3 Small Daily Habits To Maximize Productivity & Transform Your Life | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So I invented earlier in the year what we call the Deep Life Stack, which was a step-by-step way to cultivate more depth in your life, and I think now that I've had some time to think about it, it has some problems. But let's start with what that original stack was. For those who are watching instead of just listening, I will draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my screen here. Again, for those who are not watching but just listening, everything I'm doing here is beautiful. Uh, I'm drawing layers. These are the layers of the stack. I'm putting five of them on top of each other. Now, there's a couple different small variations of the stack we talked about earlier in the year, but they're all basically more or less in this shape. All right, I'm now gonna write inside each of these layers. At the bottom, the first layer of the stack, the bottom layer, we had discipline. This was somewhat controversial, but this is when I argued you actually have to start by injecting some regular discipline into your life because it changes your self-identity as someone who can do hard things that are important even if you don't want to. Then we had values. Nothing like drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting. Values was when you then next, moving up the stack from discipline, is where you got clear on what was important to you in your life. Then you went to service, fixing in your life how you could serve other people who are around you or important to you. From there then came organization. This is gonna be a long word for a small box. You had to get control over what's happening in your life, organize your obligations, organize your time, if you were gonna have any hope of actually really aiming your energy in a good direction. And then finally you had vision, which is where you get to the fun stuff. This is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more remarkable. It is when you get to this final stack in the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we like to romanticize, like changing your job or moving to a, a farm somewhere in the country. There was a couple different variations of the stack, but they were all more or less something like this, and the idea was you moved up the stack in order, starting with discipline, moving all the way up to vision. All right, so what was, uh, [laughs] what was the problem with this? Um, it's missing some things. So here's what I discovered. It's missing, uh, explicit mentions of some things that are foundationally important, I learned from you, my readers and listeners, for cultivating depth. Physical growth, intellectual growth. These were things that we used to talk about on this show when we had the old bucket-based paradigm for the deep life. Keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind engaged. This was not explicitly called out in this particular formulation. What about craft or learning to do things well? The- this idea of how do you learn to take on something difficult, deliberately practice it, and get better at it? This is key to almost any direction for depth, but doesn't have its own place in this stack. Uh, there was also some pushback on a lack of ambition here. That when we get to vision, we were talking about overhauling parts of your life, but when people think about the deep life zoomed out, there's also this notion of some sort of larger scale legacy leaving type of initiative. That's at a scale that was too big for this. And finally, and this was, I thought, something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack, is there's two different related initiatives that are mixed together in this particular stack formulation. There's the initiative where you're getting your life together. Okay, if you don't have your life together and are in control of things, it's hard to do anything values-driven or interesting. And then there's the initiative of trying to do really cool things that mark a life as deep. In this stack, they're mixed together. Discipline, that's sort of getting your life together. Values is part of cultivating a vision of the depth. Organization is about getting your life together. Vision is more about how to cultivate depth. And, and so the feedback I was getting from my own experimentation is these are maybe two separate endeavors. Get your crap together. Okay, I'm done with that. Now we'll turn our attention to how do we a- aim this somewhere depth. So these were all things that came up when I was looking at the original Deep Life Stack. So we're gonna try to fix that with our new version 2.0. Maybe I'll even type that. Let's see here. I'm gonna actually write on the screen here. Oh my. Jesse, I have no idea how Notability works. Oh, I see. You know what I've been thrown by? By the way, this is not interesting, but I switched my note-taking software.

Speaker 4:34 To what?

Cal Newport 4:36 GoodNotes I think it's called.

Speaker 4:38 You switched it off of...

Cal Newport 4:40 Notability I was using to teach my lectures, and then it developed some bug where when it was projecting on the screen and I was typing into it, it would, uh, continually jump up and down where it was on the screen. So I liked the program, but it had this weird bug in projection, so I had to switch.

Speaker 4:55 Huh.

Cal Newport 4:55 All right, here we go. I'm typing on the screen the Deep Lipes... Deep Life... Stacy. The Deep Life Stack version 2.0. All right, so what are we gonna do here to fix all of those mista-- not mistakes, but we'll call them shortcomings that we were missing in the prior stack? And let me, uh, highlight this to show you how good I am. Look at that. Woo! I highlighted the word The Deep Life Stack.

Speaker 5:18 It looks good.

