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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.
- [00:03]
B
My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside
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A
and I have just read a phenomenal book. It's been around for a little bit, but came out in a new edition. It's called Rest why you get more done when you work less. And the author, Alex Soojun Kim Pong is here. What a book. Thank you for being with us, Alex.
- [00:20]
C
Oh, thanks for having me, Jenny. Pleasure to be with you.
- [00:23]
A
So this is not your only book. You also have a book called Shorter, which is about the four day work week, which is like the dream. The dream. I think everybody thinks if the work week could be four days and we have this three day weekend, I mean, it would solve a lot. Although I think you probably have to be pretty careful about not shoving things in and really taking that time to rest. Because what you talk about is that rest is not something that the world gives. It has never been a gift. It's never been something you do when you finished everything else. If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously and protect it from the world that is intent on stealing it. If we had a four day work week, do you think people would take time to rest?
- [01:06]
C
The empirical evidence is they absolutely do. So I have worked with a few hundred organizations now around the world that have implemented four day weeks without like moving to four 10 hour days, but rather actually shortening the amount of time that you're working total. Okay. And it turns out that what they do with their free time is ridiculously wholesome things. They spend more time with family, spend more time doing volunteer work, they have less takeout, and they cook more. Giving people more time does not end up with, you know, more idleness or giving people, you know, or people. People don't spend it planning the perfect crime. They spend it with their children or, or with, you know, sort of down at the shelter or something. So yes, people do. And they also spend more time on themselves. There was a really interesting study in Iceland that found that broadly speaking, when public servants there moved to shorter work weeks, men spent more time with the families and women spent more of their discretionary time with each other, on themselves. And so, and I think that's revealing even in a famously egalitarian place like Iceland, where, you know, gender roles and stereotypes are supposed to be sort of, you know, we're followed less than they are in other, in other parts of the world. But, you know, just to wrap up the four. You know, one of the other things that's really impressive about the, about the four day week of is not just its impact on rest, but also the impact that it has on the careers especially of working mothers. And what we see is that, you know, generally most high tech companies, financial services firms, startups, the kinds of places, in other words, that have been experimenting with four day work weeks now they have a default, whether they know it or not, to try to hire 25 year old unmarried guys with no pets. Basically people who have as few external commitments on their time as possible so that they can be asked to and agree to work as many hours as they possibly can without, without, without any inconvenience to the system. When you move to a four day week, as one, you know, one founder told me said, you know, what we need, it turns out, are not people who can slee their desks. What you need are people who are super organized, who are a little bit ruthless with their time but have, you know, but also can work well with others, have good listening skills, are well organized. And it turns out that those, where do you, where do you find those skills? Mainly in sort of working moms who very often when they, you know, when, when they're trying to get back into the workforce, you know, when, you know, after you, after having a child, you know, let's say a child or two really struggle to find positions in the same or at the same level that they had been in before they exited. And so for these small companies who are struggling to find really good talent for them it's an opportunity to get people with a level of experience who they would not be able to otherwise. And for, you know, the women, it's an opportunity to work in an environment that they, that is, is designed not around the idea that you should give as much time as you possibly can to the organization, but rather that you should be as thoughtful as you possibly can about how you spend that time and sort of take that wisdom and use it to having a life outside. So anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. That's, or that's, that's the benefit of the four day week.
- [05:16]
A
It's fascinating and it's fascinating how the two books work together because you know, I think a lot of us live at our margin and so we don't like you, like I said this very beginning part from your book where you have to be deliberate about rest. But if you did have that extra, if you cut off a work day, it's eight hours but maybe more because you have a commute. Maybe it's 10 hours.
- [05:38]
C
Right.
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A
That people are attuned to their bodies and they do and could choose activities that bring them to life. And then the rest book, it's so cool how the books coincide. The rest book then goes to show and you talk about all these different people that they prioritized walking and they prioritized hobbies and they prioritize play and that enhanced the work that they did. So.
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C
Right.
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A
I love how the books coincide. So talk about then how you're a Silicone Valley guy.
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B
It's how people say silicon.
- [06:09]
C
Silicon.
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A
It's not silicone. No, silicon. So you're a Silicon Valley guy. And you know, you're in this culture that is a race. You know, it's like you're going to be obsolete. You're, you're already too old, you should have already done it. And you are really pushing back on that with a four day workweek and an entire book about rest. How'd you get interested in the topic?
