← Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Ep. 368: I Want Work-Life Balance. Am I Doomed to Mediocrity?
01:27:58
A 22-year-old made a splash recently when he published a Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming that work-life balance makes you mediocre. He went on to brag about how sleeping less than 4 hours a night and gaining 80 pounds helped him become a millionaire. In this episode, Cal wades into the furious debate this article sparked. He argues that once you look past the author’s dorm bro bravado, the kid does actually ask a good question. It’s just that his answers are lacking. Cal then tackles listener questions and reviews the books he read in August.
Loading summary
Transcript49 lines
- [00:02]
Cal Newport
Last month, a 22 year old entrepreneur named Emil Barr wrote a Wall Street Journal op ed with a provocative title, Work Life Balance Will Keep you Mediocre. In it, Barr claims financial success requires sacrificing sleep, health and social connections in your 20s. This article annoyed a lot of people, including me, but here's a key question that has stuck around. Is it possible that bar might be at least partly right? This is a debate worth having and it's exactly what we're going to get into today. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode I want work life balance. Am I doomed to mediocrity? All right, so we should start with the actual op ed itself. I'm going to bring this up here on the screen. If you could do that, Jesse, for people who are watching instead of just listening. So as mentioned, the title of this article is Work Life Balance Will Keep youp Mediocre. The subhead was for Financial freedom by age 30. Optimize ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years. This came out online August 18th. This came out in print the next day on August 19th. What I want to do here is just read you a few quotes from the article. That should give you an idea of what exactly the author is arguing. So I want to start where the author sort of introduces himself a little bit more. He says, I'm 22 and I've built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million. Jumping down here, when people ask how I did it, the answer isn't what they expect or want to hear. I eliminated Work Life Balance entirely and just worked. When you front load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life. That's sort of like his big claim. Let's get some more details from the article. Here's a quote from a couple paragraphs later. During my first year working on Step up social, I averaged three and a half hours of sleep a night and had about 12 and a half hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal. I gained 80 pounds, lived on red Bull and struggled with anxiety. But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion dollar company. Heady words from Mr. Barr. I have a couple other quotes I want to read here. Here's another one. I steer clear of courses that banned laptops in the classroom because I couldn't be offline for three or more hours a day when my team and clients needed me. Plus, it isn't 1999 and that kind of thinking won't get us anywhere. Another piece of advice he has every commitment had to justify its place on my calendar. With social events, casual hangouts, and even family gatherings weighed against business priorities, I constantly felt guilty about missing important moments with loved ones. But ironically, the relationships that mattered most grew stronger because the time I did spend with them was deeply intentional. That's good to hear. I appreciate that. He also says the path I chose was painful. There's no sugarcoating the mental health struggles, the physical deterioration, or the social isolation that came with this intensity. But in a winner take all economy, extreme efficiency during your peak physical and mental years becomes a baseline for building wealth that lasts a lifetime. All right, well, there we go. There's some strong statements from a precocious young man. I want to play a little audio here of the Emil Barr himself. This is him appearing on Fox and Friends in the aftermath of this op ed, sort of explaining why he wrote it and his inspiration. So let's play that clip there for a second there. Jesse, tell me how you did it. Yeah, well, it was a lot of sacrifice and it wasn't easy, and that's not necessarily something everyone wants to hear. But the truth is, to have extraordinary achievements, I think you have to make extraordinary sacrifices. All right, so what was your motivation behind this? I saw folks like Elon, you know, that slept on factory floors to build Tesla, and like people like Kobe Bryant, you know, that trained at 4am Even on the off season.
- [04:37]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [04:38]
Cal Newport
And so I made those same decisions to grow my business. Elon and Kobe. This is very gin. It's very Gen Z. Jesse, as you can imagine, this op ed generated a lot of reaction. The Wall Street Journal article itself has over 2000 comments just on the article itself. Lots of follow up media, lots of follow up articles, lots of discussion on social media, on Reddit and other types of places where people discuss these things. As mentioned, Barr went on Fox Business and then that earned him a call up to Fox and Friends on the Fox Channel. Much of the feedback that he generated, probably not surprisingly given what I've read you so far, was negative. So here's a comment from the original article I want to read here that caught my attention. I checked the publication date twice just to be sure this wasn't an old April Fool's Day prank. The authoritative tone of the 22 year old author is comical. Does anyone over the age of 30 actually endorse a front loading lifestyle and that he really used the word mediocre to describe a person who earns an Average wage, I can't help but suspect. Andrew Tate peer reviewed this op ed. Here's another reaction. This one came from Reddit. My dad was always away at the office and I really only have a few memories of him. He caught a sudden illness and died in his early 40s. When I was a teenager, I'll be mediocre and take my kids camping instead. Cheers, Emil. And finally, here's a letter to the editor from the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Barr's story is no national model. It rests on the peculiar economics of infinitely scalable digital platforms. Does he really believe the country would be richer if more young Americans spent their peak years optimizing algorithms on Chinese social media platforms rather than studying, soldiering or otherwise fulfilling their civic duty? So people weren't that happy. I definitely got this a lot, Jesse, in my personal inbox. It came over my various text threads. This came in some, I guess right in our official emails as well.
- [06:38]
Jesse
Yeah, we definitely got some emails about it.
- [06:40]
Cal Newport
Yeah, this definitely generated some debate. You probably had a similar reaction to me. A little bit of Gen Z reaction there, right? Little knee jerk like, oh, 22 year old's telling me what to do.
- [06:51]
Jesse
What do his businesses do?
- [06:53]
Cal Newport
I looked into that. It's a little bit tricky, which I think is always the point with sort of dorm room bro businesses. It's always a little tricky to pick apart what they're actually doing. So he started a company, as best I can tell, that was called Step Up Social, which did exactly what you'd expect a 20 year old's business to do. It helped TikTok influencers have more successful channels and connect to brands that want to have sponsorships on their TikTok channel. So peak Gen Z and then it was acquired or he rebranded it or it merged with another company. Our researcher, newsletter director Nate found some LinkedIn post somewhere where the guy talked about how his deal to merge this with another network involved in instead of money, them buying him a Porsche or something. So I don't know. Then he started this other company called Flagship Education. No Flashpass Education, not to be mistaken for the thing you buy at Universal Studios to get ahead of the lines. I can't quite figure out what's going on with this thing. In theory it's like a flashcard program you can use to get digitally certified. So do online courses on topics to give you a certification that could help you get jobs. But I know he won a business plan contest, student business plan contest, and got a grant from the state of Ohio to work on this there's no actual products available on the website, just links that say book a demo. It has testimonials. But unless every user so far a flash pass is also a model, they're clearly stock photography. I mean it's like beautifully lit, imposed with their backpack on the campus. It looks like a community college brochure. So I don't know what's going on. Look, these are, I'm sure you can at that age sort of trade your youth and energy for essentially like whey, like you can kind of hustle and like I'm going to get brands interested and hey, I'm going to match you up with this TikTok person and will you pay for them? And I'll take a cut. And so I don't quite know what's going on. It's not to knock Emil Barr, but it's not Bill Gates leaving Harvard for Microsoft where it was, you know, here's our clear IP on which you can build a scalable business model that I'm going to take on investment right away to scale. This is not Mark Zuckerberg leaving Harvard after he already had venture commitments, right? This is not the Sergey and Larry at Stanford saying we've developed, you know, this, this PageRank algorithm that is revolutionary for web search and we have funding from Sequoia. We're going to, we're going to start Google right? Like this is, it's not that it's sort of the types of businesses and I had these businesses myself when I was young that 20 year olds start as best I can tell. All right, so there we go. We got this guy, he wrote this op ed. People are upset. It did. However, you know, as I hinted at earlier, it kind of stuck with me, right, because I wanted to be careful. It's easy to be upset about the fact this kid is young. It's easy to be upset about the fact that these are like dorm room businesses and no one really knows what they are. And it's not. I invented a new web search, right? So it's easy to be kind of dismissive. But not everyone thinks that the, the basic points that Barr is making here is wrong. Just last week Palantir CEO Alex Karp said something similar. I'm reading a quote here. I've never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20. Susie Welch, who's a well known professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, wrote into the Wall Street Journal in response to this op ed and she said, don't get me wrong, I don't consider Mr. Barr a boy genius. He says dumb things, but I do give him points for saying something that I only mutter to my MBA students while also asking forgiveness for being an oldster. You can't, well, being yourself to wealth. There are going to be seasons of misery which could last years. That might not be fair, but it's how life tends to go. So there's something in this 22 year old's op ed that I don't think we can just dismiss out of hand. And in particular, there's one quote I want to pull out, which to me is the most interesting, intriguing and impactful quote of this entire op ed. And this is where Barr says the following. I'm not suggesting that everyone eliminate work life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre. That is really the core of his argument. Not whether or not he's really a good entrepreneur, not whether or not his claim at the end of the article that he's going to be a billionaire by 30 and solve climate change is cringeworthy or not. But this idea, work life balance, is a path to mediocrity. That idea is sort of sticky and uncomfortable, sort of sticks with us a little bit. Like, is that true? A lot of us who do think about more than just work, often in our quiet moments, maybe wonder about this. So I want to take a closer look at this claim because I think it really matters and I think it needs a more systematic investigation than what we're getting with just this sort of back and forth conversation online. So let's do that. Now, I want to start by saying, what do we mean by mediocre? Work life balance will make you mediocre. What do we mean by mediocre? I think the right way to actually answer this question is we have to flip it around and we have to say, what does it mean to you to not be mediocre? And of course, that's a clunky way of saying, what does it mean to you to be successful in your professional life? We have to answer that more refined question, right? So here's our more refined question. How does work life balance impact your attempts to be successful in your professional life? I think that's the better way to actually get at what's going on here. But when we say it that way, right away we see a problem. What do you mean by successful? There's a lot of different definitions that people have for not being mediocre. What it means to have a successful working life. And the answer to this question of does work life balance get in the way depends on what definition of successful that we're actually using. So I want to get really systematic here in response to popular demand. I haven't done this in a while, Jesse, but people especially, I would say fine art lovers among our audience, art critics, people who really enjoy seeing really good draftsmanship, have said, why haven't you done your tablet recently? So I'm doing, I'm bringing. For those who are watching instead of listening and you know, you're welcome, I'm going to build a chart here because we are going to get way more systematic than Emil Barr did. So for those who are listening, I have two columns on this chart. On the left it says success model, and on the right it says requirements. So what I want to do here is go through the different common models that people have for what it means for their work life not to be mediocre. And for each of those, I want to answer the question, what sacrifices are required? In other words, like, what is the way to succeed with this model? So we can see, do some of these require that we sacrifice work life balance and others don't? Do they all do? None of them? Let's get more systematic here. All right, so I want to start by giving Bar his due. And what I mean by that is there are certainly some particular definitions of success where what he's saying actually does in some sense hold. All right, I'm going to put two in particular. So the first thing I'm going to write here is startup exit. Now, I'm not typing, Jesse. That's just my great handwriting.
