Like things are going, well, I could automate this. But you don't, if you're not frustrated, if there's not stuff you're trying to do and you don't have time to do it, then you run the danger of what you're talking about where, all right, I hire David Hall.

I guess, uh, I guess I'm going to start drinking. You know, like, I don't know what to do with my free time now. Hey, let's check out these pubs in colonial Philadelphia. I haven't had time to see them before. Yeah, so you want to make yourself frustrated and then you want to work to relieve the frustration. Another person who is a prolific maker of things that I'm a huge fan of, Lynn Manuel Miranda, his musical in the Heights. Okay.

I love how deep you went on this and how it was at the beginning when he first wrote it to where it ended up becoming in the process in between. There's another part about him, too, about where he wrote Hamilton and the house. That's a separate topic, but I am fascinated by his story as a whole. Can you share more about his initial drafts of In the Heights, a musical, to how long it took to it to get, I would say, of high quality? He's a great example. He's going to be a great example of another principle. So if we think about, if we framework this conversation, right?

There's like obsessive quality. We're thinking about Jewel. There's like, don't do too many things. We're thinking about Ben Franklin. Too many things gets in the way of doing anything. Lin-Manuel Miranda and in the Heights is a great example of the third principle, which is working out a more natural pace, right? So if you don't know in the Heights, this was the play that Miranda did before Hamilton.

And it was a huge success. It was seven or eight Tony Awards, right? Like it was a triumph. We just, we overlook it because Hamilton was such a triumph. We don't realize. but any playwright would be happy with just that first play. Miranda wrote the first version of this play in college at Wesleyan. He was a performing arts major.

So he had a version of this play done when he was like 20 years old. It was another eight years after that until the play actually debuted on Broadway. So there's this eight years. So in the book, it's like, let's take this apart. It took apart this story. It was actually kind of hard because Miranda is new enough that it's not like there's definitive biographies written about him yet. So I had to really piece things together from a lot of sources.

But here's basically the story that came together. He wrote this play in college, but it wasn't very good because he was 20, right? And 20-year-olds have a hard time writing great plays. But there was a chorus, some stuff in it that was original, in particular the music, because this is where he debuted that sort of sung through mixture of hip-hop with classical Broadway musical numbers that we know from Hamilton, you know. He was experimenting with that even when he was 20. So there was a couple alumni of Wesleyan saw the play. They had a production, a theater production company in Manhattan.

And they said, look, here's what we're going to do. Let's stage readings. We'll hire actors for the day. We'll stage a reading. And then you can go work on this thing. When you're ready, come back, we'll stage another reading. And we can kind of keep working on this over time. And so he begins working on crafting this play, but it's over years.

And he's doing other things. Like his dad, he's a substitute teacher in high school. His dad's like he got to go to law school, but he ignores his dad. He has a freestyle rap touring group that he's touring to world like doing freestyle rap performances. He's writing restaurant reviews. So he's got a lot kind of doing different things. But he keeps coming back. All right, let me take another swing at this and they'll do a performance.

And he'll go and just digest that and like a few months later, let's try this again. So he's just slowly evolving this thing. He's not procrastinating, right? I mean, he's continuing to work on it, but he's not forcing it. Right? He's not like, we got to get this done. When I'm 22, this play has to come out.

It would have been okay, but probably pretty bad. He's like, I'm going to keep relentlessly working on this, but I'm going to take my time on this until it gets better and better and better. And over the years, it got better and better and better. And finally, it was good enough that it got accepted into this program where it's a program entirely focused on developing your musical play to be ready for the stage. this allowed him to bring on another playwright. She was fantastic.

Miranda's great at the music, but he's not great at the book. So they brought on this other playwright, who went on to win a Pulitzer of her own for another play. Now it started to really begin to rock and roll. He brought on the musical director, who ended up being his director for Hamilton as well. And everything came together finally in this like one year period. And the play took off.

