Ep. 256: Start With Discipline

Cal Newport 0:00 So this is today's deep question. Why does cultivating the deep life start with discipline? [instrumental music] I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So for those who are watching at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, Episode 256, or at thedeeplife.com, you'll notice I am back in the Deep Work HQ, the original studio, joined in person by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm already nostalgic for this place.

Speaker 0:46 It's good to have you back.

Cal Newport 0:47 Now, I'm only back temporarily. I'm just in DC for a few days. We wanted to make sure that we got a recording at the old HQ. Uh, I'll be back in New Hampshire for most of the rest of the summer, so most of the rest of the summer, I will be broadcasting out of the Deep Work HQ North up in Hanover, New Hampshire. However, I am bringing back up with me quite a bit of equipment. So for my first stay up north, I flew up there. I had a small bag. I brought bare bones equipment. I'm driving back up this week, so I'm bringing some cameras and some switchers and some lights. So you'll see, if you're watching, if you're watching at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you should hopefully see in the weeks that come, me making Deep Work HQ North closer and closer to HQ South in terms of both the, uh, the quality and the, the visual look. So I'm excited about, I'm excited about that project. But, you know what, Jesse? There's nothing better than the actual studio itself. So-

Speaker 1:41 And you're bringing the shirt up, right?

Cal Newport 1:43 I'm bringing the shirt. So we're gonna try to replicate it, but it's never gonna be the same as the, the DC Takoma Park studio. So it'll, it'll be a triumphant moment, triumphant moment when we return for good.

Speaker 1:53 I can tell you're determined, so you're gonna make it work.

Cal Newport 1:56 I'm gonna make a cool studio up there, but it's not gonna be the same. So it'll, it'll be cool when we get back. Uh, you know, just in time for me to leave and go north for the summer, Jesse, the, the bookstore down the street finally opened.

Speaker 2:06 Oh, it did?

Cal Newport 2:06 Yeah. So, like, uh, just in time when I could be in there buying books daily, it opened just as I was leaving. So we'll have to, we'll have to check that out more when I get back. But if you're in the Takoma Park area, People's Books, Takoma Park. It's open. It's rock and rolling. Check it out. We'll have to do something there at some point, Jesse.

Speaker 2:25 Yeah.

Cal Newport 2:25 Yeah. It's a cool space. It's a cool space. Um, so what are we gonna talk about today? I wanted to get into a question or issue that you the listeners have been bringing up recently, an issue with, or a question about, I should say, the deep life stack. The deep life stack being the, the rough organizing framework we've been using recently to think through the quest to escape the shallows and make your working and profess- personal life more deeper, the sort of central quest of this show. We've organized it more recently around this notion of the deep life stack, and there's a question about the stack that I wanted to address. But just as a reminder for those who are new to this, let me actually bring up on the screen here, uh, the old diagram of the deep life stack I drew a few weeks ago. So again, this is, if you're watching, this is Episode 256. That's what you should look for at youtube.com/calnewportmedia. So you see on the screen if you're watching, the deep life stack. We have a series of four layers that you move through in order as you're trying to transform your life from something that is shallow and reactive to something that's more intentional and deep. So we had this first layer was reestablish discipline. The second layer was build a foundation of values. The third layer was create calm through control, and then the final layer was plan for the remarkable. That's where you actually get to the different areas of your life, what we used to call the buckets, and trying to overhaul them one by one to be more intentional and remarkable. But there's an arrow at the top that says iterate, because you go back through this at least once a year and clean up different layers, revisit different layers. All right. Here's the question. The question that I was sent from many of you is why discipline is at the bottom. Why is not values at the bottom? Why not figure out what really matters to you, and in there you will find the motivation? In there they w- this is the question people are asking me. Why not have values first, because in there you'll find the motivation to do everything else. That's where you'll get your orientation. So there's a reason why I don't have values first, and I wanted to talk about it today because I think it's just useful in general for thinking about the types of transformations we discuss on this

