[Music] all right but let's do a deep dive uh so i wanted to talk about this topic of tips for doing hard things and what's going to be different about this deep dive versus past deep dives is i'm not giving my advice for doing hard things i actually want to relay some advice that i saw in an interesting video that a reader sent to me from 2020 of an author giving a talk about this topic and i recently wrote an essay about this talk and i publish it in my email newsletter which if you don't
get you probably should you can sign up for that at calnewport.com but i figured i just wrote that this morning before we started recording i said i want to talk about this on the show so i brought in some of my notes from it so here's the setup the video is from 2020 it's from the fantasy novelist brandon sanderson who wrote a bunch of best-selling series i've read some of his books i read name of the wind and whatever the second book was in that particular trilogy and it's really good and i'm actually now one
of the books i'm reading right now as i decided i wanted to read some ursula k gwen and i was going back and reading some of her earth c chronicles which has that's from the 60s but it has some ideas about the true names of elements being critical to the magical system that sanderson plays with anyways think big successful fantasy novelist and he gives a talk in 2020 that was titled we have it here the common lies writers tell you but this was not really what the talk was about the talk was about doing hard
things and sanderson comes right out and you know i'm going to appreciate this he comes right out up front and says he dislikes the fact that the media keeps telling young people that you can do anything you want to and you should follow your dreams and he said look that is way too simplistic that's not the way it works that's not going to help anyone to say that it's definitely a perspective you would hear for example in my book so good they can't ignore you and he says okay here is the more realistic claim i'm
quoting him here i can do hard things doing hard things has intrinsic value and they will make me a better person even if i end up failing he said that's the right way to talk about ambitious goals is there's value in doing hard things you're able to do hard things and you're going to get value out of it no matter what actually happens whether it makes you a famous novelist or not or whatever that dream happens to be and that this is better than telling people no of course you'll succeed you can do whatever you
want and then for the remainder of his talk he said so let's talk about doing hard things and he gave three tips three tips for the reality reality-based tips for dealing with hard things so i thought what i would do here is i want to go through these three tips i'll tell you what he said and then give a little bit of my own commentary on each so the first tip he gave was make better goals so when it comes to doing hard things he thinks we are not good at setting the right goal so
we don't help people set better goals so he mentioned for example that in an ap literature class in high school he won a minor contest for a story he wrote and decided oh my goal is to be a successful novelist and he said that was not a good goal it was way too long-term vague and grandiose how do you make progress on that particular goal in particular what are you supposed to do tomorrow to make progress towards that goal become a successful writer he said what you should do instead is make goals that you have
control over and what sanderson ended up doing was writing 13 manuscripts before he actually had a book he could sold and he said his goal should have been focused on producing a certain number of manuscripts as an act of practice and having a commitment with each manuscript to be more ambitious than the last to push and develop his skills because that's a goal he could make progress on i could write another manuscript i can for sure make this next manuscript be even more ambitious in this way this way or that way those are achievable goals
saying be a successful author that was too vague all right now my take on this is i write about something similar in my book deep work in that book deep work i talk about this methodology this business methodology called 4dx the four disciplines of execution and i i talk about how this methodology which was designed to help teams and companies do better gives us some insight into accomplishment when we apply it to individuals and one of the core ideas from that methodology is lead versus lag indicators a lag indicator is the the big goal you
eventually want to accomplish i want my next academic paper to get into a top-tier journal the problem with lag indicators according to 4dx is that it doesn't give you a clear action so they said instead you should focus on what they call lead indicators which are things you can track and do and control and they should be chosen such that if you do well with those lead indicators you're likely to have successful lag indicators but it gives you something concrete to focus on and so for that example the right lead indicator might be i'm going
to do 15 hours of deep work per week on the paper i'm writing well that i can track that creates friction i can push back against now i can actually make real changes in the intentional application of my energy cancel things move things wake up early progress can happen so i like sanderson's idea there and i've talked about variations of that all right his second tip learn how you work so sanderson when it comes to writing thinks it's a real disservice when he hears people say things like real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write
and that if you don't have that compulsion you should do anything else and only people who just can't help but write and that's all they can do should be people who should be writers he thinks that's nonsense he says writing is hard and it's hard work to figure out how to get yourself to do it he is a professional writer and i'm quoting him here i love writing but i have a hard time sitting down and writing so even for this very successful professional writer says writing is hard so his advice is when it comes
to doing hard things you have to put in a lot of effort to figure out what works for you to basically get yourself to do that type of effort and it could differ from person to person sanderson uses daily word count tracking in a spreadsheet it's like a game for him he likes that but he says other people thrive under the social pressure of a writer's group other people need a deadline now i talk about this a lot in my own work i talk a lot about how deep cognitively demanding efforts are unnatural it uses
a lot of energy more ancient parts of our brain cannot immediately see what benefit they're going to get from this energy what's the threat we're escaping where's the food or mate source that this thinking is going to give us right away and it doesn't have an answer for that you try to convince your brain for example that your 460 000 word epic fantasy novel is going to help you in mate selection your brain's not going to buy it it's going to see that you're talking a lot about wizards with names like gargamel who are passing