- [14:30]
Jesse
I like it when you draw.
- [14:31]
Cal Newport
Jesse thinks it's calligraphy, but it's just, you know, my natural grade handwriting. Startup exit. What do I mean by that? Okay, this is a very common idea that some people have for what it means to be successful in their career. And that's like the notion of I have a startup, probably a technology startup, that has an exit that makes me a lot of money. I think this is what Barr has in mind when he's thinking about mediocrity and success is he's thinking, what I want to do is have a startup that eventually is sell or acquired and I make a lot of money, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. So what is required for this model of success to have a successful startup exit? Well, if you're in a venture backed startup going for this, the investors are probably going to demand that you grind. So I'M going to write that down here on what's required. I am going to write the word grind whether or not you need it. This is what is expected in this particular field. So if your model of success is I sell a company for a lot of money, a startup, a venture backed company, you probably will have to grind. Not as hard probably as Barr was talking about, we'd have a lot more heart attacks. But they do expect you're answering emails, you're having meetings, you're staying there late, you're working weekends. Partially it's performative and partially because when you're in a tech startup, it's a small number of people doing a lot of things you haven't had time to hire yet. And the only way to juggle everything is to sort of inefficiently try to touch on them all. So in that world, bar is sort of right. All right, here is another world in which I think bar is sort of right. I'm going to call this elite wage labor. All right, so these are jobs where there is a clear deal offer, no obfuscation. Here's the clear deal. If you have an elite education and you did really well in your elite education, you're a top 20 school. What we're going to offer you is in exchange for you giving us a large number of hours. So let's somewhere between 60 to 80 hours a week. In exchange for you giving us a large number of hours, we will pay you a very high salary for those hours. So there are certain professions that offer this deal to the small segment of the population that happens to have elite college education. So this would be working for a big law firm, this would be working for a big consulting firm. This would be working for a big finance firm. That's just the deal. They offer your hours for money. Now the reason why they are demanding that many hours is like typically you are actually being billed for those hours. So the more hours you work, the more money they can make. And so our agreement will be, if we've gone through all the trouble of hiring this Harvard kid, is to say work 80 hours a week so we can get as much money as possible out of you. Finance is a little bit more complicated, but it's sort of just more the culture there. So if you're in one of those, if that's your model of success, we're still in a meal bar territory. What's required, you're gonna have to grind a lot of hours. That's just the way those industries work. But here's the thing, this is a very narrow band of economic activity. It's a very narrow band of economic activity that is open to only a very small group of people. To really have access to like Silicon Valley funding, especially if you're young, that is hard. You basically have to come out of a top technical program like MIT computer science and got into an incubator program before they'll even listen to you. If you want to be in one of these elite wage labor jobs, you got to be coming out of an IV or another top 20 type elite school. And even then, only the best students who go through all the right work to do the interviewing right are going to get those positions. So it's a very small amount of people to which these particular jobs are actually open. Interestingly, even though Emil Barr I think is probably basing his approach on the startup exit success model, even he doesn't even have access to that world. He is not running a venture backed startup in the way that this model demands. These are more sort of, they're not solopreneur companies, but they're sort of like dorm room businesses. Like I'm trying to mix and match sponsors to TikTok influencers. That's different than I've taken on 5 million in Series A from Sequoia because we're going to build out the server farm for our search algorithm. So he's sort of mimicking what is required of the sort of Elon Musk venture backed tech company world, even though he's not himself, actually has access to that world. Similarly, the elite wage labor world, it's pretty narrow. If you are in one of those worlds, you do need the grind. But I think those are very narrow worlds and so we cannot generalize from those that in general work life balance will make you mediocre. In these industries it's not even that work life balance will make you mediocre, you're just not allowed to have it. It's just the agreement of the industries. This is how many hours you have to work. That's just what it is. Okay, but there are other definitions I think are far more common that people have in mind when they think about what does it mean to not be mediocre in their job. And here the answer of what's required to succeed starts to become more interesting. So let's put down another common one here. I'm going to call this impact and respect. So for a lot of people when they think about successful career and avoiding mediocrity, it is I am doing something that is High impact. It matters and or I'm highly respected for it. This is very desirable to a lot of people and it very much matches what a lot of people think about as success. So you're a respected artist or writer, academic or athlete or musician or filmmaker. Sometimes, as you're having a really big impact on the world, your books really make a difference. Sometimes it's just the respect. You're like Jiro and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, where you have this four star Michelin sushi restaurant in the subway in Tokyo and only a few hundred people have been there that year. But everyone in the industry knows you're just the best in the world at making sushi. And there's like a real meaning that comes out of that. This is a very common notion of what it means to be successful. So what matters here? Is it grinding? Well, no. I happen to know a lot about this because it's one of the models of success that I have been writing about for my entire career. It's a model of success I really care about and what I've written about in multiple books and many articles, including some that date all the way back to when I was in my 20s. I found these, Jesse. So I sort of have a counterpoint to what Email Bear was saying. What matters here is relentlessly working on the things that make you better. Not on what you want to do, not on busyness, but on the activities that make you better at your craft. Sticking to those activities, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you want to be a respected sushi chef. Day after day after day, you're pushing your ability, you're learning more. You're pushing your ability at sushi. You want to be a writer, you write, write, write. I started writing professionally when I was 20 years old. I never stopped writing. I finish a book, it's another book. When I finish that, it's another book. Like, I am always working on books. I'm always trying to make myself better. That is what's required. It's hard work. But here's what it's not hard to do work because when you're trying to improve yourself, it requires focus and deliberate practice, et cetera. You can only do that so many hours in a day and then that's it. He talks about Kobe Bryant. Yeah, Kobe Bryant would wake up early to practice, right? But there's only so much that Kobe Bryant could practice in a day before he had to worry about injury. You talk to any sort of professional athlete, they're like, no no, it's not a game of who can practice the more total hours. Injury rest and recovery is important. What matters is you're doing the exact right type of training relentlessly. Off season, what's the exact right thing to be doing in the off season? In the season, what's the right thing to do in the season? What's the exact amount of rest to get? It's relentless and it's hard, but it doesn't require sleeping three hours. It doesn't require, I don't see my family because there's only so much of this hard work you can do in any given day. I relentlessly work on my writing. I've been doing this since I was 20 years old. I rarely work past 5:30. I don't grind, I don't stay up late. I want to spend time with my family and my friends and my communities and my other types of interest. I want to put in a minimum of 40 to 50 hours a week working on Halloween display decorations. I think Jesse has seen what I have laid out in the other office right now. We'll get into that later. I care about hard work, but not hard to do work. So that's what matters. If we're going to talk about being high impact or high respected, it's the long game. So I'm going to say relentless depth, returning to the things that matter every day, relentlessly ignoring the distractions that want to take you away from that. Doesn't make any one day particularly hard. But you have to have the hard work of sticking with that. So that is a different model than what Emil Barr is talking about. All right. There's other definitions though. What about remarkability? What I mean about this is there's a lot of people when you say what is your definition of like a non mediocre professional life? They say it to be remarkable in the literal sense. Remarkable that other people remark about my life and what I do, like that's really cool or that's really interesting or hey, did you know what this guy does? Let me introduce you to him at the party or her at the party. A lot of people, that's the definition of not being mediocre. So maybe you live in a really exotic place or have a really exotic job or you have a really exotically autonomous life. There are certain people like this I've written about before. Maybe you're like Laird Hamilton, living on the north shore of Maui, waiting for the big waves to come, just sort of sitting around like exercising and bored until the waves come and then you go off in your jet Skis and do this sort of amazing feats of physical things. Or maybe like Paul Jarvis, who I've written about in Slow Productivity and we talk about on the podcast all the time, who sort of moved from his busy web development life in Vancouver to Vancouver island to a small house in the woods near surf break on Tolfino, cut back his hours, raised his rates, made his life much cheaper. They reduced their expenses. As he says, there's not much to spend money on there. