So this Christmas was just passed really for the first time I found myself watching multiple Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies uh this all transpired because I came across an interesting article written by the New York Times cultural critic Amanda Hess the article was titled how I aged into the bad Christmas movie it was an interesting discussion which piqued my interest so I decided to Go watch some of these movies over the break and what I want to argue today is that in watching these movies I identified an unexpected but interesting connection to one of the
major ideas we talk about on the show and idea that is very relevant to the New Year season where we are right now so let's start with this article I'll pull it up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening here is the article from The New York Times how I Aged into the bad Christmas uh movie written by Amanda Hess so I want to start for those who are like I was until recently uninitiated with these movies what are they about so I'm going to read from this article up
here on the screen this is Amanda hess's summary of the typical Hallmark Christmas movie so quote the protagonist will be a pastry chef or a gift wrap shop owner or a candy cane Company CEO she will acquire an Alaskan Inn or she will inherit a Scottish Castle or her flight will be diverted to a Christmas themed town by the way Jesse I watched both of both the Scottish castle movie and the flight being diverted to the Christmas themed town I saw both those movies she will become a recent widower she will meet a recent widower
it be a lot more dark if early in the movie she becomes a widower uh she will meet a recent widower or a handsome woodworker or a Charming Earl his home will be Aggressively bed decked with Christmas lights and decorative bowls of frosted pine cones he will wear a scarf he will wear another scarf at one point he will gift a protagonist a seasonally appropriate necklace together they will be forced to put on a strudel Fest or locate a missing antique Nutcracker in the end she will abandon her professional Ambitions in order to join him
in his small town or in a more recent plot reversal he will forgo his Small town life to join her in the big city it will snow and they will kiss so that's kind of the plot of most of these movies a few observations with my cinematic hat on um the production values are not great I think at their worst they look very bad and at their best it's sort of network TV show quality they're they're shooting fast and quick it's like a glint Eastwood movie um the writing is very bad in these movies I
will say that no One's really caring much about the dialogue the the uh acting also tends to be very bad as well no one really seems to care about this the Netflix movies they try to be more funny they're like more ironic and then the Hallmark movies are um much more Earnest and a lot of the Hallmark movies are on Netflix it's kind of confusing all right so why are these movies popular well again I'm going to go back to Amanda Hess explaining her conversion from someone Cynical about these films into someone who uh grew
to grew to like them all right so here's what Amanda said when I first discovered the existence of made for television Christmas movies maybe 15 years ago they struck me as sentimental and anti-feminist recently I have felt so pummeled by stress and responsibility that I have found it difficult to turn on a compelling new television show at the end of the day I have no extra Energy to expend familiarizing with unknown characters deciphering twist or even absorbing scenes of visual interest what I've been looking for instead is a totally uncompelling new television show one that
expects nothing from me and that gives me little in return the bad Christmas movies beats are so consistent its twists so predictable its actors and props so loyally reused it's easy to relax drowsily into its rhythms the genre is formulaic which makes for a Kind of tradition now it plays through the winter like a crackling fireplace in my living room this is clearly a big part of the appeal you watch for 6 weeks or so it's traditional it's Escape um so look you wouldn't be able to keep this up for a full year because these
movies aren't very good but this idea she's saying that they it's it's something that you look forward to in the season it's supposed to be corny it doesn't make much demands from you uh That makes sense she then Amanda then elaborated in a podcast I listened to on she did a daily episode she talked about this article and she elaborated the she was pummeled by stress and respon responsibility in part because a friend had gotten a potentially very scary medical diagnosis and they were sort of fearing the worst and it ended up okay but it
was a a stressful time so you can kind of set that context all right that's what these movies Are that is why Amanda hes came around to them what I want to add today is that I think there is another reason for the appeal of these movies especially to people of Our Generation that is not only relevant to us but underscore is one of the big lessons we talk about on this show so what is this hidden lesson in these movies well look there's this funny SNL skit I remembered it vaguely and I found it
earlier today it was from Five years ago that made fun of Hallmark movies and and it setup was it was a dating game where the it was the sort of the the female protagonist and dating the sort of classic characters from these movies and the dating game was titled a winter boyfriend for holiday Christmas and toward the end the host named Emily Pringle deliver sort of the the joke line the true reason for Christmas is husband and I think that matches a sort of common Misunderstanding about these movies that they're basically visual romance novels where
the thrill isn't imagining sort of finding uh true love and giving up everything for it this was sort of the the the original understanding that led Amanda hes to think like hey these movies are anti-feminist I want to argue from Millennial viewers this is not why these movies are largely appealing a lot of these viewers already are married already have families it's not the the Fantasy of the Christmas tree lot owner that captures them the real value I think these movies have the real aspiration is in their portrayal of Lifestyle Centric planning so yes Jesse
I brought this all back to my favorite deep life topic lifestyle Centric planning all right so hear me out the most common plot for these movies think about this is a lead that has a stressful job in the big city they end up in a small town where They uh do not have the stresses of that job they connect with the community which tends to be like tightly knit around they all are coming together around a holiday the holiday itself uh gives them exposure to to sort of escapism and fantasy the town is beautifully lit
up and they just sort of appreciate the the way it looks they appreciate the the people in the town the the pace is slower the days are unpredictable there's Adventure going on They're hunting down an antique Nutcracker trying to put on the strudel Fest the Escape as I'm in here therefore is not hey maybe I can find a husband who owns a Christmas tree farm but instead the idea that you might be able to reduce your work hours spend more time outside walk down the street through the snow to the coffee shop that has the
Corky owner who knows you and I get lost that evening in some like Town tradition or they like light up the the Tree in a way that is really over the top a attractive so one way to recast these movies then is the struggle between two approaches they're trying to cultivate a meaningful life the protagonists at the beginning of these movies are often implicitly deploying what here on this show we call the Grand goal strategy which is where you pursue a single big and impressive goal that you hope will make everything in your life good
right So in the movies as it is for many people that ambitious goal is usually some sort of focused impressive professional goal there trying to get the CEO slot or whatever it is it's this big the big city job ambition by the end the protagonist has found happiness tooing something more like the lifestyle Centric approach in which it's not a singular goal that's going to make their life better but they're identifying the properties of an Ideal lifestyle and then finding ways to move closer to it and then so often what they are discovering is that