Cal Newport 4:35 show. So this is today's deep question. Why does cultivating the deep life start with discipline? Now, here's the framework I want you to use when thinking about this question. Uh, when it comes to making changes in your life, there's really two types of goals, and we will call the one type externally powered and the other type internally powered. So what I mean by this is externally powered goals are changes to your behavior or consistent actions aimed towards an objective that are driven by a palpable sense of excitement or motivation in the moment. So for an ex- externally powered goal, you feel motivation. You're excited in the moment. "Yes, I wanna do this. I like the way it makes me feel." An internally powered goal, by contrast, is one where these changes or consistent actions are driven by an internal sense of efficacy. You trust that you can keep going on something you deem important even if it doesn't feel desirable in the moment. You trust yourself to make progress on what matters because you know the long-term results is where you get your fulfillment. You trust yourself to be able to stick with it, even if in the moment you say, "I'm not excited about this anymore. I don't really wanna do it right now." So if we think about some examples here, I've long labeled for the aspiring novelist National Novel Writing Month to be an externally powered goal. The whole idea about National Novel Writing Month is that you get really excited about the idea of being a novelist, and you're You drift on this, or you surf on this motivation through this month with a bunch of other people all doing the same thing right every day. You let the excitement about it, uh, carry you through to very quickly get a manuscript done. An internally powered goal, by contrast, for the aspiring novelist might be the slow accumulation of pages. Maybe you wanna finish four short stories over the course of an entire year, each of one-- each of which you're gonna bring to a writing group that's gonna critique and give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next story. When you're on month five of this one-year-long plan, just putting in your pages, even though you don't feel like it, even though you're tired, even though the last short story didn't work, long after the ardor for novelist life has passed, that is an internally powered goal. Another example is talking about fitness. Doing that one-time action because you're pumped up about getting in better shape. Maybe you had a health scare, or you're inspired seeing or reading about someone who is in really good shape, and so you buy that gym membership, or you tell your partner, "I'm over-- I'm overhauling my eating. I want you to be really hard on me if you see me eating the wrong stuff." That's in the moment. You're driven by the in-the-moment excitement, like, "I'm definitely gonna do this, so let me try to set things up the, to force myself or to ins-- to keep myself inspired to do the work." Whereas an internally powered goal towards something like health and fitness might be that actual just reshaping of your schedule that has that space every day for the long walk, has that space most days for some type of training, something that gets you to the, the home gym, and just doing it, and it's five months in, and you just do it. Uh, I don't wanna do it today. There's nothing particularly exciting that I've seen recently. I haven't even been thinking about fitness recently. I've been interested in something else. I still go to the garage and lift those weights. I still, uh, move the meetings to make sure that four to five is always clear so I can get to the gym. That's more internally powered. Similarly, watching productivity YouTube to try to motivate yourself to work really hard. Wow, look at these people with these well-edited clips that have all these musical montages working hour after hour on YouTube. Now I'm motivated to try to finish this hard thing all in one push. That's externally powered goal versus the internally powered goal of just sticking with s- uh, semester, weekly, daily time block planning, multi-scale planning, just doing the work, making the plan, executing the plan again and again, letting results pile up over time. All right, so here's the thing. If you are not comfortable with internally powered goals, you are not gonna succeed transforming your life using the deep life stack. Now think about values, for example. Let's say instead of becoming comfortable with internally powered goals, you said, "Let me just start with my values first. Let me figure out what it is I care about, what should be motivating me." Here's the reality about this. A refined and powerful sense of values is based as much in experience as it is in self-reflection. If you are coming to values first from a context in which you basically exist in a setting of externally powered goals, you go after things only when you're motivated, and then your interest wanes when that motivation goes away. If you live in that type of world of reactive ambition, the values you come up with themselves will be warped. They're gonna push you towards things that are maybe easier than harder. When you try to think about, "How do I put my values into action?" you're going to avoid things that require regular, difficult, disciplined action and find things that are more, uh, less demanding, less in the moment. You're not gonna have the iterative experience of pursuing hard things and seeing what matters and what doesn't that's needed to have more insights. You're, you will come up with values, but they're not gonna be true to you. They're not gonna be in their most powerful state. They are going to warp themselves around your general mindset of reactivity, of externally powered goals, of chasing what seems exciting in the moment. On the other hand, if you have an internally powered goal mindset, if you're comfortable with that, you're gonna have more rigorous values. You're gonna have values that are more born out of experience, and then the routines and codes and rituals you build around them are gonna be more demanding and therefore probably more effective. If you don't have an external, uh, internally powered goal mindset, you will fail when you get to the calm stack as well, finding control, f- calm through control. This is where you get your systems in order. You organize your obligations and time. You find breathing room. That's all internally powered goals to do that consistently, so you will fail there if you're not comfortable with that. And if you get to the planning layer without comfort with these type of goals, you will also fail because your plans for overhauling different buckets in your life, if built only around externally powered goals, will have these flashes of motivation and then crumble away. Very little long-term or sustainable transformation will happen. So at every layer, every layer of the deep life stack, you are going to struggle if you're coming at it from a mindset of, "I only do externally powered goals." This is what that first discipline layer is really about in the current version of the stack we're using. Discipline is on the bottom not to have some sort of martial allegiance to rigorously defining your life as this is the end-all or be-all. What I really mean by that layer, and this is the way I consistently explain it, is that you start by choosing a small number of things, two or three, uh, tied to areas of your life that are important. So you have a variety. There might be a sort of a community one here and a fitness/health one here, maybe something related to craft or whatever's important. Two or three things tied to areas that are important where you have a daily discipline that is carefully selected to not be trivial but to also remain tractable. You're in that, that region of tractability that is right beyond triviality. So it's not simple to do. It's not, "I'm gonna touch my gym shoes every morning," but it's also not, "I'm gonna get up at 4:00 and run 12 miles every morning." It's somewhere in between. It's I, I get my coffee and do this 20-minute walk and jump on the pull-up bar in the park halfway through, and I'm just doing that every morning before my day even gets started. It's not trivial, but it is definitely tractable. So you have these daily disciplines, two to three, that's it, covering a couple different areas of your life, and you do them every day, and you mark that you did it every day. If you use something like my Time-Block Planner, there's a metric tracking space where you can write this every day. If you don't, you can have another type of notebook. Uh, there's a friend of mine who buys these oversized wall-mounted calendars. You see all 30-day calendar on one big sheet that's, I would say, you know, two feet by two feet, hangs it on his wall, and for his core disciplines, he marks a big X on the day. It's the Seinfeld method, don't break the chain. So you're just seeing, did I do it or did I not? Now you can put all of your energy not into some grand scheme, some grand overhaul of your life, uh, some impossibly ambitious, "I'm gonna become a ultramarathoner." You can instead put all of your energy into just, "Here's a small number of tractable, tractable but non-trivial daily disciplines. I wanna mark it on my sheet every day." That's doable. That'll stretch you if you're from an externally powered goal mindset, but it's not going to stretch you to an impossible degree, and that is the main focus of that first discipline layer. If you do this long enough, daily disciplines, your mindset shifts. The way you think of yourself shifts. You begin to think of yourself as someone who is capable of and attracted to internally powered goals, and now all the other layers are enabled. Now you can attack the values true to what really matters to you with the rigor required for that to make a difference in your life. You can track to finding calm through control with systems that you're gonna stick with and actually benefit from that, benefit from that consistency. You're gonna get the planning and actually trust yourself to be able to make potentially significant overhauls that take effort over time and diligent focus and the, the, the turning your attention away from distractions month after month. All this becomes possible, which means the deep life becomes possible. So that's why I put the discipline as the first layer. Now, there's other parts to it. The other thing I want you to do when you get to the discipline layer is just create your central repository. Here's where I write down all the systems and disciplines I'm following. You do want one place for that, so that's the other part of discipline is just having a place where you just say, "This is where I keep track of the things I do, so I just have one place to look." So you set up that first folder. It could be physical or digital, I don't care. And then you start... The first thing you put in this is gonna be your initial daily disciplines. As you move up the stack, you'll develop more systems, more routines, codes, disciplines. All that will go into that same folder that you created up front. But this is really, again, why discipline is first, is that if you don't shift your mindset to the internally powered efficacy, nothing else is gonna happen. Everything else is gonna be flights of motivation, and then you're gonna see your intention begin to crumble. Now, we see this in some classic tales. There's some classic tales, uh, uh, books or on the internet, uh, internet famous or book famous figures who had exactly this order of operations in the transformation of their life, beginning with disciplined activity, oftentimes arbitrary-seeming discipline that then changed their mindset and enabled a much more intentional transformation of their life. Thinking about Rich Roll. Thinking about Rich Roll, The Rich Roll Podcast. If you go back and read his memoir, Finding Ultra, what do you see? Well, you see Rich was a, uh, college athlete. Actually, I don't know if you know this, Jesse, around here, he swam... He was at, uh, Langdon.