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere and they surf and have this small town and have a greenhouse and keep chickens or whatever. It's a remarkable life. It's really interesting and different than what his peers were doing. It might be like the Thamess up there in Vermont, otherwise known online as the Frugal Woods. I talked about them. I interviewed Liz in my book Digital Minimalism, where they were very frugal, they saved a lot of money. They were living right outside Boston in Cambridge Central Square, and they were very kind of frugal and like, sort of saving money. And they bought a property up in Vermont. They moved up there, allowed her to stop working. He kept working, but in a remote capacity. They rented out their house in Boston, which more or less covered the small mortgage they had on the house up in Vermont. More recently, he was able to stop working. They have this, like, life on this 55 acres where they do maple syruping and they have apple orchards and trails and all this sort of outdoor quiet living with their kids in this local community. That's an example of a remarkable life. You remark on it. Oh, I got to introduce you to these people. They're doing something interesting. All right, if that's your definition of not being mediocre, how do you get there? Well, it's not about eschewing work life balance. It tends to be much more about build career capital, have the courage to leverage it. What I mean about that is you get good at something that has a sort of lasting, sustainable value to the market that can get you sort of a lasting, sustainable source of income and stability. And then you have the courage to say, I'm going to build a really interesting life around that, like the Frugal Woods. Nate was a computer programmer, basically for nonprofits. And they sort of worked out like, this is a very useful skill. We can't run our organization without you. And he said, great, I don't want to try to maximize salary with you anymore. I want to be able to work remotely and on my own terms. And then we'll then have the courage to build this whole life up in the woods of Vermont around that career capital. Laird Hamilton had the capital of I surf these crazy waves and I can get just enough sponsorship money out of being shown in those surfing magazines. Surfing these waves, the sort of make ends meet and I can keep doing this. Paul Jarvis got really good at web development and he said, okay, instead of growing a big company because there's all this demand now for me, I'll just raise my rates and work less hours. So I will use this skill as the engine to move to Vancouver island and live by the surf break in Tolfino and have a greenhouse. So it's career capital and courage is what matters here. So we'll put down career capital and courage. So not only is the answer not just grind, the answers differ depending on what your model is. So we're being more systematic about this because, you know, that's the way I like to do it. The final model of what people have in mind is what most people, just the average person has in mind. If you say, what do you think about like having a successful career? Really what they envision is some variation of what we can call the post war American dream. I don't have a family. I live in a neighborhood I like, nice house. I'm not worried about money. Like we're financially stable. I'm not stressed out about money. We go on two interesting vacations a year. We're close knit communities that we're a part of. We have good friends and hobbies. I have spent a lot of time in my kid's life, picket fence, et cetera. Starting in the 60s we began to sort of get bored with this and say it was bougie and this is not that interesting. But talk to a GI in 1945, they would have been like, this is like the best possible life you could offer. Are you kidding me? I'm not stressed about money. I'm not stressed about my, my, my town being bombed out by, you know, a world war. I have my own yard, I have a car. Like my friends are here, we can walk to the whatever. I have a stable job that's interesting but not too demanding, that is for a lot of people that's not mediocre. To have something like that is the dream. I'm not, I have a family I love and spend time with and I'm not stressed about money. My job is interesting and you know, I don't know, I'm in the bowling league. That's what A lot of people are thinking about, so how do you do that? You get capable. It's a term I'm playing with in my new book on the deep life that I'm writing right now is the power, the overlooked power of capability. What does it mean to be capable in the professional setting? I'm reliable. I do the thing I say I'm going to do. If I say I'm going to do this, I do it. I do it. When I say I'm going to do it, I do it at a high level of quality. I've got my act together. You can trust me. I'm capable, right? I've got my arms on what's going on. I don't take on too much work. I choose to write projects that matter and I get them done. And I'm professional and I'm nice and people like me, we overlook how valuable capability is. But if you are capable, almost any profession, almost any job you have, what are the managers going to worry about losing you? Oh, we have a capable person. They get stuff done, they're good, they choose the right products. They don't get overloaded. They're nice. They're a leader to the other people. Capability gives you the post war American dream. It gives you that sort of stable job. It's what allows you then also to be careful about your money and not to overspend and to stay in shape and to care about like, okay, I want to make sure that I do things with my kids. This school's not working for me. I'll make the change so that things are okay. We deal with all of these things that are necessary for this. Like, hey, we just sort of have a good rich life is built on a foundation of capability. What Gen Z sometimes refers to sort of derogatorily as adulting. I call it capability. You build up those abilities. This is boring stuff technically, right? It's time management systems, it's productivity systems, it's strategic plans. It's having an explicit workload management system. It's all the stuff I talk about in books, like deep work and slow productivity. But it matters. I don't know why I put a slash there. Capability. All right, people who are listening, what you're missing is just Cape put Cape a bit. Oh, God, I don't know what I'm writing here. Jesse Cape, A bill. You should hire me. If you need like a fancy sign, I'll just freehand it for you. All right. Boom, there we go. So here's what I mean about this. Like, I Don't want to get too much in the weeds here of exactly what these models are or exactly what is required. But my point is you got to get more systematic here. What do you mean by success when you say you want to avoid mediocrity? What does that mean to you? And then you got to get specific what is really required to get there. Sometimes it's like be ready to grind if you're at a Big ten law firm or you just got, you know, funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Like, we want our return on your weird web3 idea. But for most people in most models, this sort of like I'm just going to stay up real late and burn it and be pretend like I'm in, you know, like the West Wing and have all these calls and emails and slack and I'm going to drink Red Bull all day. Like, you know, that's not going to short term. It doesn't, you know, whatever. But that's not what it's going to matter in the long term for your definition of success. So it does really matter. So let's wrap this up. Let me, let me read again that key quote from Barr's piece. The quote that sort of gave us some uneasiness. I'm not suggesting that everyone eliminate work, life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre. All right, so in the final accounting, was Barr right? I think in this case Barr was asking the right question, but his answer was too narrow. You need to get specific about what you mean by success and then you need to learn specific strategies to reach that specific definition. Bar's must was to think that all definitions of success require these performative 15 hour days and hustle, but they don't. In fact, the definitions of success that do require that type of hustle are very narrow and they're open to only a very small number of people. And most people could care less about them. Most definitions of success, by contrast, don't actually require wrecking your health or your social relations. But here's the thing, as we just saw, these other definitions of success aren't necessarily easy either. They require hard work and focused work, just not all the hours of the day. So why are we talking about this topic on this particular show? Right, well, look, in my roles as a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I talk a lot about technology's impacts on our lives and how we should react to these changes. And one of the most Common vectors that new technologies use to colonize your life, to keep you zonked out in video games or social media, to keep you doing mindless streaming or stewing and nihilism and outrage is to take advantage of aimlessness. When you're working actively towards a definition of the deep life, something that's compelling to you, suddenly TikTok and call of Duty doesn't seem that attractive and rage bait on YouTube starts to look childish. But when you're instead drifting aimlessly through your life, especially when you're young, you become a target for these technologies. If you don't get in the game, the tech companies will play your turn for you. So my real fear about Emil Barr is not that he's going to trick a bunch of 22 year olds into like giving up their sleep and working 100 hour work weeks. Right? Most people see through that bravado. My real fear, my real fear instead is that people will look to bar and be so turned off by the idea of work. Oh, is this what it means to be successful in work that they throw up their hands and give in? Denialism. And then the technologies can creep in and ossify them in that position of aimlessness. So you can go ahead and ignore Emil Barr, but we have to keep his underlying claim in mind. Creating a deep life does require hard work, just not the simplistic, performative type of hard work that Barr talked about. So there we go. It may seem like a non technology related issue, Jesse, but kind of is. It's like people like that make you anti work and when you're anti work, you don't have focus. When you don't have focus, that's when, you know, TikTok kind of crawls in, is like, hey, look at me. There's something interesting going on here. Also, Barr kind of looks like a 16 year old bond villain in some of the videos I found. So it doesn't help. There's a video where he had a, a mock turtleneck in a blazer and was holding a cat like Blofeld from a Bond movie, but he looks like he's 16 years old. So I was like, that's not helping your cause, not helping your cause. So there we go.