this this new life that is presented to them in you know the town which is usually called like jingle bell City or something this new life hits a lot of Beats of a lifestyle that's more attractive there's no one thing about the new lifestyle it's it's they they realize a lifestyle that daytoday resonates has more value than The pursuit and accomplishment of a single Grand goal so let's recap then lifestyle Centric planning since these movies are implicitly endorsing it let's recap how this actually works to do lifestyle Centric planning You Begin by imagining a uh
typical day like what it's like its rhythms it's not specific I'm in this town I have this job but what's it like are you walking to the coffee store are you going through a trail walk through The woods are you in a busy City and you're it's like this really active scene you kind of get a sense of like what are the rhythms how does this resonate you use specific imagery that that that also resonates you imagine yourself in this scene or that scene you're really playing with these internal resonance uh trying to I imagine
sort of like a day in an ideal lifestyle you then identify and isolate the properties that make these images That make these scenes resonate so what is it about the sort of day I've constructed in my head that makes it resonate so much for me you can then survey your full landscape of opportunities and obstacles to figure out what's your best bet for moving towards those properties in your life and it's here where like really interesting options come up when you're saying giving all the obstacles I have and opportunities I have how can I move
Closer to these particular properties you're able to explore a wider range of options I do this with my job I move this work to this work we move here I start doing this if I if I move this over here if we you begin to come up with these interesting configurations which you probably never would have thought of from scratch it's not necessarily like oh here's the obvious big thing to do but it ends up in the end having the effect Of making your lifestyle overall more congruent with things that actually resonate so I think
that's what that's one of the true messages of these movies Lifest St Centric planning they're happy because in the end they've better aligned their lifestyle with stuff that matters and have realized that the pursuit of the singular Grand goal wasn't making them happy and so we're we're seeing I think Millennials in particular because They're at that stage of Life are saying H there's something here and so that's where I think we have our uh our hidden value of these movies hey it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video
then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without burnout this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos you can get a free excerpt at Cal Newport.com slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the video um so yes you know somehow in the end as I always do I've made a leap from Hallmark movies to Lifestyle Centric planning one of my one of my favorite topics and as I always argue all
this stuff comes back to the modern digital landscape the modern digital environment one way or the other and one of the reasons why lifestyle Centric planning Is so important is because in our current digital environment work has become more abstract it's moving symbols around on a screen so it's much less able to sort of uh directly provide us a sense of concrete meeting um work can follow us everywhere so these sort of modern symbolic knowledge jobs now have the way of sort of infusing more and more of our life and therefore bleaching from those parts
of our lives are things that are meaningful so this helps create A meaning crisis uh so we have that going on um we also have all of this sort of electronic distraction that subverts our deeper instincts from meaning so we sort of feel connection and wonder and all this type of stuff we get a very attenuated form of this through social media and our form I'm kind of like talking to people on Twitter or I'm seeing these Tik toks that are kind of pressing the button of like whoa that was kind of Cool to see
and it subverts those instincts just enough that that the drive doesn't push us to actually like change our lives in meaningful ways to get there so the modern digital environment did help set up the sort of meaning crisis that we have right now it also opens up new opportunities that abstract work that persists that sort of you're just on a screen moving symbols can be pretty portable it can give you a lot of autonomy it's something you can That's compatible with a much greater variety of day-to-day Lifestyles than Maybe would have been 40 years ago
where it's like where's your office building you need to be within 10 miles and that's just what your day is going to be so uh all this comes back to the modern digital environment but that's the lesson I think is there so I've connected Hallmark movies to email and social media because I've always I always find a way to do that so I would Say my work here is done so I don't know have you ever seen of these movies Jesse Yeah a long time ago though long time ago yeah um I watched several I
would say my I think the the best example this year of this year's crop that kind of hit my theory and just the best production values was Christmas Island which has a a No Nonsense plot a very ambitious young pilot and this doesn't quite track if you look at the the the plot line um This very ambitious young pilot she's wants to be a very successful pilot but she's flying just the regional routes and gets hired to be a pilot of a private plane for like a rich couple now for some reason the first flight
she's given on the private plane is LA to Switzerland so she's been doing Regional flights and now she's flying from LA to Switzerland whatever um as things go the flight gets diverted to Christmas Island which is like a small island off the Coast of Canada that's really into Christmas and the air traffic controller that was sort of snippy with her while she was in the air also for some reason lives on Christmas Island uh Classic Movie um you know ends up falling in love with like Christmas and becoming less blah blah blah but I lik
it it had good good uh scenes of the the island and they had a really good decorated downtown it often comes like how Christmasy they can decorate The sets so that was a good one I watched another one where they were in Ireland maybe or Scotland and Scott wolf May was Scott Scott wolf and Lucy was her name both who are both in Party of Five are like the siblings and they find out their mom I guess owns a castle or something but they they have a new newspaper clip these are things I noticed they
have a newspaper clip of the mom being born and it was like 1963 right Mom the you know the Duke has A baby or something they show that clip because I guess the actress like the idea of like whatever age that was she wanted to be the problem is Scott wolf is playing her son and Scott wolf was born in like 1967 so like for this to actually work she would have had to been 5 years old when she had Scott wolf I think that's more Scott wolf trying to play 20 years younger than the
mom trying to play like too young anyways I don't think I'll be Watching a lot of these movies now that are in the new year but I think that's what's going on lifestyle Centric planning captured in a movie I did see the red one on Amazon Prime with the rock who was that movie for a PG13 Santa movie who's it for that's a good question it's like a santa santa movie with cursing oh because they're usually PG yeah because you know it it it seems like it's aimed more at like a teenage Crowd but teenage
don't want to watch a Santa movie I mean was it good it was entertaining yeah I'm glad I watch it all right I might watch it I watched carry on that was another good new one Jason baitman oh that was horrible I couldn't stand you didn't like it yeah I mean let's say the plot didn't completely check out didn't completely check out you like that movie it was fun I didn't I didn't completely understand the plan uh but it was good it was fun They spent some money on that they filmed at the airport have
you seen the the new Dylan movie not yet yeah I do I do want to see that though a complete unknown uh it won't hold a candle in an Oscar competition perspective probably a complete unknown will probably struggle to beat out for Best Picture Christmas Island which is I think is going to make a big a big push all right enough of that uh we got cool questions but first let's hear from A sponsor so here we are it's a new year 2025 and you're probably thinking how am I going to make this year different