wind spells on elves and it's going to say this is not going to get us children this is not going to get us food why are we doing this and this is generally true when it comes to doing cogly demanding work it's unnatural so a lot of effort is required to trick yourself into doing it so i like what sanderson talked about i would also add scheduling philosophy and ritual that's why this plays such a big role get rid of any decision your mind has about when you're going to do this work instead you have
a philosophy it's always these days at these times or at the beginning of the week i put it on my calendar and it's right there in the same color as meetings i know i can't skip that time is protected i don't always feel like i want to go to a meeting but it's on my calendar i go i don't always feel like i want to write but it's there on my calendar that's what i'm doing next this is also why ritual matters writers will build out these spaces that seem over the top or go to
weird places like i wrote about in my my new yorker piece last summer about working from near home where riders will leave perfectly nice and good homes to go to weird eccentric locations to write just because they associate that transit they associate that new environment just with writing that's why peter benchley left his bucolic carriage home on east welling avenue there actually he's on curless avenue carlos avenue there in pennington new jersey to work in the back room of a furnace factory so steinbeck would balance a legal pad on a boat in sag harbor it's
why maya angelou would go to hotel rooms and take everything off the walls so there was zero distraction and wright laying down on the bed propped up on an arm doing this so often that she built up deep calluses on that arm that she was supporting herself because it's hard to do this work you gotta figure out how to get your mind into there so scheduling philosophies and rituals especially over the top rituals play a big role and i'll say when it comes to writing there's a quote i i've said a few times has bounced
around a few times which is basically what some people call writer's block by some people i mean amateurs is actually just the physiological feeling of what it writing the writing experience is that feeling of i don't know what to say i don't wanna i i don't feel inspired i don't know what to say i'm stuck it's like great now you've started writing that's what it feels like all right sanderson's third tip break it down maybe it's most prosaic tip out of the three but basically if you have a big goal break it into manageable pieces
so you have something to go after he noted that the book he was writing at that time was longer than the entire hunger games series put together so he's saying that's such a big hairy epic goal because he'll write 400 000 word plus books which is crazy by comparison my books are usually 70 to 90 000. so it's like five deep works uh he said you gotta break that down that can't be your goal i'm writing this book it's no no i'm trying to finish the chapter cycle that establishes the back story for the wizard
gargamel that passes the win spells on the elves or whatever it is i obviously know a lot about fantasy books so i think that's good work um i think the key part about this final tip is that he says in figuring out what those goals are that's where all the that's where all the uh magic happens is that we don't give people enough training especially in creative fields to figure out what those smaller goals are he said this is a particular problem in writing where if you talk to a professional writer and say look i
really want to do what you do what's your advice they'll just look at you and say well you gotta write is that's too vague no no what you need to tell me is it's gonna take about six manuscripts before you get your chops down and those manuscripts have to be successfully harder in this way and here is the level type and source of feedback you need on each to make sure that you're gaining particular skills you do one on your own you do one with two with a writing group for the fourth maybe you want
to hire an editor a day of their time to like come back and give you harsher the fifth you want to submit and get notes from the the publisher that you submit to we need that type of detailed roadmap it's non-trivial and it's not obvious you don't just tell people if you want to write write if you want to be a musician play music you want to be an artist paint no these are big hairy goals that you need to break down and it's not obvious how they break down the thing i talk about a
lot on this show in particular is that if you're going to get this information you have to go get it and by what i mean by that is you have to go to people who know what they're doing and don't just say what's your advice because they'll just say write they'll just say paint say i want to hear your story how did you get there what was the first thing then what was the next thing oh oh sanderson you wrote 13 manuscripts oh i didn't realize that so you mean i can't just do national novel
writing month and have the name of the win be the book that comes out of it oh okay now i get that i don't like that that's reality but that's really okay i have to write 13 manuscripts how long is that going to take you know maybe i'm going to need much more time on this and i think you get the reality not what you want to be true you get the reality of what actually matters for the endeavor you want to do you get that reality from people who came before not by asking for
advice but asking for their story you look at that and you find out what really matters i talked about this if you want to see a more extensive conversation about this when i was on the tim ferriss podcast earlier in whatever this was january i guess i was on his podcast we get into how i got started in writing and they go into detail the story about how through connections with my family i got in touch with an agent a literary agent who i promised i'm not going to try to sell you a book and
i had that agent walk me through step by step what exactly would a 20 year old need to do to get a book deal with a major publisher and she walked me through here's what matters here's what doesn't here's the process here's the steps it was not at all what i would have guessed and it's not at all what most young people have met who say i want to write a book do but it was the reality and it took me two years but i followed that plan and sold that book and wrote that book
as a senior and everything else unfolded from there so that's my advice there is yes you need to break down your goals the more manageable goals it's not always obvious how to do that ask the experts but not for their advice but for their story and you can extract from their story the reality of what matters all right so sanderson uh thank you for giving that talk excuse me for my my wizard elf jokes uh obviously you're very good at what you do and i am of great awe but that's good advice don't just follow
your dreams focus on doing hard things for the the meaning of doing hard things and treat doing hard things like a complicated endeavor that requires a lot of nuanced nuanced feedback [Music]