It was just this years of him, like I'm going to keep working on this. Keep coming back to it. polishing, get some more life experience, try again. So he took his time. He took his time and eventually that helped them produce something that was fantastic. So I love this principle of slow productivity. It's like not everything has to be done as fast as possible.

Sometimes things take time and that's okay. Like it's okay to say this decade I want to produce something awesome. And Miranda was like in my 20s, I want to produce a great play. And it's like a very different way of thinking about productivity than I want to be super productive on Tuesday. It's just a much wider time scale to think about productivity. There could be an issue

with this paralysis by analysis though. How do you know when it's time to ship it? With like a book, for example, your publisher gives you a deadline and you better turn that sucker in, right? I mean, you can extend it sometimes, but for the most part, you know when it's ready

because you have a deadline and you better get it ready. But for him, And for others, like let's relate this to just the, he's a genius and a savant, right? But maybe didn't start out that way, but worked this way into becoming that. But for the rest of us, how do we know when it's time? How do we know when it's time to ship as opposed to just constantly analyzing it and then being paralyzed almost by all that analysis? Yeah. So you have to have stakes in the ground that other people can see.

Yeah. Right. This turns out to be the solution. So for Miranda, what this was was the production company in Manhattan. You're like, great, when are you coming back in four months? Great, we'll put it on the books. We're going to bring in actors, and we're going to read the new version of the play. So he had stakes in the ground where I have to deliver something new and better.

Other people are counting on it. So it's not just, it's up to you. Take as much time as you need. No, no, you're putting stakes in the ground. You're putting commitments in the ground. What matters is how far out you're spacing those stakes. And he's willing to, I'm willing to take three years of doing this slowly. another example like that from the book was the Beatles working on Sergeant Pepper,

which was a very, it's a key album not just for them, but in the history of music, because I get into this in the book, but the big decision the Beatles make before they record that album is no more touring. They were exhausted. They had this sort of tour from hell right before this. This was like 68, I think. This was the tour where the, we're bigger than Jesus quote came out. and also they had all these issues overseas with the Philippines and Japan

they had to bring out the right. Like it was just a terrible tour like we're done with touring but it was a problem because this meant now there's no constraints on their album. If you're a touring band like the Beatles in the 1960s when you're recording an album

you're recording songs you have to perform on stage and that like put a lot of constraints on what you can do. So their very first album after deciding not to tour was kind of a big deal because they could do anything they want it which is why Sergeant Pepper

has tape delays and unusual Indian instruments on it and all of these weird interesting things you can do in a studio but you can't do on stage. So they had the problem of perfectionism. What's to stop them from just spending four years working on this album?

And what stopped them was they put out a single, it wasn't them, there's actually their manager, as soon as they had something releasable as a single he put it out. Now there's a steak in the ground. Oh, okay, an album is coming from the Beatles, right? Like, we got to actually deliver this thing pretty soon because our singles already out there. So a stake

went in the ground. Now they spent way more time on this album than any previous album, but still a reasonable amount of time. So you can do the same in your own life. You want to put these public stakes in the ground. You can stretch them out. Don't rush yourself, but keep putting them in the ground. If you can't, and this came up, you know, people have been asking me about this since the book came out. Like, well, what if I don't have the ability to do that? There is no production company that wants to stage my reading. There is no publisher who's expecting a draft of my book. There is no single for me to put out. There's no company that's going to release my single. Well, then you want to put your focus on, how do I get better at this to the place where now I can put these stakes in the

ground? Like, how do I get good enough at what I'm doing that people care enough that I can actually start putting these stakes in the ground to pull myself forward and producing something, right? And so it's kind of a two-stage process. You've got to get good enough at something that people care. Then you have to leverage the fact that people care to hold you accountable to make you actually deliver. But just give yourself time. Miranda kept having to be accountable, but he did so over a period of five or six incredibly creatively fertile years. The Beatles spent way more time on Sergeant Pepper than their first album. Their first album they recorded in one day.

