This Idea Will Make You Unstoppable. (How To Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals) | Cal Newport

So today I want to talk about a common feature that comes up when you study the lives of people who have embraced depth that is they are living deep lives and this common feature is they often are notably good at something valuable right so if you can be a a 10x coder or throw a baseball that's hard to hit or write in a way that is compulsively readable your options for cultivating a remarkable existence expand Significantly right because it's rewarding to be good at something humans crave Mastery it can provide you Financial Independence which gives

you a lot of control over how you live and work you can shape The rhythms of your life in unique and interesting ways and Mastery tends to open up interesting varieties and interesting opportunities of the type that makes your life itself more interesting like let me be specific About it because I was just talking to him the other day let's consider my friend the writer Ryan holiday uh he got very good at pragmatic non-fiction writing in fact he basically over the last decade or so revolutionized how the genre of pragmatic non-fiction can function in the

internet age so I went down to uh Texas last spring to visit him and he has built this really interesting life so him and his wife owned this really Cool bookstore the painted porch in a quaint town in Texas that's about 30 miles outside of Austin uh he works in an office suite that's up above this coolly decorated bookstore and his his team works up there he records his podcast next door they bought the building next door it has a generic storefront and then behind it is like this beautiful studio and behind that is this

space where he has his editors and graphics people are all working they Have this back porch behind uh I went for a nice walk while I was there you can just walk from this building down to the river and there's like this long path you can walk on people come from uh all over to sort of just hang out at this bookstore there's a steady stream of fascinating writers athletes and actors that make the pilgrim pilgrimage there to hang out with Ryan and record in his studio and when he wants to more quiet he Retreats

right outside of town To his 50 acre property where there's a cattle and a pond and it's quiet and you can go for a long walk without ever leaving land that you actually own on top of that Ryan you know his life has a lot of interesting Adventures he goes and hangs out with NFL teams and just got back from Australia and hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger not long ago the point here I'm using Ryan as a case study the point here is that getting notably good at something Valuable is a powerful tool for crafting

a deep life so let's talk a little bit today about how people get good at things that are valuable uh I have three rules I want to share all right so rule one is something I informally call the 10year rule and to make it a little bit more clear what I'm talking about I actually want to play a little bit of tape here this is from uh the uh rewatchables podcast Bill Simmons is rewatchables podcast one of my Favorites uh they're talking here in this clip about Quinton Tarantino uh his rise in the 90s and

Pulp Fiction it's also going to be a little bit about Bill itself let's listen to it and then I'm going to analyze it for you way up and it felt like in 94 the ceiling just came off it's true I that's definitely how it felt and how it was narrativized if you listen to Tarantino talk about it he's basically spent eight years in obscurity trying to get stuff Right and so that was a great story to tell in magazines about this guy who came out of nowhere to take over movies forever but that isn't really

what happened I mean he tried to get this 60 millimeter movie off the ground for years and years he shooting it on the weekends just like Kevin Smith Shaw clerks self-funding trying to write his own ticket in that way and it took a really long time and it it took him convincing people to give him money like He talks about the story about getting like Richard gladstein to give him money from live entertainment for Reservoir Dogs like he worked really hard for a long time dead broke thinking he was going to fail and so there's

this tension in the storytelling where you're like wow you could do it too but you also have to for a decade and maybe not succeed by the way I completely identify it because like when I went to Espin in 2001 I had the [ __ ] and then it was like Oh yeah you were at the Forefront of when the internet and Sport and I was like yeah I from 93 to 2001 and I was on my own and nobody read anything I did when you read the the stuff about how long it took him

to get even to to get meetings with people you know and you're just like this guy's just going to work all right so that was uh Bill Simmons talking with Chris Ryan and Sean fennessy on the were watcha bles all right here's what was important about That clip why it caught my attention when I first heard it Tarantino took about a decade to get the where he was going the myth as Chris made clear In that clip the myth is 1993 this guy comes out of nowhere resar dogs Pulp Fiction boom but the reality was

almost a decade of him out there working trying to make uh they're filming Reservoir Dogs on 16 mimer they're trying to make it work they're trying to get funding he was selling Some scripts he was doing anything he could and then Bill Simmons spoke up and said yeah that was the same for me people remember him in Grantland that ESPN like oh Bill Simmons came out of nowhere and sort of revolutionize Sports coverage and using podcast and blogging for doing so and he's like well wait a second I was at this for eight years before

that before things really started to click so 10 years more or less uh is what it took tantino 10 Years more or less is what it took Bill Simmons to actually start to make a mark in what they were working on this rule which I call the 10year rule give or take a couple years in either direction is pretty Ironclad when you look at people who do really cool things I mean this is true of my own life when did my first book come out 2006 when was my first hit book 2016 right 10 years

Steve Martin I recently reread his professional Memoir Born standing up I wrote a whole thing about it for my most recent book slow productivity which I cut but I did all the math for the section that I cut about Steve Martin and it took about a decade after he quit his comedy writing job full-time to do standup to really begin to uh explode in the standup world now sometimes you will find people who uh make their move faster but often times these stories what you'll realize is they're doing basically 10 years Worth of work but

they're just like combining it like a madman into a shorter period of Time Michael kon's a great example of this there's only a three-year gap between the publication of his first book in 1966 and his first hit book The adona Strain which came out in 1969 but during that three-year period he published five books before he got to the adron train they were all published under his Puda name Jong Lang they were Like pop boiler spy Adventure Thrillers uh so that's like 10 years worth of writing he just collapsed like a madman into three years

but he was doing 10 years worth of work and honestly there was another three years after that before his next book under his own name came out so you can really think about it as really like a six or seven year period before he was regularly writing books under his own name all right so the conclusion here for this rule is That getting good at something that uh is unambiguously valuable it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort in some sense that's the bad news you're not going to be able to

have Ryan holiday's life next year but in other ways that's the good news because most people are not willing to stick with something that long so when you're thinking about the odds of success in one of these interesting Fields there's two odds to consider the odds of just anyone who Starts down this path what are their odds of succeeding versus what are the odds of someone who sticks with this seriously for a decade what are their odds of succeeding so maybe for example one in a thousand people who uh set out the become a writer

and write novels actually becomes like a sustainable professional novelist right next month or maybe November I guess is National novel writing month and all over the country people will sort of try to kick Off their writing's careers and maybe it's like a one, of them are going to actually succeed but what are the odds if you say let's just consider people who give it a decade of concerted effort what are the odds that someone in that position succeeds in professional writing I bet it's like one and three right so your odds radically change if you're

willing to stick with something over a longer period of time so you could see that as bad news because it Takes more time than you might hope to get good at something or you see it as good news because that's a barrier that's going to squeeze out 99% of people who might be competing for those same limited slots 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 all right rule number two you must relentlessly expand explore and exploit I'm trying to be alliterative here so I'll have to explain what I mean by each of these words all right so understand expand I I want you to think about a common Observation if you go to a gym like a normal gym there's usually a crowd of

guys and they're like upper 40s uh and 50s who are just cycling from machine to machine and they're sort of going through the motions with like a moderate amount of weight on just like knocking out their reps and then moving on uh to the next machines are like checking things off of a list if you talk to these guys almost always they're there because their doctors said look we're Looking at these these numbers from your blood panels like you got to exercise because you know we worry about your heart very common like they're cardiologists mid-40s