Cal Newport 5:19 Yeah, doesn't it look good? It's a professional operation here. All right, so how are we gonna update the Deep Life Stack, our systematic plan for escaping the shallows, to take in mind those flaws we had with the original version? I'm gonna break it into two stages. So in the, the first stage, call this Stage One, this... Oh man, that's not how you spell "stage." Stage One is where you learn to become a capable human being. We're gonna make this its own stage. So we're gonna say, "Become a capable human being." And we're gonna isolate this. Let's do this stage, do everything involved in this stage first. Before we move on to what we'll call stage two, surprisingly enough, which is then cultivate depth. So we're not gonna mix these together anymore. Let's get our act together. Let's become a capable human being or what Jocko Willink called in his book, The Code, imminently qualified human. I like that. Jocko talks about becoming an imminently qualified human. Well, we're gonna talk about becoming an imminently capable human being. This is gonna have its own collection of four stack layers. Once you're done with that, stage two, four more stack layers, cultivate depth on top of that foundation. All right? So this is the first place we're changing things. All right, so let's actually draw our four stacks, our four stack layers over here for becoming a more capable human being. So we're gonna have four here and then four for cultivating depth. You do stage one first, then you do stage two. All right. So we're gonna start as before with discipline, but now, again, this is coming from, uh, feedback, we are going to specify the three places where we're gonna pursue discipline as the foundational layer of the Deep Life stack, and that's gonna be body, mind, heart. So as before, what does it mean discipline? We're gonna have you select some keystone habits, habits you return to every single day, habits that you track whether or not you actually accomplish them. They should not be trivial, but they should also be tractable. Unlike before, I'm gonna tell you specifically what the three categories are. You should have three habits, and they should follow these three categories. Body, you need a fitness habit, something about making your body more healthy. This could be exercise. This could be involving food and drink. The second category is mind. This is gonna be making your mind sharper. You have an instrument here, but you have to train it how to think. So we need to lay down a foundational habit probably built around reading is gonna be our best bet here, where this becomes a regular part of your life that you're tracking. And then heart, by this I mean other people. There's something you're doing on a regular basis, and it could just be calling or texting or emailing a different friend or family member every single day. It could be checking in with, you know, your partner or your kids every day and having a conversation with them. Body, mind, heart, keystone habit for each. As we iterate through this stack, you can make those challenges harder and harder. So if you're just getting started with this, your body habit might be pretty simple. It's this twenty-minute walk that you do to the, a coffee store and back each morning, followed by twenty push-ups. It might be simple, but you're doing it every day. As we iterate over time, that's gonna get more and more potentially, uh, aggressive in its ambition. It could eventually end up, uh, a really rigorous workout routine, for example. All right, we go from here now straight up to control. This is what we used to call organization. Same idea. Control your time. Control your obligations. Want to do this right away. Lay down this foundation of discipline. I'm practicing doing things that are important to me that aren't urgent. Very next thing you do, let's get control of our obligations. Let's get control of our time. This is where you're gonna deploy things like my multi-scale planning methodology. It's where you're gonna, uh, deploy things such as full capture, David Allen style full capture. Every obligation is written down in a trusted system, not just in your head. You're time block planning your days. Those are based on weekly plans, which are based on quarterly plans. No open loops, nothing you're just keeping track of in your head. You have a plan for your time. You have your obligations captured. You have a plan for executing the obligations that need to be done. There's a big part about becoming a capable human. I only have so much energy and time to deploy each day. I want to do so with intention. So I'm moving this right up front in the Deep Life stack. Right after you got a taste of discipline, you're getting your crap together. On top of this, I'm then gonna put craft, just learning how to do something really well. This, again, is gonna be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the Deep Life is gonna be quality. You learning how to do something really well and/or you learning how to really appreciate someone else doing something really well, but an embrace of craftsmanship and quality. So craft is where you're gonna begin practicing two things. One, getting better, and you could jump right in with a work-related skill here as you go through this stack. Let me choose a skill that I am going to deliberately and systematically improve on, but maybe it's going to be a hobby. You know, I think some of the, the more, uh, bro-oriented, really big podcasters that are out there have gotten some flack because they all seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly anachronistic or arbitrary hobby, such as bow hunting. Why is Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink and, uh, all these people bow hunting? And it seems so random. But you know what? There's a logic behind that, which is learning to do something really well teaches you how, what it takes to do things really well. You can then translate that to other things that come up that are more important. In other words, learning, uh, even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow, but systematically building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need mentally speaking to say, "Okay, now when there's something else I want to learn to help transform my career, there's something else I want to learn to make a big impact over here," you know what that feels like and what that takes. So when it comes to this craft stack, uh, when you first get there, you're going to learn a skill. It could be a hobby, it could be professional. I also want you to appreciate other people who do skilled work because that helps