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if you don't like it give it away to a salting friend they'll give you your money back no questions asked That's drink element.com deep all right Jesse let's do some questions first question is from Michael I just finish reading where good ideas come from by Stephen Johnson Johnson talks about the commonplace book a notebook to to record interesting ideas the idea is that you can revisit this book to examine incomplete ideas does Cal keep a commonplace book and if so what form does it take I like Stephen actually I was trading emails with him Not
that long ago uh cool writer one of that like original idea writers who came up in the the 90s and early 2000s and written a a lot of cool books um okay so stepen if I remember was really early to these ideas of using technology to help manage partial ideas he was big on a tool called Devon think that you could enter in ideas and would help make connections I think that's now since been more subsumed by these zedcast in specific Techniques that are all about storing ideas even when you don't know what to do
with them in a way that like connections can be formed and excavated and the tool can work with your ideas to help you come up with new connections he was really excited about that right now a lot of other people are excited about that as well um I don't tend to do that so I don't keep any sort of digital equivalent of a commonplace book at least with that type of rigor my problem Is not coming up with an idea when it comes to writing it it's you know having too many ideas right it takes
a long time to write something there's only so many things I can write and and the limiting factor is almost always time to write for me not scarcity of ideas so I actually tend to just use my brain as a common Place book informally speaking I read lots of stuff I talk to lots of people I listen to lots of stuff what I look for for ideas Is something that becomes insistent it kind of sticks around in my mind I'm using my brain as its own informal filter idea like really sticks around in my mind
then it keeps coming back and I'm like yeah I like that oh I just heard this new thing which seems I could that supports what I was thinking about before oh listen to that interview over there my idea would be very relevant there if an idea has really stuck around um then that's usually when all I'll Write about it now once I'm writing on an idea like okay I'm going to do an article on this I'm going to write a book chapter on this then I start collecting information systematically I typically just put that right
into the scrier project I'm using for that particular uh writing objective so I don't have a separate system if I'm wrri an article the research folder of the scrier project for that article is where I'll start throwing any sort of ideas I Have any sort of links Clips movies so once I'm specifically working on something I do collect everything but not in highly structured way I just throw them all into some folder so I I lean more into my mind's informal ability to sort through ideas I lean into that uh quite a bit and don't
really use outside structures to help me structure my information Stephen Johnson he had an oped the New York Times this morning oh He did yeah there we go all right who we got next next question is from Mark I'm looking for some advice on a weekly template I'm a high school teacher and need to set aside time for prep I'm also learning web design with a view of starting a side business I train in the gym three times per week and run two times per week I train the gym in the mornings before school at
the moment I get some School prep done at school but most in the evenings I would like to use The mornings more for cognitive work well let's just remember real quick what's meant by a weekly template we talked about this earlier in the fall in an episode so a weekly template is where you've you've set aside certain times of the week to sort of work on certain things in a regular basis so when you make your weekly plan for a week you apply the template first oh yeah Monday mornings I always work on this I
always go to the gym in the afternoons on Thursdays afternoons is when I work on this so when you're making your weekly plan you start with that template then you you can fill in the rest you get some regularity to your work and I always argue if you have stuff you're going to do on a regular basis have a weekly template and then that can change season to season and you know I change my weekly template every semester because depending on my teaching schedule the times the days and times I Want to do certain work
is going to change so often like I'm constructing a weekly template now for the upcoming spring winter semester okay um the good thing about designing a weekly template is that it forces you to use terminology from earlier in the show to face the productivity Dragon that's the situation I think Mark is in Mark says I want to learn web design I want to uh start a side business I want to train at the gym I want to run uh and I have a bunch of prep to do setting up a weekly template for all those
regular occurring activities will help you figure out is it even possible like time is time so you might as well go through this exercise of where am I going to actually make this happen and if you're hitting up against hard constraints like I really don't have enough time I so much of my day is spent in the classroom and then prepping takes A lot of time and I'm not just seeing enough time unless I wait up at like 4 in the morning that's an important signal time is time you don't have it some sort of
change has to be made and maybe that change is dropping something from this ambition or it's alternation or it's finding a way to like mix cardio with strength training in a more intense way or whatever it is right it might look different uh or being more effective about prep the time is time And that signal is going to force you to be sort of innovative so uh I don't you know I can't tell you a specific template CU I I you know I don't know your exact details of your schedule but I think coming up
with the template is important because it's a way for you to actually just move your time around like chest pieces if you were just going to take each day as it came say what do I want to work on today just imagine how much less you would get done you'd have Such a lower probability of actually fitting these various things into your life so the weekly template we can see an examples like this is like really important for figuring out the puzzle that is your week and is really can be really important as a reality
check I mean I'm just starting that now I mean we're recording this on the what January 2nd and so like a week until the semester starts so I'm working on my weekly template now uh Monday Wednesday Teaching and so I'll work around like I'm doing Monday Wednesday teaching um probably going to use the space in between the classes as office hours like I'm I'm trying to like piece together and then like what day we're going to podcast and versus like what days I often like to a meeting afternoon on my weekly template on campus meeting
afternoon like I'm still trying to figure out where that's all going to fit in terms of Mike in terms of the Question in terms of um cognitive work in the mornings and going to the gym in the mornings do you think that working out in the afternoon would be better and doing all the stuff in the morning or I think more people should work out in the afternoon yeah I I think for most people the natural Rhythm all things being equal cognitive work in the morning ex is a transition from work to non work that
might not be logistically possible for everyone but just from like A physiological standpoint I I would say for probably the majority of people that's that's best get up I mean you could stretch or do some things in the morning but but take advantage of like that first Rush of coffee and have good thoughts uh and then like serious exercise use that to transition I mean that's what I try to do I think that that works well for a lot of people some people really do swear by like the early morning run but cognitive work in
the Afternoon is hard for a lot of people mhm I mean when you hear about writers who are night owls the reality is typically what they mean is not 4:00 but you know 10 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. or something like that where they find this like completely blank bit of time but but for most people afternoon's hard early evening I sometimes do early evening writing sessions I call them happy hour sessions because it falls like in the time that you would normally Have happy hour at a bar and and it sometimes works I'll often come
