Audio file

3- Deep Questions with Cal Newport.mp3

Transcript
I'm Cal Newport and this is deep questions. The show where I answer queries from my readers about
work, technology and the deep life. Today we have a good show. When I was actually going through the
recent batch of questions to pull out the ones I wanted to answer today, I was struck by the fact. That a
lot of them, I would say, by far the majority were really questions about the deep life. Now I guess this is
not surprising. I think the last few months have been a period where a lot of us are thinking about bigger
picture questions. But I did find that interesting. So it actually took me some work to pull out enough
questions in all three categories to keep them balanced. But I thought you would appreciate getting
some insight into what I'm seeing. So among other topics today. Do a. But among other topics, today
we're going to get into the origin of my productivity obsession. How a digital minimalist millennial can
form deep relationships when everyone else around here is constantly distracted by their devices and
also how do we make the life lessons learned during the coronavirus pandemic something more? So I
think these are all exciting topics. I look forward to diving into them now. Remember these questions
are solicited from my mailing list. So if you want to ask your own question, you need to make sure that
you are signed up for my mailing list. You can do so at calduport.com. All right, let's get. Started it's time
for work questions. M asks. How does one determine how long a deep work session should be? I get this
one a lot and my advice would be not to get too caught up in rules here. Different types of work are
going to be conducive for different duration sessions, so some deep work is incredibly draining. If you're
trying to learn, for example, a very complicated skills, you're doing deliberate practice, and in particular.
If you're not used to really straining yourself to learn something hard, you might not be able to go more.
Than 30 minutes without having to take a break. On the other hand, if you're brainstorming. Your
brainstorming and it's a topic that's really interesting to you. You might easily be able to say wander for
hours thinking about it, so don't get caught up in rules. Let your own attention be a guide when you're
working on something, do it without distraction. Remember any context or network switching means a
session is no longer deep work session, so you want to do it without. But once you make those
commitments, let your own concentration be your guide when you feel it waiver in a way that you
cannot control, it's time to take a break or move on to something else. Speaking of something else, the
next question is from. He asks. When did you realize that productivity was important to you and how
challenging was the initial efforts to be more productive? That's a good question. I can give you an exact
answer college. So if we go back to, let's say 19 year old at Cal Newport, we see something quite
different. I come out of high school. A public school in New Jersey is basically one of these kids. That
was. Just pretty smart, you know, I got good grades. I did very well on the Sats the first time I took it, I
ran a business which was interesting, and I played a lot of guitar in a band. I mean, I was sort of like a
smart, relatively interesting kid, so I got into a good college, but I was a lazy student in high school. I did
not like the discomfort. Of studying, I actually won an award that used to give out awards to students.
This was actually during middle school, but they would give out the the teachers. Joke awards to the
students at the end of the year and I won the homework in Homeroom award, which I think tells you
something about where my productivity mindset was. So that was me trying to catch up here to the 19
year old me, I told you where the inflection points going to happen. I go to Dartmouth College, I show
up, I put my. Got lazy procrastinators by. Approaches to work on college level Ivy League level school
work. And it doesn't go as well. Turns out that's harder. It turns out that the kids from the prep schools,
which seemed to be about half the kids who were there, had never really been around prep school kids.
But a lot of these kids came from prep schools. They knew how to do that. They knew how to, how to
pull all nighters and study at the last minute and get it done. But I. Had no real experience with school
work at this level, and so, you know I. I struggled, not terribly, but just had sort of average freshman
year grades A's and B's. I think for the most part, one or two courses I had to switch over to the non
recording option which is basically you get a limited number of pass fails. You can you can throw on at
the last minute when a course is not going that well, so. This is going on and at some point I have this
revelation. I should probably take this more seriously, and I think probably the main motivation for that
inspiration was seeing some of my first student loan payments and this was back in the early 2000s
where they would allow you to take on staggering amounts of student loan debt. I guess they still do,
but back then they didn't even really. It seemed like by the end of my college career they were a little bit
more wary about. Are you sure that you want to take on this much debt, but back then it was free
money during that initial.com boom as the way they advertised it? So I think seeing those initial
statements got me concerned. Wow, I should probably take this a little bit more seriously. So what I did
is I launched an experiment of self improvement. I said I'm going to figure out how to study because I
want to get better grades. This thing that the prep school kids are doing where they just stay up all
night. I'm not good at that. So I got to figure this out. So for a whole semester this would be the fall
quarter of my sophomore year. I began to systematically experiment with different techniques for taking
