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Speaker 1

00:00

The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone who's writing, like his book, Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media, and in his book, Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives.

Speaker 1

00:31

And very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches. To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.

Speaker 1

01:00

Quick mention of our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux virtual machines, Sun Basket meal delivery service, and SimpliSafe home security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years. Deep work is hard, but it's ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing.

Speaker 1

01:30

The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distractions of the world just fade away. Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation. Too much takes away the focused mind, and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both, the focus and the fun.

Speaker 1

01:56

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, if you can only figure out how to spell that. And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport. What is deep work? Let's start with the big question.

Speaker 2

02:18

So, I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name, necessarily, that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.

Speaker 3

02:45

What does it mean to work deeply on something?

Speaker 2

02:49

I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that. Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right? So I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians.

Speaker 2

03:03

And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turin Award, Turin Award, MacArthur, Turin Award. I mean, you know the crew, right? Theoretical computer science.

Speaker 2

03:13

Theoretical computer science, Yeah, yeah. So I'm in the theory group, right? Doing theoretical computer science and I publish a book. So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier 1 skill.

Speaker 2

03:27

Like that's what you would talk about, right? Like how intensely I can focus, That was the key skill. It's like your 440 time or something, if you were an athlete. Right.

Speaker 3

03:36

So, so this is something that people were actually the, the, the theory folks are thinking about.

Speaker 2

03:41

Oh yeah.

Speaker 3

03:42

Really? Like they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus?

Speaker 2

03:45

I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, quantify it, but focus was the tier 1 skill. So you would come in, here would be a typical day, you'd come in and Eric Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard, right, with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them. And maybe they projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem.

Speaker 2

04:06

You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back, they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard. Like that's the tier 1 skill.

Speaker 3

04:14

This is the difference between different disciplines. Like I often feel for many reasons like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists. It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work.

Speaker 3

04:29

Because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming or like machine learning, like the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering version of it, it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe. It feels like you're just cheating your way into some trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this 1 particular case. That's how it feels. I'd be interested to hear what you think about that because programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply, to work deeply.

Speaker 3

05:11

But sometimes it does. So it's a weird dance.

Speaker 2

05:14

For sure, code does. Especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs, I think it's a great example of deep work. I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme.

Speaker 2

05:26

I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with an Olympic athlete, like, oh, I see that's what it is. Now, for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty, the faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes. But coding, I think, is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve. I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly.

Speaker 2

05:56

But so basically, I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. You know, that was the term I used. Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012.

Speaker 2

06:09

So like right as I began as a professor. And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction, that it's not just following your passion. You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage. And there's this big follow-up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at this?

Speaker 2

06:26

And then I look back to my grad school experience. I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do. I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians, it's important here, it's important here, it's important here.

Speaker 2

06:48

And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector, focus is very important, and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.

Speaker 3

07:00

So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically, you say knowledge work, but basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world.

Speaker 2

07:09

Can we break that apart a little bit? Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think.

Speaker 2

07:26

So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different, really, even if it's brief, and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pileup that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay, and I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on But every 5 or 6 minutes, you quickly check like an inbox or your phone that initiates a context shift in your brain, right? We're going to start to suppress some neural networks. We're going to try to amplify some others.

Speaker 2

07:57

It's a pretty complicated process. Actually, there's a sort of neurological cascade that happens. You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing. And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing, even though it's also in your brains in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts.

Speaker 2

08:11

And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. And it's fatiguing too. I mean, you do this long enough, you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.

Speaker 3

08:23

Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say? So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so? So if you're thinking of like this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming, you know, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function or large scale on a system, And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that?

Speaker 3

09:08

And then you have to look it up. This is the danger zone. You go to the internets. And so you have to now, it is a kind of contact switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem, you now have switched thinking about consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem.

Speaker 3

09:31

It definitely feels like a contact switch. But is that a really bad thing to do? So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to, as much as possible, go deep and stay there for a really long period of time?

Speaker 2

09:45

Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar, right? You're thinking about this type of solution, you're thinking about coding, you're thinking about this type of functions, where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different.