- [34:57]
Jesse
How do you go about playing with the word capability for the section in the book?
- [35:03]
Cal Newport
So I'm working on this notion of a crash course in becoming a more capable human. So the idea is the book's about the deep life. How do you really create a brief life? We use lifestyle centric planning, we talk a lot about that on the show. But a lot of people, I've discovered this on the show. A lot of people, when it comes time to do lifestyle centric planning, to transform their life into something cool, to follow one of these definitions of success, what they realize is I don't even know how to get started. I don't trust myself to even do the basic work of transformation. Or I'm in a place where I'm feeling so stuck, I can't even imagine what a more deeper life would even look like. And the issue there, I've come to realize, is just lack of basic capability. So to be capable means you kind of have your act together in the basic ways. You have some control over your time, you have some control over your mind. You have sort of a basic reserve of discipline. I can do a hard thing, even if it's optional, knowing that there's a longer term goal that this is going to. To give me. It's these type of basic level capability that allows you to have confidence. Oh, I can do stuff. Oh, lifestyle saying, planning, Let me give that a try. That's the type of thing I could and maybe make progress on. Right. And so I'm toying with a structure of the book where you learn all the ideas of the deep life. And then I have this four month crash course based loosely off of that really popular video of ours. Four months, two things per month. Do these things, you'll come on the other side recharged, and then you can get back to lifestyle centric planning if you're struggling. So I'm just realizing these things kind of, they all intertwine. It's all complicated. That's why, like simple op eds. I can't complain though. I wrote op eds in my 20s for major papers that also had like declarations about. I've done this and this and this. And so I gotta be careful about the pot calling the kettle black here a little bit. So there we go. All right, we got some good questions. Also, it's the first episode of a new month. So we have the books I read in August coming up. But first we have to get to what you all came here for, which was a word about our sponsors. All right, so, Jesse, I gotta tell you about the newest thing I'm obsessed with. I'm gonna hold it up here to the camera for those who are watching. See this right here? This is my ridge wallet. It's two slim pieces. I'll tap it here by the mic of quality metal attached with strong elastic. My credit cards and my IDs are right in here. There's this little notch here, so you push it so they can come out and you can grab whichever one you want and then you hit them back in to be here. It's secure, it's strong, and it's small enough. I can put it in my pocket. I don't have my. I had one of those George Costanza wallets. Remember that? Where he got, like, back injuries from, like, having this thing in his back pocket. And I would have to keep it in my backpack or my wife would have to carry it in her bag, which she wasn't very happy about. This just fits in my pocket and I have all my cards and IDs in there. I mean, this is a game changer. Really happy about it. This is a true story. Tuesday, we're recording this on a Friday. Tuesday, I went out to dinner with some friends, including a friend of mine who works at a major tech company. We go up the pay at the counter, both pull out our ridges, right? I was like, Ridge. He's like, Ridge. And then we did like a Dutch style clog dance. That's what you do when you meet another Ridgers. Anyways, I love Ridge. But here's the thing. This is crazy. Jesse Ridge does these sweepstakes. I didn't know about this. Legendary sweepstakes. Like crazy Prizes their fifth one. They're doing this for the fifth time right now. Here are the prizes for the sweepstakes that Ridge is currently doing. Two lucky winners get to choose between a $280,000 Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato or a $100,000 Hennessey Velociraptor, which is where Hennessy Automotive takes a Ford Raptor pickup truck and like, soups it up to a crazy amount of horsepower. Or you could choose $100 in cash. $100,000 in cash. If two people get to choose between those. Jesse, your truck should be in there. That's what I thought. You can also choose Jesse's 1974 Ford Rustmaster. What's it called? Something like that? Pretty much, yeah. You get a Lamborghini Stirrado or Jesse's 1974 Ford Rustmaster now with occasionally working air conditioning. So I think that's the one that's going to be chosen. Anyways, this sweepstake is going on. There's no reason not to enter. You go to ridge.com, you can enter for free. So why not take your shot? And if you want to boost your odds, every dollar you spend on Ridge's site gets you one additional entry. They have a lot of cool products, but I really do love this Ridge wallet. Been using it every day since we got it. So if you're ready to upgrade your wallet and maybe your ride for a limited time only, head to ridge.com and use the code CAL at checkout for 10% off your order and and a chance to win Ridge's biggest sweepstake ever. A Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, a Hennessey Velociraptor or $100,000 in cash. The Velociraptor has 560 horsepower. I believe is more than my Kia Carnival hybrid minivan, which I believe is powered by a hamster that turns a wheel. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's how my minivan is powered. So the Velociraptor would be a little bit better. No purchase necessary to enter, but every dollar you spend gets you more entries. That's Ridge.com and use Cal after you purchase. Use Cal and after you purchase they will ask you where you heard about the show. You got to list our show. That's how you know they came from us. I also want to talk to you about Element spelled lmnt, a zero sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte drink born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times Government recommendations. Element is a no sugar, no dye, no other dodgy ingredients, drink mix or sparkling drink that gives you the electrolytes you need without all that other junk. This is an honest to God endorsement. I drink Element essentially every day. Typically after I work out, I'll drink it to replace what I sweat. But also if I wake up in the morning feeling particularly dehydrated, I'll throw Element right into some ice water in my Nalgene. I titrate it depending on how thirsty I feel like how much of the drink mix I use. I used a mix instead of the prepackaged sparkling drinks and I love it. I honestly don't trust other athletic drinks because I don't know what goes into them. With Element, I don't have to worry. Right now I have a bunch of the watermelon flavor, but there was a new flavor that they introduced over the summer that I want to recommend. It was called Lemonade salt. So on those really hot days, I think that was a really good one, to be honest. When they announced Lemonade salt was their newest flavor, Jesse, I'm kind of glad they chose that over the flavor I had suggested to the executives, which was tobacco diaper lemonade, salt is better. They probably made the right choice. So I'm not, you know, good at coming up at flavors. Element is better at that. So if you want to try some element, go to drinkelement.com deep. That's drinklmnt.com deep. If you go to that special URL, you will get a free Element sample pack with any order. Remember, you can try Element risk free. They're happy to refund your money if you don't like it, but you will, unless, of course, you order the tobacco diaper flavor. So go to drinkelement.com deep today. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.
- [42:20]
Jesse
First question is from Joel. My work requires me to get a text message through Microsoft Authenticator multiple times per day. This has me on the phone more than I want. How should I deal with the distraction to always look at my text messages?
- [42:34]
Cal Newport
Interestingly, as part of his employment with me, Jesse is required once every three minutes to call me on a landline to sort of check in his the give me his 20. He has to say, this is a big bird over my 20 is. And he has to give me the 20. I got to keep an eye on my people I work with. Okay, well, it's kind of terrible that you have to answer these text messages throughout the day. I don't buy, however, that this means you must now go into all of your text communication multiple times a day if you don't want to. So you got three things you can do here. One, don't look at the other text messages. When you get the Microsoft Authenticator text, just you see things come up and you say, I don't care. This is when I do my text messages. This is not one of those times. I will just pretend I didn't see that. That might seem impossible. Practice it for a few days. Won't be so bad. Two, if you're really not sure about your capability to do that, you can set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows messages from that particular number to come through and not others. And you just put it in that mode and only those messages will come through. Or I bet if you talk to it. There's other factors to use in this. Two factor authentication. They say, yeah, that's the default, but we could do other ways it can call or like an email. And you could find another way to do it. Just say, I don't want to do text messages. 80% chance there they'll hook you up with something. Else. So do not use this. Kind of looks like you're angling for this answer. Do not use this as an excuse to like. I guess I just have to like, be involved in text messages all day. You can get around that. All right, who we got?
- [44:06]
Jesse
Next up is Emily. How did your experiment with summer schedules work out? And what is your. What are you planning for your teaching schedule?