notes, studying for exams, working on problem sets and writing papers. Some of these techniques
worked well, some of them didn't it some of them were overkill. As a computer science major who was
also an art history minor. I thought that there could be a great consilience there and so I coded up a
custom flash card program to help me memorize the dates of the artwork. Turns out complete waste of
time. You already have them written down. You might as well just flip through the cards. There's no
reason to put that information into a computer, but you know I experimented. Somethings worked,
some things didn't. The results of these experimentation, so my grades got drastically better. And I mean
really better. I got a four. Oh, in every. Quarter starting my sophomore fall until my senior spring in
which I got all A's except 1A minus that that semester. That was my first non A grade. After my freshman
year was in my senior spring, obviously I did not become a lot smarter between my freshman and
sophomore year. It was to more systematic study habits to make a big difference, so I was sold and said
this is crazy. I'm doing significantly better at this cognitive task while spending a lot less time. Than most
of my peers, I never did an all nighter in college. And it said and it's because of my techniques. The
productivity techniques made all the difference, so I became a bit of a zealot for the power of these
techniques and I thought, you know, I should write about this and I I signed my first book deal when. I
was. 20 and therefore student books. And I think the the rest I guess is history from there. So that is how
I got obsessed with productivity on it. It was. My student loan statements. Caroline asks, how do you
make deep and meaningful progress on a work project that seems to be going nowhere, but you were
expected to get done, especially during quarantine. Well, Caroline, I get where you're coming from. I
have many projects I've had to push through during quarantine, many of them administrative in nature
and not exactly what I would describe as a passionate person. I'll give you a hint. One of these projects
rhymes with Ruget and starts with a B. Yes, I had to build out the the budget for our graduate program
for next year, which was a exceedingly tedious task. That ended up me spending hours moving things in
Excel spreadsheet. So I'm just saying I'm. I'm empathetic. Couple pieces of advice I want to give. To the
extent possible. If you can realign the project. Even if it's just a nudge towards something that actually
seems more efficacious. That makes a difference. I used to talk about this when I did student advice and
would give toxicologists this technique or I should say phenomenon, not technique called productive
procrastination. Because I had this theory that when students procrastinate on schoolwork, it's often
because they don't really have a good plan. For how they're going to study, they just vaguely think that
they're going to go to the library and get after it and our brain. Has evolved to be very good at
evaluating plants. Humans can can come up with plants and execute them. That's part of our our
species. Real power and advantage. So how does that actually work from a neurological perspective, it
means our brain needs to be able to generate plans, but also assess them. If a plan seems. Food like why
don't we throw a spear at the mammoth from far away, you'll feel motivated to do it if the plan feels like
it's not so good, such as maybe I'll just charge the mammoth and take it out with my fist. Your brain will
say let's not put motivation behind that particular plan, which you will experience as what we would call
today procrastination. So I used to tell students. If you're really procrastinating, it might be in part
because your brain doesn't trust your plan, so have a better plan if it. If it doesn't trust it, what you're
going to do is going to get you a good grade or it's going to take way too long that it's it's not going to
motivate you. But I always noticed that students that had. Really structured approaches to their
studying. Had a lot less trouble with procrastination, so you can kind of tell. Right. Now I'm I'm stuck on
the student world after that recent question, but I think this phenomenon is real productive
procrastination. So if a project feels like it's not going to go anywhere, or if a project's important but you
don't really know how you're going to accomplish it, it's very hard to get motivation to do it. It's very
hard. To do make work. There's any number of sort of bureaucrats in certain situations, have learned in
their experience, make work is very demotivating. So if you can realign or nudge this project towards
something that you actually believe is useful and something you know how to do, you know you can
accomplish that goal. You might find that the the instinct of not wanting to do it, the drudgery, the
procrastination. Will reduce another piece of advice. Don't be afraid. Of actually trying to take that
project off your plate, I think a lot of people don't do nearly enough of this in the knowledge work
context. Go into your team, go into your manager. I don't think this is worth our investment. Here's why.
Let's not do this now to make that particular trick works, you almost always have to then have the coda,
which is, and now let's do this thing instead. I think this project's going to get us more than what we're
doing over here over here. We're spinning our wheels. We don't really have this information. We're not
quite sure we're doing this alternative. I think that might be the smarter project, because again, if it's
something that you believe is useful and you know how to. Do it this notion of procrastination or
drudgery is going to significantly reduce, so if you can do that, that's great. If you can't, you're stuck with
this thing like me with my budget has to get done. You don't want to do it. You're not very good at doing
it, but it has to get done. Then it's time to actually put your grinding hat on. And what? Does that mean?