here to the HQ so there it's like a definitive break from you know home it feels different I work I'm done I come home and I I'll I'll use that sometimes but it's always a stretch it's always much harder than just coming over in the morning and writing what do we got next question is from Gonzalo are the five books you read every month separate from the reading You do for book and article research yeah it's a good question uh if I finish a book I read a book and it's entirety I will count it
on my my list of books read so you will see you'll notice the astute listener will notice that in my my monthly book collection you can often pull out like oh I think these books were being read for something he's working on it'll be kind of oneof you'll see a couple books on similar themes that I I read like one after another uh But when I'm researching a book or an article often times I'm not reading an entire book um I'm reading certain chapters of a book or I'm skimming a book or trying to get
out of it what's important and that's a lot of research and those don't get counted so yeah I will count the book if I finish it regardless of the cause but when it comes to research there's a lot less finishing the books than you might imagine you get very good at like this Chapter is what's important of this book let me read these 10 articles oh I remember reading this book 10 years ago and this section is the section that's relevant to what I'm doing uh like I'll give you an example for the the Deep
Life Book I'm working on now the first part of the book and especially to the first chapter the first part of the book I'm drawing some from the history of monasticism I'm actually sort of using the history of monasticism we've talked About this on the show before um I'm using that as a like an analogy for understanding uh preparing for the Deep life the idea being in the in the history of monasticism just very very briefly you see very early on you know Christian monasticism was kicked off its precursors were the so-called desert fathers the
the Hermits essentially that went out into the desert and Le LED aesthetic lives I'm going to just be in a cave and ascue everything and and have These religious experiences and what they discovered is okay this this just like throw everything out and just go out there and be aesthetic and try not to die and you'll eventually have religious experience wasn't very replicatable so the monastic system was built up where he said okay we have to have structure right we have to kind of help people prepare the monks prepare to have these religious experiences with
some structure uh here's how we run our Days and here's our rules and we have these short-term goals and structures to help get you ready for the big uh encounter with divinity as opposed to just like let's just go for it and I have this whole analogy in the first part of the book is this is the same when it comes to overhauling your life and the overhauling a deep life don't just do the equivalent of going to the desert don't just make the big changes you actually need short-term goals and Structure that get you
ready that prepare you for making that that big change and so the first part of the book is about like preparing yourself and practicing to get ready for big changes okay I wanted the poll from uh Jamie Ker's book The distracted mind which is this like great book uh she's a medievalist I think she might be at Emy I might have that wrong but a medievalist that studies monks and wrote this good book I think I blurbed it so I Had read it years ago and I said this book is she's a great medievalist has
got a great sort of history about monks and how they think about distraction but I didn't read that whole book I I read selected chapters that really had what I needed like that book didn't show up I wrote this in July that book did not show up on my July books I read but I got really good information out of it so a lot of a lot of research for books and articles is like that you you've heard Of a book or you've read it a long time ago and you're pulling out what you need
um on the other hand there are some books I think was it last month or the month before uh or is it this month let me see what books are we reading this month I don't know I can't remember when I read what but there's been a couple of these Memoirs I've been reading recently like Zena herz's uh the what was that book called The not the intellectual life That's search chinges but whatever um lost in thought I think her book was called and that was like a memoir of like an intellectual life I reread
Rich RS Memoir recently and that might be in the January books may I don't remember where these things are but I finished uh you'll see there's like a bunch of Memoirs that are coming up soon and that's because I was preemptively like I'm WR reading these various Memoirs that have particular Properties because I might want to pull something from them for my book so it what I'm trying to say my my Peak inside the writing process here is a lot of times when researching stuff you're not reading full books and then sometimes you are and
I only report them when I do and is that research done during deep work hours yeah I mean I worked on that monk most of that monk writing was we were up in the mountains and at the house I had the writing shed that like Really cool writing shed yeah and in the morning were my deep work hours and I would go down to that writing shed with my coffee and I was like reading that book I have very strong connections with that book and that place really um uh but that I was largely reading
in deep work hours like I would be I would be there with my laptop and I would read a chapter and underline it and then pull from it and write a little bit and read like it was really intertwined with the The writing other books if I'm like like lost in thought that book that was just reading during my normal reading hours yeah any question I haven't really thought so systematically about how and when I read so that's cool all right who we got next next question is from Heath I'm a third grade mechanical I'm
a third year mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech and have failed integral calculus twice I spend over 30 hours in the library every Week trying to study and never seem to get the results that one would expect from that effort I bought How to Become a Straight A Student but would appreciate an overview of the best strategies to learn High level math all right integral calculus I was just reading about that in that math class book oh yeah yeah had a remember multivariate integration um okay so Heath when I see you say I spend over
30 hours in the library every week trying To study that's meaningless to me I and I think the fact that that's meaningless is important because this really is one of the key messages I had for students in books like How to Become a Straight A Student the term study is meaningless it can mean all sorts of things many things which aren't very useful at all when it comes to learning information studying is not a self-evident activity that you either do or don't do and a lot of Students get into similar trouble like you get into
by quote unquote studying for hour after hour but what they're really doing is actually very ineffective when it comes to cementing in their mind understanding of knowledge so a lot of people just have this mindset of like uh I spent a ton of time in the library the weekend before the exam and that this is like Penance the pain of being in the library for 30 Hours should transmute into a better grade but your exam doesn't care like how painful your weekend was or how many hours you spent in the library it cares how much
you understand the material and so all that really matters is activity that cements your understanding of the material and as it turns out the activities that best cement understanding the material don't tend to be extremely timec consuming the very best students don't tend to be the Students who quote unquote study the most but they can be unpleasant because they're demanding so for example in your case integral calculus I write about this in the book how to become a Str student I also wrote a blog post you can find on my blog from way back when
it's titled something like how I got the highest grade in my discreet mathematics course and I wrote this not long after I graduated from college so I remembered Getting the highest grade in my discreet math class which was 50 or 60 students my number one tool for studying in that class was a big stack of white printer paper and what I would do I I had written down and this this method is in How to Become a Straight A Student um I had for every topic we covered sort of sample problems taken from lectures Andor