- [44:13]
Cal Newport
So something I'm really trying this semester, Emily, and we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I have not been in recent years, as I guess because I'm trying to be accommodating. I have not been as firm as I should be with just these are my deep work hours and I do deep work. And that's just that, right? And a lot of people will be annoyed. And that's just what it is. I mean, I'm the guy who wrote the book Deep Work, so you can't say you weren't warned. I'm trying to hold the line on that. This year, first thing in the morning, I do my deep work hours. There are two exceptions. I have to work around. Our faculty meetings are once a month, but they're held in the morning on Fridays. But I've worked it out that I can get up and start writing right away and make it to the faculty meeting, having got in a reasonable deep work block, so I don't have to break that chain. So now I'm really down to just the end of semester school events for my kids because they often hold those right after school starts so parents can come in and do that before work. That makes it impossible. Obviously I want to be at those, but if I'm down to just those when I have like a presentation of my kid at school, it's the only time I don't start with deep work, I'm going to be happy. So I'm going to try to hold the line on that. I've been. I've been. The problem is by the time I made that decision, I already had a non trivial number of things scheduled in the morning for the next month or so. So I'm holding the line now, but it might not be for another few weeks until I'm in a territory where that's being preserved. The other thing is I'm trying to do what I call a studio day, where I dedicate an entire day, the same day every week, just to doing the stuff related to the outreach to the public. So working on podcast scripts, writing my newsletter, any of the sort of stuff that surrounds that, instead of making that Ad hoc. Have a day. And I've announced this. I've told my department chair I have a studio day. This is part of my job as a digital ethicist and in the center for Digital Ethics to do outreach about technology and its impacts. There's a day where the office I'm working out of is my office here in Takoma park where my studio is. And I don't schedule any other meetings on this day. And that I'm trying. But as Jesse knows, I've been struggling with this because as soon as I declared that I already had for the next couple of months, stuff that fell on every day. So again, it won't be until October until any of this becomes steady. And I might actually have to change what that day is. This is another conversation, Jesse. But I might have to change. It's hard stuff. So anyways, Emily, I'm working on it. But my resolution this fall is I'm just going to be more annoying about it. This is just my thing. And then here's the thing. I get chirped at so much now by so many people from so many different walks of life, from national level commentators to just random people that we know to random strangers. I'm kind of used to it now. So this is what I want to do. I want to make sure that I'm writing every single day and that the outreach part of my media company gets a full day of my attention. That's just my standard. And then I'll make everything else fit. And if it doesn't fit, then I'll reduce it. So that's what I'm practicing this year is. And I'll report back how it's going. It's just I'm going to hold the line more and again, it's easy to say and then be really accommodating and the whole thing falls apart. I'm actually going to be less accommodating.
- [47:24]
Jesse
But for the summer, you wrote all the time, didn't you?
- [47:27]
Cal Newport
Yeah, I just wrote all the time.
- [47:28]
Jesse
So that worked out well.
- [47:29]
Cal Newport
That worked out fine. Yeah, we travel, we go up north and the writing didn't go well, but the schedule went well. Yeah, so the schedule was fine. So in the summer it's great. I just write every day for the first half of the day. And we just built a whole summer around that.
- [47:43]
Jesse
But realistically, now you're on schedule to where you hope to be going into the summer, right, with your writing.
- [47:49]
Cal Newport
It's complicated. I'm reworking some things. We'll get there. We'll get there.
- [47:55]
Jesse
I mean, you wrote a lot of New Yorker articles.
- [47:57]
Cal Newport
I wrote some New Yorker articles. Oh, yeah. I was doing a lot of stuff. I'm never not writing. It's like we talked about in the deep dive. I'm never not writing.
- [48:03]
Jesse
The newsletter's looking great.
- [48:04]
Cal Newport
I want to. Yeah. You know, and shout out to. So we have weekly newsletter. Shout out to Nate for the. He handles all the formatting and actually looks, you know, professional. So I think all that's. I think all that's good. But I want more of that summer flavor. In my regular year, I can't write as much. Obviously. I have more obligations, but I want to write every day.
- [48:21]
Jesse
And then what about deep work for, like, research? Is that like in the afternoon?
- [48:25]
Cal Newport
Well, it depends what. What. What we're talking about for research. So if it's the. The things I'm working on in my writing blocks in the morning, is it books and articles? And so if I'm doing research for a book chapter or an article, that can happen during that time. Like this week, I spent one of the writing blocks just finding sources and then the next two blocks working on writing about it. All of the other type of stuff I'm working on. Yeah. Afternoon. By afternoon, I mean, sometimes I can get this block in. I'm done by 9:30. So it might just be like a normal workday is kind of starting. Right. If I need to start early, I'll start early. But I'm getting the. I'm getting the hours. And I'm using the old meta productivity trick of fixed scale to productivity. These are my hours. This is when I deep work. These are the studio days. Everything else fits in. And if I'm not getting to this, then I'm not getting to this. Something has to give, so that's something I'm tuning myself into more this semester.
- [49:21]
Jesse
All right, who we got next up is Larry. I went back to episode one where he introduced the idea of the deep life. It's been almost five years since that episode aired. And I'm curious, what did your ideal lifestyle look like back then? How has it evolved since? And what changes do you make to where you are today? Does some of this get answered in your upcoming book?
- [49:43]
Cal Newport
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I haven't gone back and listened to that episode in a while because the mic wasn't great and the audio is a little live. So where I recorded that first episode, this would have been late spring. It was like May 2020, right in the middle of COVID Right in the middle of COVID and the county we live in in Maryland, Montgomery county was all in on like if you even open your blinds, you probably should go to Guantanamo. Like it was very much like just lockdown. And everyone was trying to out lock down each other to like, I don't, I guess signal their worthiness or whatever. So like this is, this is terrible, right? So we, we rented a house down in Southern Maryland where no one, no one cares about anything. Like it's just, it's empty, whatever. It's not like we were there all the time. It was like we temporarily had a second house we could go down to. And it was a weird piece of property because it was like a. Just a modest house. And then not making this up, an airstrip. It's like a Runway, but it was all grass but cut out of the trees. Runway so really long. And at the end of the Runway it was on water. And there's a fire pit down there and there's water. And they had golf carts because it was so far away. So you would ride the golf carts down to the end of this Runway and there was water down there. Anyways, we just spend more and more time at this crazy property so we could have space and be outside. And they opened up stuff there way sooner. So I could go back to museums and stuff. We've talked about this before, but I went to five museums in three weeks. When they opened up again, that's where I recorded the first episode on a table in that house. A hard table on a hard floor. So it was a little live. That's what I was trying to get to. Live, meaning echoey. So that's why I haven't listened to it. I will say in the pandemic is when I set a lot of the pieces that became part of my ideal lifestyle vision that I've made huge progress on but continue to pursue. A lot of those pieces came down in the pandemic. So that was definitely a face shift point in whatever my ideal lifestyle vision was. I'm sure pre pandemic it was much more. I don't remember exactly all the pieces of it. It was much more just functional, just moving forward in my academic career, having a book that was successful. I had a family still relatively young back then. We had just moved like my books were just starting to take off. So I'm sure it was just, I don't know, it was a little bit more prosaic. And then it got a little bit more interesting during the pandemic. Even doing the Podcast itself came from driving that golf cart back and forth, listening to mainly the Rewatchables podcast with Bill Simmons and just hearing what they were doing. I was like, oh, this is interesting what people are up to in this medium and trying to, like, imagine what it could be. I read a bunch of Disney books during that period. I still, as we'll see at the end of this episode, I'm still reading a lot of Disney books, but I was reading a lot of Disney books back then. During the Early Pandemic is when that weird obsession and I began thinking about the media side of what I do and a lot of ideas that now we see today. And the deep work HQ and the podcast, the video and the newsletters and the way things are progressing now and the footprint it has in my life and in my career. A lot of those scenes, seeds were planted back Early Pandemic. Thinking about what I wanted to do with my books and what I wanted the work to shallow ratio the shape of my career. This is when I began to change beyond just the simple path of just, you're a computer science professor who goes to these conferences and publishes these papers and has these students. That's when I first started shifting towards a more ambitious and idiosyncratic vision for my academic impact. So without getting into too much details, a lot changed right around the time I did that podcast, Early Pandemic. And I made a lot of progress, actually, on a lot of those ideas that, that, that came up then. So still going well. All right, who do we got?
- [53:47]
Jesse
Next up is Carrie. I have enough time in my morning hours to focus on deep work and projects that matter to my work. I also get to inbox zero most days. However, I want to start using my afternoons for other pursuits. My problem is that I obsessively check my inbox for new emails.