- [06:31]
C
That's a great question. So, you know, and I'm sure that there is a Silicon Valley somewhere, but, you know, who knows, you know, they say you write the book that you need. And so in my case, partly it was a response to my own experience with overwork and burnout. It was also, there was also kind of an intellectual journey which very briefly was that when I was in college, one of the most formative classes I took was called Invention and Discovery in the Arts and Sciences, which was all about kind of the psychology of creativity among famous scientists and artists and other kinds of highly creative, prolific people. And it's, you know, one of those intellectual experiences that, you know, you imagine having in college that not all, that not all of us are lucky enough to, to have. But it for me really set up a set of questions that I've been kind of pursuing sort of ever since. However, when you, when you're interested in things like the psychology of creativity, people are always trying to figure out like what goes on in the heads of people sort of while they're working. Right. You don't, you know, you don't ask. All right, does non work time play some role here? Right. In what? In what people? In, in helping people be more creative. And I had this experience when I had a sabbatical. I was at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and about halfway through realized that I was getting amazing amounts of work done. I was reading a lot, talking to people, having these cool experiences, but I didn't feel the kind of time pressure that is just part of normal life here in Silicon Valley, where you always feel like you're half a step or half a project behind, especially now with, you know, AI threatening to sort of take over everything. And it made me think, you know, maybe in order to do really good work, what we need to do is build in more time in our lives for rest, and that it is not through working more and more like machines or computers that what if we're going to succeed? Because you're never going to win that race thanks to Moore's Law and the fact that, you know, what if machines don't need to sleep, but rather that if we need that, rather that rest can be both a source of renewal, but also a kind of creative wellspring from which good ideas can emerge. And, you know, it turned out that not only was this, was there a bunch of research in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity that helped explain why these periods of downtime or are really creatively very fruitful, but when you look at the lives of highly creative folks like Nobel Prize winners and famous artists and writers, what you see is almost, you know, all of them who have long creative lives learn to take rest seriously. And they rest in some pretty consistent ways that we can follow and put in, you know, put into place in our own lives. So that's the, that's the story behind or coming to recognize the importance of, and then writing the book about rest.
- [10:03]
A
It's a fantastic book. I love how you woke together all the different types of things that you can do to be more rested, which is like napping, but it's also active rest. It's also play. It's also your morning routine. And then you just go through person after person. You're like, this is what C.S. lewis did. This is what Dickens did. You know, he would walk 10 to 12 miles. That was typical of him. This was Stephen King's. This was his morning routine. I mean, you just went person after person and you even talked about how that sometimes they would almost describe themselves as lazy because they are doing all of. They, they're enjoying their lives like they're putting in some good work hours, but then they also have limit to it. I, I would love to just. If you talk a minute more about your class that you took, because this is in the acknowledgments and I thought this was such a cool thing, Alex, that entry level classes at college, you know, everyone thinks about their first two years often and they're like, you know, it's just the things that you have to check the box and get through. But you say that this is the very first class you took in college. That really struck a chord with you.
- [11:13]
C
Yeah, no, this was. It's one of those things that happened not quite by accident, but almost. It was in sort of a special program. The. My alma mater also had a program in history of science, which is kind of unusual. There are not that many of those in the United States. And the person who was teaching this was an historian of technology named Thomas Hughes. And part of the reason that I chose his class was that I was that he had gone to University of Virginia, and that's where I was from. So we actually had gone to rival high schools a couple decades apart. And, you know, I was at that time planning to be an engineer. I was going to, you know, study computer science, kind of, you know, sort of, you know, typical kind of ambitious Asian kid stuff. But taking this class with Tom made me realize that as interesting as spending time calculating circuit voltages might have been for me, actually what I was much better at was history of science and history of Technology. That was a class that combined readings from Sigmund Freud, talking about Leonardo to books about. About or of schizophrenia to Thomas Mons Magic Mountain. There was a. We read a little bit of Goethe's Faust. But, you know, it was, you know, and Tom was one of these. Was one of these teachers who had that brilliant ability to ask a couple questions and then apparently step back for most of. The. Most of the rest of the class and just let things flow. Now, having done some teaching myself, I know that that is one of the hardest things you can do as a teacher. You know, there's that the. There's that line in the Usual suspects that, you know, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was. Was convincing people he didn't exist. And there are some skills that are. That make themselves disappear. And if you know how to do that, then that's really amazing. And Tom had that ability in the classroom. And so that course moved me from studying engineering to design to sort of doing history of science. But the course also, you know, inspired me to do things like I was, you know, I was writing a paper based on the work of a professor at Princeton. And so I called him up, went of. Went up to Princeton, spent a few hours interviewing him. And, you know, not the sort of thing that a freshman typically does. But Tom's class sort of was engaging enough so that. To. To make you want to. Want to do that. So that was. Yeah, so it was a. It was a choice based upon one of these crazy personal connections that have nothing to do with the subject. That turned out to be to have ramifications that I basically I am still living with.
- [14:42]
A
So yeah, yeah, still with these books. Yeah. Here's this guy. He's from the Richmond area. You take his class. He's the most eminent historian of technology in the world.