motivate you to get better. I write about this a lot in my book coming out in March, Slow Productivity. This idea of being exposed to people doing really good work makes you want to do really good work. So as part of your first time through this craft layer I am gonna recommend that you build up an appreciation of some sort of craft. So I'll put two arrows here. Get better, and then we'll say appreciate better. All right. So then our final building block we're gonna put for the first stage, simplification. Final step to get ready to cultivate depth, we gotta clear out the dead weight. So this is where you go through, now that you have some discipline, you're in control of your time, you have an appreciation for and trust in craft as the way forward, now you can say, "Let's start slashing some of these obligations. Let's, uh, let's change the way, you know, what we're doing at work, and I'm gonna put all my chips onto this over here and no longer get involved in this, or I'm gonna simplify or shift laterally to something that's more focused or is more accountable." It is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your technological life. It's the first time you can step back and say, "Okay, I'm starting to get my feet under me. Why am I on TikTok all the time? Why am I on Instagram? What tools do I really need here? Maybe I should do some digital minimalism, work backwards from what's important to me, use those to select value." So you can start simplifying out your habits. Like, the single most important techno simplification small step you could take at this step would be let's do phone foyer method. When I'm at home, the phone's plugged in. If I need to look something up, I can go to the phone and look at it. It's not with me when I'm in front of the TV. It's not with me when I'm trying to read. It's not with me at the table when I'm trying to eat dinner. I do not have the option of just looking at that. So you can begin to simplify these parts of your life as well. All of this sets the stage for stage two, which is now let's start cultivating depth on top of this foundation. So we're gonna have four boxes over here as well. This is where the fun stuff happens. This is where the stuff that catches people at, people's attention happens. You do the first stage, people are gonna say, "Yeah, you got your act together. Yeah, they got their act together." Stage two is where people say, "Wow, this person is interesting." All right, so I'm gonna put as the... Let me draw arrows, by the way, so we see the order here. Beautifully drawn arrows. Bob Ross does happy trees. I do crappy arrows. All right, so first, first, uh, stack layer over here in stage two, now we get to the values. You figure out your code, what you're all about. You figure out the rituals that connect you on a regular basis to these things you care about. This is where, uh, if you're religious or interested in being religious, is you really lean into that. It's where you really recognize that faith traditions actually depend on action for you to gain insight. You can't just figure out in advance, is this religion right? You do the religion and say, "How does it make me feel?" All that happens here. Now, this feels really late, but again, I, I, I'm convinced that when you come to these higher order decisions in your life from a foundation of capability, it's more meaningful and it's more effective. So I, I, I push this later. People often say, "Let's just start with this," but if you, if you have no foundation in a code or rituals or a faith-based tradition, it's hard to start there. You're throwing darts at a board. You don't even know what you're capable of or, or, or have the, the capacity to follow in a disciplined way what's required to actually gain insight. So let's become capable first. Now we're getting to the bigger stuff. So values now comes next. This is followed by service. You need to be a leader. You need to serve other people. Community, without it, you're nothing. Now you're ready to actually be a leader. Before, you weren't capable enough. You could kinda be a leader, but you're gonna drop the ball, and people weren't, you weren't gonna have a big effect on people. You weren't gonna move the needle. Now you're an exceptionally capable person, let's put that to work. Serve other people. Non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of other people that are important to you, family, friends, community, larger, uh, civic society writ large. You can move up these layers as far as you want. Make this a key one thing, uh, uh, a tier one thing now that you're starting to work at in your life. Then we get transformation. The crazy thing is, of all of these stacks, this is what the one place most people think when they think about cultivating a deeper life is this one stack. Transformation's where you make the big values-based changes. You get a clear vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like, and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle. Preferably, there's some element of remarkability in these visions. It's where you change your job. It's where you move to the countryside. It's where you become the surf instructor in Tolfino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It's where the big kinda cool stuff happens, but look at how many layers. How many layers we had to go through. I even have a laser pointer I can show you, right? Whoo. All the way up, all the way up before we moved to Vancouver Island, before we, we quit our job. Because you're not ready for that yet. When you're not capable, if you try to make a big change, God knows what's gonna happen. And if you are capable, but you're not, have a, a sense of your values, if you're not sacrificing on behalf of other people, filling that deeply social leadership itch that all humans have, then your transformation's gonna be shallow. It's gonna be selfish. It's not until this point that you're finally ready for that. And then we can add the final thing, which is legacy, and that's where you begin thinking about, what's the impact I wanna leave on the world even after I'm gone? The sort of bigger picture orienting mission for your life. This is so big, I would say you could probably go all the way through this stack and stop at transformation the first time through. And you might go through this stack a few times, iterating, tweaking, and improving each of these layers before you really get into legacy. You don't have to get there right away. In fact, you probably aren't ready to get there right away because you haven't done all this other cool stuff yet So how do all these pieces come together? Well, you