you got to go exercise so they're kind of doing like look I'm here I'm exercising I'm doing lots of machines the thing here of course is uh what they're doing is not going to make them super strong it's not can make it much stronger at all uh we know what's Involved for like muscle growth or strength growing and you have to like make a concerted effort to exhaust muscles it's difficult it's uncomfortable um but you have to do that if you want to get stronger these guys aren't getting stronger it's not bad they're doing it

but they're just sort of going through the motions this applies to when we think about the 10 years it takes to get good at something if you spend those 10 years Doing the equivalent of the middle-aged guys on the machines in the gym nothing's going to happen right so if you're just sort of I just kind of have my writing my writing time every morning and I get my ages in and you're sort of just doing this uh year after year you're not guaranteed to get much better you're not guaranteed to actually increase your odds

what you actually have to do during those 10 years for them to actually be useful is you need To deliberately improve your skills that's what I mean by expand you have to expand your actual uh abilities and this requires that you uh look to relentlessly stretch yourself Beyond where you're comfortable on the areas you need to get better at right just like if you want to make that muscle stronger you can't just sit down and and do the butterfly machine with 25 lbs to move on to the next thing you have to do like I

was doing the other day and I Hate but you just have to do is you have to get on an incline bench and get those 45b dumbbells and just do set after set and it really kind of stinks but like you're putting the real weight on the real muscles you got to do the same thing with whatever it is that you're trying to get better at I mean look I'll go back to our example before of Ryan holiday right uh 2014 he publishes obstacle is the way this kicks off What's going to be his career

uh where he finally succeeds as writing about stoicism for a big audience but that book doesn't do great out of the gates people forget that book doesn't hit a bestseller list until five years after it comes out after he's already sort of Off to the Races so he's right away sold his next book uh ego is the enemy he was like I'm going to give this a try and I remember talking to him during this point he was very Systematic about how do I make this better like what is it that's where can I improve

myself where where are the points where I have actual ground I can make up that's going to make this book better than the last one he was stretching like where I want to not just be working towards this goal of being a a professional non-fiction writer I need to be working at getting better there's a sort of relentlessness there uh kryon was the same way he relentlessly wrote These Thriller novels under pseudonyms this was like a lower barrier of entry and it allowed him to practice the different elements of writing like a really high quality

uh Thriller type novel I I own a lot of these they re-released them not long ago I own a lot of these and they're not like a later kryon book right they're much simpler you can see he's working they'll have technology in it you can see he's still working with how do you bring Technology into these books they have uh some Preposterous characters that are that are cardboard that he gets better at making the characters a little bit more interesting you can see there's plotting pacing elements that he starts to get better at even with

his first book The adona Strain he wrote that book and his editor the the the famed you know editor Robert gotle who who before that ran the New Yorker uh basically said to him like we got to Rewrite this from scratch and so he went through this whole training process where he wrote The adona Strain with a lot more interiority and psychological realism and he said look you're not uh you're not Tolstoy we got to rewrite this book it's not about the psychological life of these scientists who were fighting this virus uh it's about the

fact like this virus is getting through the seals or I guess it's a bacteria and everyone's going to Die and the clock is ticking rewrite this like a New Yorker piece like you're uh you know Richard Preston reporting on the Ebola outbreak in West in Virginia later on write this like you're reporting on something that happened that was exciting had to rewrite that book from scratch this is all deliberately expanding skills so yeah it takes 10 years but it has to be 10 years of getting better all right explore that was the second piece of

our alliterative Trio here explore the other thing you notice when you study people who go through this period of becoming good at something notably good is that they're constantly looking around for opportunities within the general direction that they're pursuing there's like this Paradox to this you need to stay focused on one thing for a long time but within this one thing you have to be incredibly agile looking around where is my traction point and usually This means finding places to actually like produce and ship something that other people are going to see or care about

or pay you for these are the traction points you can actually move if you don't have traction you can't move forward and you see this a lot it's like kryon trying with these Thriller novels he also wrote a lot of non-fiction books and he was trying to figure out where his Niche was as a writer he was trying lots of things Ryan holiday tried lots Of things his first book was about marketing the same year that obstacles to way came out he tried uh publishing digital only book called growth hacker marketing he was thinking am

I a marketer is that my space is the stoicism thing going to work he was trying uh lots of things my similar in my career is I'm let me try this book let me try that let me write for this place it's all Within Walls of like I want to be a writer but you're exploring You have to keep looking for uh opportunities within uh the field that you're in that brings us to the third element from rule two which is exploit the people who really make their move when their exploration finds something that has

traction they mash the accelerator oh this is working let's get after it right so I'm going to follow these same examples uh ego is the enemy holidays second book does better there's traction Here he's like okay we're doing the stoicism thing traction Point number two he starts a daily newsletter the daily stoic based off of the book he put out called the daily stoic that model takes off now he's Off to the Races right he's like oh I see daily newsletters he now has three daily dad daily stoic and one called like daily philosophy and

he ramped up like these this format for stoicism the story based format built around a single principle let's go and He's you know uh seven books since just boom boom boom let's go right build the audience find a thing to work let's go for it for kryon it was really Terminal Man his followup to adonus strain he kind of gets he's getting he's like I think this might be it he experiments with his third and fourth book are out of the Techno Thriller genre he wrot The Great Train Robbery and Eaters of the Dead these

are books that like no one Associates with kryon um after that it's All Michael kryon techno Thriller one book every year every other year I'm going to war with Clancy and Grisham you know let's go and then he just mashed that accelerator and that's where he was going after then right so when you discover what's working you're like great we have to give that a huge amount of effort we got to really push that so it's not just taking 10 years it's what you're doing during those 10 years well that's a lot to handle so

that brings us To rule number three you must abandon distractions like the core of this podcast of course is cultivating a deep life in a distracting world right it's in in this world with largely digital distractions in both work and our life outside of work how do we navigate and build full human lives that's what I care about I'm a computer scientist I'm a digital theorist I care about that angle it plays a big role here you cannot Succeed with all of the expanding the exploration and the exploitation for 10 years within a narrow field

if you're looking at your phone all the time if you're looking at highly engaging sort of addictive social platform or content platforms all the time it is just stealing the brain Cycles you need to actually build the cool thing to do the thing that's going to allow you to actually craft the cool life right we're talking Tik Tok we're talking Instagram Um we're talking YouTube recommendation wandering Wander from recommendation to recommendation we're talking Twitter now there's a couple forces at play here that makes these particularly pernicious the first one is the obvious one you spend

more time looking at these things that's time you could have been spending on your Pursuit it just steals time and we know that to be true this was actually and and I I've made this point I want to keep preaching this point the The point I had in my book digital minimalism which was uh a little bit countercultural at the time and remains countercultural today I said hey when we're thinking about digital destraction in our personal lives like what's happening on our phones don't get so sidetracked by the what of what people are looking at

what matters is to how long all of the interest in this topic was no what matters and it continues to Be this way today what matters is what's distracting people it's their the content is the it's bad content it's the wrong people putting out content it's misinformation it's making you mad it's making you crazy it's all about the content is what's wrong and I said forget that this is not what I'm picking up from the average person the average person is not on Twitter yelling at people the average person is upset by how long they're

looking at these things That's what matters and it matters because it takes away time from other things and in particular none of these people I talked about spend a lot of time looking on their phones because they're building the stuff that made their life cool right Ryan doesn't look at social media they have this team that like puts stuff out on all these channels I don't think he knows how any of that stuff actually works I don't think he cares I Don't use social media right I don't have enough cycles for that to to to

lay claim to my life but there's a less obvious harm as well if you have a lot of these highly addictive digital distractions in your life it's not just that the content distracts you is that the tools trick the people producing things into thinking the tools are productive things to do so if you're in especially in some sort of creative field these tools have This Insidious way of convincing you that spending time on them is actually part of what you need to be doing to build up your really good skill to get an audience to

get noticed right uh it tricks you you say look I'm not just being distracted I'm on here like posting and engaging because this is a key part of me being someone doing something creative that is you just being tricked by these companies it's just a great way To get a lot more of your attention to convince you that that one or two hours per day you spend working on these platforms they want you to think that's productive because it's fun it's a simulation of actual hard creative work it's like going to the Pirates of the