They came in, they performed the songs, four-track recording, a couple takes per song, and they were out the door. It was a hundred times longer, Sergeant Peppers, but they still had the stake in the ground. They still had the deliver. So that's what I tell people. It's like you got to be accountable. And if there's, if there's no way to be accountable yet, then maybe you need to turn from your project idea and back towards the fundamental skill building for a bit more. We're focusing a lot on artists, musicians, inventors, people who make things. There is an overwhelming population of people who have really solid.

solid jobs within Fortune 500 companies. A lot of leaders who listen to this cow who have a job exactly like that, right? You're trying to hit the quarter, you know, help the company achieve whatever goals they have set. You haven't set them. The company has. You work within that place. When you think of slow productivity, which a lot of Fortune 500 leaders probably say, I don't want my people reading that book, even though they should. Let's relate this and the thesis and the principles from slow productivity to that person. So I'll build an avatar. A VP of product or a VP of sales at a Fortune 500 company, you know, they're building teams, they have aggressive goals, they have a lot of pressure, they got to hit each quarter, you know, that type of,

you worked with people like that. How would you apply the principles from slow productivity to a person like that? Yeah. And so this is the second of the two audiences for the book, right? And And one of the big claims is the principles we identify by looking at these famous case studies apply equally to entrepreneurs, solepreneurs, people have a lot of autonomy, and people who work within big knowledge work organizations. That the same principles can apply to both, it just looks different. Like, let's take that avatar. What is like working on fewer things, avoiding a logjam look like to that avatar?

Well, what it looks like, for example, is having fewer concurrent active projects, right? Not fewer things you work on, not fewer things that you accomplish, but fewer things that you're working on actively. Because the argument there is if you've said yes to, let's say, 10 things, and you're trying to work on all 10 things at the same time, each of those 10 sort of traditional knowledge worker projects has with it its own administrative overhead. If I'm actively working on this, there's emails I have to send, there's meetings I have to attend. So let's say you have 10 things you're actively working on at once. all of that administrative overhead is adding up, and it log jams. And soon you find yourself, and I think a lot of knowledge workers are probably shaking their heads in recognition right now, you find yourself in a day in which you have five or six hours of meetings dotting the day

and just frantic emailing in between, and it's very hard to actually make progress on any of these projects. You get a metaphorical logjam and the rate at which you're finishing good stuff that moves you or your team closer to your quarterly objective slows down. So let's say instead you say, okay, I've agreed to these. 10 things. But I have a clear demarcation. These three I'm actively working on, these seven I'm waiting to work on. And as soon as I finish one of these active things, I'm pulling the next thing in from the waiting list. And I'm making this public. It's a shared document. If you gave me one of these commitments, you can just, you can look at it, see exactly where it is. It's number three in the waiting list. You can watch it march towards active. As soon as I drag your thing into my active list,

I'm going to write you like, I'm working on this actively now. I'm all in on it. Call me any time. Let's email about it whenever you want. I'm just working on these three things. at a time. What do you get? A lot less administrative overhead. A lot more of your day for you to actually work on what you're working on. Stuff begins to be finished faster. Stuff begins to be finished at a higher level of quality. You're going to hit your marks better. Okay, let's look at the Linmanwell Miranda. Well, what does this mean if you're, again, you're like our avatar here working in a big organization? Well, one of the big ideas from that principle is we're not wired to try to work at full intensity eight hours a day all year round.

So what we want to try to get here is more variation and intensity on different timescale. So maybe we want to do something like the technology company base camp does with cycling. I'm in an on cycle where I'm focused on a few huge objectives that are really important for the company. And then we have a two or three week down cycle after that where we're sort of reflected on what happened, figuring out what the work on next, we're recharging, we're sort of taking care of details. and then we up cycle again. So maybe we can have more variation and intensity.

Maybe I can be more realistic when I give timelines for things. Instead of when someone says, how long is this going to take? Instead of giving them the absolute best case scenario, I give them a much more realistic time frame estimate. So I actually have the breathing room to do it right. And what about jewel and obsessing over quality? Well, for our avatar, this says, focus on the things, identify the things in your job that really move the needle for your company.