actually move through this stack and give yourself one to three weeks for each of these layers to get that part of your life going and making sure it's going well, and you move your way through the stack. You could end at transformation if you want at first. Legacy can come later. Then live with this for six months to a year, then come back and iterate. All right, let's go back to the stack. How are things going with discipline? I wanna upcharge this. I want more aggressive physical discipline. I wanna do better with my relationships. What's going with control? Well, it was going well, but I left finances out of there. I wanna fix that up. So you iterate six months to a year. You iterate through, go through each layer, give it time to improve what's happening there. You iterate every six to 12 months and improve on each of these layers again and again. Each time you make it through to transformation, maybe you're thinking about a different thing you wanna transform in your life. After you've done this five years in a row, you may have had several major transformations. You've also tightened up all these other things, and now your life is really humming. Now, the idea that you're just gonna go to a cubicle and check email all day and then be on TikTok all evening might seem laughable, and maybe you're ready to even really jump into this legacy stack at this point and start to have some really exciting long-term visions about what you're gonna leave in the world. So this is the Deep Life Stack 2.0. Stage one, become a more capable human. Stage two, cultivate depth. Then iterate and repeat, iterate and repeat. As mentioned, it seems very far away at first from the, the proximate concerns of, "I'm distracted by my screens," but if you don't have a shining destination to aim towards that's more interesting than the glow coming off those pieces of glass, those pieces of glass are gonna win, and so we have to talk about our lives if we're gonna talk about our technology. The way most people think about, uh, learning these type of master-- getting mastery of these type of, uh, different topics is that everyone has a fundamental limit determined by their brain. So the common mental model says for this one individual here, maybe when they are thinking about, you know, "Hey, I wanna really master some element of music," they can do that, put some earphones on them in my picture here. Like, this is great. I'm capable of doing it. But maybe the same person when they say, "Okay, what I really wanna master is, uh, mathematics, so I can do, like, mathematics proofs," in our common mental model, we might say, "Oh, that's just beyond this person's brain, so they can't do that." Right? So we, we have this notion of the complexity of what you have mastered is just a direct reflection of how smart you are. Oh, this academic has a really... S- uh, PhD in literature, has a really subtle understanding of these books that I don't even know how to approach. They're smarter than me. I understand music. Uh, that makes me smarter than this 22-year-old whose, like, main interest is YouTubers, right? That's the way we think about it. Um, this model is wrong. So this idea that your brain is determining the level of complexity of stuff that you're able to comfortably master completely misunderstands how learning happens. So what I wanna do here is present to you the reality, and I'm gonna present to you the reality here in two parts that we can think of as the good news and the bad news. So the good news and the bad news about how people actually learn complicated things. Now, the good news is most people are cognitively capable of learning things that are pretty high up on that imagined hierarchy of complexity, that you can learn complicated literature. You can learn mathematical things. You can learn an appreciation of a complicated sport or music. Most people can learn most things. Now, is there a, a brain power difference that comes into play here? Well, th- there's stuff that shows up. I mean, I think certainly by adulthood you get a sense people have different RPMs going on with their brains. Um, I tend to believe that a lot of this is less genetic than it is just what you did as a child. If you're, you know, a heavy reader as a child, for example, your brain has just been trained to be stronger, much in the same way if you're Arnold Schwarzenegger and your dad made you do push-ups and squats before you would eat, be given a meal, you're gonna be stronger by the age of 19 than someone else, right? Uh, so I tend to think the RPMs you have going is as much nurture as it is nature, but yeah, there are some differences, but l- that difference is where is this going to affect learning complicated things? The upper end, which is not gonna be relevant to most people, it's like almost anyone can learn calculus. Yeah, maybe not everyone, however, is going to be a Fields Award winner, but most people don't care. They're not trying to become Fields Award winners. You might also see it in some speed differences in how fast you make progress towards learning things. There's some, some, some epsilons there depending on, uh, how used to that your brain is. But again, for most people, no one knows exactly at what rate you mastered something, so it doesn't really matter. So I think for the most part, I'm gonna argue most people can learn most things. So you can learn almost anything. Part two of the reality, and this is the bad news, you can learn almost anything, but you can't learn everything. So I think what is obscured when you encounter people who have mastery of something really complicated, what is obscured is that it took them a really long time to get to that place. We jump ahead and just imagine them a month ago, just picked up the math textbook and was like, "Ooh, this just makes sense to me." And then everyone kind of applauds, and they're really good at math, and they're obviously smarter than you. No, there's a long process that we're gonna unfold here in a second of how they build up to that expert knowledge. The reason why this means you can't learn everything is that it takes time. Time is finite, so there's only gonna be so many complicated things you can learn because you only have so much time to put into it, and it takes a lot of time to actually get there. So this is the big mental model shift I wanna start us making right now is thinking about Learning, uh, the complexity of what you learned, shifting this away from brainpower and towards time investment. More time means more complexity can be learned. Less time means less complexity can be learned. Brainpower is sort of orthogonal to