- [14:54]
B
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A
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- [18:28]
A
You know, Alex, I've not read any. Anyone who is in their acknowledgments talking about, you know, a particular college class and I mean, you wrote paragraph after
- [18:39]
B
paragraph about this class that you took.
- [18:42]
A
So what an inspiring thing. I love that you also thank the library. Thank you to the Menlo park library as well. It's a great resource. Okay, so talking about the history then. This is interesting, this history and the change. Because here you are in Silicon Valley where you say if you're not rich by the time you're 30 years, you know, you're becoming obsolete, you're too decrepit, you, you can't work a hundred hour work weeks and you're never going to be able to because now you're 30 and you're like on the downward slope here. You say in a world where we're all encouraged to become entrepreneurs, figures like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk become the standards against which we're supposed to measure ourselves. But this was not always the case. So I love that you include the history in this book. What did it used to be like? So obviously, you know, people didn't used to know of Steve Jobs. You know, he, he hadn't risen to prominence. Or Elon Musk or, or these different. Like the, the Amazon guy. Yes, him, you know, and so now we have all these people. But you do talk about how even in the 1980s that work hours were starting to increase. So can you talk about some of the cultural changes? I think this is interesting to understand.
- [19:53]
C
Yeah. You know, we are in a world in which, in which long hours and overwork are so much like an accepted part of life. They seem inevitable and inescapable. That it is, it can be difficult but really revealing to discover that just a generation ago our ideas about success, about what, about what the lives of successful people had to be like, were really quite different. And you know, I think that in the immediate, you know, the years between the end of World War II and let's say about 1980 or so was this, you know, was this era in which you had a couple, for one thing, the heads of America's two most sort of, most prominent companies, right. General Electric and General Motors were both run at different times by two guys named Charlie Wilson, each of whom had worked their way up from essentially the mail room, where the engineering design shop, to the corner office. And that's the way careers worked in America, right? You started in a company, you paid your dues, or if you climbed the ladder and then you made it to the top. It was also the case that this was, it was not obvious that working super long hours was proof that you were really good, but rather proof that you were inefficient. Right. This. And you know, what begins to change in the 80s is the rise of sort of the finance, mainly the finance and the tech industries that sort of operate according to very different kinds of cultural rules here in Silicon Valley, you know, it is, I think, you know, sort of Apple and Steve Jobs that helps sort of promote this idea. Built kind of drawing from the world of, you know, Computer hackers or, or computer bums as they were sometimes called, right. These people who are obsessed with computers who stayed up all night playing, playing space war. People for whom long hours at the terminal was, you know, was a way of life and now it turned into a way of business. And so what happens is you get a shift, a kind of cultural shift to this idea that in order to succeed in this fast moving, globalizing, high tech world, you need to work super, super long hours. And one of the reasons you needed to do that was the technology was going to change. So if you were a technical person and five years from now your skill, those skills are going to be obsolete. So you know, you got to, you got to make hay while the sun shines. I think it's also the case that sort of with process re. Engineering, you know, the whole, the, the tumult of corporate reorganization, downsizing, et cetera in the 80s and the 90s, generally our sense of career stability and goes way down, right. You see sort of the growing use of, of temporary workers or precarious work in, in all kinds of industries, including professional services. Right. Academia, law firms, sort of, et cetera. And so in that environment, it becomes ever more important to demonstrate your worth. And how do you do that? Well, if you're not in a factory or working on a farm, where your output can be measured by how many widgets you've put together in a shift or how many acres you've plowed in knowledge and service industries, it becomes time because we don't have much better measures. And so working long hours becomes both a way of showing your dedication, it becomes protective covering and against being laid off. I mean, I think there, there is some evidence that it is also a kind of rear guard, defensive reaction against the growing presence of women in the workplace, particularly in professional settings, you know, that, you know, as, as the percentage of women increase in or in professions, one of the things that can happen is expectations around hours sort of get longer as, you know, as a, as a way of sort of, you know, keeping too many of these, you know, too many of these women from sort of taking sort of too many, you know, too many jobs that sort of men had. Had. This is, this is a little bit disputed, but, but I think it makes sense. Yeah, right.
- [24:48]
A
They gotta be home with the kids and I don't have to be.
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C
Right.
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A
It's super. I love that you talked about, you know, this class that you had with Thomas that, you know, he was the most eminent historian of technology in the world, that the history Here does matter, because so often we're caught up in doing things just because the culture has changed, not necessarily because it works. And that basically is what rest is about. You're like. And shorter.
- [25:11]
C
Yeah.
- [25:12]
A
Just because this is what everyone's doing. And you say it works for a
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B
few, but very few.
- [25:18]
A
It works fabulously well for Jeff Bezos. It works fabulously well for Steve Jobs. Well, and not anymore because he's passed away, but it worked fabulously well. But for the majority of people, they're gonna burn out and they're gonna have very little to show for at the end.
- [25:33]
C
Right.
