[Music] i'm cal newport and this is deep questions episode 162. well i'm here in the deepwork hq and i am a little bit nervous as we are trying for just the second time to do a full listeners call episode live that is we're going to go from beginning to end with my intrepid producer jesse playing the calls live as we get to them they will be the first time i hear the calls when they when they're actually played a video of the whole episode uncut should be available so we will have to see how we can mess this up jesse do you think we're going to actually make it through this time we're going to do our best i think we'll be okay yeah it is a bit of a rube goldberg type setup required to actually run a live show but uh hey it gives us something to do all right so i think we have five good calls uh jesse why don't you start us off what is our first call about our first call is from kobe he's uh looking to be a hedge fund manager but he a big part of his job is convincing people like selling his work but he also wants to schedule his time more where he's like focusing on himself so he has a question about that so we'll see what he has to say that sounds good hey kyle my name is kobi aponso first off i want to say thank you for all the work you've been doing it's been extremely powerful and impactful in my life so i appreciate you for it and i encourage you to keep going my question is i have a stock investing program and the goal of my program is to really educate beginners on how to use leverage stock investing to increase their income potential and i'm finding that i'm getting to a point where i'm i feel like i have to convince people to do something that would really benefit their lives and normally it's people approaching me um and you know part of the problem is that maybe i'm not doing as good of a job as connecting their problem to my solution that might be part of it but the other side is that i'm spending all this time trying to convince people to join the program when i could be sharpening my sword and maybe even increasing my income potential right learning never stops so as i'm sure you know that as well right so is it better for me to continue trying to find a way to get to these customers in a better way or do i just sharpen my sword focus on myself and then have them um follow me afterwards i do have a goal of becoming a hedge fund manager and i'm working towards that so that might be a route that i want to take so i just wanted to know your thoughts on that well kobe i am going to lean towards your instinct here of focusing more on yourself and the your performance and being so good that you can't be ignored that's almost always going to be the right approach in these situations selling is important right you do have to sell if you're in any type of industry where you need to get clients but if you're spending too much time selling especially in something like this i would be worried that that is a signal that's telling you that you need to go back to the the woodshed or back to the sword sharpening stone so if what you're trying to sell here is stock lever stock investing first of all become richer i mean this is the irony of what you're selling what's going to make this appealing to people to buy is going to be when you get to the situation where you don't need them to buy it and i know that sounds kind of circular but if you're if you're saying there's all the success you can have financially by doing leveraged stock buying then people need to see that you're having a lot of success doing it which will lower the pressure for you to do the selling because you'll be doing fine financially anyways that's going to add more authenticity to what you're selling because you're producing something you believe in you don't you're not trying to push a lot of different students into it you'll gravitate more students towards you in in that situation and then more generally what i would say is keep in mind the concept from my book so good they can't ignore you which is the law of financial viability and this was an idea that i borrowed from the entrepreneur derek sivers who said money and people's willingness to give it to you is a good neutral indicator of value so how do you know for example if your course is good or not how easily are people giving you money to take it and if it's a real struggle think about that as being a real honest return that they're it's not right it's not there yet i mean maybe they're picking up like why is kobe not more successful himself or there's something about the quality of the course and it's a really important signal so that's what i would say sharpen your sword to use your terminology get better at what you're doing hone your system have demonstrable results keep polishing and improving that course put the word out there i mean you want people to know what's there but don't push super hard to sell it what you want to see is that relative signal of easier to get the people i'm getting more people are coming with less effort i'm hitting a mark that i used to have to really push to before and that'll be your signal that this is getting better that the course is getting to a place that maybe is worth having even more energy pushed into all right so thanks for that question kobe all right jesse what do we have on the docket next our next question is from pablo he's got a two-part question his first is he wants your thoughts on how to persuade his girlfriend to minimize social media oh man and he should read your news article about uh the twitter in january and then part two is he actually has a question about his bodybuilding and if that counts as high quality leisure josie how many uh girlfriends do you think are out there in the world right now who um curse my name because their nerd boyfriend is like pushing some cal newport idea and they finally just say enough enough i don't want to hear about i don't hear about coming forward i think i have been cursed in you know apartment buildings and living rooms more now that your uh your today show appearance so all those that's right there's a big audience there that's right well yeah now that i'm world famous from being on the today show it's only going to make this problem worse now that i wear suit jackets to work i'm going to start wearing a suit jacket on air for for this podcast i think i think you should too i think it's just about showing people that we're pros a suit jacket and tie i never used my ties in my closet so maybe it would be good excuse to put them on yeah we could do like the lex