Speaker 16:10 Oh, really?

Cal Newport 16:11 Yeah, he was at Langdon. Uh, but a really competitive swimmer, swam, uh, D1 at Stanford, had, you know, Olympic aspirations, developed substance abuse problems. Went to law school, became a lawyer, had drug and alcohol problems, got sober, but sort of when he got sober, he traded it off for, uh, eating terribly. So he finds himself, you know, around, uh, Jesse and I's age right now, and he is, uh, really out of shape. There's a... He walks up the stairs in his house, this what he talks about in his memoir, after eating cheeseburgers, you know, late at night, and winded. He finds himself winded, and he's like, "This is enough. Something has to change." He doesn't really know how to do the change, so what he, he just does, just in a why not, is he puts on his running shoes and goes for a run. He lives down in, uh, Calabasas. Beautiful house, actually. Goes for a run, and he talks about in this book, it, he ends up running some absurd distance, like 18 miles or something. He just sort of just keeps going and then comes back, and something about that clicks, and he says, "I'm just gonna exercise." And he just starts exercising, which he was sort of used to from his college ath- athletic days, but he just starts exercising, and after a while, he's, he's saying, like, "I wanna train and do some sort of endurance event." This is his daily discipline. "I'm just gonna do this one thing. I'm gonna start just training for endurance-type sports." And that becomes the core that transforms his life, and of course, he becomes famously, uh, a vegan and then starts doing these really attention-catching endurance athletic challenges and then transforms that over to his, his podcast, The Rich Roll Podcast, where now he's more of a sort of elder statesman of the self-improvement space and delivering life wisdom to people and has built this whole really cool career and lifestyle ar- around all of this, a completely healthy guy, completely in tune with himself and his spirit. But it all started with an arbitrary discipline. "I'm gonna run long distances." And it's not that there's something specific about running long distances that was really important for the way he envisioned his life. I think it was the discipline transformed his mindset, reactivated the confidence in his ability to go after internally powered goals, and then everything else in his life changed after that. Jocko Willink, I think of the same way. If you listen to how Jocko Willink, the, uh, former Navy SEAL and host of the Jocko podcast, if you talk about his story, when he joined the Navy to become a SEAL, he was a, a young sort of punk kid that was up to no good, sort of adrift. He sought discipline. And again, this is arbitrary discipline. I'm gonna do special operations training. It's a... requires incredible discipline. But you'll see in his story that that then transformed him. The discipline of, in this case, special forces training gave him this idea of the, uh, I can handle internally powered goals. I can control my life. And now he has molded himself into someone who is the opposite of a punk kid, but someone who lives by a code and values. He was literally involved in the writing of the Navy SEAL code, the code by which Navy SEALs now identify that they, they work and operate. The discipline came first. The transformation came second. I think we see something similar in Cheryl, uh, Strayed's book, Wild. I say her name wrong often, Jesse. Maybe we should, we should look it up. It's Cheryl Strayed. Am I saying that pos- properly?

Speaker 19:36 That sounds right.

Cal Newport 19:37 Yeah.

Speaker 19:37 Let me look.