Organize your efforts. Make sure you have a plan. Make sure your brain trust that you know what you're
doing. If you don't understand some steps go out there and get that information. So so take away that
that particular rationale for procrastination. You don't know what you're doing and then day by day,
piece by piece, you do the grinding an hour to day 2 hours. Next day, an hour to day and over time at
least. Find some pride in the fact that progress is accumulating. Sometimes there's just parts of your life
in which grinding happens. And so you're just going to. Have to get after that. The next question is from
E. And let's see what he asked. The company I work for does not value deep work at all. We had an open
door policy before COVID and now we're expected to be 100% available by instant Messenger during
the work day. Well, I think first of all, send them a copy of my most recent New Yorker article, which not
only gets into the origins of remote work, but gets into what makes remote work hard and talks about
what we need to do to make remote work actually work. Again, I'll give you the spoiler. Here, structuring
your efforts in the office, having more clarity, having more processes is essential. If you're going to be
able to effectively work in a distributed environment, so send them that article, send them a copy of
deep work. If that doesn't work, immediately quit. No, I'm joking. Don't do that. I think you should.
Because if you don't, if you don't listen to me, then what type of company is this? But let's say, OK,
you're not going to immediately quit. Your best bet might then be to try the deep. The shallow work
ratio tip. From deep work quick reminder you go to whoever supervises you. You say this is what deep
work is. This is what shallow work is. Both of these things are important for our success, given my
particular role, what ratio of deep to shallow work hours each week do you think is optimal? What ratio
do you think would produce the most value for the company? Different positions will have different
answers to that question. Once they actually agree to a ratio, you say great. Let me go measure and you
can come back and say wow, I'm way short of that ratio because let's say the messenger culture, I have
really no time when I can never be more than like 5 or 10 minutes away from Messenger. Like what
should we do about this? How do we hit the mark? We think is going to create the most value for the
company. You would be surprised by the amount of workplace reforms that this exercise can generate.
Even in organizations where you would swear that they will never give an inch. On workplace culture,
the deep to shallow work ratio actually can unlock a lot of those ossified work habits, and the key to the
work to shallow work ratio approach. That's positive. How do we maximize the value I produce? Is a
question that a manager can get behind. When you instead say hey, manager, let me tell you the things I
don't like that you're doing. You bother me too much on e-mail. You schedule too many meetings.
You're not running this company. Well, what are you going to do about it? That doesn't go very far. You
come in and say, hey, I'm trying to be more. Now they're on your side. Big changes can happen, so if
they don't listen to my article, they don't listen to my book. If you if you're not willing to quit for some
reason, then try the deep. The shallow work ratio. Right. Final work question. Paul asks how do I choose
a valuable skill to pursue so I can accumulate career capital? Paul, this is the question. I mean, this is the
big question about actually trying to advance in your career to build a career in which you have
autonomy, where you have a sense of mastery, where you can then use these skills as leverage to push
your career towards things that resonate and away from things. They don't, as you know, because you
used the term career capital. This is the thesis of my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore you building
up skills that are rare and valuable is the key to almost everything good and satisfying and meaningful in
a. So you're asking the right question. The answer, it's really, really hard. Be willing to work really hard at
it. Finding the right skill to put effort into in a lot of knowledge work context is way more difficult than it
should be, but it is. So, you know I've mentioned this before, but Scott Young and I have this course top
performer, which is all about that how to identify skills that are valuable and apply deliberate practice to
get really good at them really fast. And we ended up after we learned this from the pilot. Spending a lot
of time in the course talking about exactly that question. How do you actually identify the skill? That's
valuable because it is so non trivial. One piece of advice I'll give you from that. From that research we
did. Take people in your field. Whose current? Set up professionally resonates with you so that the goal
they represent sort of what I want in my career. Then figure out how did they do it, particular what were
the, what were the key things they did that allowed them to advance to this position where they are. If
it's someone that's in your own company and you can take them out for coffee, do that. If they ever
allow us to do. That again, we'd love to do that. I can't keep up. Maybe coffee, but 6.5 feet. But if it's tea,
then maybe it should be 7 feet. And if the sun's out, maybe four, I don't know. I can't keep up with it,
but whenever we're allowed to get coffee again, take them out for coffee. If you know them and talk to
them about their career. A little caveat, don't ask people for advice. I've learned this as a professional
advice writer. Most people are very bad at giving advice. It's really difficult to actually distill your
experience on the fly into the actual, correct, actionable steps. Just talk to them about what they
actually did, what was their career trajectory, how did they get from A to B, how they get from B to C
and then like a journalist. Pull out of their experience. What you think the key? The key things were that
helped them advance to where they are today. The place that resonates. From there you should be able
to extract the skills that were valuable. Now you know. To work on, there's other ways to do this too,
but I think. There's journalist method start from the example. Figure out how they got there. Extract the
skills from the story, then focus on those skills like 80% of the cases that works really well. I don't know
where I got 80%, by the way, is that that that is a. Non scientific number I just said that. All right. Well,