problem sets and I would copy one of the problems without the answer onto a sheet of white paper and then solve it On that paper while solving it annotating it as if I was lecturing to a class all right so next we going to do this well hey if we're doing this integration what we're looking for here is the anti-derivative and and notice when doing the anti-derivative here that we can sort of ignore those terms because those would be constant etc etc if I could do that I could get the answer right show the proof
get to the right answer without looking at my notes Explaining my steps so I'm clearly indicating to myself I understand it that Topic's done I don't come back to it if I struggle I go back and review it and try again later once I can actually teach from scratch match sample problems from every topic I need to know then I know it and I'm ready to take the class and that got me the highest grade in my in my math class now the problem you might be having if you try this approach is that You
might find that you're not able to answer many of the questions because what a lot of people do and this is a huge problem I think with undergraduate education in general a lot of people don't attend lectures or sort of tune out in lectures and then sort of implicitly hope that in the two days before the exam that they can not only study but teach themselves all the material from scratch this is going to be the Trap that I Think really captures people if I had to guess the problem with your 30 hours is partially
that what you're doing is ineffective you're probably reading notes silently to yourself as opposed to trying to recreate problems from scratch and partially you're spending most of that time trying to teach yourself the material but the material is hard to teach that's why they pay us professors the big bucks it's not obvious how to teach yourself this stuff so the other Thing you have to do is the 48 hour rule and again this comes from How to Become a Straight A Student but the idea is this you go to lecture you pay attention in lecture
you take notes in a math class you want to capture every sample problem every step to the solution and annotate those steps to the best of your ability when you don't understand something this step in this integration problem I don't understand how they did that you put a question mark and you Circle it now the clock is ticking you got 48 hours to replace that question mark with understanding not deferring it till the day before the exam you got 48 hours to fill in that question mark uh right then you 40 hours from right then
now you have various Circles of of uh time sort of concentric circles of time that stretch out that you can uh work with here so the very tightest circle is right away raise your hand hey I don't understand what you just did the next Tightest circle is right after class go up to the professor hey I don't understand what was happening here and here can you explain this to me the next tightest Circle would be office hours like when is the next time that there's office hours with either a TA or the professor also in
between those circles is like to a friend or looking at the textbook to try to figure it out so typically why we call it the 48 Hours rules is that you're no more than 48 Hours away from all of those circles being done that you're no more than 40 hours away from probably the next office hours and all these other things can happen quicker so by that point you should have resolved those question marks now when you do this when it comes time to quote unquote study for the exam you already at some point understood
all of the techniques you actually went through the mental effort of grocking the technique already There's nothing you're learning from scratch for the first time you might have to review it but there's a huge difference between remembering something you actually did the mental activity of learning then there is actually learning it from scratch the effort to learn from scratch is intense so you want to spread that out over the semester so you're not doing too much of it at once and so study now you're reviewing and then when you're reviewing you want to use the
White paper method of just I'm recreating things from scratch if I can I understand that if I can't I don't go back and review again that's how you study for math class it's all about Distributing the understanding of the material as you learn it and then your reviewing being all what we call Active recall as that's the most effective way to actually seeit knowledge so he you can absolutely pass integral calculus integrals are not Actually that complicated but I think what's happening is you're kind of teaching yourself this this you're probably trying to teach yourself
this material from scratch like a couple days before the exam all right who do we got what we got next we have our Corner hey slow productivity Corner question we like to have one question every week that is related to my new book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without Burnout we mainly do this corner because we have theme music which we're going to hear right [Music] now all right what's our slow productivity Corner question of the week it's from Dylan in addition to your books do you have any book recommendations for culing a
deep life or to embrace slow productivity what I often recommend in like if you're interested broadly in the Deep life or more specifically in more of a slow productivity approach find real stories that resonate and usually this means Memoir look for Memoir that resonates because what happens is the written form when you're reading a non-fiction book like a memoir the written form can put you inside the head and experience of someone else you get a sort of step into another life and when you're in that life you've stepped into someone else's Shoes you really get
a visceral sense of what resonates and what doesn't and it it's It's really informative there's a lot of self-discovery to be made there's a lot of motivation or inspiration to be made about what's important to you what's not important to you what about this life is important to me what's not so I'm big believer of finding Memoirs where the life of the person being lived in the Memoir speaks to you in some way and it might not be when I say Memoir I Use that broadly I mean it could be a book that is specifically
a memoir uh but sometimes it could be like a non-fiction book where it's a certain part of a person's life and they're doing some Adventure or something like that but that that's anything that's actually like about someone's life that resonates I I often think that's the right way to better understand yourself and what you're looking for what the Possibilities are for pursuing it as opposed to just straight up advice the obvious exception of course be my books which you need to buy many many copies of all right do we have a call this week we
do oh should we should we hear the music one more time do we play ourselves out with the music we do it half the time I think in 2025 we should commit the playing ourselves out of the slow productivity corner by hearing the music one more time are we gonna have a slow Productivity for the whole year uh that's a good question at least for next couple months I want to I want to get to the one year mark of the book how about that oh that's fair that's only three months the book came out
in March yeah yeah okay so we're going to keep the corner alive until we get to the one- year iary of the book um and in 2025 in the 3 months that that are between now and that anniversary we're going to play the Music twice so let's hear it one more [Music] time all right she said we have a call this week Jesse yes we do all right let's hear it okay hey Cal this is Trevor I'm a digital product manager and earlier this year I left my full-time position and started my own business I'm
offering Consulting and fractional product management where I'm struggling is applying multiscale planning to the Growth of my own business previously as an employee I've gotten pretty good at applying the principles and prioritizing and time blocking toward our company goals and even now I feel like I'm doing a decent job applying that to my client work and helping them achieve theirs uh last week I spent a day trying to work on multiscale for my own business and while I was able to develop the values of which I want to develop my Lifestyle you know career plan
around putting together that career strategic plan I kept banging my head against the wall so I'm curious if you could share more details in terms of what kinds of things are in your career strategic plan uh because it's that middle piece between the values and principles into the weekly and daily planning that I'm struggling with in terms of growing my own business and Career Capital now as a solo PR thanks as always all right so in multiscale planning we have three levels there's that strategic plan which is maybe covering the next season then you have