Caribbean ride at Disneyland instead of going to the actual Caribbean it kind of feels like you've gone to uh the Bahamas but in reality you're in a blackedout warehouse in Orlando right that's what happens when creators get sucked into the social media World it tricks you into thinking you're doing work and it's the best most fun work you've ever done because it's not too it doesn't require much of you to concentrate it's interesting it's pressing all these buttons it's low friction it's high energy and you can check things off I've been maximizing my account and

I'm doing these these Twitter threads that people told me I Need to do where the very last uh tweet in the thread says thanks for listening if you like these type of things please subscribe and I took some course online that said this is how I'm going to build up an audience and I'm going to do these stupid articles on medium they're like 400 words and I'm convinced that it feels good because it's easy and you can check it off and it exposes you to all these distractions it's the the the robotic Pirates are Funny

but it's not the the same as being on the beach on you know a luthra so you got to be careful especially if you're trying to do something interesting that you got to hold these like digital distractions at Bay to use them all the time you're not being Savvy you're clocking into a factory that's owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk you're clocking into the factory to do your shift and they're not sending you a Paycheck all right so those are my three rules to get good at something uh notably good at something that can

help you unlock the Deep life you have to uh follow the 10year rule it's going to take a while but use that to your advantage during that time you need to expand explore and exploit and that is going to require that you significantly reform your relationship with digital distractions here's the good news about that last piece by the way if you're Thinking to yourself man I'm G to have a really hard time not look I do all the stuff on my phone I'm going to have a really hard time not doing this you know what

makes that a lot easier to be getting after something you care about the people who are locked in doing something like I'm starting to get some traction here I'm exploring uh I'm I'm shipping things I can feel myself getting better I'm being deliberate about it they have a pretty easy time Not spending all day on Instagram because they have something else capturing their attention that seems even more rewarding so that final rule won't be as hard as you think once you actually get going so there you go Jesse I like it good 10 year rule

that means we have six more years till this podcast gets good we're about four and a half years in we're getting there yeah we getting there though we do a lot of podcast so Maybe we'll have a bit of the Michael cron effect where we're kind of compressing work so maybe like five or six years extend the lease on the HQ I know now we're getting new desks I mean we'll have to extend the lease uh we are we are it's very exciting I'm buying new desks for the maker lab portion of the HQ also

where we do our editing Bay big substantial big wood desks so yeah we got to now we got to make this succeed if this doesn't succeed now we're going To be stuck with a lot of desks yeah all right so we got some cool questions that just cover a lot of these topics time management career like a lot of stuff just around trying to like succeed cool stuff uh but first here for one of our sponsors so I want to talk about a relatively new sponsor that I'm pretty excited about and that is our friends

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young shrimp black and salmon like it's good Food Kitchen time is to a minimum it's about 2 minutes I mean I have a terrible microwave Jesse so it takes me a little bit more we have like a small I don't know why we have a small microwave really yeah for for for whatever reason I think we just bought on Amazon when one broke and it was like oh this much Smaller than we thought I mean our microwave is basically I think it's like there's like a a squirrel like rubbing sticks together in there to create

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visiting expressvpn.com That's expressvpn.com and you will get an extra 3 months free but only when you go to expressvpn.com deep all right Jesse let's do some questions who do we have first first question is from Pete I've watched your time management video a 100 times on YouTube for whatever reason I can't make it stick it just feels like I have this insal backlog of stuff that is forever in my inbox planning Beyond a single day Feels impossible why can't I succeed with your time management system be funny if we looked up our time management video

and it had like 105 views it's just all Pete and there's like 20 comments All from Pete that would be depressing actually our time man video is pretty popular yeah yeah it's very popular yeah it's a great video yeah all right well Pete I appreciate the question uh a couple Things here um okay so first of all let me start philosophically then we'll get tactically okay philosophically when you say you have a hard time planning Beyond a single day I'm not quite sure what this means right so my system does not necessarily have you building

detailed plans for multi days in the future uh you'll build a plan for the current day you'll time block plan make the most of the time you have available that day you might have a Weekly plan but a weekly plan doesn't probably does not mean you're making detailed plans for your week it's you're checking in on your week what days are open what days aren't do I need to move anything um your weekly plan is where you might be you're looking at your quarterly goals you might say you know what I want to make time

this week to make progress on some bigger non-urgent goal I have and maybe you schedule some time on your calendar for that uh but This idea that you're doing a lot of detailed planning to the future is not necessarily something that you need to be doing with with my system the thing that I think might be affecting you here is that you don't have uh a good capture board when you say stuff is forever in your inbox I'm suspecting what you might be trying to do is just answer all and do all the stuff in

your inbox like once I handle the thing in this message I take it out of my inbox in most Knowledge work jobs that's going to be impossible it's going to be impossible to keep up your inbox is just going to grow longer and longer so I want you to get your obligations out of your inbox and into some sort of capture system and the one I recommend is using these sort of uh role based status board so you should have a different status uh board for each of your professional roles so if you have multiple

hats you wear in your job have a separate board for each I use Trello but you could do this in another tool you can also do this in a shared document you could do this with a stack index cards in your desk if you wanted to I'm sort of tool agnostic here for each role you have uh a column or a stack for the different uh statuses of things you need to do so this could be like backlog like non- urgent but stuff I might need to get to you can have a a stack here

that is working on this week you can you can and should have a stack That says waiting to hear back it's a critical one um I sent a message to this person I'm waiting to hear back when I hear back here's what I I have to do next you need that to exist somewhere should exist in you're waiting to hear back stack if you have regular meetings with people at your organization have a stack for things to discuss at the next meeting with that person I'm the director of undergraduate studies for Georgetown computer science uh

this year I have one of those stacks for my associate Duss for our weekly meetings and I have a stack for our department chair that we have monthly meetings so I put stuff on there to remember to discuss it at our next meeting you want to get everything into these boards all right so you don't have to do the things in your inbox but you do got to process them out of your inbox into one of these status base boards now you don't have the problem of I can't keep my inboxes Overflowing I I'll never

get to everything in my inbox when people say I'm just going to have to declare you know email bankruptcy say oh you don't have a capture system your capture system is your inbox H and the thing is so many things that show up if you look at your status boards especially these like backlog or things to get to one day those things grow really wrong right you don't empty these Boards out like the stuff that you actually need to be Working on is relatively small compared to the hu the full amount of stuff that comes

in so if you're just storing your task in your inbox that thing is going to grow it's going to continue to grow so you got to get into these status boards now because they're role based so you have a different board for each different role this allows you now to avoid higher level context shifts you can say okay here's one of my roles is like I'm in charge of the hiring Committee at my company and I have a board that just has the tasks for that and that's piled by their statuses when I'm working on