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A
So you give an opportunity to do it a different way and show why things have changed. The other thing that's changed is our children. And I actually thought this was a huge key. So what we're trying to do here, Alex, is we're trying to preserve time. We're trying to preserve time for kids to be kids. We're trying to preserve time for rest. We're trying to preserve time where we're not sucked into all these screens all the time. And what happens is that parenting becomes easier. And one of the things that you talked about in this book in terms of what is taking up all of our time, which is so insightful, is dealing with our children. Earlier generations gave children more independence and mobility, but today's parenting is much more time and labor intensive. This is one reason the amount of time spent on housework has barely budged in the last 100 years. Despite the fact that we have dishwashers and washing machines and other appliances, we are still consumed a large part because our children have less independence.
- [26:31]
C
Right. Yeah. Also, children spend less time doing housework. It you sort of. So if you could. If you. If you cast back to, let's say, 1890 or so, the bad version of this was your, you know, you've got six kids and the nine year old is taking care of three of the others. Right. Because the more positive version of it is, you know, you didn't have a vacuum cleaner. You took the rugs out in the spring and, you know, to be cleaned. And it was dad and the sons who did that. Right. It's very physical. You take them out, you beat them with brooms, you get all the dust out, et cetera. There were jobs that daughters had. And so the division of household labor was less gendered than it would have than it was when any of us were growing up. And paradoxically, part of what happens with the growth of technologies in the home, like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, and things that you would imagine, you know, things that genuinely do make it easier to do, things like wash dishes or wash clothes, etc. Is that men and boys stop doing that. They spend more time working outside the home and standards of cleanliness increase. So you're no longer wearing a shirt for two. It's no longer okay to wear a shirt for two or three days and then wash it. You've got to, you know, you wear it once and then it goes on the washing machine.
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A
Yeah.
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C
You know, and so even though the act of washing one individual shirt sort of goes, the amount of labor for that goes down. The total amount of work that you're doing stays the same. Wow. So, yeah, it is. It's. It's one of those hidden things that turns out to have a real impact on women's lives at home. It impacts their, you know, what they're able. Their sense of agency or freedom in the workplace. And of course, it has an effect on their ability, sort of their ability to rest and sort of everybody and everybody else in the household's ability to rest. And that's important for kids because, you know, for kids, downtime, you know, time that's unscheduled, that is kind of, you know, safely unsupervised, is really important for their own psychological development. Right. Their development as people at their. For the development of their imaginations. And when you give kids less of that, that sort of. That has downsides over the long run. Right. Their independence, their agency, their creativity of their ability to deal with things on their own all decline a little bit. And so I think what that tells us is that, you know, a little strategic, ignoring your kids when they say that they're bored is perfectly fine for them. It's pretty good. It's probably pretty good for you. And I think that it's going to pay off sort of for everybody.
- [29:47]
A
Yes, yes. Today's parenting is more time and labor intensive. It is wild and fascinating, Alex.
- [29:54]
C
Yes, absolutely.
- [29:55]
A
The amount of time spent on housework has barely budged in 100 years. In 1925, they were spending the same amount of time on housework that we are in 2025. But you can see it 2026, because that's what my mom told me when my mom was growing up. She said, like, as soon as dinner was over, the kitchen was closed, no one's go, because you had to hand wash all the dishes, and, like, you had to put it all away. So it's like, well, in this day and age, if someone's getting out of A plate for their pizza rolls at 10 o' clock or, you know, you're just. It's it, you can see it. And it's fascinating to read about and to consider. Like people would vacuum every day, you know, because they can, because the standard of cleanliness. Whereas like you said, the beating of the rugs was something you did in the spring, it was only maybe once or twice a year. So all of this ties into what we can do about it. And it is also fascinating that so many famous. And then obviously there would be other people that are not famous but still successful. So many of these people that everyone would know about, like a Stephen King or a CS Lewis or a Charles Dickens, they did things somewhat similarly. So you talked about the four day work week. I would love to talk about this four hour work day. Yeah, that was in the morning, even if people are night owls. And how this really helped to shape people's success.
- [31:21]
C
Yeah, so I said earlier that when you look at the daily calendars of really creative people, you see a couple consistent patterns. And briefly what this breaks down to is the following. One is almost all of them start the day really early. Ernest Hemingway at his typewriter at 6am and this is a guy who might have been out drinking hard until midnight or one.
- [31:49]
A
Yes, they're night owls too. It's not that they're like early to
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B
bed, early to rise people.
- [31:55]
A
A lot of them are night owls.