Cal Newport 24:50 all of this. So let's fill in this mental model. I'm gonna draw another picture here that I think captures well what the process really looks like when you're trying to learn something hard. So for those who are listening instead of watching, what you'll see I'm drawing here is a bunch of stairsteps, and we can put some goal at the top, so, you know, I don't know, I'll put a music note at the top, and you're trying to master, have a good understanding of jazz music or something like this. The way you actually progress towards hard understanding is upstairs, level by level. Now, here's what's important. When you're at a given level of understanding, so, like, let's say you're right here, your brain is only capable when you're moving up your level of understanding of making a relatively small step at a time. That's why these steps are small. So we have multiple steps to get from down here where you know, in this example, nothing about jazz music, many steps until you get up here to being able to talk really, uh, intelligently about it. So it's from your current level, you move up to the next level. Now, how these steps are actually made, so how does this actually happen here and here and here? Deliberate practice. Carefully designed exercises that push your understanding to the next level in a way that takes you out of what you're already comfortable with. There has to be some strain into that. So in order for this step to be successfully had at each of these levels, you have to stretch past where you're comfortable, right? It's kind of the practice aspect of deliberate practice. It, it's not fun. I'm not, I'm not comfortable. I don't really understand this thing, and I'm stretching myself to try to understand it. And the activity you're doing is carefully designed. This is the right next level to actually move up to. That's the deliberate act, uh, the deliberate piece of deliberate practice. So when you see someone like, wow, this person has a lot of expert knowledge of complicated things, in their past, they have done these stairsteps. Now, there's various cultural or professional structures that help drive you through these stairsteps, right? So if you're an academic... I mean, I'm an academic. One of the things I do is theoretical computer science. I write mathematical proofs related to algorithms and computability and complexity. If you encounter a paper I wrote, you might say, "I don't understand any of this. I can't imagine just, like, sitting down and un- learning all of this." But what you have to realize for me is that that process started when I was about 16 years old, and the education process as you move up the ranks, um, high school to advanced high school to undergrad to grad school into young professordom, is it's designed to push you step by step by step with literal tests, you know? Okay, you're now taking AP Computer Science, right? I took that when I was young. Um, that you're taking literal tests. In order to master that test, you had to gain new knowledge, and it pushes you to the next level. And then after AP Computer Science, because I was good at this stuff, I started taking some college courses in computer science. That had, okay, that's pushing me a little bit farther. Now I'm go to college, and I can take the more advanced courses. It's pushing you farther. I get to MIT, and now these courses are much harder. Uh, but I've gone up 17 steps before I got to taking, you know, Theory of Computation with Mike Sipser step by step by step. And by the time you encounter me at the age of, like, 35, like, oh, you, you know all this stuff. Like, yeah, it was a really long climb up the steps, really long climb up the, the staircase. Same thing when someone has this, "Wow, how does this guy know so much about music?" Well, probably he was exposed to it early on, and his dad or mom really got him into it, and step by step, they got knowledge. So if you want to cultivate expert knowledge now in your life, you have to replicate all of these steps. Your goal is on what is the next step of understanding I can take, not how far am I from the top. It's a consistent stairstep upwards. This requires patience because the ladder up is long, and it requires expert help because choosing the right activities that move you to a new level and are tractable but not trivial, this is the key dichotomy for deliberate practice to be effective, tractable but not trivial. You can accomplish this next step, but it can't be super easy because then you're not actually stretching. That could require expert help, and that could be found by actually working with real experts. That can be found in courses. That can be learned, uh, found in books. Um, it can be found in choosing careful goals for what you want to do next and then seeking out help anywhere you can, online, in-person courses, to get to that next step and accomplish that goal. So just the careful choices of goals can get you there. But it's patience and this careful expert-guided design of how you move. That's how people get smarter and smarter or seemingly smarter and smarter. It just takes time, and it takes care. So is this worth it? Well, I think the answer is yes. The brain is what distinguishes humans. Our brains distinguish us from other animals. We have this ability that, you know, Aristotle talks about in the Nicomachean Ethics, we have this ability that no one else has to contemplate deeply, to aim our brain at abstract ends. Dogs don't do this. Cats don't do this. Parakeets don't do this. Humans can. So Aristotle would say this is perhaps the ultimate teleology of the human experience. The thing that we are wired to do ultimately is to use our brain in these exalted ways because that's what defines us as humans, so we want to push our humanness. It is a key element of life you're missing if there are not things in your life that you're, you know that are hard, that are complicated, and you can do very well. To have that in your life in some sense, in the, in Aristotelian sense, is to be more human. So what I recommend, especially for younger people, is here's what you want almost the, to be aiming towards right away. Something in your professional life that's complicated that you do well, better than anyone else you know at your company or organization. Right out the bat, what is a complicated skill here? Uh, really good at programming these type of data systems. We're an SAP company, like being able to build advanced models using statistical analysis. Uh, a type of art, you know, you're, you're a graphic designer for a video game company and pushing whatever the latest is and doing some sort of 3D modeling. Something that is really complicated and valuable that you know well. Just set that standard right wa- right away. In your personal life, you should have the same. Everyone should have one thing that they're working towards just being really good with. I really understand movies. I really understand wine. Not like a casual, "I kinda read about this," but I got a sommelier certificate. Not just like I go to the theaters, but, you know, I could write, and I do sometimes contribute reviews to commun- online publications about movies. There is something deeply satisfying in feeling the mastery of complicated things. It's uniquely human. I think a lot of people avoid it. A lot of people do not have this in their life, and, uh, and it, it leads to this distinction. Well, there's people who do that stuff and, and I don't know how to do that stuff. And either that leads you to feel down on yourself unjustifiably, or it makes you real reactionary and angry. "Ah, these elites think they're so smart." Neither is great. Neither is healthy from a mental health perspective. We all should be trying to master at least some complicated things. Now, this could take years. You're gonna see progress along the way, but you wanna get really good at something hard, it could take years. Start right now. You will get benefits along the way. You'll get better and better. But don't, don't pull yourself up short. Oh, I l- I know a little bit more about this than just the average person. That's great. Keep pushing. You wanna push some knowledges to this connoisseur level. It really is, I think, a, a key part of the deep life because it unlocks in you an understanding of what your brain is capable of. The final question is, where are you gonna get the time? Where are you gonna find the time to have one or two of these projects you're working on? And honestly, and look, this is a show about technology and how it impacts our lives, this might be, uh, non-surprising, but this is where you're gonna find the time. Stop spending time on the phone. If you have nothing in your life that you feel like you're a real expert on, I'm going to guess, without knowing for sure, that your screen time statistics aren't great, that you're getting that, that, uh, that dopamine push towards the screen where there's gonna be something funny or outrageous or distracting or whatever on there, and this is eating up time after time after time. Put that phone into the foyer. Phone foyer method. New Year is a great time to do this. The phone is plugged in in my kitchen or the foyer. If I need it, I can go there to look something up, but it's not with me as a default. It's not with me at the couch. It's not with me at the dinner table. It's not with me, God forbid, in the bathroom. Now your brain gets some freedom. It wants something to do. Let's give it something to do. We're moving up the next stair level on this work skill. We're moving up the next stair level on this personal life skill. This really will, that's why I wish it for everyone in the New Yor- New Year, is really gonna change the way you feel about yourself, your efficacy, your ability to actually do, uh, important, useful things with your brain. So you can't... You can learn anything, you just can't learn everything. So choose a few things that are worth learning and trick a lot of people into thinking that you're smarter than you actually are, because the more complicated the stuff goes, the more they're gonna just think that you're a big brain, and I think it's worth it. So there you go, Jesse. I think too many people think they're stupider than they are because of this image of, you know, for some people, this quote, unquote, "comes easy." There is no coming easy. It's the exact same as muscles.