hiring committee stuff I just see hiring committee stuff my mindset is in hiring I've given myself two and a half hours to work on H hiring committee stuff all I'm doing is looking at the task on this board and my mind is in it and you will find after like 10 or 15 minutes you're able to make progress through these Things much faster and then maybe after lunch you're like I'm working on my other role as like a copywriter and now I go to that board and my mind is only focused on doing copyrigh or

stuff and it could be a long deep work session or I could be churning through tasks but they're all related to the same role that makes it much easier if you instead just have all this stuff mixed together in your inbox and it's an archive that's growing longer And it's mixing urgent stuff with non-urgent stuff and backlog stuff with stuff that maybe you're waiting to hear back from someone and you're trying to go message by message you're shifting from Roll to roll task by task and your brain just says enough and you get exhausted the

final advantage of having these task boards is that over time you'd appreciate stuff out of there you stuff you put onto these like backlogs I often also have a stat called two Process where I don't I I don't even know how to turn this into a task yet so let me just put this here as a stake in the ground so I don't forget it but it you know it might just say something pretty vague like new website like this was come up in a meeting I don't even know what this means that I Vol

you know but let me just not forget this I'll put it over here over time you're going to take stuff off this you're like you know what this has sat here forever no one Has brought it up again I'm taking this off all right this thing over here you know what I'm going to do I'm going to write the person involved like look I know we talked about this I really don't have cycles for this right now it doesn't seem too urgent unless and this is a key terminology unless I hear otherwise from you I'm

just going to put this on hold for now and when people hear unless I hear otherwise they say great I don't have to Reply and so you got to take these things off right so it's the other thing it allows you to sort of over time clear stuff out of your obligation in a really systematic way this doesn't happen when everything just exists in your inbox it just grows and it grows and then you feel like you have to declare email bankruptcy and just delete everything but the problem is in that stack of 1,600 emails

is probably like 200 that you probably do need to keep Track of and you probably still need uh to have that information somewhere so it's a really stressful situation so get your inbox empty not by doing everything but by getting things into these role-based status fors it really makes makes a big difference I I mean I really I really have to push people towards that it really makes a big difference all right what do we got next next question is from Matthew I'm an Electrical engineer and I'm able to work from home a lot the

phone foyer method is effective but I still enjoy staying up to date on things like my substack YouTube feed and other distraction machines I'm looking for ways to effectively slow down the consumption of this content especially using RSS aggregators to facilitate the way content is delivered all right well Matthew i t to care more about the how you consume content than the when right Uh so so a couple things I would suggest here let's tackle these distractions category by category I like newsletters I think email newsletters are great uh you can effectively create a custom

magazine for yourself of just writers you like just writing about stuff you care about that's the way I think about newsletters you need to see of yourself now like okay um these aren't email correspondents I am an editor and these Are my writers and they're sending me these pieces that I'm going to put together into an awesome issue of a magazine that I'm then going to sit down at some point and read so collect all of your substacks or other email newsletters you subscribe to collect them in a folder or a gmail label and then

semi-regularly you want to get these out of your inbox into another form to sort of read all at once again used to magazine metaphor one of the Cool Tools I lik it's out there right now is called newsletters the Kindle yeah you can Google that and you can find it it makes it easy for you to take these email newsletters and to get them onto your Kindle now what you can do is like have a set time all right what I do is on like Friday mornings or something uh I go through my folders I

send all the interesting looking emails to my Kindle and I go to a coffee shop and I take an Hour and I have some coffee and I get a cinnamon roll and I'm reading these newsletters with zero distraction on my Kindle and it's great and it's like this awesome magazine that I wish existed in the 90s and now I have it and it takes me an hour to read it's not some I'm not engaging with these newsletters exactly as they arrive and just seeing it as like part of like my flow of my work it's

a magazine and I don't read magazines in the middle of my workday And I'm not going to read these newsletters in the middle of my workday when it comes to something like YouTube I think video is the future of independent generated media I've said this before I'm also very suspicious of uh algorithmic recommendations and the idea of using YouTube as a distraction machine so let's be really careful about how we use YouTube have the channels you like treat them Like shows like you would again 20 years ago uh like shows you like watching right in

like 2006 there would be shows you liked watching and you would too them right I whatever it is I like to watch the office on NBC uh I I want to watch um The Amazing Race I'm trying to think of shows that were around there there was a show in 2005 or six that was called Kids Town on Fox where it was there's like a town it Was like a kind of like a old west town and they put a bunch of kids in it and said okay you guys got to just like Run This

Town by yourself and it was like the kids had to just run the town and uh I guess there's camera people there uh but it was like okay it's a great idea but anyways you would too your shows um PBS shows whatever um and then like you would have times you sit down to watch like yeah we're going to make dinner on Thursday night we're going to watch Kids Town an amazing race right that's the way you should think about YouTube and I would use bookmarks even right I mean I would even like bookmark the

channels I like so you bookmark my channel um you bookmark the like hardcore kidst toown fans for 20 years been trying to bring that show back whatever right you bookmark these things and in fact you should learn like I kind of know when the new episodes come out like you know Cal episodes come out on Mondays or Whatever and then you can have like appointment viewing like on your iPad instead of watching TV I'm going to sit down and watch like the latest episode of XYZ or I'm going to load the YouTube app on my

TV and I'm going to watch it on my TV while I eat dinner treat YouTube like you would tv in 2006 that's fine what you shouldn't do is say in the middle of the workday I'm going to open up YouTube and I'm just going to rock and roll down those recommendation Letters right because you start with kidst toown clips and then you know 20 minutes later you're either in unboxing videos or you're like watching People's videos about like we should imprison kids in towns and they're like trying to make a case for like we basically

should you know whatever so that's the way I would suggest doing YouTube so you just have to have care about how you do these things and my book digital minimalism I Said look if it comes to a social platform if there's a specific value you get out of it and there are specific values you can get have rules around it I talked about artists for example uh reducing their Instagram feeds to just other visual artists and on Friday nights they sit down with like a glass of wine and they look at the art they posted

and they get inspiration and that's valuable and that's the only time they mess around with that app the whole Week uh another important use for YouTube for some people is exposure to positive portrayals of a goal they're pursuing so you're getting really into uh rowing like okay I want to follow some of these rowing feeds because it's like seeing the workouts and the success of these uh rowers like motivates me that's great like make that your feed have a set time you look at it 10 minutes before my workout I'd look at these videos so

uh you got to understand The value you're getting out of these things put smart walls around it that preserves the value and gets rid of everything else and they're no longer distraction machines they're just one of uh other sources of sort of like valuable interesting information like that's how you have to navigate the world of information and if you time block your workday then you really don't have to worry about this stuff intruding on your workday Because unless you put Down a Time block for you know mess around on the on the internet you're not

going to do it you know uh if you really want to end your day early if you need to and put aside 90 to mess around the internet but time blocking will keep this out of your workday but put walls around it put fences around it all right who do we got next questions from gako as a ux designer I find find it to be cognitively demanding to empathize with and persuade others is Preparing for and attending reviews about my designs deep work yeah there's nothing about deep work that demands it be solitary it's one

of the big misconceptions I tried to dispel it in the book deep work I call it the Whiteboard effect I talked about the advantages of doing deep work with other people uh it's not by definition a solitary activity the things that define it if we go back to the original Definition cognitively demanding and you're doing it with no distraction so it requires you to concentrate and you're not context switching if you're context switching you're looking at email you're looking at your phone back it's not deep work it could be cognitively demanding but it's not deep