enough of that. Let's move on to technology questions. Don asks what programs or applications do you
use to take notes or capture information. Well, a lot, Don, I'm. I'm a notebook guy, both physically and
digitally. They're some of my favorite possessions, so I'll just run down the list. I use Evernote. Evernote
is where I organize ideas for the most part, book ideas, blog post, ideas, ideas about my my writing
business, ideas about academic papers or academic research. Topics I might want to pursue. I have so
much information I get. It goes into Evernote. I use Google Drive to create documents, so if I'm capturing
a particular let's say plan like here's my summer research plan. The the papers I want to write how I
want to break that down, how I want to organize those efforts, I'll use Google Drive share documents. I
have a mole skin. I've always used moleskins. Used since 2004, usually for capturing big ideas about
living a deeper life. So I always have a moleskin with me to capture those ideas. I review that about once
a month. I also use a particular type of spiral bound grid note. The book. When I'm working on research,
I think for sure, so solving theoretical computer science problems or sometimes. When I'm I'm. Not
writing down an idea, an idea about how to live a deeper life ago in my moleskin, but let's say I'm trying
to map out a new business strategy. Or workout a plan for one of those ideas. I'll use these grid
notebooks as well. The ones I like. It's called Maruman MARUMA in they're from Japan. You can order
them on Amazon. Beautiful paper. Really good paper. A little bit creamy, not too creamy. Takes to ink
very well, especially if you're using, let's say, like I like a uniball micro with a 0.5 millimeter roller tip. It's
a really fine tip. The grids are not too dark, but you can see them. I love those notebooks. They're
beautiful. I buy them in stacks of five to 10 and I have them. All right. So that's where I am with
notebooks. McKenzie Ann has the next question. How do unplugged and unaddicted millennials? Form
deep relationships when those around them, including previous generations, are still plugged in and
addicted. So if you're a digital minimalist, how do you meet people when no one else around you is
Mackenzie, and that's a good question. My biggest piece of advice is join things to do things in the real
world. Join things that require you to actually go to physical places and do physical things with other
people. Get out of the digital world, get into the physical world. Skilled endeavors tend to, for whatever
reason, foster deeper relationships. Whether this be friendship or romantic, so develop skills. These
could be professional skills if you're a writer, you could have a writers group. If you're a beer Brewer,
you can meet with other beer Brewers. It could be hobbies or athletic skills. Biking, having a biking
group, you you row, you get to have the rowing group. Your skilled endeavors tend to have a I think a
more of a coherence, and if it's a sort of anyone can join type of endeavor. That's how I think people
used to meet people. That's how I think people can continue to meet people, do things in the real world
when possible with skills. All right, Misley asks how to how can I study for my phone when I can't afford
a laptop or PC? I'm assuming this might have something to do with the massively increased dependence
temporarily on distance or online learning. Well, my advice is to get the information off of your phone
and onto physical paper. And then study off the paper. This is how we used to do it. When I went to
college, I didn't have a laptop. I had a kind of cumbersome desktop TV or not TV computer on my desk in
my dorm room. But that was about it, so I spent a lot of time with books I couldn't keep all those books
with me, so notebooks for everything. You would copy information into notebooks. In your own writing,
copy it on the note cards it. Was something you're. Trying to memorize and then the advantage is. These
notebooks are really portable. And so you can bring them. With you anywhere so you can study
anywhere, go anywhere you can find some peace or quiet and you have the information with you. You
get a double whammy here, a just recording things in your own words that that transference of
information from the passive consumption to active recreation. That alone is going to help you build a
framework for understanding. And then you have it in a form that is easy to study. Doesn't require
batteries. You don't have to share it with anyone else. You can take it anywhere that you can find
silence. So mostly that would be my advice. Alex asks. How can I make my blog or writing stand out and
become popular? Well, Alex, I get asked that question a lot. As a professional writer, I have two quick
pieces of advice. One, you have to become a non amateur writer. You don't need to be Anne Lamont. To
have an audience. But if your writing comes across as amateur. People sense that and it's actually much
harder to form a following or people who are going to stick at you. So how do you become a non
amateur writer? In my experience it's not enough to just do a lot of writing. The thing more than
anything else that accelerates writing skill is writing for editing. So doing writing where someone on the
other end is going to edit it. Perhaps it's a case where if they don't like it, they're going to reject it. This is
how I got started in writing. I worked my way up to become a columnist at the student newspaper. I
worked my way up at the Dartmouth humor. Magazine shout out. To the Jackal Lantern from a
contributing writer to an editor. By the time I got, I was editor in chief. By the time I got to my junior
year. When I was trying to sharpen my advice writing, I began to pitch online magazines. At first it had
very low bars, but there was a. You had to have an idea good enough and written good enough that they
would publish it. And then I worked my way up when I was in Graduate School, there was a a much
better online magazine called Flack Magazine, sort of like a hipster, a Gen. X type magazine that that no
longer exist, but they had higher editorial standards. These guys knew what they were doing and so that
became my training ground when I was trying to then advance. From an advice writer to a general idea,
book writer Flak magazine became my training ground because it was hard to get your pieces, etc. You
know, they were pretty demanding editors and so I would try out new techniques. I would try out new
writing styles and formats and that really pushed me right. So to become non amateur writer, find a way
to write for other people what's going to be edited or maybe rejected. That will make you better fast.