- [54:04]
Cal Newport
Well, you do that because you worry about bad things that could happen. And so when you do that type of obsessive checking, you worry about bad things that are happening. But when you're actually doing the checking, what you're looking for is the positive feeling of relief when you see nothing is there. So your mind is like, what if there's something there? What if someone needs you? What if there's something urgent? Do we need to do something? And you're like, you know, what if I check and there's not? I'm going to feel good. I kind of want that good feeling. You can get addicted to that positive feeling in the same way you can get addicted to the positive feeling of Eating a donut or smoking a cigarette. It really can be powerful. So we have to break you out of that cycle. And the way I often suggest in these situations that people do that is commit for one to two weeks saying, I am going to make lots of bad things happen. Even if things go terribly awry, I can always apologize my way. Out of one week, I could be like, sorry, it was a hard week, I wasn't feeling well or whatever. But for one week, I'm not going to try to convince myself that nothing bad will happen if I don't check my inbox in the afternoon. I'm going to say, let the bad things happen. I want to see how many bad things happen. If I don't do that, my new rule is going to be do an emergency check at 4:30 just to make sure there's nothing really urgent. If there is, you can give your quick apology and be like, I'm on it, I'll get to it tomorrow so people aren't stressed out at the end of the day and that's it. And be like, I'm sure bad things will happen. People will be upset, things will get missed. But it's not going to jeopardize my job because it's one week and I can be like, hey, it was a hard week, so make that commitment. Your mind will be on board with that. If you try to convince your mind it's fine, nothing bad will happen. It's like, I don't believe you. That is a wrong thing. And because that's a wrong thing, I am not going to base my activities on it. But if you're like, no, no, no, bad things will happen, but we won't get fired for it because it's just one week, your mind's like, okay, fine, this is a stupid exercise, but we'll do it. And here's what you'll find. Bad things don't happen because no one really cares. And if you're on the ball and you're responsible and you can touch base at 4:30 when you need to. When people send you a message, it's off their head. It's off their plate. Like, great, there's one less thing I have to stress about now. I'm going to pay attention to the next 500 things. It is not as people imagine. When they see an email sitting there in their inbox and it's like 4:30 and it's been there since like 1pm what they imagine is that that sender, since 1pm has been sitting there staring at Their inbox slowly pouring slugs of bourbon, gripping the glass as it shakes and being like, where the hell is your answer? And slug back. And they slam it down. And then looking at the clock and there's like a wildly ticking second hand behind them. And another half hour goes by and they pour another slug. It's been 30 minutes. So you imagine that's what's happening, that everyone is just sitting there like, I cannot believe this guy has not answered my message. I am probably going to have to dismember him with an axe. Because, like, this is unconscionable. No, they have a thousand messages. They're just glad they got this one thing off their plate. They don't want you to answer right away because then it's back on their plate again. So it's like, great, we'll let all the terrible things happen. Oh, my God, it's going to be so terrible. And then it won't be. And you might be like, okay, fine, you're right, this is okay. And then you'll stop worrying about it as much. Then the relief you get from checking will be less. And if the relief is less, the positive signal is no longer so salient, and then the addictive loop will degrade. So just tell yourself, yeah, mind, let's just see how many bad things do happen and then see what really happens. So much of problems with work communication, Jesse, is what we imagine other people are doing in terms of tracking our behavior.
- [57:38]
Jesse
It's kind of amazing.
- [57:39]
Cal Newport
They really think that there's a war room where everyone is sitting there with, like, real time graphs. It's like the Apollo mission control from Apollo 13, except for its like, graphs of your inbox. They check in on all the people in the control stations at Mission Control. Like telemetry, go. Whatever life support, go. That you have. Everyone. That's like response time, go. Number of committees, they agreed to go. They're all sitting here with these charts trying to figure out what's going. No one cares. Be reliable. Get your stuff done. No one's charting your email response times. And if they are, get out of that job. That's stupid. All right, who do we got?
- [58:15]
Jesse
Next up is Maureen. Can you summarize how values and strategic planning documents, birthday projects and lifestyle centric planning combine together?
- [58:24]
Cal Newport
Nobody knows. Just leave it at that. It's just the way it is. No one knows how they fit together. We just accept it. Yes. All right, this is like a Cal Newport potpourri. Let's put these. Let me go through these all here. Okay. So lifestyle centric planning is an approach to transforming your life in which you work systematically towards a holistic picture of a better lifestyle, as opposed to assuming that one radical change or accomplishment will make everything better. So it is an approach to transforming your life. Your values. Having a clear description of your values in a values document can help you when creating your ideal lifestyle that you're moving towards. It also just helps you day to day in trying to figure out how do I react to particular situations as they come up. It's a good reminder your strategic plan is a tool you use to move closer to your ideal lifestyle, among other things. So that might be useful towards that. How do I make sure I'm making progress on these various things? It moves me closer to my ideal lifestyle. Your birthday plan. That just means check in on all this on your birthday to make sure that you don't fall into stasis. Hey, let me look back at my ideal lifestyle. Do I like this vision? Do I need to change anything? How do I want to change my approach, my plan for this year to move closer? So I think that covers it all. Strategic planning, birthday projects, existing planning and values. There you go. And my new book, which right now feels like it'll come out in 2035, but no, I'm making progress on it. It will come out on time. In my new book, I get into some of this. So you'll definitely get into lifestyle centric planning. Why that's the better way to do it, as opposed to hoping for one radical change. How do you build these lifestyle plans? How do you figure out what even matters to you? How do you write a good ideal lifestyle plan? What's the process? How do you go from your notes with your intuitions about what resonates to an actually usefully formatted plan? How do you then build a plan to systematically move closer to that vision? Because I'm all about. It's idiosyncratic and it's making very careful. If I do this, it could help four things at the same time. Then if I combine it with this, it'll prevent this from backsliding. It's more of a puzzle than it is a key. That's a big argument in my book. Changing your life is sometimes fitting together the puzzle pieces of your obstacles and opportunity, not finding the one key that unlocks everything. It's not as dramatic as that. So we'll get into that as well, as well as the advanced techniques that you throw in to help make that progress. So that's where we might hear about Birthday plans and values, documents, et cetera. Then another big part of that book will be like, wait, but what if all of this is just, I can't even do any of this. Crash course and capability. And maybe you want to do that. And I imagine that being something that you do throughout life. Like, I have a hard period. I got knocked on my, you know, knocked on my butt a bunch this quarter. Life work or whatever. I need to kind of re get the engine and capability going here. Crash course. Or maybe you've never gotten there. You're 27 and it was like straight from college to video games and you're like, I gotta just get started, you know, Crash course, right? Or you really have your act together, but then you went into a new phase of life management position, started a family or something. You're like, oh my God. Bought a house. You're like, I don't know how to like keep the walls up. Crash course. So these are the pieces I'm working with, working with now. All right, who do. Is that our last question? All right, great. So we have. Do we have a call this week?
- [61:50]
Jesse
Yeah, we have a case study.
- [61:51]
Cal Newport
All right, which one should we do first? Jesse, you can choose.
- [61:53]
Jesse
Do the case study first.
- [61:54]
Cal Newport
Do we have our fabled case study music?
- [61:58]
Jesse
I think we do.