work if if you're giving it your full attention but it's filling out forms that's not cognitively demanding that's also not deep work so there's Nothing about being in front of a an audience for example that makes it not deep work so yes if you're you're pitching to an audience and it's requiring you to empathize and try to understand like what people are saying and integrate that information real time to try to adjust your pitch or or update your ideas on the Fly that's deep work right I consider for example if I'm teaching or lecturing that's

deep work I'm in front of an audience I'm trying To synthesize complicated information right I see that as being deep work yesterday I spoke on a panel with a bunch of uh digital legal experts like that's deep work I you know I had to be thinking about what they were saying I had to adjust my stuff to fit into the context I had to respond to the questions we're in a room with a 100 people that's as much of deep work as when I'm sitting alone with a computer so I think uh it is good

to think about Anything that's cognitively demanding that's getting your full Focus like that is deep work and deep work uh is important so yeah what you're doing is deep work even when there's other people around all right what do we got we got from Lindsay my son has just entered High School my goal is to help him think through the kind of Lifestyle he would want in the future rather than simply encourage him toward arbitrary college and career goals I want to ensure that His academic and career choices are intentional and align with his personal

values in entrance all right so I'm going to give you book recommendations right now uh with your son in high school I'm going to recommend that you both take a look at my book how to become a high school Superstar uh this follows a collection of high school students from the early 2000s who got accepted to good colleges but had interesting non-stressed High School careers the terminology I use in the book is I call them relaxed Superstars and I deconstruct how did they do it right in particular there's a chapter in here on what I

call interestingness how is a high school student to become an interesting person and why this is like a much more important goal than becoming um a highly quote unquote accomplished person why this is a more important goal than having the most crowded possible Resume that there is a huge power to becoming interesting and this is something that you can systematically cultivate and I give ideas for how to do that so in high school that's what I would look at this this relaxed Superstar model it's a great preparation for what's going to come next once you're

in college I would then recommend that your son read my book so good they can't ignore you and this is going to change the way that they think About uh the career world and it's going to push them away from this idea of like you got to choose the right job right now and there is a right job and it's about matching that job to you it's about following your passion or finding the job that you were meant to do and if you get that wrong you'll be miserable and it changes that and says no

no no no uh your working life is a part of your bigger life and you cultivate it to be good for you and interesting and Resonant and how do you cultivate it you build up what I call career Capital which you build up by becoming good at things that are valuable and as you become good at things that are valuable you get more control over your career and you can shape this into something cool whatever cool means to you and it can mean a lot of different things so interestingness in high school so you avoid

getting caught in the Trap of just more is better professionalizing Yourself at two young of an age and then career Capital training in college those two things together a your son is going to enjoy and find life interesting in high school he's going to enjoy and find life interesting in college not going to be in this grinding mindset of sacrifice now for some unspecified future later he's also going to be uh able to craft a really cool life in college and Beyond right so I care a lot about those issues I wrote those two books

uh I recommend Them all right what do we have Jesse we have our Corner slow productivity Corner let's hear that theme music [Music] so every episode we like to have one question that connects to my most recent book slow productivity the Lost start of a complishment without burnout if you have not read the book you should it's sort of like a cheat sheet for so many of the ideas we talk about on this show you can find slow productivity anywhere Books are sold including an audio version which I recorded so you can hear the dulit

tones of Cal Newport uh the slow productivity theme music interesting fact plays non-stop during the audio book six hours of just that theme music we recorded it with a live band for so for six hours we had a live band there's like a guy on a guitar doing arpeggios and someone doing I'm going demand that for my next book all right Enough nonsense what's the actual slow productivity Corner question this week hi it's from Jonathan I've been getting close to launching a new business I've been reading s productivity and applying your lessons to get rid

of every extraneous project and minimize time suck when possible but I still find it difficult to give each Endeavor the intention it deserves to grow how do I find time well Jonathan what you got to do here is like we sometimes use this Phrase on the show uh you have to face the productivity dragon now face the productivity dragon is deep question speak for confronting the reality of how long things you want to do take and how much time you actually have we often write fairy tales where uh we can just go get the proverbial

gold and we don't realize there's an actual Dragon there so be really clear like what needs to be done for this business to launch successfully how hard is it to Do those things how much time and energy is required you might find the answer is this is going to take a lot of time there's more here than I thought there might be some of these things are going to be sort of Ambiguously long like I have to find a partner to do this and what I'm going to recommend from a slow productivity perspective is to

say that's cool it's going to take longer right the slow productivity mindset is is if you're Willing to relentlessly stick to something you can make its footprint in your life reasonable and sustainable you can trust what we call the compounding interest of accomplishment that if I stick with let me do this thing then this thing and this going to take me a month and this is the time I have free this might take me a couple weeks and it might be four months to get this done as long as you don't stop and you keep

making Deliberate progress intentional progress not just going through the motions but intentional progress it's okay to say this might take two years I'm going to aggregate up the again the compound interest of accomplishment I'm going to aggregate up these steps and this is going to lead to this and lead to this and it might be two years later and now I'm ready to pull the trigger and it's not at all risky or weird everything's in place all the pieces are here I have My first clients we've done these test things we have a fall back

option uh and if you do this right when you flip the switch to like switch over to the new company it's not even stressful a slow productivity mindset says it's okay if the stuff takes time in fact many accomplishments that you see that are very impressive took people a really long amount of time I I do these stories again and again in slow productivity the book hey you know this Famous thing from history Newton's you know principia right uh Galileo figuring out the the a pendulum motion it took decades they worked on it regularly they

didn't give up but they weren't burning the midnight oil they weren't going in some sort of frenzy they just let the compound interest of accomplishment acrew and over time they produce these things which are awesome and we remember them for that and we have no idea how long it Took the issue is our culture right now especially the internet culture and a lot of this again is shaped by this Fool's Gold that the social media and influencer Community puts out there to try to get more engagement this culture gives you this idea that inspiration plus

the ability the willingness to just like get after it and be Fred for a few days is like how stuff happens that you're like I'm going to make this YouTube channel work and You just sort of like get after it and record these cool things crazy you're like Mr Beast for a week and then it just works that like I have these pithy things I'm sending on Twitter and then I'm just like a famous influencer right that's not how most useful stuff happens it takes time so slow productivity is is about that's fine that's the

slow piece of it be fine life is long life is long enjoy the day right you want to enjoy Each day and you want over the years to have done stuff that's pretty cool so maybe this is just a matter Jonathan of just being okay once you face the productivity dragon and like it's going to take a lot longer than I thought but that's not a bad thing not a bad thing because I'm making progress on it every day and but each of these days is sustainable so just got to slow down let's hear that

music One More Time Jesse [Music] all right do we have a call this week we do oh let's hear this hey Cal my name is braah and I'm from Maryland so I have a a non-fiction book idea that I'm working on so far I've only written one chapter that captures the the core of the idea I also don't have social media or a Blog what would you recommend as way to test the demand or to see if it's useful to people before actually writing the full Thing thanks all right well I got two pieces of

advice here one is just tactical bookwriting advice and then the second is specific to your question about social media blogs and uh writing careers my tactical piece of advice stop writing the book that's not how non-fiction works you do not write the book in advance having written the book in advance is a big NE negative hit against you in non-fiction you sign an Agent based on the potential of the idea and uh the potential of VI as a writer the agent helps you write a proposal which you then sell to a Publishing House the publishing

house then gives you an advance for the book and then you go write it the editors want to be involved in shaping the ideas your agent's going to want to be involved in and shaping your ideas do not try to get around this system everyone has like well I'm going To get around it by writing my book and I'm going to do this and that I'm going to make an in run around the system the system works everyone's desperate for good stuff to publish right so no one is trying to hold you out of this