Speaker 2

10:08

And if there's unresolved obligation, so really, the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox, right? Because here's 20 emails, I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different. Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this, is very different than the coding I'm doing.

Speaker 2

10:25

And I'm leaving it unresolved. So it's like, someone needs something from me and I'm gonna try to pull my attention back. The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing. So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter, I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right?

Speaker 2

10:37

That could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing. That's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there. And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again, It's really difficult.

Speaker 3

10:47

So it's both the information and the emotion.

Speaker 2

10:50

Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time. Because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before.

Speaker 2

11:02

If you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual peak lacks going on there. An hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus. I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk. We can get a lot done.

Speaker 2

11:16

But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of. Pull back a little bit. Yeah. And 1 of the beautiful,

Speaker 3

11:23

you know, people can read about in your book, deep work, but, and I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts, but it's still pretty profound and it has stayed with me for a long time. There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts. Like words matter, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 3

11:44

And Just for me, sort of as a comment, there's, it's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time. But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy. So forget being productive and all that. I'm just satisfied with my life.

Speaker 3

12:09

I feel fulfilled. It's like joyful. And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards. It's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 3

12:19

And I find the opposite when I don't do that kind of thing. I'm much more irritable. Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything and there's this stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life. So in that sense, deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness.

Speaker 3

12:39

I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate deep work into your life? What are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend, just at a high level? What are different ideas there?

Speaker 2

12:52

Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking. So if you're facing your workday, don't allow your inbox or to-do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think what do I want to do next?

Speaker 2

13:05

Yes. I mean, I'm a big plan is saying here's the time. Here's the time available. Let me make a plan for it.

Speaker 2

13:11

Right. So I have a meeting here of an appointment here. Here's what's left what I actually want to do with it. So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this.

Speaker 2

13:17

For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that. And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in and then actually have this half hour gap between 2 meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run 5 errands, I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available.

Speaker 2

13:32

I mean, I find that's much more effective. Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, to deep work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this. And you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying what's next.

Speaker 3

13:51

I schedule every single day kind of thing. So it's like try to in the morning to try to have a plan.

Speaker 2

13:56

Yeah, so I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done, you know, during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. Like I want to, these are, there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season.

Speaker 2

14:12

Here's what I'm working on. I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this. Like you have the, the big picture vision of what you want to get done, then weekly, you look at that. And then you look at your week, and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I gonna, what's my week gonna look like?

Speaker 2

14:27

What do I need to do? How am I gonna make progress on these things? Maybe, Maybe I need to do an hour every morning, or I see that Monday is my only really empty day, so that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day, you look at your weekly plan and see if you can block off the actual hours.

Speaker 2

14:42

So you do that 3 scales, the quarterly down to weekly down to daily.

Speaker 3

14:47

And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot, and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it, is scheduling the duration of time. This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings. I'm like, religiously don't do meetings.

Speaker 2

15:07

All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.

Speaker 3

15:09

Yeah, I know. No Zoom meetings. I find those are, That's 1 of the worst tragedies of the pandemic is both the opportunity to, well, okay, the positive thing is to have more time with your family, you know, sort of reconnect in many ways.

Speaker 3

15:27

And that's really interesting. Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things. The negative is, actually both those things are also sources of the negative. But the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule.

Speaker 3

15:46

And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting. Like, what are we doing here? What's the meaning of life? Every Zoom meeting is, I have an existential crisis.

Speaker 2

16:05

Kierkegaard with an internet connection.

Speaker 3

16:10

So what the hell were we talking about? Oh, so when you don't have meetings, there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to, like the important things, like deep work sessions to last way longer than you maybe planned for. I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule.

Speaker 3

16:33

The goal is to schedule, to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope I can keep going. And hope I can get lost in it. And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go? And the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world?

Speaker 3

16:54

Or is there some magic to the time blocking?

Speaker 2

16:57

Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right? So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially.

Speaker 3

17:09

There's

Speaker 2

17:09

academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff, there's the business surrounding my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well, you just rock and roll and let it let it go on.