Two, I think in the blogging world. It helps to have a point of view that some people are going to find
quite engaging or aspirational and preferably a point of view that's not for everybody. That tends to
attract an audience because the people for whom your point of view resonates not only they want to
hear about it, because they find it aspirational, but they're going to they're going to enjoy you being an
avatar. Of their own interest and helping to defend this thing that they like. Against other ideas. So we
see this in the rise, for example, of the minimalism blogging community. This happened starting around
like 2008 into the early 2000s, tens. They had this particular lifestyle, they were preaching and it was not
for everybody, but it's quite aspirational. You see this more recently in the fire, financial independence,
retire. Early community, they have a pretty ambitious, aspirational approach to life and they defend it
unapologetically. It grows a crowd, so that'd be my advice. Don't worry about pleasing everybody. Don't
worry about caveats and everything, so no one will be upset. Have a point of view you believe in. That's
aspirational. Is gonna make people feel better about themselves in their lives. It's not for everybody. Be
their avatar, you know, have something to say that that will be your best bet for actually gathering a
tribe that's going to care about it. Care about what you have to say and be. A really good source of
support. All right, it's time for questions about the deep life. Ken asks. What habits can I implement daily
to become the type of person who cares? Less about what others think about me. Ken, I was doing well
on my anti rant streak. I think I've. Been pretty calm and collected, but you may have accidentally
pushed me into rant territory because my advice to you is very simple. Get the hell off social media. I'm
telling you. It is warping the brains of 1,000,000. Now here's my source that I think read this. I mean you
should read this. Everyone should read this Neil Postman's book, amusing ourselves to death. It's a very
important, subtle work of philosophy of technology. Postman was a he studied under Mcluhan. Clue and
of course, innovative. The medium is the message idea, which is a deep idea that requires a lot of
unpacking. But Postman makes it more accessible and basically postman's point is the dominant forms
of media to which you are exposed. Can actually change the way. That you process the world, it can
change the way you think. It can change the way that your brain actually operates. And I think what
social media has done in recent years has really warped the way people understand the world. I I think
the power of these positive approval indicators likes and not likes you say the right thing and you get
love. You say the wrong thing and you get attacked. It hits these dopamine buttons that that really
makes you hyper aware. What did everyone say about me? Oh, I really don't want to say the wrong
thing, because who knows what's going to come down on me? It really changes the way you perceive
the world and your fear of judgment. There's a lot of other negative effects that social media has on the
way your brain functions. The list is very long. I don't want to get into all of it right now, but can your
problem that you report about caring too much about what other? People think of you. That is one of
the real issues. If you marinate your brain in the world of social media too long, it literally changes the
way that you perceive the world. So that habit will get you there. OK, so you. Might say, but Cal. There
are reasons why I need social media. I've heard all the reasons they fall into two big categories. All right.
Hey, there's certain information. I can only get on social media, so I try not to try not to date these
podcasts too much with current events. But you know when I'm recording this podcast is right into the
third week of protest marches surrounding George Floyd and Social Media has been, among other
things, a source of information. About when, let's say a particular protest March is going to.

OK.

Right. So that's a reason. Another reason and support for social media is inspiration, and I think this is
legitimate. I used to. Undervalue this. I think I should value it more. You know, for some people who are
who are going through a particular transformation, that's difficult finding other people who are doing
the same thing or have succeeded in it can be a very important source of inspiration. If let's say you're a
guy trying to get your act together and you want to be in better. Shape for your family. Going to Jocko
Willink's Twitter link, what's he do on that? On that Twitter feed every day he takes a picture of his
watch. At 4:30. AM which is when he gets up to exercise. I think for a lot of people that can actually be
the nudge they need to to to get up and do their own work. So I get inspirational purposes as well. But
here's the thing. You can get informational advantages of social media. You can get the inspirational
advantage of social media without having to marinate your brain. In the cogitation warping aspects of
social media, how do you do? It set up a dummy account. Set up an account for these platforms that you
do not ever post things on. No one knows it's you. There's no performance. Made-up dummy account.