ridman thing like wear the same suit every time all right here's pablo hi kyle first and foremost thank you for drastically improving my quality of life i wanted to ask two questions to start i want to know your thoughts on how i can harmoniously persuade my girlfriend into minimizing her social media use and lastly would you count pain inducing bodybuilding workouts as high quality leisure greetings from santa cruz bolivia all right pablo uh so for the first question minimizing social media use how to encourage someone else in your life to do that it's dangerous waters dangerous waters when you're trying to tell someone else about an improvement you think they should make regardless of what the topic is i think anyone who's been in a relationship knows this experience it's usually not going to go well so you have to be very careful there i usually recommend that what people do is be the change they want to see in the world where you can replace world with spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend or kids or what have you be the change you want to see so first of all live your life in the way that you think is valuable use the phone for your method don't have your phone with you don't have social media accounts or the accounts you do use you use on a schedule on a desktop for very specific purposes let the other person in your life see what that brings you the concentration the peace the the lack of anxiety let them see that then been clear when the topic comes up why and how you're doing that oh well i'm a digital minimalist this is what digital minimalism is and this is i've built my life around using this in this way and not that and i've been getting a lot of benefits about it and so they know what's going on they know why you're doing it and how you're doing it at that point then you have to let the seed germinate on its own and you have to let the other person see what you're doing know that it's an option know the philosophy behind it and make that step of you know kobe i think i want to do this do you want to do it with me do you want to help me but you can't push it that hard now if you want to be you know nudging you can try to do a new year thing so i talked about in a recent episode that this january when this episode is coming out january 2022 i've announced on my newsletter and analog january challenge which was built just around not using twitter for the month so you might do something like that built around new year's resolutions and say hey do you want to do this with me i think it'd be fun so you could try that but for the most part be the change you want to see in others and let the others come to you the the most extreme alternative that i've heard is on one of my events i was doing on the digital minimalism tour i met a parent who was worried about their teenage kids social media use so they took their devices on a long car trip so they had no nothing to look at or listen to and then put digital minimalism audiobook on in the car and basically basically force them to listen to digital minimalism so that would be the opposite extreme and those kids went on to invent tick-tock so that backfired second question uh bodybuilding as a high quality leisure activity jesse i'm going to throw this to you you know a lot about that culture and maybe not bodybuilding but exercise et cetera et cetera that's a really intense complicated high quality leisure activity right 100 yeah i mean even looking at i was a big fan of arnold's biography and some of the stuff that he's put out and he said you know when he was training like when he was in his 20s and stuff like going in there was like doing deep work for he'd do five hours a day he broke it up in the morning in the afternoon but i would think 100 that would count yeah no that sounds good to me i i just watched that biography on i think it was on netflix for ronnie coleman who was the six or seven time mr universe uh a huge guy now his whole body's broken down he can't walk and he's in constant pain because it's lifting such heavy weights but that looked pretty deep to me look that look that looked pretty to me so yeah pablo i think that's great also i like that it's it's uh different so you're using different parts of your brain than like your normal work or your other types of life and i think there's probably a clarity that comes to that i mean look when people see me they're like this is a guy who knows about bodybuilding so they're often coming to me for advice when you look at me you think super athlete you think steroids you think that's a guy who knows his way around the gym so i'm not surprised you asked me ask me this question but yeah that's deep go for it actually i'm going to ask you another question to his part too so a lot of these bodybuilders a lot of people who lift and whatnot they what's your view on them having earphones in and listening and stuff while they're lifting because a lot like arnold talks about like really thinking about the muscle and like feeling it and feeling it grow and stuff but you could be distracted if you have other things in your ears so i was just wondering to know your thoughts on that uh you know i've read about that somewhere i mean you might know more about it but it seems to be true that because of the the mind muscle connection that really concentrating on the muscle that you're trying to um exhaust or contract or do the reps on makes a difference so i mean is this the case you would you would know this just more than me is this the case for serious weight lifters that the concentration on the muscle aspect of what they do is key i think so 100 arnold is totally believes in that and that's was i think a big because he was so disciplined he could focus on that and i think that helped him when he was training and i said it in my personal life by just not wearing headphones anymore i mean sometimes you're at the gym that might be music on whatnot you can't really help that but yeah i don't know i've kind of always thought about what your thoughts on that were i suspect i'm just thinking about this out loud but i suspect doing that type of training so you're doing muscle training but you're giving full concentration to the contraction because it helps is probably fantastic general deep work calisthenics like in other words if you're doing that on a regular basis as part of a fitness routine you're gonna be able to concentrate on a book better you're gonna be able to concentrate when you're walking and trying to hold a thought in your head better so so it's a