Speaker 2

17:24

So like 1 of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it. So I even, you know, sell this planner to help people time block. It has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over 1 next time you get a chance to move over 1 column, and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining. So in other words, there's not, there's no bonus for I made a schedule and I stuck with it.

Speaker 2

17:46

Like there's actually, it's not like you get a prize for it, right? Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time. And if I have to change that plan, that's fine. Like the state I want to be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and, and gave it some thought for what to do, because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs and I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot.

Speaker 3

18:10

Yeah.

Speaker 2

18:11

So that's kind of my strategy is like just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot because I feel you if you're rolling. Yeah. Well, that's that's what it is for me.

Speaker 2

18:19

Like with writing. I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's you don't really get on a roll in some sense. Like it's just difficult but working on proofs. It's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction.

Speaker 2

18:33

Just you've been at it for a couple hours, then you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made. It's really hard to pull away from that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.

Speaker 3

18:45

Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume as opposed to stopping on a dead end.

Speaker 2

18:58

That's true.

Speaker 3

19:01

There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task.

Speaker 2

19:08

Yeah, or a cold start. I'm on a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently. So now we're sort of starting something up from cold.

Speaker 2

19:18

And it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it. Here's where we are. We feel like something's about to give. We're in the very early stages where it's just, I don't know.

Speaker 2

19:31

I'm going to read hard papers, and it's going to be hard to understand them. And I'm going to have no idea how to make progress. It's not motivating.

Speaker 3

19:38

What about deadlines? Can we, okay, so this is like a therapy session. Is Why, it seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines.

Speaker 3

19:50

And so 1 of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline, or there's an artificial or real sense of urgency. Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines? Why do deadlines work so well?

Speaker 2

20:06

Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this, is that you don't have the debate with yourself every 3 minutes about, should I take a break now? Right, like this is the big issue with just saying, you know, I'm going to go write.

Speaker 2

20:26

I'm going to write for a while and that's it, because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks, right? We're not just going to write forever. And so why not right now? You have to be like, well, not right now.

Speaker 2

20:35

Let's go a little bit longer, 5 minutes. Why don't we take a break now? Like we should probably look at the internet. Now you have to constantly have this battle.

Speaker 2

20:40

On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule, like I've got these 2 hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. I have a break scheduled over here, I don't have to fight with myself, right? And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect.

Speaker 2

20:53

I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due.

Speaker 3

20:57

Perhaps, but we had described as much healthier sort of giving yourself over, and you talk about this in your email book, is the process. I mean, in general, you talk about it all over, is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process. But then you have to be strict with yourself.

Speaker 2

21:17

Yeah, but what are the deadlines you're talking about? So like with papers, like what's the main type of deadline work?

Speaker 3

21:24

Well, so papers definitely, but publications like say this podcast, I have to publish this podcast early next week, 1, because your book is coming out. I'd love to support this amazing book. But the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins.

Speaker 3

21:48

And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life. Like I don't wanna be in a hotel in Vegas, like editing, like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling

Speaker 2

22:00

at me. An hour

Speaker 1

22:01

43

Speaker 2

22:03

of your Terrathon thing that you're doing.

Speaker 3

22:05

But actually it's possible that I still will be doing that, because that's not a hard, that's a softer deadline, right? But those are sort of, life imposes these kinds of deadlines. I'm not, so yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline.

Speaker 3

22:20

But I am almost referring to like the pressure that people put on you. Hey man, you said you're going to get this done 2 months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done?

Speaker 2

22:29

I don't see, I don't like that pressure. Yeah. So maybe now, first of all, I think we can, I

Speaker 3

22:33

hate it

Speaker 2

22:33

too? We can agree by the way, having David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique. I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling. But see, I don't like that.

Speaker 2

22:45

So I, I will try to get things done early. I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today, right? It's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as the night before because then I get in my head about, well, what if I get sick?

Speaker 2

22:59

Or what if I get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly, so I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked about this, If you go back and read the ethics, he's trying to understand the meaning of life.

Speaker 2

23:20

And he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply. It's kind of a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do, and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said, ultimately, that's where that's where he found his meaning.