weekly planning then you have daily planning so the the caller today is talking about that biggest scale thinking thinking through that more strategic plan that's may be existing at the scope of something like uh season And it sounds like if I'm understanding it properly he's he's not sure what to put in there right he's like what what is like what are I what are my strategic goals what am I working on more specifically you know uh if you're writing this plan right now for the winter and the spring like what am I trying to get
done by June where do I want to steer this ship well I think there's there's two things that are relevant here that hopefully are Helpful one it's okay for this to be to seem relatively un underspecified if you're doing something new in particular it is sometimes not even clear what the pretend poal opportunities to pursue R what like you should put the the pedal down on and what you should put the brake pedal down on sometimes this is not even clear yet when something is relatively new you're still feeling out your client base and What's
working and what the opportunities are so it's completely fine if you're like I don't have this Crystal Clear we need to try to this is our goal for the next four months is to try to to introduce this product or move this you might actually be very sensical Gathering data on this new setup and trying to just look for your moments look for your spots so that that's completely fine to be underspecified especially when something is new and You're still feeling yourself around so your strategic plan let's say for this upcoming semester season for something
new like you're talking about might really be uh seem very mundane you know it's continuing to polish your client management setup and to get your some sort of logistical pieces that you're using to to Bill or to deliver assets like get those those cleaned up and operating smoother it might seem very mundane and that's fine that doesn't Mean your Ambitions are mundane it means you're waiting to choose your spot to make a bigger make a bigger move the other thing I would say when it comes to these plans the key is working backwards especially when
you're doing something like you're doing which really is a lifestyle play fractional project management for example like clearly you're looking for autonomy uh you're looking for more flexibility you really want to have this clarity about the the Properties of the ideal lifestyle that you're aiming towards and you can keep coming back to that and and and asking the question which what's going to move me closer to towards those what's going to move me farther away and this can lead you to some objectives that you might not otherwise come up with if you're just trying to
say like what's good for this business or what's a big idea I can pursue so like one of the analyses you Might be doing the new year for example is you have these properties identified that you're looking for in your ideal lifestyle and be saying is there any big disconnects right now is there like one of these properties I'm I'm really far away from or one that I seem to be moving farther away from what changes could I imagine that could that could stop that erosion or move me closer to it so so when you're
specifically working backwards from properties of Ideal lifestyle specific changes can emerge that wouldn't normally show up if you were just taking an approach of hey what's something good to do with my business or what's the natural next step to take with this right so those are my two answers if you're doing something new it's okay to don't feel under specif IFI that's okay sometimes you're just trying to like get the lights on and the invoice is sent out and once you really get to know what you're doing then the Opportunities will become clear six months
a year down the line and number two work backwards from the properties of your ideal lifestyle and just keep asking the question am I on track towards getting closer to these and in the places where I'm not do I yet see a change I could make that would correct that and the answer might be not yet but at least I have it in the top of my mind or the answer might be you know what I could do this completely unexpected Thing that makes no sense financially makes no sense strategically but from the point of
view of like it's really important to me that I can you know ski every day makes a lot of sense when I'm working backwards for my lifestyle image this this change I'm making makes a lot of sense so those are the two things I would say keep in mind all right well we have a case study here this is where people send in a description of how they've applied the Type of advice we talk about on the show into their own life so we can see the advice we discuss in action if you have a
case you can send it to Jesse at Cal newport.com all right today's case study comes from Holden Holden says longtime listener firsttime writer I'm 28 years old and a gardener by trade out of high school I fell for the follow your passion narrative at the time I was not ready to pursue a degree and elected to move Across the country and pursue my dream of working in the mountain bike industry I graduated from a certification program related to the mountain bike industry got my foot in the door and accomplished what dreams I had for that
industry by the time I was 22 I shortly became embittered by the industry and realized that regardless of one's passion work eventually becomes just that I left the bike industry at 23 and having established connections and Friendships in a town that I love I took the best job available to me at the time this was a landscape gardening job where I could leverage the trail building and construction skills that I had gained over the preceding years in the 5 years since leaving the mountain bike industry I started my own landscaping company and enjoyed some suc
uccess at that for the last year and a half or so I began to feel unfulfilled in my business venture and unhappy with The path I was on and had set for myself the past decade the sense of unfulfillment as well as economic circumstances motivated me to begin the shutter my business and take a job with the local government as a gardener I had fun in my early 20s but I'm unfulfilled with where that has left me in my late 20s I found that I enjoyed being a business owner entrepreneur but did not like my
future in the particular industry I was in I began doing Lifestyle Centric career planning for few months or a few months ago I've taken your advice and started a single purpose notebook to jout down anything that resonates with me as it pertains to my ideal lifestyle these things that inform My Lifestyle Centric career plan I have found the career path that I have been on since high school is not in alignment with where I want to be in life I am called the more intellectual Pursuits and work in which my mind as Opposed to my
body is the main tool I use to produce value I am unsure how to make this transition or begin this transition towards a knowledge-based professional life I do feel ready to pursue a degree now but have trouble determining what I may study as I have an embarrassment of intellectual interest I also cannot shake the small Cal on my shoulder telling me that I'm falling for the Trap of gram goals but I really enjoy Studying for studying and knowledge's sake and do believe it agree would set me up better for professional life where my mind is
the main producer of value all right Holden we see a pretty realistic case study here of Lifestyle design in both its positives and negatives in action I'm going to zoom in early on this story where he talked about my quote dream of working in the mountain bike industry end quote that's like a Classic passion trap Type move as Holden correctly identifies the interest was in mountain biking and our mind tricks us into thinking well if I had a job related to this thing I like that must be my dream and as Holden quickly learned a
job is a job what matters for a job are the properties of the job not the content not like the subject of that job so the fact that your job is related to mountain biking probably doesn't matter So much as like what are the properties of that job engagement autonomy connection this Mastery Etc right so kind of kind of a classic passion trap all right so he fell out of that went into gardening where he could start his own business use skills that he had built up you have some rare and valuable skills now you