good point jesse because i think pablo actually i'm going to go beyond now and say not only does that count as high quality leisure doing serious weight training might actually be a fantastic way of improving your general your general ability to concentrate and so and you have all the other advantages that's different than the other type of thinking you do so you get that relaxation and anxiety reduction you know look i'm picking up my fitness this january as well i don't like the dark i don't like the dark uh weather and so i'll see if that has a difference but it's a good point yeah yeah i think that's a good tool in the deep work toolkit all right what do we got uh next question we have a question about time blocking tips on your tips on time blocking and how he can factor that into taking some time off of work and writing his dissertation hi cal my name is carson long time fan first time caller i've taken some time away from work to finish my dissertation after a long hiatus and i'm using time blocking my question is this do you have any tips for like when you have a tendency to not do what you schedule yourself to do i basically have three buckets related to the dissertation work research writing and revision and uh often you know when it's time to write do more research or maybe even pay the bills um i have a feeling this may be i'm not alone here uh curious for your tips and uh thanks for all you do all right carson well first of all i think we're going to now refer to time blocking as as seen on nbc's the today show time block planning that's just a little bit of branding strategy there second of all you have a fantastic voice so you should sell things you should team up with kobe from earlier in this episode who is trying to sell the stock investing tip lessons because carson if it was you reading these lessons i think we'd all be all in you know you'd be like i want you to mortgage your house invest that money into crypto and everyone's like yeah makes sense man man knows what he's talking about i'm gonna let me just mortgage that house over there uh so great voice use that use that to your advantage uh i have two things to suggest for what you're talking about here again very common problem time blocking is hard blowing past blocks or ignoring blocks is something that happens all the time a lot of it has to do with what's happening in your head the pain of context shifting etc i think one schedule less you're probably being too ambitious you have multiple buckets of different type of work you want to be doing on your dissertation it sounds like you're trying to do all this work every day i think you're being too ambitious your brain might be just crying uncle when it switches to the bills or becomes more linguid in its pace on the research and lets it overlap into the other so think about doing less be very regular i'm going to work on this every day but i'm going to be less ambitious about how much i'm going to work on maybe i'm doing one thing every day so i just do that thing and i have some flexibility around it if it runs long and that's it for the dissertation two i'm going to say you want to ritualize this better so this has to be when i say ritual i mean in terms of timing setting and activity so for something like this i am working on a hard long-term project you're going to want to use the same times if possible probably first thing in the morning in deep work i have a couple examples especially one in particular i'm thinking of a brian who would did his dissertation at 5 00 a. m 5 a.
m to 6 30 a. m heavily ritualized every morning he had a full-time job 5 in the 6 30 a. m dissertation and that just the same time same day was heavily ritualized and then setting so where do you do this work same time same place brian had this dank office in the basement that he used but it was perfect because he only used it for that and then activity again using that same example of brian from deep work he was down to a specific time he would make coffee and how he would make the coffee and when he would drink the coffee i believe he even had like the bathroom break programmed in so it's very ritualized activity all of this all of this what it does is break down the context switching cost in your brain it makes it much easier for your brain to a not have to negotiate with itself should we work now it's a hard argument waste energy you might lose it so just take that off the table and b the rituals get you into that mode quicker so you don't have as much of an expensive context shift operation happening so you waste less energy on that you get into it quicker you get into it easier so do less and to be much more ritualized about the work you do it's a a core principle of slow productivity is change the scale at which you're looking for accomplishment to be longer so it's not what did i get done today it's am i happy with the chapter i produced this month you're going to a larger time scale and then it's just about clean deep reasonable sustainable work again and again head down the wheel is grinding you look up three months later and say hey this first part of my dissertation looks pretty good all right what do we have for our fourth call jesse before we get to the fourth call i loved how carson was first time caller you get that a lot in sports talk radio i know well which again we should do we should do live calls at some point i mean i maybe we would regret that i just love the you know first time caller first time a long time you hear it all the time i feel i've heard a few times like listen to some of your listener calls i do enjoy it i do enjoy it and also the thing i want to do is we should do a we should do one of these live do it actually live and we should do it like the the morning after an important nationals game and like just let it devolve into sports talk radio we would be swimming in fans if justice became uh calls long discussions long discussions about the nationals yeah all right the next question is about balancing and balancing ambitious with everyday life hey cal this is same from india thanks for your podcast and i really enjoy it my question to you is that how do you balance ambition with life i see many entrepreneurs and leaders say that they are overly ambitious and have very little time available for life and health related tasks on the other side of the spectrum i see more people having regrets about not meeting their potential so how should we find this ambition life balance thank you well it's a it's a critical question and i think it's one that