- [31:56]
C
Yeah, some of them are early to bed, early to rise. But even the ones who aren't sort of practice this. And so start really early in part because for creative work, there is some evidence that your creative subconscious is a little more accessible in those super early hours that, you know, I think if anybody, anybody who's been on religious retreats, for example, or spend any time in sort of any kind of monastic environment, those people are up at like 4am praying. And it's not just, you know, like a proof of, you know, a proof of strength or your own devotion. There really is something about being awake at that time of day that is special. And, you know, whether this is for devotional purposes or for creative purposes. So the first thing that they're doing is kind of harnessing a little bit of that. But the other, the next important thing is, is you're working in highly concentrated blocks of 90 minutes to two hours. And this is mainly because research tells us that we can't actually concentrate hard for longer than about two hours. We may feel like at hour three that we're still crushing it, but that's because our capacity to evaluate our own mental states is also on the decline. And so we still think it's, you know, sort of, we still think we're doing amazingly, but that's because our capacity to really sort of, to measure that has broken. So they're doing it for 90 to 90 minutes to two hours and then taking a break, going for a walk, or maybe spending a little time in the garden doing something else. And what this does is first of all allows you to kind of do a mental reset and recharge some of the energy that you had spent down previously. But also when you take that kind of break, you reach the end of the page and put down your pen and go outside. You still got a lot of stuff running around in your head, right? Problems that you haven't solved, the next sentence, et cetera. And that break gives your creative mind, your creative subconscious time to continue thinking about this stuff and even as your conscious attention is elsewhere and you are maybe physically removed from your desk and off doing something else. And so essentially what this does is it creates a situation where you're not just using conscious effort and logical deduction in order to do your work, but you're also able to harness that usually more elusive, harder to reach part of your creative mind. And then you go back, maybe you've had an idea or two that you can then get onto the page and sort of elaborate, do that for a couple more hours and then basically you're done.
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A
Yeah.
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C
The other thing is that if you need to work more, wherever possible, you don't stretch out the day, but rather you make the peaks higher so, you know, you have stricter rules about sort of about what before or before you work, so that you can, you know, you can focus more intensively, more exclusively.
- [35:25]
B
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C
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- [36:41]
B
is when homeschool families start looking ahead. You can almost see the finish line. Spring goals, end of year milestones, maybe even testing around the corner. And this is such an important time to reinforce key skills and build confidence before wrapping up the year. If you are thinking about assessments, whether required by your state or simply the benchmarks you set for your family, it's helpful to have a tool that makes review simple and clear. That's where IXL can really shine. IXL is an award winning online learning platform that fits seamlessly into homeschooling. It offers interactive practice across math, language arts, science and social studies from Pre K through 12th grade. It personalizes learning for each child, keeps them engaged and gives parents clear insight into progress. What stands out this time of year is the real time feedback and progress tracking. Kids get instant explanations when they miss something and parents can see exactly where growth is happening and where a little reinforcement might help. It takes the guesswork out of finishing strong make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and 1000 Hours Outside listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com 1000hours. Visit ixl.com 1000hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.
- [37:52]
C
When I'm working on a book, for example, I will set up as much as I possibly can the night before, like choose my clothes, I will set up the coffee maker and before I stop work, work in the day before I'll write down on a post it the three things that I'm gonna I'm gonna deal with first. And this is important because first off I love to sleep and so getting up at 5am is even after 10 years, not an easy thing. And so laying out stuff kind of blackmails my future self, the 5am self into actually getting up and doing this. Number two, I have to make fewer non critical decisions at that Time do I wear this sweater or that sweater? I already decided that I can operate a little bit more on automatic until I get to the point where I lift up the laptop and start typing. The other valuable thing about this creatively is that your mind continues thinking about stuff overnight. And if you have an unfinished problem and you know that you're going to go back to it the next day, there is still some processing that happens. And so if I'm really lucky, I have this experience where the first few sentences I write, it's like, where did that come from? You know, it is kind of my subconscious sort of just, you know, not coming up with. Probably not coming up with those things that second, but rather, you know, kind of servicing stuff that. That my creative mind had been sort of. Had been think. Had been thinking about previously. And then the other, you know, the other part to. To wrap up sort of with. With these days. So you're layering periods of deep work, as Cal Newport calls it, with deliberate rest. You make the peaks higher whenever you can rather than sort of stretching the day out. And then what do you do?
- [39:58]
A
What of.