system but and it's it's a also a really good checkpoint right like you don't have to do that much work to approach an agent but your idea plus you gets a uh really good early screening right you got to convince an agent and if an agent is Convinced then they have to convince a publisher um so you got to follow the real process I wrote a blog post about this long time ago sort of I think just like two books into my publishing career I wrote this blog post at Cal newport.com you can find it

with Google googlecal newport.com and I think it's called like how to get a non-fiction book deal and I I go through like here is how this world Works don't write your own rules follow the real rules of the World if you're afraid to follow the real Ru uh rules of the world because you think you're going to get rejected early on that's useful feedback good how do we make sure you don't get rejected right it gives you feedback right away of how do I actually make this idea ready to go all right all right so

now going to the role of social media and blogs here's something to remember there has been a non-fiction publishing industry uh in this country For a long time you know I'm reading a thorough biography right now for example mid 19th century he is you know selling Walden to tickner right like there's companies they they were based in Boston like people this was big business for at least 200 years okay social media blogs as like a widespread used thing is about 12 years old so just ask yourself this question how did all of the tens of

thousands of non-fiction writers who existed before 12 years ago how are they Able to uh come up with ideas and sell books and just you there's your answer right I I I do not buy the premise that in the last 12 years the way we we did this for uh 150 years now no longer works and the only way to sell a non-fiction book is to have an online platform or to the the test ideas out on on uh platforms uh people have been doing this for a very long time and what you're looking for

if we want to be more specific and this is in My blog post so find it uh if you're a non-fiction and it's pragmatic non-fiction not journalistic non-fiction but like here's a book about an idea book about advice like this is where um non-journalist authors can write it's got to be an idea that people are going to feel like they have to read and you have to be the right person to write it you get those two things together and you can prove that you're a not bad writer you don't have to be a good

Writer but you have to be a not bad writer it can't be embarrassing then you've got a shot of selling that book you don't need to test run this on social media you don't need to have a Blog necessarily you just have to be thinking like I read a lot I know the industry I feel strongly about this idea I think it is an idea that is hitting my gut as that people will see that on a shelf and say I have to read it and I'm the right person to write about it like That's

what it takes you know that's how I came up with like my first books I didn't have a platform or this or that it was just I I think about ideas and and what works and what doesn't I trust my gut I see what's happening in the market so don't get distracted you want to be a writer don't get distracted by the platform right now we talked about this back in the Deep dive where I said the the the meanest trick that these online distraction Platforms ever played was figuring out how to convince potential creators

that these platforms were necessary right it's like tricking a a professional endurance athlete into thinking that the the key to their success is going to involve smoking two packs of cigarettes a day it's actively making them worse at what they do and that is what happens is what these platforms do so well they want you they want to steal this energy you have Towards doing something really meaningful like writing a book that might affect thousands of people they want to steal that energy into you doing uh this these sort of ephemeral fake activities that they've

created for you to go into their warehouse and the the the the seem like you're being productive then which they can just monetize it's like a shame it's like a tragedy don't let them steal your energy Polish your idea find an idea that you're the right person to write if you're not a not bad writer become a not bad writer which means you have to go out there and find places where you can write you have to find magazines online magazines newsletters whatever it is that people let you write for you got to be good

enough writer like all this is hard work that's fine we talked about the 10e role during the Deep dive that's fine it took me uh you know it took me 10 years to like write my first really good book that's fine be willing to do the work get the idea be the right one to do it learn how to write pitch the right way to agents don't write your own path that's how this all works don't let Instagram or Tik Tok or you know Elon musk's Twitter uh steal that energy from you they have enough

money I was looking at the richest person's uh the top 10 in the World list earlier today musk is number one right now Zuckerberg is like Number five like they don't they have enough money don't you don't need to monetize is your time on their behalf right now you need to focus on your idea learning how to write figuring out the idea where you're the right person to write it okay so go read that post uh cart.com and how to get a non-fiction book deal if you Google something like that you'll find it uh and

then get after it and let those guys have their their stock their Stock's high enough They don't need your help so with all the literary agents you know do they get pitched a lot by potential they do but not enough it's I mean it's it's to me it's just the oddest thing that if you want to be a writer like why not figure out how does the world of writing work yeah everyone wants to write their own story to that their own answer to that question they want the world I mean it's usually the same

thing they want it to be a combination of like having the Right tools and like writing every day like the Romantic elements and I having a a beautiful idea notebook and I write each morning and but but I spend 10 minutes each morning instagramming a photo of my Earth and wear mug next to my notebook and like and just it's going to I'm just going to have this Brilliance eventually that it's going to like shock the world and no the world is like you got to convince an agent what do the agents like what do

they care About if you don't know the answer to that question like don't start yet like that is going to be your first step is selling the agent right I'm con so many people try to go around the agents right to the Publishers because they're worried it's too much of approximate rejection it's a really quick rejection with an agent it's like here's my query letter here's here's my idea do you want to find out more and it's often like no that's not quite right they don't want That rejection it's like maybe I'll just go and

send like a fully written non-fiction book which is do not do straight to a publisher and why because I think it feels like you know maybe you never know like it feels somehow like the rejection won't be so approximate don't write your own story learn how the world works right uh when you learn how the world works it's very it's accessible it might be hard right I mean it might take years Uh to get it done to figure it out right but learn how it works and go for it the other problem that happens and

I see this a lot with writers is they forever wheel spin especially like the potential novelist it's just manuscript after manuscript that they just get stuck and they're like I'm writing and I'm editing and like N Get The Wheels on the track sooner like here's this thing I'm pitching an agent they're telling me it's not right I'm going to do something Else and pitch that agent again like be in the game as early as you can be in the game find the easiest way in too like that's another way to do this like I got

in the book writing uh with student advice guides because it was the only thing I could sell as a 21y oldh and they were easy to write right we were just man those were short chapters we were just with my my agent uh and I were talking about my first book which came out in 2005 I Think and we're we're updating a few like making some corrections and uh you know there's some stuff in 2005 that doesn't exist in 2012 2 so we we just had to go through but I'm like man these chapters are

like you know a page and a half when you print them out but like that was like a very low friction way for me in the writing like I could not have written so good they can't ignore you uh when I was 21 you know but I was able I wrote it when I was 29 and by Then I was ready I'd written three books and done a bunch of magazine writing I was like I was ready to do it so like find low friction ways in you know it's like Michael kryon he didn't start

with Jurassic Park he started with these Jong Ling uh pop boiler Thrillers which like back then we don't have this industry today but back then because there's no phones right there's these huge industries of just there's paperbacks everywhere because that's like your Entertainment so there like these like kind of bad paperback you buy him in the drugstore you buy him at the supermarket you'd read them in three days um today this equivalent would probably be writing online or something like this right but he was just like let me get in there and start figuring out

how to actually like make writing work you know so I I I do have a soap box I think writing is a great thing but you got to you got to embrace the reality of how That world works and do not let the social media companies take that energy from you I hate that they steal this from creative potential creatives it's such a target for them and because it's a ripe Target because if you're if you're a Creator it is such like an appealing thing to be like I could be doing this stuff on this

platform and it feels productive and I'm checking things off and there's like a lottery feel that like something could go viral and it's All cycles that could be going to creating something new that matters just being stolen and aifi into the stock price of like a small number of these giant conglomerates all right anyways good call got me on my soap box I want to do a case study now this is where people send in accounts of how they put the ideas we talk about on this show and in my books into practice in their