- [61:58]
Cal Newport
All right, do I read it? Is it a one time music or do I read with it in the background? Pretty brave. I see. That'd be funny if the case after that music. The case study started with. Well, yesterday I killed a man. Ryan. You from prison. Must be nice. How do I do deep work when I'm in prison for killing a man? We need different music for that. I like that music. We'll play it again at the end because I kind of talked over it. All right, today's case study. I like. This one's from Nick. It's about household admin, which is something I've been working a lot on recently. Nick said, I started using your idea of using a mail sorter to organize household admin. When I first heard this mentioned on the podcast, I was drowning in household admin work. The concept of a mail sorter really clicked with me, so I immediately put a card cardboard box on the kitchen counter with all my pending paperwork in it. I also told my wife that if she had any paperwork for me to handle, she could just dump it in that box as well. This instantly made both of our lives a lot easier. For the first few weeks, I was still in the habit of handling admin stuff as it came in. So it was easy to slip back into the habit of following up on the stuff every night. But over time, as I built up the routine of checking the mail sorter weekly, I started to trust the system and I got to the place where I could rely on it. After a month or two of using the cardboard box, I decided it was time to over engineer a more permanent solution. What I came up with was a real mailbox, the style that goes on a wall with a lid on the top. And I mounted it on the kitchen wall with two magnets. This frees up space on the kitchen counter and keeps all the housework paperwork out of sight. It's just the right size to hold a week or two of paperwork and with the magnets it's really convenient to pull off the wall when it's time to process. For a long time, I had a weekly reminder in my calendar to process the mail sorter. However, the system was working so well that I recently reduced the frequency to every other week. So using a mail sorter to manage my paperwork has dramatically reduced my household admin burden. And keeping that in check is an important piece of my journey towards the deep life. Nick, fantastic case study. Having a place where stuff goes, where you trust that you're going to get to it. This is a David Allen idea, is like the best stress reducing drug you can find because your mind doesn't worry about it. It's in that box and I look at that box on Fridays and I trust I'm going to look at that box on Fridays. And so if I put the thing in the box, it'll be seen on Friday. And what you're gaining here, it's not a time thing, it's what people get wrong about time management or productivity. It's not a time thing. It's not, I got the total minutes dedicated to paperwork is smaller. It's not the game. The game is a psychological relief game. You don't have to worry about it. It's all in one place and then you can get it done all at once. And it might not be faster, but it is cognitively more pleasant because as we've also talked about on the show, when you do a big batch of, let's say household paperwork, you can transform your mind into the cognitive context of household paperwork and then do all of these things in that context. And once you're in the context, these things are much easier to do from just a psychological effort required perspective. Whereas if you take these same household admin things and do them in an ad hoc on Demand pattern. Just in the middle of something else. Oh, let me do this now. You're never in the right cognitive mindset. So it's like pulling cognitive teeth, right? You're like, oh God, I got to do this paperwork. But I was just thinking about this thing I was doing over here and it constantly creates friction and it constantly creates sort of mental strain. So it feels better to do it that way as well. So I think that is a great example. And the key is trust. Yeah, Put the weekly calendar thing, you're never going to forget it, but it gives you peace at first because like, oh, my calendar will remind me to check this. You'll remember. But it just gives you peace to know that it's on my calendar. I won't forget it. So I think that's a fantastic way to do it. When we bought our first house, it was kind of my job because my wife would go to work early, I'd have the first shift with the kids. And so I just had this mail sorter and a 30 minute block every morning right after the nanny came, I think is how I did it before I kind of get started with Georgetown work and it was like, just do house. Because there's so much household stuff to do when you buy a new house. I don't have this, this or the water bill is not working right or we need this type of insurance that we didn't have before. Or you're like, there's, you know, snakes in the faucets. It's always something, right? And so I was like, just every day for 30 minutes I work on this stuff and when stuff came in, I just put it in there and man, I was just on top of it. So that works. Trusted systems do work quickly. The music, the play us out here. I enjoyed.
- [66:33]
Dave Curlin
Foreign.
- [66:39]
Cal Newport
We got a call. We do now. Let's hear it.
- [66:44]
Dave Curlin
Hello, my name is Dave Curlin. I'm a real estate salesperson and my question is in regard to the capture and review parts of your productivity system. I know you use Trello and I personally have adopted using it myself. But as a number of Trello cards get bigger and bigger, the list gets longer. I find it difficult to effectively look at them and make decisions about what to do and not to do. You have alluded to David Allen's system in the past and I'm familiar with his method of capturing things in context categories. Is there a reason you don't create more columns in Trello and use this method? It seems like it would be a more efficient way to review these tasks, etc. When doing daily and weekly planning and dealing with a really big list of possible activities and projects. Love your podcast. It's been so helpful and the time blocking method has helped me immensely. Thanks.
- [67:37]
Cal Newport
Well, for my professional task when organized in Trello, I do have many columns. I also have many boards. You need to organize information in various scales of context. Helps you make better use of it. Right. So I tend in the professional context to have a board for each major role. So I'm director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department. That's a different role than say a role working in the center for Digital Ethics or my role working as an algorithm researcher. So give them a separate board. I only want to see things related to a given role at one time. And so when I want to service that role, that's what I'm doing this afternoon. Then let me just see those things. And then within those boards I have a lot of columns. There's like classic columns like make sense of. I haven't processed it yet. There's sort of urgent working on this week but I have a lot of like waiting to hear back from is in there. I sent an email to someone. I'm waiting to hear back. Let me remind myself of what that is and what I'm going to do when I hear back to discuss at next meeting for like any regular meetings in my life assigned for that role, I'll have a column, right. So my director of undergraduate studies, I have meetings with my associate director every week and then every other week I meet with my department chair. I keep track of for both of those things, things I want to talk about at that next meeting. That saves me a ton of email by the way. So instead of just sending the people's instinct is as soon as I think of something, let me email my department chair. Hey, it's off my hands. But now you've just added another email to the thousand that she's going to get and she responds. And now you have to work this out. Not at the time you want to, but whenever these emails move back and forth. So instead you put on a card, talk it next meeting. When you get to the meeting and you go through them all, gives you relief. You can have columns for like particular projects that are going on. If it's like this is like a time sensitive, complicated project that I, you know, we're trying to get this conference together. Great. Here's a separate column over here so I can just keep track of those things. So create as many columns as you need and create different boards for different contexts. I think all of this helps. Lots of things together that have unrelated context. You all have to look at the same time. That can be really overwhelming. So I'm not sure where you got the idea that I have a very small number of total columns I use. I have a ton in my trello universe. All right, we got our final segment coming up. The books I read in August. But first, something even more exciting. A word from another one of our sponsors. So look, if you run a small business, you know, there's nothing small about it. Every day there is a new decision to make, and even the smallest decisions feel massive. Jesse knows I get upset, but when people refer to our business as small. Just the other day, for example, Jesse might remember this. The nice woman who runs the gift shop down the street here in Takoma park was like, hey, how's life as a small business owner going? So Jesse and I, we rolled our car into a swamp. You don't call my business small. I don't want to hear about it that way. So here's what I'm trying to say. It's hard to run a small business. So when you can find decisions that are no brainers, you should take them. And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no brainers. Jesse. That was word for word. That whole thing was word for word. The script they sent me, the car and the swamp, and you know, that's just word for word. The Shopify script. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations. It has very impressive features like endless aisle, ship the customer and buy online but pick up in store. So these features that make you seem like you're a much bigger company. Seamless when you're using Shopify. And with Shopify pos you can get personalized experiences that help your shoppers come back. We have data about this report from EY said that businesses on Shopify POS see real results like a 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to a 8.9 uplift in sales on average relevant to the market set surveyed. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com deep go to shopify.com deep shopify.com deep I also want to talk about our friends at Caldera labs. Guys, wouldn't you like to look A little younger maybe. Get a few more compliments on your skin. As I've mentioned, as part of his employment contract with me, Jesse has to compliment my skin no fewer than seven times a day. But for the rest of you, your best way to getting compliments on your skin is to actually take care of it. That's exactly what Caldera Lab is here for. Their high performance skin care is designed specifically for men. These are simple, effective products that are backed by science. In a consumer study, 100% of men said their skin looks smoother and healthier. 96.9% noticed improved hydration and texture, and 93.8% reported a more youthful appearance. Their products include the good, an award winning serum packed with 27 active botanicals, the eye serum, which helps reduce the appearance of tired eyes and dark circles and puffiness, and the base layer, a nutrient rich moisturizer infused with plant stem cells and snow mushroom extract. You just put this on every day. Keep the skin hydrated. These products will make you look better and feel better about yourself. And they're cheaper than hiring Jesse to comment on your skin throughout the day. So that is a bonus. Skincare doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be good. Upgrade your routine with Caldera Lab and see the difference for yourself. Go to calderalab.com deep and use deep at checkout for 20% off your first order. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment. So, like, I like to do our first episode of each month, talk about the books I read in the previous month. We should get theme music for this, Jesse.
- [73:36]
Jesse
Yeah, we should. That's a good idea.
- [73:37]
Cal Newport
It's only once a month. I think it'd be funny if it was something that like, made no sense. Like it was really incongruous and we just don't mention it. This is gonna be funny. Like, girls just want to have fun. What would be the craziest thing? La Bamba. Be great. So we're going to do that next time. We're going to have incongruous theme music and we're just going to roll with it. That's what we do. All right, so in August. It's a weird month. I'm looking at my books here. I was on vacation in August for a lot of it. So I was reading, I was on vacation. I was writing a lot. I was struggling with my writing. I didn't want to read. It's an interesting set of books. Let's just say jazz, Jesse. That's what I'm trying to Say, these are the books that someone odd like me reads when on vacation. And it's just like, I'm not interested and hard new ideas right now. So let's just keep this in mind. This is a summer list. All right. This first book, I don't know how to even explain this book. It's called Boundless Realm by Fox Nolte. It is a book. I think it's regularly published. Maybe it's self published. I read it on Kindle. It is a book about the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World. Not the Disneyland version, but the Disney World. But it's the craziest book, Jesse, because it's not. Here's a history of the ride. It is. Here's a history of the haunted house in the American Gothic imagination. Let's start there. All right, now we're going to have like, a history of, like, it's like cultural trends that surround the very notion of, like, haunted spaces. Now let's get a whole history of the dark room attraction, starting in these, like, small amusement park attractions where it'd literally just be a dark room that you're on a track and then how things were added. It's like strands of sociology and history all wine together. And then it's like a beat by beat examination of this ride. And it goes like, on each section, it kind of goes deep into what's there and how it's represented, the artistic, cultural impact. But also, historically speaking, when something got changed and at this year they came. I mean, it's the craziest thing. It's like the level of detail you would write if you were writing about a presidential assassination, like, that level of research. But about this ride, and it was fascinating. And he has another one out. I think he writes a bunch of these books. So I don't know. The labor of love.