Cal Newport 19:37 You look it up. Anyways, uh, I don't know if you're, you're familiar, you might know her, uh, from her columns and what she's done since or the... But if you've seen the Reese Witherspoon [laughs] movie that was made about her, her breakout nonfiction memoir, Wild, again, what you see in that memoir is Cheryl took on a act of arbitrary discipline at a time when her life was all over the place and out of control. That arbitrary act of discipline was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

Speaker 20:06 Strayed.

Cal Newport 20:07 Strayed.

Speaker 20:08 Yeah.

Cal Newport 20:08 Cheryl Strayed.

Speaker 20:09 S-T-R-A-Y-E-D.

Cal Newport 20:11 That's how I wrote it down, actually. All right, I had it right, Cheryl Strayed. So it's an arbitrary discipline. But she, she was having drug problems and was really having a hard time dealing with, I believe it was the death of her mother, and there's all sorts of issues going on. Arbitrary discipline. But what that did was then shifted her mindset to say, "Okay, internally powered goals are something I can do," and, and now is, you know, obviously is a very influential cultural commentator and thinker. It helped her get out of that really difficult place. So we see this often in classic stories as well. The, uh, seemingly arbitrary discipline becomes the foundation on which all the intentional stuff is built. And that is the mindset shift I want you to do until you're used to this identity of yourself as someone who can do these type of internally powered goals. All of the navel-gazing in the world is not gonna get you very far. All of the thinking through what really matters is not gonna get you very far. You're going to see activity burst in flames of inspiration that then dissipate as the winds of everyday life and the grounding realities of normal responsibilities take away that p- temporary charge. And so it's a mindset shift comes first. Everything else follows. So that is, that is why I have discipline as the very first layer of the stack. All right, so what we're gonna do is I pulled some questions that all, I think, roughly orbit this notion of, of discipline and applying disciplines as the solution, so this sort of using discipline to change your mindset. That all roughly orbits that central idea, so they're questions from you, the listeners. And then we have a Something Interesting segment at the end where we'll talk about an unrelated topic that you sent in to my interesting@calnewport.com email address. First, I wanna mention one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That's our good friends at Henson Shaving. Jesse, I gave my Henson blade a, uh, real workout today. I hadn't shaved in two days coming into this morning, right? Because we, I, I flew back from New Hampshire and we were working, you know, packing and working around the house and, you know, wasn't out and about in the world. And I said, "Okay, we got quite a bit of growth here. Let's see if my Henson razor is up for it." And as you can see, it was.

Speaker 22:27 Yeah.

Cal Newport 22:27 Right? And here's the thing, one 10-cent safety razor blade put into this beautiful Henson razor could handle multiple days, multiple days of growth smoothly, no

Cal Newport 22:40 razor burn, no nicks. How does this work? Well, it's because the Henson razor is this, again, beautifully designed, precision milled piece of aluminum. The people at Henson know how to do this. Their day job, so to speak, is designing parts for the aerospace industry, so they have these high-precision routers that can build metals to s- extreme tolerances. So you get this beautifully milled piece of aluminum. You put just a standard 10-cent safety razor blade in there. You screw it on, and you have only .0013 inches of blade extending beyond either side of the razor housing, which means you get no up and down flexing or diving board effect. You get just the very rigid cutting edge, and so that one blade in this beautifully designed razor can give you a very good shave. Gets rid of clog, gets rid of burns, gets rid of nicks. It's also quite affordable. You pay a little more up front for the, the razor itself, but because you're using 10-cent blades, it quickly becomes cheaper to operate than using a subscription service or going to the drugstore every month to buy the disposable sort of plastic housed 97-blade whatever apparatuses they're selling these days. So this is why I love my, uh, my Henson razor, and I recommend it. So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com/cal to pick the razor for you, and use code CAL and you'll get two years' worth of blades for free with your razor. Just add the two-year supply to your cart, and when you enter the promo code CAL at checkout, the cost of those will drop to zero. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com/cal and use that code CAL. I also wanna talk about our friends at the always fun to pronounce ZocDoc. This is one of those products that just makes so much sense, I'm surprised that it didn't exist before, or I'm surprised I ever got along without it. So, Zocdoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online. We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top-rated patient reviewed doctors and specialists. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located near you, and treat almost any condition you're searching for. You can also look at reviews. So this just makes it easy. I need a podiatrist. I need a new primary care physician. I'm looking for a dentist. You just go to Zocdoc, your Zocdoc app or zocdoc.com, and you say, "Here's what I'm looking for, in this area, takes this insurance." Boom, here they are. Which ones are taking appointments? Great. And then you can click and say, "Okay, what are the reviews? What do actual patients think? Oh, patients really like this doctor. It's nearby. It takes my insurance. They're taking new appointments. Great, let's book an appointment right now." It really makes healthcare much easier to navigate. No more just asking around your friends, "Hey, do you know a podiatrist that you like?" And they said, "No, I've never... I haven't gone to one." It takes all that out of it. It is the smart way of actually finding medical care, uh, providers, and then working with those providers. I've had, what, so I guess three different doctors now that have used, that use Zocdoc. So not only does it help me find them, but also the appointment booking. Uh, also the reminders. When they're in the Zocdoc ecosystem, you get great reminders, "Hey, appointments are coming up." You can do paperwork online in advance. I'm a big fan of Zocdoc and the Zocdoc ecosystem. I'm also a big fan of being able to say zocdoc.com [chuckles] as much as possible. Um, so go to zocdoc.com/deep to download the Zocdoc app for free, then find and book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep. Zocdoc.com/deep.