have something you can put in the marketplace he seemed to do well with that the government job doing gardening simplified probably his life Got rid of some autonomy but simplified his life like I can just sort of do the work that I'm given and now he's doing lifestyle C career planning and realizing there's parts of his life like if he really sits and says what is it that I'm looking for in my life he feels like there's a lack all right so now there's the complicated piece because yes hold on I do the small cow
on your shoulder is has a point you want to be careful here being Like okay maybe what I'm missing is intellectual work so let me just make a big swing and like go get a degree and and and hope that this somehow leads to something that something is better I would be way more specific about this I would really try to clarify what your ideal day looks like like is it sitting in an office is it you know writing poetry by the pond is it being outside but having like a lot of flexibility with your
hands like it could be that The the government gardening job is this very stable base on top of which you are a a writer that you like teach yourself to be a writer which doesn't involve you like quitting everything and spending years going back for a degree or maybe really it's like you're tired of working with your hands and it's it's like exhausting you say I would be very happy to have like a a shed in my backyard that I convert into an office that I can go to and like work on a laptop and
like Five hours a day and it's like kind of engaging then I can be done and go mountain biking okay great that's a very specific other Vision you can start asking what's the quickest way to get there what are skills I can learn effectively and efficiently that'll allow me to try to find a job that can do that so I would get very specific about what you want your day to be like and then figure out what are your opportunities and obstacles because I'm Concerned that you might just say I'll just go get a degree
and then maybe this will all work out you should be way ahead on your planning than that I want to know how to do this because then I could do this type of work which allows my data to unfold in this type of way and that's what I'm really looking for so you need to sort out like what is this like a this appeal of the intellectual what does this really mean is it is it really related to your Actual day-to-day work is it is it related to what you do in your time outside of
work what are you actually looking for in work in terms of like how it feels and the autonomy or the financial renumeration you need to keep thinking about your career Capital if you're starting from scratch with career capital is very hard to compete in the marketplace with people that have more Etc so this is a time not to get caught up in like a a singular move because it Can be seducing the move itself right you'll feel good if you do something big for a little while go back to school you'll feel good because you
made a big change that's exciting there's opportunity then that goodness wears off and you're still pursuing that change and it doesn't necessarily lead you to somewhere better so this is the time to do careful lifestyle Centric planning don't be seduced by any one Particular change or move that's a complicated case study there Jesse mhm yeah I love the reference of the little cow on the shoulder that's that's what we're going to sell in our Shopify store little cows you plac on your shoulder that basically just chastises you for looking at Instagram and says don't go
to don't get a master's degree and don't make Grand goals don't make Grand goals stop looking at Instagram couldn't you be Reading right now that would sell well that would sell well all right well we got uh speaking of books we got a final segment coming up where I talk about the books I read in December but first another brief word from our sponsors want to talk about in particular our sponsor Defender we have the uh multiple Defenders the 90 the defender 110 the defender 130 which can seat up to eight these are very slick
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straight into whatever comes next head to ran.com Cal and use the promo code Cal to save 20% off your entire order that's 20% off your entire order when you head to r h n e.com Cal and use code cal It's Time to Embody your most confident self all right let's get on to our final segment all right so I like to report in the first episode of each month the books I read in the preceding month as long time listeners no I I read I try to read five books a month okay so it's January
2nd when we're recording this so we're going to be talking about the books from December 2024 listeners know I like in December Because of the holidays as a way to kind of unwind from the fall to read Thrillers I love Thrillers in particular techno Thrillers so I call December Thriller December and this December did not disappoint especially because I was dealing with these medical this injury I've been recovering from I was like The Thrillers were like I went two ways with this I read a bunch of Thrillers early on and then and these These are
these Books are all going to show up in the January list um because I was just finishing them now I turned to books that were like hardcore intellectual because I couldn't exercise so I was like well what can I do still I can still think so like I read a bunch of math stuff which we'll get into it the next book but I started December with a bunch of Thrillers all right here's the the first thriller I read was Brad meltzer's book midnight Ride so Brad is known he's a Boston based writer that's known for
writing the sort of narrative non-fiction books uh he got famous with Bringing Down the House which was about the MIT blackjack club that got made into the movie 21 but he also wrote the book The Social no The Accidental billionaires about Mark Zuckerberg which was in the book on which the movie The Social Network was based um so this was his style was he wrote These non-fiction books but he he Would write the non-fiction books in a novelistic style like with dialogue and interior thoughts he's like I kind he kind of just like guesses so
it's like this mix of like fiction and non-fiction anyways during the pandemic he serialized in a Boston newspaper a thriller it's like each week like another chapter it's kind of cool like Dickens used to do and then he collected into this book The Midnight Ride so this is like a National Treasure Style plotline it takes place in Boston it's it's a Harvard professor in a tough Professor it has to do with the colonial periods they're they're they're going to all these different historical in Boston to try to collect clues that are hidden in them one
of those type of one of those types of books and it was a lot of fun uh it's it doesn't end at the End of This Book it's part of a a longer Series so you're going to have to keep going and you know I thought it was well done I mean it's the style he was writing his non-fiction books in so with it's purely fiction he can just let it unfold in any crazy way he wants and so there's some cool Boston history in there some good villains I don't know I think it was
well done midnight ride then I went and read one of the few Michael kryon books that I I haven't yet read uh was Eaters of the Dead have you heard of this one no so I mean this was written in this period Post a drama strain but really before kryon was like a huge writer the drama to strain was a big deal but he wasn't a huge writer right away after that he was he was much more eclectic in his writing style he was still doing some kind of Cheaper Thrillers under n deers like under
fake names at at this period and he was also going all around stylistically uh he this is when he wrote like The Great Train Robbery he was doing Nonfiction he he wrote a book about Like A Memoir of his traveling he wrote a biography of Jasper John's and in that period that early experimental period he wrote the Eaters of the Dead which is it's a book about Vikings it's told it's written like you've discovered a historical document the whole conceit is like this is a document a written by someone who is part of this trip
with these Vikings and this is like in the year 600 or something and we've Translated this from the Arabic and you're reading a historical document right like that's the conceit he actually built it off of a real document that talked about the travel of someone from like I don't know some Court in the Middle East all the way towards Scandinavia and then once they actually get to Scandinavia it's basically B wolf so there's like grindle in there so then he it it becomes full out Fantastical so he kind of is in the style of like