- [39:59]
C
What else do you do during this day? Well, a good bit of what people do is physically active. So, you know, whether that is going on long walks like Charles Dickens did, or going to the gym or going sailing or, you know, Einstein, for example, really loved to be out on the water. So there's often this physical component to your day. A lot of them also will take naps in the afternoon because, you know, particularly the ones who are night owls. You're not getting a lot of sleep between, let's say, you know, 1 and 5am So a long nap in the afternoon is a way to make up for that. And these people also often have hobbies that they're fairly serious about. And, you know, whether this is. They're serious. You know, some of them are serious chess players. Plenty of them are musicians. But, you know, this is. But they recognize at some level that having that kind of hobby is important because it's both a break from work, from sort of the thing that they're working on, but also they recognize that the more creative you are across different domains, the more creative you'll be at work. Creativity. In this sense, creativity is like a muscle, and you don't save it just for work. The more you're able to use it, the more capacity. Capacity it has. But really, if you look, if they were doing time cards, you know, punching in and out, what. What you would see is the amount of time that they're spend doing what we would regard as work comes down to like really four or five hours a day, but doing it consistently, you know, sort of five or six days a week means that, you know, in contrast to these styles where, you know, you're working 20 hours a day for a year on a product and then you know, you're a zombie for six months or you know, you burn out completely, you're able to work, you know, you, you get, you get less done per day perhaps, but you're able to work more consistently. You produce as much or more over the course of a year. And if this is work that you really like, you're also setting yourself up so that able to do it for more of your life. Lots of the people I write about had their published, published their last works or had their last symphony in their 70s or their 80s. And we, you know, I think we make, we make a tragic mistake when we, when we accept the idea that if we have this thing that we really love to do, we should risk self destruction in order to, to do it. And I think that's, this is true. Whether you're talking about professional labor, whether you talk about parenting or something else, that, that, that giving, that giving everything immediately rather than playing a long game is, we are taught, there is some, we believe that there's some nobility to that, that sort of, or that, that that kind of self sacrifice is a good thing. But it means that you have less to give over the course of your life and you risk falling out of love with this thing that you used to be passionate about. So you know, play a long game or make the peaks higher and do this for decades rather than, or rather than years.
- [43:56]
A
I mean, what a fascinating thing, Alex, that like, if you were to study and this is what you've done, you've studied all these people throughout history and these are like the most recognizable creative figures in all of history, that they have this similar schedule, that it's not some willy nilly thing. And you think, okay, what an incredible life that would be. Like you wake up, you know, you get going on your stuff and you are, you're just like, it's quieter in the morning, you know, you get going, then you go on a walk, you take a nap, you relax and, and maybe then you do some hobbies in the afternoon and you paint, Churchill painted. You know that you have this, this, it's such a fulfilling life, you know, as opposed to this drudgery or even what we throw kids in. You know, kids are at school from 8 to 3. They're exhausted when they come home. And you, you know, you talk so much in the book about active rest and how, you know, it's like so many times we do these passive things and we feel worse. So, you know, to have the energy to be able to do the things that make us feel better. What's so wild is it's so different, I would imagine. And I know you also have a book called the Addiction. It was it called the Distraction Addiction. The Distraction Addiction, where like our world today really is just not that. Like we don't have the large 90 minute, two hours, you know, the four hours. We don't even have that because we're constantly on the phones. And then it's longer. It's just a whole day of distractions. And you talk about these people, Scott Adams included, who just passed away. It was really cool to read about him in your book. But you talk about how they're, they're methodical. Stephen King said writing is just another job, like laying pipe or driving long haul trucks. Toni Morrison, writing before the dawn began is a necessity. And then, you know, they talk about how this isn't about being inspired. You just get up, you do the work. You have the routine. Routine will enhance your creativity. You set it going. Someone said inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. It's a really enticing way to live.
- [46:03]
C
Yeah. You know, I think that quote about inspiration being for amateurs is one that I love and partly because it flips on its head an assumption that we have about work and passion, which is that you get this flash of insight, right, this lightning bolt of inspiration, and then you rush to the canvas or wherever and you know, you're typing away. You're working for 18 hours until you collapse in this sort of fit of exhaustion. But you've got the Mona Lisa or, you know, whatever or whatever. In reality, it's a cool picture. It feeds into this idea that the creative, that, you know, creativity is beyond our control. It's this, you know, it's this wild animal and that in order to express it, we have to, you know, essentially burn ourselves out, like pour ourselves into our work. It's a very romantic idea. The romantic poets, you know, the first generation of rock musicians, were into this. But it also turns out to be wrong. That the. And in fact, the way that creativity generally works is it's not that you get an inspiration and then you go and, you know, you work it