we're not necessarily dealing with in a sophisticated manner right now in our in our cultural moment the way i read our current moment is that in the first decade of the 2000s we had a emphasis on crushing it right i mean this was a time where we were in especially american culture lionizing the new wave of tech entrepreneurs and the that burst of the the whole like zuckerberg musk uh that whole world bezos etc right so we were like into like these people who got after it up all night moving fast breaking things building fortunes changing the world this is also the period of like cheryl sandberg and lean in and uh so there's definitely an emphasis of we were pretty activity oriented and then we whip sod so now more recently we we have the anti-productivity movement so we've gone hard the other direction and you know we can look at things like ginny odell's book or which was i always miss it up mix it up it's how to do nothing or i think it's how to do nothing or the art of doing i think it's the how to do nothing and then uh chelsea headly had do nothing there's um berkman's book which i really enjoy four thousand weeks but there's there's a push back in the other direction which was we shouldn't really be doing things like productivity in general is constructed and depending on who you talk to you get different extremes on this so like i think berkman has a much more milder setup to this which is just like hey in general we're excited about doing two things but we set our aspirations too high and on the other extreme you know you have the commentators to think like all the productivity is basically exploitative mythology created by capitalist to you know oppress the new digital age proletariat right so like it gets pretty extreme but it's more of let's normalize this idea that the drive to do action is all kind of fake anyways and just you should be okay just chilling do nothing how to do nothing etc so we've kind of gone too far the other direction that's not really working either because humans like to do things and we like accomplishment and we'd like to make long-term plans and execute them you can actually point to the specific sectors of the brain that evolved in humans that we don't share with our primate ancestors that actually help us make those plans and reward them it's what helped our species differentiate so there's a deeply human aspect of having goals that you then make a plan for and execute and see your manifest your your intentions being manifest concretely in the world so just telling people like let's just chill it's important that we normalize that you don't have to be a superhero but that doesn't do it either and i think this question gets right at that tension so my answer here this is where i become a bigger believer in this this term i've been trying to popularize uh slow productivity and it this is a concept that still is in development it's embryonic i change what it means each time i talk about it so you're seeing this in real time but critical to slow productivity is this idea of yes seeking out accomplishment but on larger time scales over the next few years i care about what i produce over the next few years that i've produced some things of real value when you're focused on execution at that slower time scale it gives you a lot of breathing room and flexibility on the small time scales when you're trying over the next two year period to produce something that you're proud of a product or a piece of writing that allows you next tuesday to just be with your kids and do nothing because on the larger time scale that one day is not that important it allows you to have a month where you're really pushing it and then a month we are taking a breather or three months we're just doing research in the summer when you're at a cabin and writing six hours a day it's seasonal it's varied it's diverse it fits the rhythms of the human condition slow productivity feeds into all of that i think this is probably the ideal setup for satisfying the human desire to accomplish is that you are working on a small number of important things you return to it and you hone your craft and you try to be so good they can't ignore you but this is work that is diligently applied over long periods of time when you look back five years later you're proud of what you produced and you don't care so much about what happened in the last five hours that i think is where you get that balance where most people are going to be happy so how do you introduce this all into your life well again this is where doing the multi-scale planning is important have your semester plan that feeds into a weekly plan which feeds into a daily time block plan that semester or quarterly plan whatever you want to call it helps you see what you're working on in this big picture for the next three or four months and then that can filter into your week where you say what days we want to work on this if any and then that filters into your day and it allows you to have clarity but adapt your execution of what clarity over the realities of what's really going on in your life and the busy times not busy times etc so basically my advice here is be ambitious but slow down your execution of those ambitions be proud of what you produce five years from now which again is going to require you're planning on multi-scale so you don't just do nothing for months but be really easy on yourself about what you do this week because it's a hard week because your kid's home sick and there's a deadline for another work-related project that's annoying you it's okay to be annoyed it's okay not to get much done that week so be ambitious but slow down the execution of that ambition for most people i think that's going to be the sweet spot all right the next question we got advice on setting up the ideal desk i'd like to get your advice on an ideal desk set up to do deep work i have a standing desk that i vary at different heights as well as different chairs but nothing seems to make me very comfortable i have chronic back issues but they're aggravated depending on how i'm sitting and standing i can't seem to find something that works and i've toyed with getting a different desk or chair it really is important that i'm somewhat comfortable for the deep work i'm trying to do is there anything that you suggest or that you've used so that you can sit and do deep work or stand thank you well okay there's a couple different issues here there's the desk issue and then there's the nature of deep work efforts themselves now in in your situation what i might recommend is moving away from the model of here is my work location this room disc desk and this is where i am is where i do my work there was a a period you know i don't remember what year it was but there's a period where i was doing a lot of posts on my newsletter and blog so at calnewport.