own life if you have a case study of your own Send it to Jesse Cal newport.com today's case study comes from Connor Connor said I played in the Australian football league for 9 years during this time I discovered How to Become a Straight A Student and deep work these books helped me complete my degree in Commerce while playing I began to think about the life I wanted to live I couldn't see myself wearing a suit and being inside all day I wanted to be outside and began to appreciate my love Of turf I used my

career capital a plane to build relationships with the turf managers this allowed me to start my own own Lawn and Garden business called blakeley's backyards unexpectedly my turf knowledge has also led to another development following my AFL career I started playing Cricket at a community level with friends this escalated to where I'm now heading to the UK to play a season there playing Cricket in England will allow me to further my Career capital in the sports turf world I will take back the intricacies of the English soil growing conditions and other gardening techniques to Australia

when I'm done so Connor there a fantastic uh example of two career related ideas we talk about on here lifestyle Centric planning and career Capital Theory these go together real tightly so lifestyle Centric planning says you need to work backwards from an Image of your ideal lifestyle as opposed to trying to choose the perfect job so Connor here knows uh I want to be outside I don't want to go to an office that that the rhythm of that type of day feels wrong for me I want to be outside I want that type of autonomy

right so now he's working backward from a lifestyle Vision there are many many different ways that could get there he's really maximized his chances of actually finding something that gives him a Lifestyle that's enjoyable this is much different than just choosing from scratch your perfect job which may or may not work out he then deployed career Capital Theory which uh is a fancy term for what we talked about back in the Deep dive earlier in this show you want control over what your your life is like get good at something people care about the better

you are the more control you have and so he realized Turf is something I could get good at he Already had career capital in the sense that he came out of a sports league so he sort of have had an entrance to this world he's not a random person uh and he's looking ahead to like his Cricket career in England is going to give him even more career Capital he's imagining how he can leverage this idea of like I know about Turf I just spent a year in England I'm a professional athlete like that's going

to come together um and really probably help what he's doing Here with this Turf business which itself is a perfect for his lifestyle Vision right so lifestyle Centric planning plus queer Capital Theory this is how people build deep lives much more so than the dominant ideas of uh passion Theory or grand goal Theory I figure out some perfect thing for me to do and if I succeed I'll be happy and if I don't I won't so Connor I appreciate uh I appreciate that case study Australian football is no joke by The way he was writing

that from a UK Pub by the way oh man and he like provided some explanation I emailed with him about it what was he drinking pint pint of a pint of Ale yeah I like that we still that's what we are missing you know we talked before about you we're above a bar here shout out to moto cat uh we talked about having like a bucket system but no I think what we need is a uh English pub Style Beer Engine right because think about it in the English pubs they often have the casks in

the cellar and the Beer Engine they use just like pressure and uh hand energy to like pump up from whatever so like We Could Have A Beer Engine I feel like from some cast that they keep for us down at the actual bar down there yeah all right I think we'd get more guests on the show if we did that yeah if there was a beer engine inside the studio that would be a great show idea Because we you probably get people if the interview goes on long enough and they're pumping that beer yeah know

we get some interesting truths out of people after a while yeah like Rogan Style style yeah let's get people long Rogan style interviews with a Beer Engine in the room would get like a I don't know it' be like Elon must smoking marijuana yeah except for we'd have just like a drunk Oliver burkeman who I'm interviewing soon That's just why I was thinking about that all right so we got a final segment I want to get to something cool I found on the internet that I'm going to react to but first I want to talk

about another one of our sponsors in particular I want to talk about Shopify when you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing right like febles by Mr Beast or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley seemingly like mandatory weaken uniform Supplier Cod axi uh you think about the products and the brands Etc but what's often overlooked is the businesses behind the businesses that make the selling simple like what is it that helps these famous Brands sell like the actual mechanics of selling their products and for millions of businesses the answer to that question is Shopify nobody does

selling better than Shopify uh it's the home of the number One checkout on the planet and the Not So secret secret which is their shop pay feature boost conversions up to 50% people do not abandon their Shopify shopping carts which means you will sell more I mean it's what people use when they want to sell things online of course they also have Point of Sales you they have all sorts of other products but like when you're thinking about e-commerce you have to think about Shopify uh hopefully our friend Zach who Made the vbl lccp hats

which we debuted last week and I think we a big hit he emailed us back as well and he said that he could make it smaller if we want yeah I mean I thought it looked cool but but anyways uh if he sets up a shop if we were selling those hats which maybe we should actually I am G to ask him I want that hat with it smaller I'm gonna talk to Zach okay I'm gonna get that designed perfect Zach's the man but if we're going to sell those hats don't not even A second

thought Shopify it's going to be a uh the same software that's behind you know Cotopaxi between th Thrive Cosmetics me Feast same all that same software but so easy for us to set up and and just going to we're the conversions are going to be uh off the charts all the the sort of EX Soviet era bureaucrats that are going to be like this reminds me of my days as the uh commissar of agricultural that's not a Zach thing by the way that's our acronym Just to be clear it's the CCP at the end of

our acronym um so anyways businesses that sell more sell on Shopify so upgrade your business and get the same checkout used by kotap paxi and Mr Beast sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com deep and you need to type that in all lowercase go to shopify.com deep to upgrade your selling today that's shopify.com sdeep we also want to talk about our Long time friends at element uh elements electrolyte drink mix is something I use every day um I am often getting dehydrated I do a lot of speaking I podcast I do

interviews I teach I I'm on panels like I'm constantly uh you lose a lot of moisture speaking and it's DC which means like six months out of the year um you essentially live in a sauna uh I exercise a lot element is how I rehydrate and I I what I do actually is like depending on how dehydrated I am I Control how much of the drink mix package I put into my water bottle I usually use like a full nine bottle uh in the morning if I'm dehydrated element the afternoon after hard day of work

element after this podcast element right now we're using the lime that's what I have we kind of do one box at a time um which I like the watermelon is good too any so the drink mix is great because it it has the electrolyte balance you need um but no junk no sugar like no weird Coloring agents like you just know you can drink this and it's nothing bad it's just getting you what you need so I'm a big fan of element um I wanted to mention however they have this new product coming out which

you should keep your eyes on element sparkling which delivers the same zero sugar electrolyte formulation you already know and trust but in a bold 16 o oun can of sparkling water so you can just grab it out of the fridge already cold which I think is Really cold cool now the sparkling is not uh been widely released yet but if you are already element Insider you can purchase uh element sparkling right now so there's a good offer here you can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase you do at drink element.com deep

that's drink element LM nt.com and you'll get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase and if you're an element Insider you have first access to element sparkling a bold 16 oun can of Sparkling electrolyte water all right Jesse let's get to our final segment I like to react to things that I discover on the Internet or that people send in to my interesting atal newport.com email address during this final segment uh this is something cool that someone sent it was CS Lewis's advice to a young writer I don't know what this is from

it's from some book I suppose he wrote um but I have it up on the screen here so if you are uh Watching instead of just listening you you'll see it here on the screen but I'm going to read it all right uh here's what he says it's very hard to give any general advice about writing here's my attempt number one turn off the radio number two read all the good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines and number three always write and read with the ear not the ey you should hear every sentence

you write as if it were being read aloud or spoken if It does not sound nice try again let's stop here before proceeding because I want to talk about those first three pieces of advice because not only is he dead on but the advice is super relevant to our current digital moment as well turn off the radio what is our modern equivalent of that turn off your phone in both cases what he's saying is you do not want a source of context switching distraction you need every Ounce your brain can offer to successfully write and