Speaker 34:56 Yeah. Well-

Cal Newport 34:57 You know, some people grow them faster than others, but it takes a really long time, a lot of cycles of cutting and building to look like a superhero. It just takes time.

Speaker 35:05 What's something you work on in your personal life?

Cal Newport 35:08 Movies. I've been, I'm working on, uh, movie knowledge. I wanna get to, and I, um, I'm working on this systematically. Um, I wanna get to a level where I can contribute reviews.

Speaker 35:19 Oh, I feel like you'll be able to do that, don't you think?

Cal Newport 35:21 Like, good reviews.

Speaker 35:22 Yeah.

Cal Newport 35:23 You know? Like, really understand, uh, really understand the, the art and form of cinema, like, what's going on. I also, another way of looking at it is I don't wanna be surprised by the good reviews. Like, in other words, I wanna be able to predict, oh, I, I, I know kinda what Anthony Lane's probably gonna say about this movie, and not have to... And I'm getting closer at that. Like, I know David Denby's, I know what, you know, David Denby's gonna write about this. Like, getting closer to that, um, as opposed to, like, I don't know. Is this a good movie? Let's read the reviews. Oh, they really love this movie. You know?

Speaker 35:54 Yeah.

Cal Newport 35:54 So it's like I wanna be able to be non-surprised by the really good reviews, and I wanna be capable of, hey, I could provide a review for, you know, an online site, and it'd be, this is an insightful review.

Speaker 36:07 We should probably put a movie and show site on thedeeplife.com so people can reference.

Cal Newport 36:13 I think we should. Yeah.

Speaker 36:13 'Cause there's a lot of times I'm l- I have, like, my own list, but...