And begin to obsess about doing that thing better. because as you do that thing that really matters better, you're going to gain more leverage in your career more of what Adam Grant calls idiosyncrasy credits, the ability to say, I don't do meetings in the morning. I go remote and then disconnected on Monday just to think deeply. I'm moving down to like half time

and you're happy to still have me because I really produce results by focusing on what really matters as opposed to just demonstrating the people that you're very efficient about dealing with emails and meetings. you begin to gain that breathing room that Jule enjoyed after her career took off. So all three of those principles apply to the organizational setup. And in fact, I would say the bulk of the tactical advice in this book is actually aimed at exactly that setup

because that's the setup that I think we need to take the most care to actually figure out how to make slow productivity work. You mentioned a few minutes ago that we are not wired to work at full intensity eight hours a day. So agree. What do you think of this idea? Maybe it's easier for you and me. I don't know, because you've got to teach. So it's a little different than at a university.

But this idea of working like a lion. A lion spends a lot of time resting, sleeping. But when it's time to go and it's time to hunt, they go with maximum effort and intensity. And I try to design my days to work like a lion where there is time. when I have, I must have maximum 100% focus on preparation for talking to Cal Newport, reading his books, watching everything online, doing the actual conversation, recording the intros and altros, but then maybe take a nap or rest and think before the next big thing where I have to go hunt again. And so, and I've read, read about that online and I really

identify with that. What do you think of this idea of working like a lion? Yeah, I mean, I would say yes, and think about this at multiple timescales. Yeah. Right. This is where you really begin to get in sync with our natural rhythms. If you think about having these lion-like variations in intensity at different timescale. So in the course of a day, it might be like you were just talking about, I'm like intensely locked in on doing something.

And then after that, I take a nap. Like there's an hour or two where I'm doing nothing. We might see this on the course of a week as well. Like Friday, I'm really dialing back, whereas I was. was more into things, you know, Monday through Thursday, then you might, again, zoom out to, like, the seasonal scale. Like, okay, the summer is going to be a completely different intensity than the fall, right? And all of this were wired for them.

You know, I talk about it in the book, I actually go back, because I did this, this long-form piece for the New Yorker, where I looked at everything we knew about how our Paleolithic ancestors worked, you know, hunting, gathering, et cetera. And this was one of the big observations. They had this huge variations in energy expenditure on different times of day and weeks. And then, of course, we got the Deolithic Revolution. We have 10,000, 15,000 years of farming.

Well, farming is incredibly seasonal at that larger scale. Like, the winter is boring. The fall is incredibly intense. So this is what we're used to. I think we have this fear of, like, well, I'm going to produce less if I'm not at full intensity all the time.

But the reality is it's impossible to be at full intensity all the time. We're not wired to do that. what we're doing is faking intensity through administrative overhead work. We're faking intensity by doing things like email and chat and meetings that feels like effort, but it's not really that draining. It's draining psychologically, but it doesn't require our full cognitive resources. So we fill a lot of time with this other stuff so that we can give the simulacrum of,

I'm locked in all the time, I'm at my station on the metaphorical assembly line, turning the crank really fast. But all it's doing is exhausting us. It's not actually producing more. I enjoyed reading about your process and how your teacher, I believe, when you were getting your PhD helped you understand this. Because you were trying to do like a million different things from what I remember reading. And she helped you understand the importance of focus and why doing all of the different things you were trying to do actually was not helping you. Yeah, I always wanted to be working on multiple academic papers at the same time because my mindset was if I'm only working on one paper as opposed to like, let's say working on three papers, I'm getting a third as much done. Like I can't wait.