You can use that account now to follow sources of information about things that you care about. You
can use it to follow sources of inspiration and then treat that thing like you would treat a TV show you. I
go on, you know, it's on three times a week. During this time, you know, 30 minutes at 8:00 o'clock. And
during those appointments you go on with this account where you are not visible to the world. No one's
looking at you. No one's judging you. No one's giving you likes. No one's giving you thumbs down. No
one's rationing you. I don't know what ratio means. But I've heard it. It's a Twitter thing. I don't get it,
but it seems to be something that I guess matters. So no one's doing whatever this ratio. No one's
throwing ratios towards your avatar. Do I have that right ratios towards your avatar now that works. But
you can still get information. You can still get the. You can still get the inspiration, but you can avoid the
brain warping that comes when you are on social media all the time. Engaging with it all the time. You
show me a single person during, let's say the three months of lockdown, who came, came away from
that saying, you know, what made me feel better about myself in that period. What really got me
through that period. Yelling at people on Twitter. You know that that's what got me through it. Well, got
through. It is connecting to my friends, to my families. Facetiming with my family going out and actually
helping to distribute the meals at the public school down the street. It's the, it's the the actual
connection. That matters. All right, so that's my, that's my ramp. You know, some people do very fine
with social media. It doesn't change their brand very much. They don't have much effect on them, that's.
But if it is, there is a cure. Step away. Use dummy accounts to get the information or inspiration that you
need. Treat it like appointment viewing. Do it for 1/2 hour three times a week and move on with the rest
of actually developing a deep life to your care that you actually care about. So can I blame you for
getting me ranting? But I do think it's important for people to hear. You can do that. You can do that.
You can still be inspired, you can still know about things, but your life is going to be a. Lot better read
Neil postman. It's brilliant. Media can change the way your brain works. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
does not change your brain in a direction that I think most people would say makes their life better. All
right, rant over. Ross, maybe you can bring us down here. What's your question? Why do you think
some people are so driven while most people are not? Do you think it's an acquired trait or that some
people are just born with it? Ross, it's a huge question. And I'm surprised we don't talk about it more.
Almost every example you find of impactful, meaningful or exceptional achievement. All comes down to
a relentless drive. To keep training to keep getting better, to get over the hardships, I mean, this X Factor
seems to be the thing we should most be trying to understand and inculcate where we can. So how do
people get this X Factor? We don't really know. We don't really know. Is there a genetic piece to it?
There might be some. So Dave Epstein, in his book the Sports Gene, he talks some. There's some
research about what's called trainability when it comes to various physical pursuits where some people,
they are just very well suited to taking training directions and just executing. All right, coach, what? 10
miles? I'm on it. And they'll just do it. You know, there may be some genetic piece of that. It's a huge
advantage if you have that, because if you have that trainability inclination and then you could be
connected to good coaching, you can get so good at things so fast. So maybe there's some genetic
component to that. I've noticed in my own I've trained. To be elite levels and riding of trained to being
elite levels and academic research, I've seen a lot of environmental factors that play a big role. Two
things that seem to be important is 1. Actually, having confidence that you know how people accomplish
a thing that you're trying. To accomplish. There's a reason why a lot of professional athletes have kids
that are professional athletes, they they a much disproportionately higher rate. Now, you might say,
well, some of that might just be genes. I mean, if you're 7 foot tall, your kids are more likely to be tall,
and that might help you. In the MBA or something like this. But it's not just that. If you read any of the
classic sports biographies, like Mike Piazza's memoir is a great one, or hear interviews from current
young sports Hotshots like Bryce Harper. What do you learn? The fact that their parent really
understood that world. Made a big difference and their parents like, here's what you need to do. Here's
how it works. It's this much training. It takes this long. If you have confidence, I know how to do this and
how someone gets good just like we talked about in that earlier question about productive
procrastination, you're much less likely to procrastinate. You're much more likely to do the training. I
learned when researching so good they can't ignore you. My book about career advice. That being
exposed early on in just the right way, that makes you really feel that a particular direction is what you
really. Want to do? That makes a huge difference. That's all environmental exposure. I don't believe that
our genetic code evolves fast enough for you to have a gene for the particular professional pursuits that
exist in 21st century. The 21st century modern world, I think that's exposure again, a lot of professional
musicians, for example, have professional musician parents. They're kind of exposed to this really early,
like, that's what I really want to do. So in other words, I think environment plays a big role. If you're
exposed to something early and really feel. Like you want to. Do it. That can make a big difference if you
are around expert. And they make you confident that you know how people actually accomplish this. It's
much more easy to stick with the work. Those things matter as well, but it's still a pretty big mystery,
and I'm glad you asked it, because we should know more about it. What makes people have drive and
others don't? That's it. I mean, that's it, man. That is the whole question in. Almost every person.