Cal Newport 36:16 Well, we should keep track of all the books, and we should keep track of, like, movie recommendations. Um-

Speaker 36:22 'Cause it'd be a good place for people to go if they wanted something good to watch, 'cause oftentimes I'm-

Cal Newport 36:26 Two movies I just watched was, uh, I had never remembered seeing Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Also just watched Jeff, uh, Gun- Tim Gunn. Not Tim Gunn. What, what's the, not the guy from... The, uh, movie maker Gunn, but I just forgot if it's James Gunn. I think it's James Gunn The, the director who did Guardians of the Galaxy was temporarily canceled, and now, uh, DC has brought him back to play the Kevin Feige role for the DC Extended Cinematic Universe. I believe his name is James Gunn, whereas Tim Gunn was the fashion designer from Project Runway. I often mi- mix up those two names. I think it's James Gunn. Um-

Speaker 37:08 Yeah

Cal Newport 37:08 ... The Suicide Squad, 2021. Fantastic, like Tarantino-esque

Speaker 37:14 He's the CEO of DC Studios?

Cal Newport 37:15 Yeah. Watch The Suicide Squad, 2021. Tarantino-esque comic book movie. Completely playing with the B-movie format, over-the-top violence, but also, um, visually completely novel, hyperactive camera, throwing in actual deep themes and interesting characterization against this backdrop of craziness. It is if, as you had s- said that Tarantino make a comic book movie. Completely off the wall. Fantastic movie. I really like that.

Speaker 37:42 Do you watch all your movies in the same, like s- TV, et cetera, with like surround sound or no

Cal Newport 37:48 Uh, yeah, I have a good TV. Yeah, yeah

Speaker 37:49 With surround sound?

Cal Newport 37:50 Yeah. We, we set that up during the, the subwoofers and everything too. We set that up during the pandemic. Um, and I see a lot of movies. I mean, we're record- not the, not to pull back the curtain, but we're recording this before Christmas. Uh, this week I'm seeing... Tonight I'm gonna see Maestro with a friend of mine, and then later in the week, another friend of mine, we're gonna go see big screen Die Hard in honor of Christmas.

Speaker 38:11 So how many movies do you watch a week?

Cal Newport 38:13 It just depends.

Speaker 38:15 Two?

Cal Newport 38:15 Uh, it depends on what's going on with-

Speaker 38:17 Yeah

Cal Newport 38:17 ... like the evenings and childcare and stuff like that. And

Cal Newport 38:20 my schedule. I like, if I have a light schedule, I like to take a day and do a lunchtime movie watching at home. But so if, if I have freedom in my schedule, I'll take a day and watch a movie over lunch. That helps. All right. Anyways, um, I talk about this, by the way, in the, the new book, Slow Productivity, coming out in March. I talk about my growing interest in movies and how, uh, for anyone who does creative work, studying and building up a good appreciation for an unrelated creative field actually can really help what you're doing. And I write about in Slow Productivity about studying films as helping my writing. If you study, if I study good writers, it's too close to home. And it, it's kind of a, a, more of a stressful work than like, it's not inspiring. It's more, "Ugh, I should do more of that," or it's more anxiety producing. But you study art in another format, you can come at that as like, "I don't do that art." So you can just appreciate it with open eyes, and it gives you an injection of creative energy for what you're doing. So I'm a big... I talk about this a lot in s- not a lot, but I, I do talk about in Slow Productivity, studying an art that's not what you do will make you more inspired for what you do actually do.

Speaker 39:28 How can I actually train those deep focus muscles to actually get tasks done in less time and actually focus deeply? Thank you.

Cal Newport 39:37 Uh, well, Sahil, I, I appreciate this because it's a mix of a case study and a good question. There's a nice case study there. This goes back to what we were just talking about with students being terrible at being students and how if you're not terrible at being a student, you have this huge advantage. Here is another example. Sahil said, "I was not a good student. I returned to work actually caring about the mechanics of being a student and got a f- began getting 4.0s, perfect GPAs, and got a job at a FAANG company." FAANG company, th- these are the, uh, uh, the big tech companies, so Facebook, Amazon, Google, and what's the N in FAANG? You would think Microsoft, but that's an A.

Speaker 40:15 Netflix, right?

Cal Newport 40:16 Netflix.

Speaker 40:16 Yeah.