- [76:03]
Jesse
How long is the ride? Like five minutes. I was on it like 30 years ago.
- [76:07]
Cal Newport
Yeah, yeah, it's like five minutes. And I've only been on the one at Disney. I went to Disneyland this summer and that's the only one. Anytime I've ever been to any Disney, this is about the Disney World one, which is a little bit different. And you find out exactly how it's different. Trust me, you could you get into it. It's a cool. I mean, I think it's a cool ride. I did it a bunch of times. It was just like I was reading that one up in Vermont. Interesting book. All right. Then I read Collisions by Alec Navalle. Oh, this is a legitimate book. It's A biography of a physicist who named Alvarez. And he was involved in the Manhattan Project. So he designed the instrument that the chase plane that chased. So there's Enola Gay dropping the atomic bomb, but you have a couple planes with you. And one of the other planes dropped a piece of equipment on a parachute to try to measure the blast and other things and then radio it back. And so he was up in the chase plane because he designed this thing. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his. He was a sort of experimentalist physicist, big famous physicist. And he won a Nobel Prize for his work on something, I don't know, cloud chambers or particles. Something, something. So he's kind of an interesting guy. Like, what made the book interesting is that his life went in. He got in. He got involved in like a lot of weird or interesting different projects so that he was heavily involved. Not heavily involved, but he got involved in Kennedy assassination debunking. So debunking the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination from a physics perspective. Like, he did a lot of work on using rules of physics to understand things like the timing of the shots and how a head could go backwards if it was shot in this direction. So he got really involved in that. And then most famously later in life, working with his son, who was a geologist or something like this, they were the ones who advanced the asteroid killing the dinosaurs theory. So this was their working together. Really made this argument based off of the iridium and the KT layer. They really began to. They pushed the argument, which we grew up with it, you and I, like, yeah, the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. What I don't think we realized growing up, that was a brand new theory. When we were growing up, like in the early 90s, late 80s, that was still being debated. So, like, we grew up and they're like, yeah, like the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. That wasn't like, yeah, we've known this since the 1950s. In the 90s still, they were like actively making this argument. So anyways, I thought it was cool. So that was interesting. It was interesting to hear about him. Alvarez, interesting guy, did a lot of deep work also. Turn this off. Lost my list here. Let me go back. Then I read. It's another Disney book. Jesse. I was on vacation. This is the mindset I was in. It was reducing my stress. I got really into people writing ridiculously detailed books about a very narrow thing involving Disney. So this is similar. This is a more legitimate book. No, Fox Novelty is a legitimate book too. I don't know if it's traditionally published or not. This one was called before the Birds Sing by Ken Bruce. Ken Bruce is an animator, director, like a Hollywood guy. And it's all about the enchanted tiki room in Disneyland. Because that was the first animatronics. There was the Lincoln animatronic, but it was really like sort of the first sort of audio animatronics in Disney. And it's the whole history of the technology, the room, like beat by beat how this came together. This author, Ken Bruce was like deep in the Disney archives. He got access to him. So he's like looking at annotations on notes about like, oh, they moved the tables around for this or that. It's like again, it's a micro history of this one ride, which by the way, I've never seen. It was closed when I was at Disneyland. So I don't know anything. But I'm interested in audio animatronics. And so you just get this really, really deep history, including why was it the tiki room? So you get a whole history about the tiki craze and about the South Pacific really coming to the attention of the American people. And there was this craze of all of these over the top themed tiki restaurants in the first half of the 20th century. Like in Los Angeles, there's this one, the whole outside is a volcano with lava coming on. You come into these tiki restaurants and they had rainstorms inside and volcanoes and giant tanks. It was all really themed and it was this whole mania. So you have to understand that to understand. Why is there a tiki room at Disneyland? It was really big and then it got even bigger after World War II because a lot of American GIs went to the South Pacific. So then they came back and they had seen all this stuff and had these stories and whole Hawaii was just about to become the 49th US state. And so it was like this moment. So you get like that history in it, but then you get the whole history of audio animatronics, which comes out of technology. They purchased surplus technology that was used in the Polaris nuclear ballistic missile program. Because the way audio animatronics work. Not to get too much in the detail here, but it's how do we, in an age before we have digital computers, how do we store all the movements we want one of a bird to do and not only store those movements, but sync it up exactly with the sound we're going to be playing. And in audio animatronics, they said, what we'll do is for each movement we'll have a tone. And if we have a multi track tape, we can fit a bunch of tones on here. In fact, we can overlap some tones on the same tape because there are different frequency bands that are they constructively we can kind of furry or transfer them back out again. Like we can store multiple frequency bands on the same channel and then still isolate both of them. And so what they then had is so you're recording these tones on audiotape for all the different motions. You want these valves opening and shutting to move things. Then they had these things that Motorola had invented for their push to talk radios called tone reads. So you have the sound that's kind of like wired. It's going over an analog cable into these tone reads and it vibrates different frequencies, vibrate different reads. And when it vibrates it closes a circuit. And that circuit can then when it closes, can open and close a valve to move something. So the program for these birds was on an audio tape. And this tape is playing and they have these huge banks of tone reeds that are vibrating different frequencies that are opening and closing valves. And they could fit something like 128 or 200 different kind of sub tracks of tones on there. And it's exactly synchronized to the sound because one of the tracks is just like the sound. So like it's exactly synchronized to it. So they kind of invented that was they were using this to control missiles and they use this for this. But then for Pirates of the Caribbean, there's too many figures for this, right? So Pirates of the Caribbean, now we're talking like 62. There's too many figures and they have audio tape and it's constant. It's not like shows like they're constantly moving and they're like, we can't just constantly be playing this audio tape. And there's too many figures to try to program. So they went to something more simple. There it was, each of the figures and their motions were much simpler because you only pass them briefly. So they made physical discs that have bumps up and down. And when the bump happens, different, different valves open and close. And they just had like these, you'd have these big racks full of discs with bumps, like big records really. And they would just turn and push a stylus up and down or they would be holes and they would have a photo thing under it. But just physical discs that would turn and each one would have like, it would take two minutes to go around and that's like two minutes of activity. So you would Have a whole stack of these discs for all the different motors on one pirate. And it was like a much more durable thing because it was really physical. Right. And then BY like the 70s, you could just have zeros and ones on. It's a computer. Just load in the memory and the computer could just do it. So this type of stuff is really interesting to me. My wife thought I was crazy. She's like, what are you reading? Actually, this book. It's a hardcover. Beautifully produced. It's hard to get. I had to order it. Not through Amazon, through some other means. Beautiful hardcover, embossed cloth, hardbound, with a Kiki Bird in. Or this or that. Self published, as far as I can tell. Just a labor of love, really. Yeah. There was no publisher. I think Brad Bird, the director, write the introduction. The guy who wrote it is like a real Hollywood animation insider. All right. Then I read a fun novel, which I got in Bethany. There's a good bookstore in Bethany called Beach Reads, which they don't carry my books, but they do have Beach Reads, a lot of novels, or this or that. And I got a book randomly off the shelf. Impulse buy. Desperation Reef by T. Jefferson Parker. It's like a procedural thriller. Family. They're surfers. There's like, I don't know, intrigue. And their criminal syndicate burns down their restaurant. And it was fun. Interesting. And then finally, I read Shift by Hugh Howey. So I mentioned one of my kids read the Hugh Howey trilogy, which is the. On Apple tv, the series is Silo, but he wrote the Wool trilogy back in the day. That was big, like, last decade. Anyways, he read them and I promised to read along. So I read the first one the month before, and this month I read the second one, Shift, and I guess I'll read the third one sometime soon. There you go. Those are my five books for August 2025. If you know of any obscure Disney books that go way too deep on a very narrow topic, I'm in, man. Now you got to just tell me. I got to read them all. There's a whole world out there. So let me know. Send those recommendations or just send me the book to Jesse. We're gonna get a lot of really narrow. We're getting a lot of really narrow books. I love the technology side of the Disney park stuff. That's really what I'm kind of interested in this year. That's my interest. During the pandemic, I was really interested in the media business brand of Disney. Now this year, because it's relaxing to me. I'm really interested in the technological side of Disney parks. I've been the one one day, but what are you going to do? All right, that's all time we have for today. We'll be be back next week with another episode. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter which you can sign up for at Cal Newport. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter a couple newport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. Sam.