com about i think i called it adventure work and i would i had a photo documentation of this and what i would do is i identify a series of locations around the georgetown campus i would rotate between these different locations to do different types of work and i have this whole theory about like it it's nice it changes the context you go somewhere just to do one type of work that's all you're focusing on as opposed to being at the same desk where you also do emails or you also do zoom calls and i documented you know here is a picnic table in the woods that was literally one of them here is a library the bioethical library that's another one here is a overlook of the potomac where you can sit on a bench and get work done i took photos of these and if you google study hacks adventure work you'll probably find it that might be more what you should be looking for here i'm more parapathetic so you're moving more diverse location style work i walk and think then sit down in this location and do work then i get up and walk and think go somewhere else i'm in that location i do work i'm never in one place for a long period of time i like that style of work i do a lot of that and if you have back issues it could really be a good option now you also mentioned ideal desk so that gives me an excuse to talk about something i'm really excited about so it's a desk nerd geek out that i i do want to have uh briefly so look i'm not someone who spends a lot of money i'm not i don't drive fancy cars i don't have i don't have multiple houses but the the one thing that we are investing some book money in uh my wife and i is we're taking my study uh the the it's not my study it's deployed the study we do school work in there we do reading time in there and we're doing a really cool renovation of that study which is built around these custom four-wall built-in bookcases that are going to be full of books and there's a fireplace with a leather chesterfield couch and a game table and and like it's cool right i mean uh but the centerpiece of this and it's the the one indulgence i would say i've had with the some of the success from my books is i'm having custom built a desk being custom built by a a company in maine that hand builds primarily reading tables for university libraries so they pick out the trees and the wood and they build these very durable beautiful american tape reading tables for university libraries and they're custom building me a deep work desk that's going to fit three sides around it built-in bookcases and then the middle is going to be this this custom built desk uh where i gave all the specifications chose the wood and all the features it won't be done till july right i mean this stuff takes time and it's a ridiculous thing in some sense right it's a ridiculous thing to spend money on is definitely not necessary but it's my one indulgence is that my custom built university style reading desk and i'll tell you this about it there's not going to be a computer on that desk there is going to be a really nice reading lamp i will i will be willing to bring a laptop to that desk if i want to write at it but then that laptop goes away so it is going to be independent from any sort of permanent electronic productivity tool i want to sit there and work with my notebooks and i could write there if i want to write but then move that laptop when i don't want to write work longhand there when i want to look longhand there i'm really looking forward to that so i'm a big believer in desk my bigger point here being and i've had a series of newsletter essays about this recently in november of 2021 i had a series of newsletter essays about interesting workspaces that people built i talked about ian colfer who wrote the artemis fowl series super best-selling kids uh series the writing shed he built in his backyard and i wrote about george lucas's riding tower this tower he had built onto a vic the first victorian house he owned in marin county and he built this tower with a view of mount tam and he wrote the first star wars in there on a desk by the way made out of three desks so it just goes to show it dust doesn't have to be fancy and my point in that whole series was it's not a crazy thing to invest money in if you have money to invest is over the top work spaces because it gives you a huge return if you're in a line of work where there is a huge variety in the quality of intellectual output that can be produced and better quality is going to give you better returns if you write books for a living if you write movies for a living if you solve proofs for a living if you have to have huge insights for a living it's not a frivolous investment if you have the money to get a very nice desk or the built-in book built in bookcases or convert a garden shed into a riding shed or in the rundown house you bought with your money from american graffiti to put a tower on it so you can go up there and concentrate more on star wars these are bets that could really pay off and we don't talk enough about it because we don't care about the human brain enough when it comes to work we just think about tools you have the right computer and the right software but environment matters and so i geek out about desks i don't know is that crazy jesse what do you think that spend kind of stupid amounts of money on a piece of wood not at all i mean 100 i think you said it best you don't i don't think you spend much money on other stuff so like at some point you got to spend money on some things like i spend a lot of money on golf but yeah and we have a pretty nice our table here i spent it's not super nice but we got a nice you can't see it on camera but jesse and i are sitting at a uh it's like a round nice wood table with a sort of like metal pedestal sort of like a uh what's that guy's name charlie rose style setup so it's got a good feel to it too like it's nice yeah solid it's not in the after all that work it's not any of the camera shots but you know we know it we know we're happy about it all right so is that number five was that our last call yeah that's our last question for the day some good ones today so keep on submitting them yeah so we made it through five questions good questions keep submitting them go to calnewport.