out. You start working and it's there. Once you're at your. Once you start working that the inspiration hits. Stephen King talks about this all the time. That the muse doesn't show up unless you're already at work. You know, you start working on this thing, you get into the rhythm and then that's where the magic happens. And I think that is a really, really valuable lesson for creatives. But I think you. The fact that there are these regular patterns also means that you don't have to be someone who is, you know, who has servants or, or lives, you know, lives a very privileged life in order to put some of these, these lessons into practice. That there are, you know, there are things, there are things that all of us can do in our own lives that can bring in more rest even if we can't get all the way to, you know, a Charles Darwin's or a Charles Dickens or Toni Morrison once she was, you know, sort of famous and could write full time. And I think that the, that, you know, your mention of devices and distraction is one good example of this. That these are, you know, these are technologies that, whose default settings are basically turn the distraction up to 11, but there are things that we can do to sort of dial that back down and to claim back time, you know, time and sort of time in our brains. So literally turning off every notification on your phone is. It takes a little bit of effort to do that, but it, you know, but it's possible and it pays off. I also have something that practice that I call the zombie apocalypse test, which is think about during the zombie apocalypse, who do you need to call and who's going to call you and give those people a ringtone that you're never going to miss. So for me, this is immediate family and like one or two other people. Everybody else gets some. So they get for me the opening bars of Derek and the Dominoes. Layla, because that incredible Greg Allman riff, that is not Clapton, that's Allman. Who came up with that, by the way? I'm going to notice that no matter what, no matter where I am, and I know that this is someone who has the right to interrupt me, right? Just as if we were at a dinner party. If one of my kids came up and they had some urgent thing, I would stop talking to whoever and. Or give my attention to them. All right? Every. The whole rest of the world gets the opening bars of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's solo pieces for cello. And it's nice, it's quiet, and it's easy to ignore if I'm working on something else. So doing things, so taking back control of your devices so that you can rebuild time for attention is one thing. Another important one is preserving nights and weekends. And I think that when you look, for example, at doctors and nurses or, or, or first responders and look at the ones who burn out on the job and the ones who have long careers, one of the things that separates those groups is the ones who last are more have a greater ability to detach from work, to put it out, you know, or to forget about it. Right. Or if once they leave in part because they have other things that they like to do and they're stricter about, not these days, you know, checking work email or doing so very, very briefly, you know, to make sure that there are no emergencies, but not letting the work follow them home. Because the more you're able to rebuild those boundaries, the better a life you're going to be have and the better you're going to be at work. So. And then this leads to one final thing, which is that the more you're able to do this with other people, the better. Right. You talk about going for, you know, going for walks in the afternoon or the evening. One of the things that makes it more likely that you're going to do this, even if, you know, maybe you don't quite feel 100% like doing it, is you're doing it with a couple friends and making this social. Having that kind of commitment and reinforcement turns out to be a really good way to support that habit. Also, for things like, you know, not checking your email in the evening, that gets a lot easier. If it's a policy that your whole team has that, you know, know, if, you know, if I, you know. And so the more you can make this something that not just you do, but we do, the more likely you are to be able to stick with it, to support, to support other people and to get that support in turn. So, you know, these are, these are all problems that we all have, so we might as well solve them all together.
- [52:47]
A
Yeah. And you got fantastic books to help with all of these problems. The Distraction Addiction, Shorter and Rest. Fantastic books. I love that one of the. And I didn't put down who said it, but they said I, I walk myself into my best thoughts. So you gotta have time, you gotta have time for these things. It really does give you such a fantastic model, Alex of like that if I were to pick what kind of a life I want, want, I would love that life. You know, you do creative work from 7 to 11 in the morning or 6 to 10 or, or whatever it is, and then you go for a walk for an hour or two, you know, then you have lunch, then you take a nap, then you do the things that you love. You know, you stay up late and you read a book and you do the whole thing over again. And if you could have trust in that, this was such a big statement. It says you have to have trust, a strong sense that these long hours will pay off and that you're not just improving your career progr prospects, but you are also crafting a professional and personal identity. So these hours of non distraction, of setting your phone aside, of having the ringtone, that's only for the people that really need to get through. Can we do that? Can we consider how we're helping our kids craft their lives? You know, they're sitting at the school for eight hours a day, five days a week and coming home and having homework. They do not have a life at all like these creatives that you talk about. So these are important things to consider. Before I run out of time with you, I did want to ask about vacations.
- [54:15]
C
Sure, absolutely.
- [54:16]
A
Because we're trying to get our families outside and you talk about how there are real costs to not taking vacations and yet in America we do not put an emphasis on that. Yeah, in the United States.