Cal Newport 26:37 All right, Jesse, let us, uh, let's do some questions.

Speaker 26:40 Sounds good. First question's from Fahad, a 21-year-old student. "I feel like I have two different personalities, one who's very productive and intentional, another who wants to be a slob, scroll social media, play video games, and watch TV all day. How do I stop falling into the slob state?"

Cal Newport 26:57 Well, Fahad, it's a good question. It's not a, it's not a original question, and I mean that in the good sense of your issue is not unusual. Your issue is not something very specific to you, and in particular, your issue here has nothing to do with some sort of intrinsic character flaw that has been overcome. I think we often miss, when we talk about tales of people who diligently and disciplinely work through big accomplishments, we often miss the subtlety that goes into setting up a lifestyle or work environment in which you actually are able to maintain motivation and accomplish something big. That is a lot more subtle than we give credit to. It's not just about some people are able to white-knuckle it and some people are weak. It's much more complicated than that. There's a couple things I wanna focus on here as being important. One has to do with how you choose what you work on. One has to do with how you build a lifestyle or approach actually working on it. So let's start with the choice question, and then the second piece we'll cover more... That's gonna overlap more with the central theme of today's episode about cultivating discipline as a mindset. But let's start first with the choice of project. Oftentimes, especially for young people, and Fahad, you say here you're 21 years old, so that, uh, that counts as you. You're half Jesse and I's age, which is, uh, its own psychological issue for Jesse and I to deal with, but don't worry about that. For someone who's young like you, you have to be very careful in what you choose to work on. So there's a couple things that is going to potentially short-circuit your motivation. One is you just set too much stuff on your plate. "Yeah, I'm gonna do this, and this, and this, because I can't wait to get started, and I wanna work on all these things, and I, I just wanna get really motivated and go for it," and your mind gets exhausted and says, "We can't be starting a business, and acing our classes, and writing a book, and training to be in really good shape. It's just too many things. The energy involved in, in trying to, to keep up with these things is, is too much, and it just seems intractable, and forget it." Motivation is gone. The other type of issue that happens here is your mind, you maybe have one or two things. It's not the quantity, but your mind doesn't trust your plan for execution. You're like, "Yeah, I wanna look like Thor," but all you're doing is sort of just randomly going to the gym and sort of lifting weights, and your mind's like, "You don't know what... This is not gonna lead to Thor. We're not gonna look... We're just doing random stuff." Or you say, "I wanna be a famous writer," and you're sort of writing every day, and your mind says, "This is not how this works. Just you're, we're, we're writing kind of random stuff or with no guidance, no structure. Uh, what's gonna happen with this? We're not gonna become a famous writer doing this. So, neh," once your initial just general excitement about being a writer dies off, we're gonna withhold motivation, and then you're gonna find yourself falling off. So being careful about how you choose what you work on. A reasonable load, and then study what you work on and make sure that your plan for approaching it is evidence-based and logical, that your mind will trust, "Yeah, we're gonna get results with what we're doing." And to get there, especially if you're young, might mean bringing your ambition down and aiming at a much closer milestone. So it's not, "I want the, the, uh, Pulitzer Prize," it's, you know, "I want to be a regular contributor to the college magazine." So you bring it down to a more proximate goal. You have a plan to get there that your mind trusts. So the, the choice of things matter if you want to have your motivation be sustained. All right. The second big category here comes to that mindset we talked about earlier during the Deep Dive earlier in the show. Does your mind think of yourself as someone Who is able to handle and stick with internally motivated goals? It sounds like right now, no. So when I hear, "I get going," I'm look- reading you here, "I'm very productive and intentional, and then it sort of falls off, and I become a slob," if I had to guess, this productivity and intentionality might be aimed in part at externally powered goals. You're working because you're very motivated about some particular outcome. You got yourself excited about it watching YouTube videos or reading something, and something got... captured you and got your attention going, and that's what's motivating you to do the work, to return to the books, to return to putting in effort. And when that external power begins to dissipate, then, eh, social media, TV comes back. So seeing yourself instead as someone who finds pride in sticking with internally powered goals, you're gonna have less ups and downs. How do you do that? I'd go back to the deep life stack. I would start with the discipline layer. I would choose two to three daily disciplines covering a couple different areas in your life that are non-trivial but are also tractable, and start marking on a sheet, on a time block planner, on a calendar on your wall, wherever you wanna do it, "Did I do each of these each day?" And really do that for a whole semester. Then return to, "Okay, what's my more ambitious goals for what I wanna do with my time?" You will find that it's easier to stick with it. Your mind is much more comfortable with, "We, we believe in this. These are carefully chosen. We stick with things even when they're hard. That is what Fahad does. That is who we are." You change your self-conception by training your mind to think about what you're doing differently. All right? So there's nothing, there's nothing wrong about you, Fahad. What's wrong is some of the details of your approach towards your very admirable goal of doing intentional, remarkable things with your time. So choose carefully, and spend some time developing a mindset of discipline, a comfort with internally

Cal Newport 32:23 powered goals, and I think you're gonna find that this up-and-down whipsawing between, "I'm working 10 hours a day," and, "I'm on social media all day," that's gonna start to even out. All right, Jesse, uh, what do we got next?