a Real historical account that existed of traveling with Vikings back then that turns into ba wolf and they're fighting monsters whatever and it's you know it's interesting it's weird because it's like in the style of a translated 7th Century travel log he wrote weird stuff back then um so it was okay it was okay then following this theme the third Thriller I wrote was the adoma evolution a follow follow up the Michael Kryon breakout book did dra a strain written after Michael kryon died um by Daniel Wilson that's a pretty good thriller pretty good straightup
thriller uh man it got gets a little crazy you know I it makes me respect early kryon Moore the adron of strain had some like big big high concept ideas in it but it still felt very grounded like you're reading like a cool New Yorker piece this thing it gets pretty cated in outer Spa like it gets Pretty crazy like it's it's pretty high octane um the biggest issue I had with it is the not everything is well motivated there's this like mission to go investigate this thing uh and it's unclear like why these people
have to do it and why they have to like go through the woods to do it and why they can't just drop them like there there's there's some we just need these people to be in the woods and so action can take place and it doesn't Really there's some lack of motivation that kryon was fantastic at like everything is always motivated cryon book you completely believe why someone is doing what they're doing they play a little fast and loose with this here but it it gets wild and it was fun was good it was pretty
good the adoma evolution all right um then I read leaving the Thriller theme I read open that's Andre August's Memoir uh man tough to be a professional Athlete he grew up in a situation where his dad was like I'm going to make you into a tennis player and it wasn't necessarily like the the best childhood and then he builds these entourages where it's like very needy I I don't think I don't think I gu even realizes this where he'll He he'll just glom on to these people and then give these big speeches of like you
have to be in my life and my life means nothing without you and he creates these like Entourages of big trainers and stuff that just like follow him around and um it was interesting main issue is I'm dealing with some pain from my injury I'm recovering from and like August's whole life becomes pain after a while you know professional athlete who plays well into their 30s so I was like it's a little close to home and it was um what's his face who wrote the book right yeah he wrote it with the Ghost Rider yeah
yeah it was the guy who wrote Um well har bar yeah and um Prince Harry's yeah yeah Prince Harry's um yeah so it's a great good Ghost Rider because he kind of takes on his voice uh it was a good story though he really learned about the world of professional tennis I mean there the problem with all these Sports Memoirs is they sometimes have a hard time really capturing at that level what makes you so good and you know this this book had the issue of there's a lot of like just I was feeling It
today and so I beat PE Hamas and then other days like I just wasn't feeling it that day it they often make it seem like in these books that winning at this level is like a matter of just you're really extra commit and then you know you turn it on in like some sort of abstract sense and I'm much more interested like like they give hints that like no no no he it's like iess he had like the serve return that his dad had forced into him that like this was His advantage or his quickness
or like you know I really love when a a book gets to that what makes a great athlete great so if if you look at levels of the game by contrast John MC's book about tennis US Open that's much better at cap sharen like what made the tennis player good like what they did what the other player did what that cat and mouse game was like how this all worked like that was a much better book at capturing like what what makes you good at the sport a Lot of times these sport Memoirs don't get
there well you still have to be on the in that level right yeah and then it's amongst the level where it gets extinguished yeah it's like at that level like why yeah what did he have that even when he's like a little bit older and achy that like he could turn it on and beat so many of these other people I just looked it up he had eight Majors I didn't realize he had so many yeah yeah he was good he was good I mean The other problem the book it's not PR the book but
just about tennis like most of the time he's losing because most of the time you lose M you know so there's like these whole long sweetches you just lose lose lose lose because it's so minor the little Edge you require to win that you could just lose for a year yeah I guess in individual sports is you lose a lot like golf you lose a lot you just lose a lot yeah yeah like if you read a memoir of golf like you lose most of the Matches or tournaments whatever they're called um yeah so he
was he was good but yeah he won a bunch of he won a bunch of Majors he was very good he was not the sense I got is like the he's a great but like the super greats were more not organized but like their life was much more structured around he was more fast and loose right like Pete Sampras was more just regimented like his life was much more carefully built around what you need to do to do well at Tennis what do you need to do with like your body and your recovery and it
was very like locked in and augusty was sort of all over the place and there's a part in this book where he's he's taking meth did they talk about his hair yeah yeah his hair fell out early and then he would wear he was wearing wigs and stuff like that yeah yeah it's interesting um final book I read in December is called the future was Now by Chris nashawati this is from This genre of book that I like that there's a lot of similarity to it where it's a movie book where it'll be about a
movie or group of movies and it's kind of basically oral histories right like we're just going to like tell you a lot about like it's not I discovered there's a whole genre of these I've been reading where we're going to talk about this movie year or this particular movie and it's just like an oral history like here's what happened here's they collect Quotes from like a lot of other sources and pull it together but I find them comforting the future ones now is about the Sci-Fi movies from 1989 so there's like all of these like
big Sci-Fi movies came out in the same year this is like ET this is the year that Blade Runner came out it's the year that um Conan the Barbarian came out and Tron came out out and um there's all these these big sci-fi like the idea of the big sci-fi movie became a thing in this One year and so he kind of tells the stories of all these movies and how they came about or whatever so it's interesting you you learn you hear about the directors and what was happening and then this was sort of
the year that changed movies it was like oh we could these like big Sci-Fi movies can be like huge box office and that kind of helped kicked off that idea so it's great if you like movies and like these sort of oral history Style movie books uh this Was good I listened to this one instead of read it and finished it so it was good all right that's what I got those are my books from December and at the end of January I'll report what I read in January as I mentioned it's a lot more
mathy because I was s of punishing myself I don't know trying to compensate for lack of physical activity with more intellectual activity so more on that but let's just say uh I can tell you now about how Support Vector machines and machine learning are really using uh kernels to help do multi-dimensional dot products to help figure out optimal margin algorithms in multi-dimensions without the computational power I can talk to you about infinite Dimension calculus and why you want to use this on Vector representations of functions as a dual way of thinking about function calculus Etc
all stuff I learned after Thriller December to try to compensate for my Body not doing what I wanted to do you'll learn all about that in a few weeks but we'll be back next week with just a normal episode and tell then as always stay deep hey so if you like today's episode and in particular the part where I talked about weekly templates you might want to check out episode 316 where I give a much more detailed discussion of that particular productivity technique check it out I think you'll like It so what is this tool
we're going to talk about I call it the weekly template