Cal Newport 40:17 Yeah. So see, it works. Caring about how you work works. By the way, the same thing happens in the world of work as well. It's a little bit less pronounced because the floor is higher. So in the world of students, of college students, the floor on people's work habits is so low, so low, like I'm surprised that like you aren't walking in the walls low, that if you're a little bit organized, you have this huge relative gap. In the world of work, the floor is higher, right? If you worked at a normal job like most college students work at their, at their work, you would get fired pretty quickly. But the floor is not super high, and a lot of people are just throwing stress and anxiety and just hours at raising the floor. Um, so again, being systematic about how you organize yourself in the world of work, it still opens up a gap with most people that you can get a big reward out of. Um, let's get to the actual question though. So Sahil wa- worries he's not very comfortable with long periods of intense focus. So as a student, he could just take a lot of time doing half focus. He's not gonna be able to do that in his job. How do you get better at actually training your ability to concentrate for long periods of time? Sahil, I'm gonna give you three pieces of advice. One is interval training. So you literally practice hard concentration using a timer. So you take a piece of work you're gonna do, you set a timer maybe for 30 minutes, and you say, "For that 30 minutes, this is full out intense concentration. If my mind wanders or I zone out, I stop that timer. I'll come back and try this again later." So you have a clear indicator of success or failure. Success means I maintained full concentration for basically the whole period. Once you're comfortable with a given duration, you up the time by 10 minutes. So just straight up practicing hard concentration. If you're roughly at a rate, which is what I've observed when I've done this with students, of increasing the duration roughly once every week or two, you can in about two or three months significantly improve your comfort level with intense concentration. So practice directly what you wanna practice. Two, uh, reading. That's your cognitive calisthenics right there. Reading hard books, books that have difficult information or complex theories. You could read a complicated primary source, like I'm gonna, you know, read, uh, Nietzsche concurrently with a secondary source about that primary source. You can kind of go back and forth and have this framework for trying to understand, uh, the primary source that you're trying to read. Uh, reading is just direct exercise with sustained concentration on abstract symbolic concepts. Big thinkers are big readers, so that needs to be your training. And then three, you need to spend regular time completely away from distractions. This gets your mind very comfortable with itself. Combine this with something interesting. I would suggest hikes, walking through nature, long walks. Your phone is turned off and in the back of your backpack just for emergencies. There's nothing in your ear. It's just you and the world around you, and the world between your ears. It's just comfort. Your mind gets more comfort just being with its own self-generated thoughts and not just reacting to digital inputs. That's a slower gear, and it gets comfortable with that slower gear. It gets more comfortable than when it comes time to do concentration on something hard because that's a slower gear than what you get when you get a bunch of those, uh, distractions. Just combine that then with the digital hygiene you already said you're doing, which is being careful about not having too much of algorithmically engineered distraction, being sure not to have too much of that in your life. That is your, uh, metaphorical equivalent of smoking cigarettes while you're training for the marathon. It's kind of productive to what you want to do, so continue to be very wary about I'm on my phone all the time. I'm, I'm looking at TikTok. Stay away from TikTok. Use the phone foyer method. Don't have your phone with you when you're at home. Have it at the foyer. You can go there if you need it. It's not a constant companion. All the stuff we talk about, keep up that digital hygiene as well. Um, and it's practiced. You will get better. You will get better at deep thinking the more you practice. At first, you'll catch up to good deep thinkers around you. Then after a while, you'll be notably deeper with your thinking than other people around you, and you'll reap those rewards. Right, before we get to our final segment, I want to do a quick case study. I like to... This is where someone sends in a brief summary of how they've used my advice. This case study comes from Don. Don says, "I just wanted to share details about the end result of Deep Work and time block planning practices that I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain. At the time, I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race, and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work. Your Time Block Planner and podcast were regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note, the book just received a starred review from Kirkus, and the review noted the book's meticulous research. That meticulous research happened during Deep Work sessions, and I can't thank you enough." Jesse, he also sent around the, the citation. So the book, which comes out in February, is called The Astro Chimps: America's First Astronauts. Well, Don, I appreciate that case study. Um, what that gets to, and I think this is important, is that we have to... And this is the, one of the whole points of the book, Deep Work. We have to value the intensity of concentration. Like, intense concentration is itself an intrinsically valuable activity, and it produces extrinsically much more valuable results than less concentrated focus. So just saying, "I want to make sure I write 1,000 words," or, "I spend three hours on my book," is not the same as saying, "I want to spend three hours concentrated deeply on my book." When you're doing high-level knowledge creative output like creating a book, you're, you're doing... This is alchemy, right? You're trying to have this brain take in information and congeal it into something that is more valuable than the information that came in. The harder you concentrate, the better this result is. And so the, the intensity of concentration should be a really key variable when we think about doing high-level knowledge work, but it's often not. And we know it's not because in the same companies that we make our money off of people doing high-level knowledge work, we also say you should be on Slack. You should be context shifting to email back and forth. You should be doing seven or eight meetings a day because that makes my life more convenient as a manager, a complete disregard for the actual goal of trying to get intense concentration, even though intense concentration is behind almost any major value production in knowledge work. So I appreciate that case study, Don. It's not just words. It's not just hours. It's not just task list. It's concentration and the quality of the concentration that matters, and we should talk about that more. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out