Speaker 32:38 Okay. Next question's from Jacob, a 20-year-old from Colorado. "I seem to have contracted a case of what I call seasonal discipline, where I'll be very actively disciplined on following my habits and systems for a few months at a time, and then fall off really hard for a few months in an endless, agonizing loop. I'm wondering if you have any tips for cultivating a more consistent commitment to discipline."

Cal Newport 33:02 We got a lot of young people today, Jesse.

Speaker 33:03 I know, I was thinking the same thing.

Cal Newport 33:05 Makes us feel, makes us feel old.

Speaker 33:07 You know when you were doing the, uh, Henson read, I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved in two days, and I was like, mine, I go back and forth a lot, but mine's white now.

Cal Newport 33:15 Oh, mine is too.

Speaker 33:16 Yeah.

Cal Newport 33:16 Yeah.

Speaker 33:16 I don't mind it.

Cal Newport 33:17 I don't mind it, but my beard is, uh, well, it's salt and pepper.

Speaker 33:20 Yeah.

Cal Newport 33:20 But it's definitely white, and I can see it at my sideburns as well.

Speaker 33:24 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 33:24 Yeah. My hair is still mainly brown, but...

Speaker 33:28 [laughs]

Cal Newport 33:29 Oh, that's coming. That's coming. We need, we need to balance these 20-year-old questions, I'm telling you, Jesse. Next we'll get, I don't know, a 41-year-old question is gonna be, uh, like a combination of wanting to know about, uh, tax filing. You know, "I'm doing my Schedule C deductions and wondering if this is, if this is the right, you know, line item to put that deduction." Some mixture of talking about, um, yeah, tax filings, a- and then also, I don't know, what else does-

Speaker 33:55 Potential hair surgery.

Cal Newport 33:56 And like, yeah, hair surgery.

Speaker 33:57 [laughs] I had that.

Cal Newport 33:59 Yeah. "I'm thinking about getting like this hair surgery for that hair surgery, and I have a kind of a tax question."

Speaker 34:03 [laughs]

Cal Newport 34:04 "And also, I'm tired all the time."

Speaker 34:07 And I need a shave.

Cal Newport 34:07 "Should I get like hor- like testosterone treatment?"

Speaker 34:10 [laughs]

Cal Newport 34:11 Yeah. Meanwhile, these young kids are, yeah. "I was up 12 hours, you know, 20 hours straight working on my screenplay."

Speaker 34:18 [laughs]

Cal Newport 34:19 "And we're like, I only get two hours of working in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap." Um, all right, Jacob, I'm sorry, let's get back to your question. Seasonal discipline. You, you, uh, some, some periods do well, some periods you do not so well. All right, very similar to Fahad. So I'm gonna have, again, two solutions here. Where this is gonna overlap with what I talked about with Fahad is just the mindset training piece. So the very same thing I recommended Fahad that I recommended at the beginning of the show, I'm gonna recommend as a starting point for you as well, that discipline layer, that very first layer of the deep life stack. Two to three non-trivial and tractable, non-trivial but tractable daily disciplines covering multiple areas of your life that you track every single day and put most of your productivity, intentionality, focus, all that willpower on just doing those every day, not breaking the chain. You wanna mark it every day on a calendar. It's a good tune-up, just to get your mind back in shape as, "I don't need external power to do things. I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited or things are going well to make progress on important things. I can also make progress in the hard seasons, in the proverbial winters when other things are going on or the work itself is not going so well." See, there's a mindset tune-up, and I think that returning to that discipline layer can help with that. And then just like with Fahad, but with slight differences in specifics here, I would say let's also think about what this, what you're calling here, uh, habits and systems, what these habits and systems are. So even if you have the right internal conception of yourself, it is still the case that if the particular habits or systems you, you've put in place, if those particular habits and systems aren't sustainable, or if they have a lot of friction, they work, but they have overhead that don't need to be there and your mind senses that, you are going to accumulate stress fractures, right? You're gonna accumulate over time this friction and grinding of the system's not quite right, it's too big, it's too hard, it has steps we don't need to do. It's, it's like the system's gonna start building up these stress fractures until the whole thing eventually breaks apart, and that's maybe why you can only make a few months. This is very common in the world of productivity systems, that if the system is not ... compatible with your life and streamlined and believable, you can last with it for a while, but after, you know, it gets just clunky. I'm typing these notes, and it goes into this notes system that then automatically populates these type of systems, and every day I have a, you know, a generative AI bot take these and generate a-a-a schedule, and then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours. These type of high-overhead, high-friction systems, they begin to just accumulate too much wear and tear until all of the gears get jammed, and then you just say, "Enough with this," and you fall back to doing nothing, until doing nothing after a while gets you so stressed out or overwhelmed by being disorganized that you go and build a new system, and that starts generating friction till its gears mesh, and then that can also be the source of what you're seeing here. One season up, one season down. One season up, one season down. So you also wanna really check out your systems here. Streamline them. The simplest possible thing that actually helps you get your work done sometimes is the right thing to do. Get rid of unnecessary things. Have a core document where you keep track of, "Here's what I do and how I do it" so you're not just trying to keep track of things in your mind, and you can see where there's overlap or redundancies, or your systems are sort of out of control. You want something that fits very naturally into your life. So if you're starting from scratch here, I would say something like multi-scale planning. You have a strategic plan, a weekly plan, and do some sort of daily time block plan during workdays but not the weekends. Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks so that you don't have to keep track of those things in your head. Put those two things together, maybe mixed in with some sort of fixed schedule productivity mindset of, "This is my work hours, and everything else has to fit into it," that's a good start for organizing all the professional things in your life. Use very simple tech tools for implementing this. I'm talking, you know, you have a paper time block planner and then a couple Google Docs to keep track of strategic plans and weekly plans. You could use Trello to keep track of tasks or even just a long text file where you're typing things. Simple technologies that are easy to get in and easy to get out that you can access from multiple platforms, that makes a big difference. As you add in other structures or goals around your personal life, keep it simple, you know. So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility. Let's try to minimize friction. Let's just make the general rhythm of your life something that's very sustainable. That'll help, too. So I don't know in your case, Jacob, which is the bigger problem. So I don't know if it's a mindset issue, that your systems are fine, but your mindset just needs right now external fuel for you to work on hard things, or if it's a systems problem. Your mindset's fine, but your systems are, have too much friction. So look at both. But between those two things, I think you're gonna find the seasonality of following systems is going to go away. One epilogue I will add to this as well is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue. I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal. I stop being organized during some months versus others. I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal. In fact, in my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, there's a, a whole s- principle is about working at a natural pace, and it really gets into seasonality and how natural and well-suited humans are for that. So I do wanna throw that in there. You might just be getting exhausted, right? Like a professor, by the time a professor gets to the end of spring, traditionally, they're exhausted because they've gone through a full, uh, full school year. So to actually pull back some in the summer makes sense because you need to recharge. If you try to go all out in the summer after a hard spring and after a hard fall before that, you might just run out of steam altogether. So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well. So let's throw that in here, not just as an epilogue, but I'm gonna throw this in, Jacob, as my third part of my answer. Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same. You're still multi-scale planning, but when you get to some months of the year, the amount of stuff you're putting to your week, the complexity of your daily time block schedules are much easier, and you get that relief of, "Man, this feels great. I can really control my time. I'm taking Thursdays completely off because why not? I'm using planning so I can move pieces around. This is great. I can actually extract a lot more relaxation and recharging because I have some structure." So I think a seasonal workload could be excellent, but you don't want your systems to come and go seasonally, and you wanna make sure that your mindset is one that doesn't require external power. So there we go. I, I upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob, and hopefully you will find that useful. All right. Let's, uh, let's keep going here, Jesse.