- [54:26]
C
Yes. So when you look at sort of data that sort of, that scientists gather about lifespans, health, mental states, happiness, depression, et cetera, for like an entire town for 40 years, and there are sort of researchers who did this with framing in Massachusetts, for example, or there are other longitudinal studies that follow a cohort of people across decades to try to answer the question, what makes people happy? How do people. And how can people live in ways that sort of make them happier and make their lives more meaningful? One of the things that turns out to distinguish people who, you know, who are healthier, who have better careers, who have, who age more healthily, and now that I'm in my 60s, this is something I think about a lot, is that they take regular vacations and this and what, what. So not taking them turns out not only to have long term of long term costs, but even people who have more successful careers tend to take, to actually take their vacations. The idea that you're going to, you know, that you're going to accelerate your career by staying and grinding away all the time because you feel indispensable turns out for almost all of us to be sort of incorrect. Now it's also the case that we've learned some Things about that, you know, about how long vacations ought to be and how long the benefits of vacations last. So ideally, if you could design this yourself, and this is what like independently wealthy people do, is you would do a week of vacation every three months because the ha. Because you know, vacations definitely increase your happiness level, but that peaks around day eight or so. So being on vacation for three months doesn't mean that you're like, like 10 times happier than if you're away for a week. You're generally at about the same level and the benefits of vacations last between one or two months. So it takes that long for you to get back to the happiness level that you were at beforehand. And so if you were to take vacations mainly with an eye toward maximizing your happiness and recovery, it would be about a week every three months or so. Having set now, now another important thing is again this concept of detachment. So if you can get away without taking your work, you know, your work phone, never checking your email, setting things up with someone in the office so that it's really clear what that ordinary stuff is going to be covered by someone else and these specific things will or of our emergency enough to call you when you're in the Smoky Mountains or Hawaii or wherever that's going to make it easier for you to put work out of your head and really be present on vacation. The other important and the other benefit to doing these shorter, more frequent vacations is that you don't quite feel the pressure to rush and rush and over planet and do absolutely everything and then feel bad if you don't get it all done done that, you know, if it, if it rains for two days, you know, or if you stay inside, you play board games but you know you're going to be doing it again in a few months, so it's not a huge loss. Having said, you know, and then finally, if you've got kids, let them be, you know, they let them be responsible for their own happiness, right? The more you know, the, this is a great time for them to learn how to play on their own rather than you being responsible for their level of engagement and their happiness. So, you know, it'll be, it'll be better for them in the long run and absolutely better and better for you in the short run. So now having said all that, the only bad vacation is the one you don't take, right? So if your spouse, if your kids, if, you know, if, if everyone's schedule is such that you can only do two weeks a year, Take those two weeks. Absolutely. And you know, even within that, the more you're able to unplug from work, the more you're able to schedule in just leisure time as opposed to, you know, seeing one, you know, to seeing one more thing. And sort of the more you're able to let kids or your spouse be responsible for their own happiness rather than you taking that on, take on their behalf. The better off you're going to be be and the better off everyone else will be. So that's, that's, that's how to have a good vacation and sort of how to benefit from it.
- [59:27]
B
Yeah.
- [59:28]
A
And I do not think that this is how people are living. And like you said, I mean, you're, you're talking about people that are independently wealthy. But you know, some people, some do they get four weeks off of work or they get five weeks off of work or you can, you know, finagle things around with different holidays and things like that. And like, are you actually taking it? Are you actually taking the time? And you gave all these statistics about how in the United States we often are not taking the time, we're leaving the days on the table. And now this is really important.
- [59:54]
C
You.
- [59:55]
A
It's such a good reminder, and it may be knowledge for the first time for people that rest is an essential component of good work. The books are fantastic. Alex, what an honor. I'm so honored that we got this chance to talk together. I love this book. Rest while you get more done. When you work less, you got the picture, the flip flops on the front, the copy that I have, there's a newer version out, but then you also have shorter. Talking about the four day work week and also the distraction addiction. These are fantastic books for parents. We're a homeschooling family as well. So there's a lot in here about how you structure life and that's such an important thing to pass on. How do you construct a life? What do these historic people who did, who are very successful and creative, you know, they did not work themselves to the bone. They did their life like this. Can we try and craft our life? You know, the weekends or whatever situation that you're in, you take these lessons that you learn from your books and you can infiltrate them into your life. So many practical ideas. Alex. We always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood
- [60:55]
B
that was outside favorite from memory.
- [60:59]
C
Okay, so my dad was a Latin American historian and so we spent a fair amount of time in Brazil. My favorite memory outside is in Salvador, Bahia, on the beach, snorkeling, sort of. There was a. An old Dutch fort that had fallen into the ocean. And so it was 300 years later, this unbelievable coral reef. And I would spend hours just snorkeling around this thing, you know, watching the fish, the skates, the rays, the occasional shark and. Yeah, that's the most vivid thing from my childhood.
- [61:36]
A
What a thing. What, have you been back? Have you been back?
- [61:39]
C
I have not. No. It's been a long time since I've been back to Brazil. You know, I go snorkeling whenever I can, but, you know, not back there.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah, alas, isn't that a thing? How those things from our childhood. Because you talked a lot in this book also about deep play and how one of the four features of deep play is that there is often a living connection to the player's power past.
- [62:02]
C
Yeah.
- [62:02]
A
And that would be one for you is at snorkeling. Alex, these books are phenomenal and so needed in today's day and age. Thanks so much for being here.
- [62:10]
C
This has been a lot of fun and these were great questions. So thank you. Always, always nice to spend time with someone who's actually read the book, which is not always the case with some interviews. But so I appreciate, I. I appreciate all the time you put into it. Thank you, Jenny. It's been a real pleasure.
- [62:31]
D
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