Someone who claims their name is meat packing. Ask the question what's the best way to stop reading
self-help blogs like yours and just get on with hard, deep work? I'm offended. Why would you ever stop
reading my blog? It's the key to. Everything more concretely, I guess I would say earlier I gave the advice
that you should treat sources of inspiration and information online like a TV show that's on at set times
on set days and do your reading then. So, you know, 8:00 o'clock to 9:00 o'clock on Thursdays. My must
see TV as I read calls blog. Do it that way you can get the information without it becoming a crutch or
something that takes over your whole life. When he asks, what advice would you give to your 20 year
old self? You know I wrote an essay about this in 2008. As I was just finishing my PhD, I wrote an essay
about what advice I would have given in 2004 to the 22 year old me that was just starting at MIT, just
starting as a doctoral candidate. And what I said in that essay is, man, I wish I had. I had thought when I
first. Started grad school. To spend more time actually trying to figure out. What is the output that's
going to Matt? When I'm done with this. What's the type? Of thing that's really going to matter in. The
job market when? I'm done with this program and then work backwards to figure out how to do more of
that, even if it was harder than the things I wanted to do, I didn't really do that. I wrote papers about
things are interesting and I think in some cases I probably didn't challenge myself as much as I could
have if I. Had to do my doctoral program over. I would have been more careful about selecting
problems. And moved away from problems that were just like kind of interesting and tractable to
problems at the field. Definitely really cared about. And I would have. I would have worked harder at
mastering those problems, which which in a a theory field just means I would have read more papers,
spent more time trying to understand existing techniques, worked more on what other people were
already working on. I learned this lesson, and by the time I was a professor. I began to actually do that
more just to give you a quick aside. How did I figure that out? Well, I wrote this another. Essay and I
forgot exactly where I was in my career. This might have been early in my career as a professor. And I
wrote this essay about how I went out and did a research project to try to understand how to get
tenure. In my field. And what I did my methodology is I went and I found students that came from the
same research group. So they had been trained the exact same. Where there is a markable difference in
their progression as a academic, so one of them would get tenure. Did well and maybe someone else
that didn't get tenure or took them a long time, or they had some struggle. So it was like a controlled
experiment. They had the same training. Wanted well, one struggled to get tenure and then I looked for
many quantifiable variables about their careers. I recorded them and I went looking as an observational
study retrospective and I went back and actually tried to say what really seemed to be the variable that
made the difference that really separates the. Ease with 10 year crowd from the struggle with 10 year
crowd. And what I discovered is it wasn't raw number of publications. It wasn't quality of the venue in
the publications they all published in good venues. The main variable was number of citations on their
five most cited papers. That really separated the group, so when I did that study early in my career as a
professor, I realized, ah, you have to write things on topics that people really care about. You're already
working on. You got to make progress on problems that people have already shown they care about.
That's what's important. That's much harder than what I had done as a grad student, where I tended to
invent problems. That's a smart guy. I would invent problems come up with clever solutions. People
thought they were very clever, but it wasn't generating at first, at least tons of citations. So you know I I
changed my whole. Tune since then, I focused on. I really want to work on. Hard problems that other
people are working on, not just my own problems. I did end up getting tenure early. I did end up racking
up a bunch of citations, so that advice was good. I wish my 22 year old self had that advice and I could
have had that advice if I had done what I said in that essay, which was actually asked a question of what
really matters here, not what is it that I want to matter. So that's my my advice. There is it's meta advice.
Whatever type of field it is, whatever it. Is you care about. Be careful that you're not falling into the trap
of inventing in your mind a list of what you think matters. That is something that you want to be true.
These type of things would be hard to do, but not too hard. Instead, go out there and get the hard truth.
What actually is true? What actually matters in my field and then work backwards and confront the
reality of what would actually be required to do this? It's scary at first. It's going to make your life
harder. The work is going to be harder, but that's really what unlocks real results and. And so that's my
advice there. Kenya asks how can I better absorb and organize all the information about things. I want to
learn. Can you? One thing I do I write book reports. Not for any publication. No one ever sees them, and
they're not always about books. Sometimes it's about a topic on which reading a lot of books or listening
to interviews about or reading articles about, but I find. The exercise of forcing myself to write down in
my own words my understanding of a topic, and then when I read more about it, come back and revise
that understanding really helps me absorb and structure and internalize information. And I do this all
the time and when I have a whole folder full of these word documents and some of it's very esoteric. I
mean, I have a big Word document about American political philosophy. I did something similar as I
watched critical theory become such a a a powerful and eventually even type of bullying force within
academia. I said I got to understand this. I went on a long project years ago where I read a lot about
critical theory. I I read the famous papers, I read critiques of it. It's very complicated the terminology.
Even just the etymology of what the different theories are, the ontologies of how different things. It how
you know critical race theory fits into critical legal theory, which fits into critical theory, which itself is a
sort of odd combination of French post modernism, but also this sort of new et cetera, et cetera. I just
wanted to understand it. I have a very. Long Word document. Where I tried to work it out. So can you?