Speaker 40:59 Yeah, and then the time management video on our YouTube channel is-

Cal Newport 41:03 Yes

Speaker 41:03 ... definitely something you should check out.

Cal Newport 41:05 Yeah, so look under the... What is it? Core Ideas is the playlist?

Speaker 41:07 Yeah.

Cal Newport 41:07 Right, so YouTube.com/calnewportmedia. Look at the playlist. There's a playlist called Core Ideas. There's one, uh, titled, a video titled Time Management where I, I talk about that multi-scale-

Speaker 41:19 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 41:20 ... multi-scale planning. Yeah, shows up, shows up right in there. It's a good place to start.

Speaker 41:25 All right. Next question is from Loyad from India, "I often take on multiple projects, but then they, as they become hard, I abandon them halfway. How do I stop doing this?"

Cal Newport 41:36 All right, so we have a very consistent type theme today. I think the reader could al- or the listener could almost answer this question on their own now, which is my goal. I really wanna hammer this point home, uh, as much as I can. So Loyad, why are you abandoning projects when they become hard halfway? Well, as you can imagine, I'm gonna have two parts to my answer here. One is mindset. If your mindset is one that depends on external power for you to get through goals, you are not gonna get very far in hard projects because the external power, which in this case is that actual emotional feeling of motivation, excitement, will die down as projects go on, as they get harder, and then you'll stop doing them. So you need to reshape your mindset towards, one, seeing yourself as someone who can handle internally powered goals. Guess how I'm gonna suggest you do that. Layer one of the deep life stack, two to three daily disciplines, nontrivial but tractable. Every day mark them Just train your mind. I do things that are important for me, even if they're hard, even if I'm not excited in the moment, and there's a deeper satisfaction I get out of that. That's why I trust myself to do this going forward. Secondly, the issue here is gonna be similar to what I talked to both Fahad and Jacob about. You might just have too many projects, and they might just actually be too hard. So be very careful about that. I think one project worked on consistently and slowly over time is gonna, in the end, open up more opportunities and have more impact than multiple projects that you're trying to tackle in a frenzied burst. So it's like sort of a key slow productivity principle here, work on fewer things. So you might just have too many projects. Again, you have this impatience of, "I'm young, and there's so much I wanna do, and I have to make my mark." And you don't realize, just choose the one thing that you patiently start building your, your skill on. It's frustrating maybe now when you're 22, but by the time you're 24 or 25 and that's bearing fruit, the fruit is gonna be so much riper and sweeter than if you had spilled that time instead just jumping from thing to thing, trying to jump from the latest idea to the latest interest. I mean, I knew someone like this in college, Jesse, and I, I kind of remember his name, but I, I'm not sure if I have his name right. And maybe I should anonymize it anyways. But I knew about him because he was my year at college, maybe he was a year younger, and he was the only other person I knew who was trying to write a book.