Speaker 2

23:34

But, you know, he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct. And so what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it. I try to get that cognitive habit.

Speaker 2

23:51

So it's like I gotta, I mean look, I have my bag here somewhere, I have my notebook in it because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof and it just, so you train yourself, you train yourself to appreciate certain things and then over time the hope is that it accretes.

Speaker 3

24:08

Well, let's talk about some demons because I wonder, so there's like deep work which, and the World Without Email books that to me symbolize the life I want to live, okay? And then there is, I'm like, despite appearances an adult at this point, and this is the life I actually live. And I'm in constant chaos.

Speaker 3

24:36

You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate it too, but it seems like I'm always in it. It's a giant mess. It's almost like whenever I establish, whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.

Speaker 3

24:52

And like, I don't want to, but you have to look in the mirror at a certain point and you have to say like, who the hell am I? Like I keep doing this. Is this something that's fundamental to who I am or do I really need to fix this?

Speaker 2

25:06

What's the chaos right now? Like I've seen your video about like your routine. It seemed very structured and deep.

Speaker 2

25:12

In fact, I was really envious of it. So like what's the chaos now that's not in that video?

Speaker 3

25:16

Many of those sessions go way longer. I don't get enough sleep. And then the main introduction of chaos is, it's taking on too many things on the to-do list.

Speaker 2

25:26

I see.

Speaker 3

25:28

I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with, which is not saying no. But it's not like I have trouble saying no. It's that there's so much cool shit in my life.

Speaker 3

25:39

Okay, listen, there's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics

Speaker 2

25:44

robots. Spot.

Speaker 3

25:46

And they're giving me spot. So there's a to-do, what am I gonna say, no? Yeah.

Speaker 3

25:51

So they're giving me spot, and I wanna do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it. Okay, so that's now a to-do item.

Speaker 2

25:57

And then you go to Texas for a while. And there's Texas. And everything's happening, all the interesting people down there.

Speaker 3

26:02

And then there's surprises, right? There are power outages in Texas, there's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things, and you sleep less. And then there's personal stuff, like just people in your life, sources of stress, all those kinds of things.

Speaker 3

26:16

But it does feel like if I'm just being introspective that I bring it onto myself. I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing is they flourish under pressure. And I wonder if that's just a hack I've developed as a habit early on in life that you need to let go of, you need to fix.

Speaker 2

26:41

But it's all interesting things. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, because these are all interesting things.

Speaker 3

26:47

Well, 1 of the things you talked about in deep work, which is really important, is having an end to the day, putting it down. Yeah. I don't think I've ever done that in my life.

Speaker 2

26:59

Yeah, well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. So, you know, I didn't have a real job. I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job.

Speaker 2

27:07

And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work. Because, you know, hey, when work's over, she'll be home. And I don't want to, I don't want to be, you know, on campus or whatever. And so real early on, I just got in that habit of, this is when you end work.

Speaker 2

27:22

And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job, right? I put artificial, I was like, I wanna train. I was like, when I'm a professor, it's gonna be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial, large, time-consuming things into the middle of my day.

Speaker 2

27:38

I'd basically exercise for 2 hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this, while still maintaining the 9 to 5. So it's like, okay, I wanna get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay, I didn't wanna get flabby when my job was easy. So that when I became a professor, and now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids. So now I don't really have a choice.

Speaker 2

28:01

That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is I just don't have time to do them. And then after a while, people stop bothering.

Speaker 3

28:11

But that's how you have a successful life. Otherwise, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.

Speaker 3

28:17

Like to where nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity. Like you're driving, you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you. So if you live in chaos, you're going to attract chaotic people, and then it becomes like this self-fulfilling prophecy. And it feels like, I'm not bothered by it, but I guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying, which is like, I think 1 of the big hacks for productive people that I've met is to get married and have kids.

Speaker 3

28:56

Honestly, it's very, perhaps counterintuitive, but it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer.

Speaker 2

29:05

Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables, though it has a huge, kids have a huge productivity hit, though, so you gotta weigh it. But okay, here's the complicated thing, though. Like, you can think about, in your own life, starting the podcast is 1 of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right?