I actually went down this Rabbit Hole I have a New Yorker piece right now in editing uh whereas part of the piece I wrote about the neural uh the Neuroscience of writing tldr it uses like all of your brain is really hard so don't have distractions all right number two he says read all the book good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines yeah that uh is True today as well just replace magazines with like anything on your phone you want to be a good writer you got to read good writers don't be sitting

watching the sort of hyper palatable distractions on your phone the the stuff coming on social media like this is not going to make you a better writer because it's not good writing back then it was magazines today it's going to be your phone number three uh write and read with the ear not the ey This is so critical this is a big Secret of My Success and I wanted to point this out because people don't talk about it enough the internal rhythms of writing which is entirely like an out loud thing how sentence Rhythm builds

how word sounds correspond with other word sounds good professional writers care a lot about this and I don't think we talk about this enough my big competitive Advantage uh that allowed me to get into writing earlier maybe than other people Is that I did comedy writing uh in college I was the editor of The Humor Magazine at Dartmouth the The Jackal Lander and I I talked about this I think on maybe one of my recent Tim Ferris episode uh visits but the thing about comedy writing is it's all sound in Rhythm you you you have

to take the same rhythms a standup comedian would have and you're you're translating the words but for comedy writing to work it's that you have to bring the writer along and Set them up and then boom catch them from offu and so when you comedy write you obsess about how the sentences sound inside your actual inner narrative it turns out that's what you need to do to write well and so I sort of had a little bit of an advantage because comedy writing forces the matter really it it just works not at all you can

write okay without caring about Rhythm and sound you can't write comedy writing at all without it by the time I got to like New Yorker writing it's all Rhythm and sound and commas and semicolons and how does this unfold and how does this word sound next to that word and this word with this word doesn't sound right anyways we don't emphasize that enough when we talk about writing uh but it's music and you have to think about that way so great advice all right another piece of advice from CS Lewis write about what really interests

you whether it was real things or Imaginary things and nothing else notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer because you have nothing to write about yeah I think this is still true we gave this advice to the aspiring writer earlier in this show um you got to have something to say that people care about and you got to be the right person to say it which means it's got to be something you care about too interesting point where he says whether it's real or Imaginary you

know CS Lewis was a serious professor at Oxford and he was writing uh Science Fiction and Fantasy I think it's really cool that that you know this is what resonated his books pre Narnia books were science fiction early 20th century science fiction uh and then his you know he writes the Narnia books which are fantasy so I think it's really cool that these uh dowy Oxford Dawn were like I'm going to write Fantasy I'm going to write science fiction like that's what spoke to him uh I talk about here's another advertisement for my book slow

productivity I talk about the group that Lewis along with his fellow Oxford Professor JRR tolken formed called the inkling and I get into how they having this group of writers like help them figure out find their voice and develop their careers and I talk about how you should do Something similar in your own life if you're working on something cool um so check out my book all right he also says take great pains to be clear remember that though you start by knowing what you mean the reader doesn't and a single ill chosen word may

lead them to him to a total misunderstanding I'm all the way on board with this uh I think about this all the time in my writing how can I not only make this clear but like perfectly clear and you have to be careful about Um red herrings and McGuffin as well right so what that means is uh you introduce something that doesn't pay off you can't do that in non-fiction writing you can't like if if I'm if I kind of start talking about this it either has to be a reason I talked about it that

I conclude right there or I have to have a call back later it can't just be a non secador I can't just sit there like a red hering or a McGuffin I can't start going this way in the chapter and then Shift gears without ever saying why the reader's mind tries to assemble as they read everything you're saying into a pattern that makes sense so when there's pieces that don't fit quite together it is like alarm Bells go off and there is a intuitive discomfort that the reader develops towards what they're writing so that's why

like non-fiction writers we obsess about how all the pieces fit together so that you don't notice anything when you Read and so you probably underappreciate a piece of non-fiction writing that just explains something and it flows like oh I know more about that that was good it seems easy and it's not because every piece had the fit with no red herrings or macguffins or hanging everything comes together same thing with screenplays everyone thinks they can write a screenplay because they know movies like I could write people talking and yes you could write a Scene that

could be in a movie if you like movies you could write a scene that could be in a movie you could come up with a plot idea that you can make a movie about but can you write an hour and a half worth of scenes that all click together all the characters get developed properly there's nothing to introduce that doesn't pay off there's no too much dece uh exmachina like everything kind of fits and flows together no loose strings hanging Nothing that catches the attention as being out of place by the viewer can you do

90 minutes of a movie that has none of that well that's really hard that's what's hard so we convince ourselves screenwriting is easy because you say I could see myself writing that scene but you can't can't do 20 of those scenes in a row without any of that friction coming in there so I I think this is great advice all right let's see what else he has here uh CS Lewis also says When you give up uh a bit of work don't throw it away put it in a drawer it may come in useful later

much of my best work or what I think is my best is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier all right I'm on board with that when I'm working on a book for example I use scrier uh I have more words in my cut folders than I have in the final things that I show up in the book I save everything I cut and I often am able to repurpose that later in the Book or in later books so I agree with that save um what you're going to save this one's interesting I

don't know if I fully agree with this today but it's interesting he says don't use a typewriter the noise will destroy your sense of Rhythm which still needs years of training here's how I read that your tools matter and having a tool that you feel good about working with is what's important uh because in the end they're all just writing going on paper the Speed differentials don't matter too much what matters is like the tool that's going to produce the best work don't get caught up with like conveniences being all that important because writing look

writing takes a long amount of time the final step of getting words onto the page whether you're handwriting or typewriting or using a very fancy word processor like the difference between those two things is like an Epsilon on what's actually Required to write so hey what works for you feel okay with that so CS Lewis hand wrote and he felt like the type writer like yeah I guess it's faster but I don't like it the rhythms off why would I use a tool that's going to make me a worse writer uh George R Martin who

wrote you know obviously the Game of Thrones books still uses one of the original versions of uh word star one of the original word processors he has an old computer that Runs the MS DOS operating system and he runs word star on MS DOS and saves his manuscript files to floppy discs yes Microsoft Word is more convenient yes scrier is more convenient that's what works for him and that's way more important so I think that's how I would read that tool is uh that rule rather is the tool that works for you is what matters

not trying to have the best possible tool whatever that means and finally his last piece of advice uh Timeless be sure you know the meaning or meanings of every word you use yeah don't try to be smarter than you are don't think that fancy vocabulary is going to uh impress people the smartest people are often the clearest right they let their ideas shine they don't try to uh Gussy up the language so anyways that's a cool piece of advice the link is in the show notes if you want to check it out for yourself um

but some things are Timeless and I think CS Louis Nailed it everything there I would recommend even today to an aspiring writer all right that's all the time we have for today's episode thank you for listening we'll be back next week with another normal episode of the show it's the fall so we're back in Action again vacations are over so we'll see you then and until next time as always stay deep hey so if you liked our discussion today about how to get good at things that matter so that you can take better Control of

your life I think you will also like episode 308 which is called the power of The Quiet Mind it gives you some extra things to think about when it comes to how you produce stuff that matters check it out and yet just like with digital knowledge work we once again have the sinking feeling that something is off that our lives are somehow not quite right in a world in which we're looking at our phone so much we can't say exactly why it's a problem But people just feel uneasy when they survey the crowds around them

and see everyone's face looking down