And she always said, no, no, no, just take the thing you want to do one paper and obsess about it and just think nothing but about that until it's done. Right. So limit daily goals. This is the theme of the book that can limit. Sometimes we have too many daily goals, and she helped you understand this importance of limiting those and making that list smaller. Yeah, and she was right because she is one of the most celebrated and productive computer scientist in computer science, right? But here's why she was right is because she was seeing the bigger picture. So when you're working on three different big goals in a day, so in my context, like switching back and forth between different papers, you're not getting very much worked on on any of them. And in fact, it's not even like you're getting a third as much worked on a need.

You have this cost of trying to switch your attention from one thing to the other thing. And so when you add up, all right, I worked on three papers per day and you add that up day by day, it's still, it takes three times as long before you get those three papers done because you're just working slower. So it's not actually speeding up in the long term how long it takes you to get these things done. But then there is also the quality hit. So what she realized, because she wrote fantastic papers, again, won all these awards. she realized if all you're thinking about is one thing, you do it better. So it's not just that, okay, it's the same time,

whether you split your time between three things and take three times longer to finish all three or just do one thing at a time, one after another. It's not just the time. It's the quality of what you produce goes up when you're just thinking about it. You have more insights. You have in the academic context. You have better proofs and more interesting theorems. You're more likely to write an award caliber paper.

So she was right, but I was young and impatient. I was like, I don't have a huge time frame relative to my age. I was like, I can't just be working on one thing right now. She had the wisdom of years. I was like, look, if you zoom out, those one things are going to finish

one after another and produce one great paper after another and you look back 20 years later, you're going to say, I produced a huge number of great things. You just have to see the long game. She was absolutely right about that. Limit what you're working on at a time. Do one thing really well, then move on to the next thing. We don't have to be switching

back and forth between, you know, five or six. That doesn't make us five or six times more productive. It makes us less productive. Obsessed over quality and think, this is a prompt I try to ask myself every day, what can I do to make my future self think my current self? What can I do today? Right. And I think working like that, your future self will thank you for it. Right. If you look at what you produce over time and how much of your work will be so good that people can't ignore it. That is a future self. Thank you. And I think some of those simple prompts are helpful.

Kyle, you open and close the book with a guy named John McPhee. Some people, especially if their writers probably know who he is and some don't. Who is John McPhee? And what did you learn from him about slow productivity? Well, I mean, John McPhee is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of the last 100 years. So his home has been the New Yorker. So I like to call him my colleague at the New Yorker. Though, you know, that's sort of like the bat boy at the Yankees being like, well, here's my colleague Aaron Judge.

But anyways, he's been a New Yorker writer since the 1960s, writes these long-form pieces, often on like narrow and esoteric topics. and then he makes it fascinating. Like one of his early big, famous New Yorker articles was on the history of the orange, right? So that's peak John McPhee. Won a Pulitzer, Serb and finalists for the National Book Awards, teaches this creative nonfiction writing class at Princeton that has turned out now two different generations of nonfiction writing leaders. So you were talking about like David Rimnick and John Crackauer took this course,

but so did Tim Ferriss in like a younger generation, my generation, took this course, Jennifer Weiner took this course, like this sort of famous course. Anyways, I opened the book on him because I say I'm going to zoom in on a particular week in the life of John McPhee in the 1960s. He's working on a big New Yorker piece on the Pine Barrens. And we know about this from a writing memoir

he wrote called draft number four. In this week, what was he doing? He was lying on his back at a picnic table in his backyard in Princeton, New Jersey, just trying to figure out how am I going to make this article work? Like, that's all he did for a week. And he writes about this in great detail.

My argument was, look, if you zoom in on that week, by modern standards of knowledge or productivity, we'd say, look at this lazy guy. How is he, he's not, there's no emails being sent, there's no meetings attending, he's not posting things on social media, he doesn't have five projects, he's just laying on his back doing almost anything.