Speaker 2

29:21

Like I could have been talking to you at MIT 4 years ago

Speaker 3

29:24

and be

Speaker 2

29:24

like, don't do that. Like your research is going well, right? But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is, the direction that's taking you is like a couple of years from now.

Speaker 2

29:33

It's going to, there'll be something really monumental that you're probably going to probably lead to, right? There'll be some really, it just feels like your life is going somewhere.

Speaker 3

29:41

It's going somewhere. It's interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 3

29:43

Unexpected. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2

29:44

So how do you balance those 2 things? And so what I try to throw at it is this this motto of do less, do better, know why, right? So do less, do better, know why.

Speaker 2

29:55

It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right? So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know. So a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting, like I have a couple bets placed on a couple different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things.

Speaker 2

30:13

And then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes. Like with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training, I was like, I want to be a better writer, I want to be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student. I really wanted to write hardcover idea books.

Speaker 2

30:25

I started training. I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself. I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills and and it took forever until you know But now today like I actually get a right for the New Yorker, but it took like a decade So a small number of things try doing really well and then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value Like in general, I think this is worth doing and then seeing where it leads.

Speaker 3

30:50

And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what, like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing, like a sense that you say you wanted to write, get good at writing. You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking, this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.

Speaker 2

31:10

Yeah, I mean it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for. I wrote that back in 2012. But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right?

Speaker 2

31:23

So what I was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start, and then that's what propels you. Where actually the reality is as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill, and more impact, the passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do, and that's a worthy goal. But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify, like, for sure you should be a writer or something like this.

Speaker 3

31:53

So I was actually quoting you. I was on a social network last night in Clubhouse. I don't know if you've heard of it.

Speaker 2

32:01

I was- Wait, I have to ask you about this because I'm invited to do a clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book.

Speaker 3

32:11

That's awesome. Well, let me know when, because I'll show up. But what is it?

Speaker 3

32:15

Okay, so first of all, let me just mention that I was in a Clubhouse room last night and I kept plugging exactly what you said about passion. So we'll talk about it. It was a room that was focused on burnout. But First, Clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of, your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place because we talk about email, we talk about social networks, but Clubhouse is something very different and I've encountered in other places, Discord and so on, that's voice only communication.

Speaker 2

32:52

So

Speaker 3

32:52

it's a bunch of people in a room, they're just eyes closed, all you hear is their voices.

Speaker 2

32:57

The real time.

Speaker 3

32:58

Real time, live, it only happens live. You're technically not allowed to record, but some people still do, and especially when it's big conversations. But the whole point is it's there live.

Speaker 3

33:09

And there's different structures. Like on Discord, it was so fascinating. I have this Discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right, we're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics. And so you're sitting there, so it's just voices, and you're able with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other.

Speaker 3

33:33

First of all, like as a dynamic system, like.

Speaker 2

33:37

You see icons, just like mics muted or not muted basically.

Speaker 3

33:40

Yeah, well, so everyone's muted and they unmute and they start, it starts flashing.

Speaker 2

33:44

Yeah. And Oh, so you're like, okay, let me get precedence.

Speaker 3

33:47

Yeah.

Speaker 2

33:47

So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation, like at a faculty meeting, and you sort of like kind of make some noises like

Speaker 3

33:54

while

Speaker 2

33:55

the other person's finishing. And so people realize like, okay, this person wants to talk next, but now it's purely digital. You see a flashing.

Speaker 3

34:01

But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting, like even as we're talking now, there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption. When it's just darkness, you actually listen better and you don't interrupt. So like if you create a culture, there's always gonna be assholes.

Speaker 3

34:20

But they're actually exceptions. Everybody adjusts, they kind of evolve to the beat of the room. Okay, that's 1 fascinating aspect. It's like, okay, that's weird.

Speaker 3

34:32

Because it's different than like a Zoom call where there's video. It's just audio. You think video adds, but it actually seems like it subtracts. The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy.

Speaker 3

34:50

It's weird, because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way. It's similar to podcasts, but-

Speaker 2

35:00

with a lot of people.