That's my advice. You know, if you want to learn things. Read a lot of stuff. Talk to people about it, but
until you write down in your own words your understanding and then go back and try to revise that
understanding as you learn more, until you do that, you're probably. Not going to understand it very
well. If you do. You're going to understand it in a way that you're not going to forget. So I think it's like a.
If you can do this on a regular basis, keep your own book reports on ideas, topics, philosophies,
whatever. That interest you? Your understanding what you understand what you have to draw on in
your life when trying to understand the world or what's happening around you is going to be really
enriched. I highly recommend it. All right. Final question Deedee asks. How do we keep from forgetting
the lessons of slowing down as a result of being constrained in our spaces during the pandemic? Well,
Daddy, I think this is a crucial question. I have a series of blog posts on my site about what I call the deep
reset. Which is my word for this impulse that a lot of. People are having. The impulse that a lot of people
are having. To come out of the experience of the lockdown. And make real changes to their. They want
to reset their life, to be something deeper. All of these questions were submitted before the more
recent events. The protests that are happening, the outrageous surrounding George Floyd, I think those
recent events have have only of course, amplified people's sense that. I just don't want to go back. To
the status quo. I want my own life, my own engagement with the world, to be deeper. I want it to be
more meaningful. I've been writing about that on my blog. I'm working on a video series to get some
ideas about how do you actually what can you actually do to reset your life. To be more deeper and
more meaningful. I think, Deedee, it is absolutely. The right thing to be thinking about. It is difficult, but
now is the time to do it. A couple pieces of advice I can give just based off of my experience when I was
working on digital minimalism. Readers of that book? No. I ran an experiment with 1600 people where I
had them basically kind of simulate a lockdown, not in the social sense of the technological sense. So
they took a whole month. And really drastically cut back their use of technology with the idea of
completely reforming their relationship with their technology so that little case study could give us some
lessons about this much bigger type of reset we're talking about, which is resetting the very structure of
our life, not just our engagement with technology, but a big thing. I learned from that experiment is
that. Working backwards from the positive vision. Is much more sustainable than instead trying to
conquer the negative. So if you just focus on, here are aspects of my life I don't like. And so I want to get
rid of. These things because I don't like them. It's actually kind of hard to make sustainable change. If
you instead say. Here are things that I think are very important that I would like to Orient my life around.
They're self evidently valuable pursuits. Changes that you make that are pointing you towards
something that you find very valuable are much more sticky. You're much more likely to actually have
those changes persist, so you want to focus on how do I get to the positive more so than how do I
eliminate the negative? So how do you figure out the positive? Another thing I learned from that small
scale, the clutter experiment is reflection. Experimentation is important. You spin this time while you're
still partially locked down, thinking, reflecting. Go for walks. Think through why am I feeling this way?
What does this mean? What's the underlying value here? Interrogate your own life. Interrogate the own
your own structures within your head for how you organize your experiences, your values, your road
map for how your life is supposed to unfold. You cannot really understand these structures until you
interrogate them that takes. This introspection takes time. You've got to do it. You've got to put in
those. Hours. You can also experiment. Let me try. What if I do this in my life? What if I stopped doing
this instead? Replace it with this activity? What if I begin volunteering here? What if I get my fitness back
in the shape? What if I actually start seriously doing deep reading? Because you know what deep
reading gives you a deep mind in a way that social media is going to warp your mind and deeper is going
to give you the type of deep mind that's going to be able to actually. Take an information, process it,
come in with real insights, and therefore use those insights as the foundation for real change in the
things. You care about. Experiment what works. What does it, what resonates, what doesn't. And then
make concrete changes. So by the time you've you've left the lockdown, things seem more normal. You
want to have done this reflection? You have done some experimentations. You want to have put in
place some concrete changes, specific things in your life, things that you can track in a notebook. Did I
do this today or not? Or here's my plan and a notebook for how I want to accomplish this goal I need. To
do this this week, this that week have those. Changes in place so that as you go back to the real life, your
life is already has been transformed. You're not just implicitly or ambiguously hoping. That somehow
your life will be different or the slowness you learn to appreciate, or the awareness you grew of issues in
this. Country will will will stick around, not just hoping you've made a life in. Which it does. And it's
supported by the positive vision of what you want your life to be. You found that vision through
introspection and experimentation. The concrete change put it into place. Now your life actually is
changed. So that I think is at the core of the deep reset, which is more important now than I think it was.
Even when I first started writing about it, so I hope you find that useful. But I'm telling you that's the way
that's the way to make substantial change in your own life. All right, so that's all the time we have for
today. Remember, if you want to submit your own questions, you need. To be on my mailing list. I solicit
these questions on a semi regular basis from my mailing list. You can sign up at calnewport.com until
next time stay Dean.