So when we zoom in, he looks lazy and unproductive. But when we zoom out, there's no way to describe John McPhee except for incredibly productive, right? 26 books. this storied career at the New York or one of the most influential writers in the history of nonfiction writing

he's an incredibly productive person by any reasonable definition of the term and yet when we zoom in on a day in his life or a week in his life we see someone not doing very much and so that was like the quintessential slow productivity that was in some sense the inspiration for the book this idea that in the short term

it can be looking like you're doing very little you're very slow and deliberate and yet when you zoom out people say I'm so impressed by all you had to do do. So I open and close with John McPhee because I think he crystallizes this idea of slow productivity that's slowing down, doing things great at a natural pace in the short term might be disconcerting, but in the long term can actually be incredibly productive. You care about high quality, you care about greatness, you obsess over that. Yes, sometimes if you look at somebody in the short term, like, what is he doing or what is she doing? But then if you're playing the long game, they're the ones who are the ones who are. who are actually the most productive because they're not hyper, they're not guarding their desk,

they're not doing the things that are the busy work, right? They are past the need for approval from society knowing that this is the way. When I first saw the book and it was sent to me, I love the cover by the way. It's a little different than what you normally do. It's this beautiful picture, like out in nature. It looks like, I want to go hike out there

and hang out in that cabin that Cal put on his book. But this idea of slow productivity and when I saw the title initially, was like, I don't know, but then I dig into it. I thought, this is it. If you actually want to be productive, this is a guide on how to do that. So I'm very grateful that you decided to write this book. It's called Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Now that you're past some of the promotion time, how are you feeling about it?

You know, I'm happy it's out there. It was, man, book publishing is more stressful these days. Yeah. It used to be, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this book got out there and definitely drew attention, you know, good and bad, which I guess is sort of the price you pay to be out there. But now I'm at the phase I like where the book has been out long enough that people have read it and they can start sending me notes about I did this or here's an example of this.

This resonated with me. Hey, do you know about this person? I think they're a great example about it. I love that period about a month after a book comes out when I can begin. to hear from readers about their experiences with the book. It could also be a frustrating experience because what happens is people send you in just the best possible examples. Like, oh, I love this chapter.

Did you know about, and it's just the perfect example. So it's always like a month after the book comes out, you say, oh, man, I could have rewritten almost every chapter with like new examples. But I love it. Now I'm starting to hear from the readers. I'm hearing all the ways people are resonating with the advice, their situations, how they're applying it. So now finally we get to the fun part. It's like that old adage. They say, hey, do you want to find a typo in your blog post? Just hit publish. You'll find it.

Same thing with the book. You want to find some better ideas or stories that bring them to life. Just publish the book. You'll get them. You'll get them. It's always the way it works. Tal, this is amazing, man. I appreciate again your work. I've been following it for a long time now. And I absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. All right, let's do it. I'll keep writing books so we can keep talking. Because I need more T-shirt. I need more T-shirt.

I'm going to get your address after we get done recording here, and I will send you a new one right away. I promise. So, thank you, man. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at LearningLeader.com.

Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Cal Newport. A few takeaways from my notes. Obsess over quality. Jewel obsessed over the quality of her work so much that she turned down a $1 million offer, even while living out of her car because she knew she needed time to make her work excellent and she didn't want a record label putting a short time frame on her music. And so she thought long term and her future self thanked her for it. Cal writes, obsess over the quality of what you produce,

even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term. Then the Benjamin Franklin story, he hired David Hall to create time freedom. He needed time to think, time to experiment. He gave up money in the short term in order to gain time freedom to create something for the future. Now, there's no guarantee that it would pay off, but I think. think. We should all think about how we can make investments that our future self would thank us for. And then how does all of this apply to a senior leader at a Fortune 500 company?

Have fewer concurrent active projects. Instead of focusing on 10 priorities, which obviously means you have none, focus on two or three projects. Make it public. Share with your team. Be known as a leader who focuses on a few important objectives. instead of 10 or more. Once again, I say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode

of The Learning Leader Show with Kyle Newport. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Apple Podcast and Spotify and you subscribe to the show and you write a thoughtful review and you rate it hopefully five stars. And by doing all of that,

you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to this soon. Can't wait.