Speaker 43:56 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 43:57 And so he had, he had interest in books. But he had all these other interests as well. Like, he, he was interested in politics because, uh, Dartmouth is in Hanover, which is in New Hampshire, so when the presidential season would come through, which happened twice when I was there, everyone comes through New Hampshire because of the primaries. You get lots of political figures coming through. So he was also getting really involved in helping to, like, organize, I believe it was a debate for the 2004 presidential election, and he had this other project going on and, and so th- there was this real sense, I remember, man, he's doing a lot of things. Book writing was one of them. All these different projects. Just the excitement of I have these... Um, he was very capable. Very capable in all these different things I could make my, my mark in. I was not that way. I wanted to... I was just writing. I was, I was doing my CS work and writing. And I just, that was my main thing outside of my schoolwork, was just writing, and I just, I wanted to write this book and do it well and then immediately turn around and sell another. But I just wanted to make my writing better, and I was willing to put my time, just focus on that. And so there's this point early on, now we're both kind of working on books, and he had a lot of other stuff going on. But all that stuff, I don't know what happened to it. But I just kept focusing on books. Then I wrote another book and that was a little bit better, and then I took some time and wrote a third book, which was much better, and then it set up my fourth book, which was a hardcover. And now that has borne much more interesting fruit. I have actually... It took me a long time, but I've developed myself into a writer who can have a career as a writer. So in the moment when I was 20 or 21, it seemed maybe naively slow, like, "I'm just gonna work on this book and try to make it good. I don't wanna be distracted." But looking back as a 41-year-old, I say, "Man, I'm so glad I stayed focused on that," because how much interesting stuff has making writing one of my two core focuses of my life really opened up. So, Lloyad, slowing down, doing less things, sticking with that in a sustainable pace over a long period of time, that's typically what you wanna be doing if your goal is either impact or opening up interesting opportunities in your life, or some combination of those two. That slow productivity approach is probably better. So that might be what's going on as well, is your mind is just overwhelmed. This is too much. So we got mindset, and we have your mind being reasonable. So your mindset might be off. You need external power. We fixed that through practice. Your mind might be working perfectly fine and is making the reasonable observation that now this is too much work. We have too many things. We can't possibly be making a difference in all of these. They're beginning to conflict with each other. So you might actually just have to think about doing less.

Speaker 46:27 Actually, focusing is one of the main messages in your student books, like where you tell people not to do, like, a thousand activities-

Cal Newport 46:34 Yeah

Speaker 46:34 ... stuff like that.

Cal Newport 46:35 Yeah. Uh, in fact, I was reminded that... So I'm, I'm back at Dartmouth and that I didn't really remember this till I got up there. I was like, "Oh, I've been back a bunch of times over the course of the last couple decades-

Speaker 46:46 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 46:46 ... to give talks." And one of the first talks I gave, there's an old poster of this I, I have somewhere in my basement. I had forgotten about this. I think it was a year out of college. I came back to Dartmouth and gave a lecture to students there about navigating their student career.

Speaker 47:03 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 47:03 And this was one of the big points I was making, was do fewer things. Do fewer things. Do them really well. You are much better off, for example, being the best student in the computer science department than you are being the student with the hardest schedule on campus. "I have three majors and I'm doing these impossible..." You're much better off saying, "I'm only a computer science student, and in fact, I balance my computer science courses with easier courses, and I take full advantage of, uh, independent studies and thesis studies where I can reduce my course load but still get credits. And so, you know, my course load is very, very manageable. And what I do is I take that energy to become the best student in those computer science classes." That is way, way more valuable-

Speaker 47:44 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 47:45 ... than, "I did a triple major," or, "I had really hard semesters." No one cares how hard your semesters are. Similarly, "I wrote a book," you know, "I wrote a book for Random House," is gonna get you much farther than, "I..." You know, "I had six different clubs, you know how hard that was? I was a treasurer here and I ran this, I did this initiative." No one's keeping track of that.

Speaker 48:02 Yeah.

Cal Newport 48:02 No one cares. They're, I mean, they're like, "Yeah, you, you, you seem like a go-getter," but it doesn't catch their attention. Like, people care about the thing you do best, so you're almost always better off making your best things as good as possible, which almost always requires doing less. And, and this was, again, this came out of my advocacy about student stress, which I did this, like, 2004 to 2007 period. I did a lot of this, a lot of talks all over the country about this. And at the core of my advocacy about student stress was students need to do much less. Th- th- this is a, the, there's only so much that tactics and strategies and time management, they can only get you so far if you have too many courses and activities. And then as a college student There's no real reason to do a lot of things because no one in your future is gonna care about that. There is no college admissions officer type figure in your future who is going to pore over what you did at college and say, "How hard was their schedule?" And let's get letters. They say, "This person was really impressive. They worked on all these things. How hard were their course, their course load?" No one looks at that after college. If you're trying to go to grad school, it's gonna be a professor evaluating your application, and what do they wanna know? Where'd you go to school? What grades did you get in your major? Have you demonstrated you can do research? That's all they care. That's all they care about. They're not gonna look at your, "Oh my God, they had three... This is a really complicated schedule," or, "Look at these activities." They could care less. You're gonna work for a company. Typically, they wanna know where'd you go to school, what was your GPA, how'd they do in the interview. That's what they care about, you know? And, and again, we're gonna see this, uh, again and again. Go to law school. What do they care about? Here's... LSATs, GPA. You can look up the grid school by school. This LSAT requires this GPA to have a r- a high chance of getting in for basically every school except for maybe Yale. That's what you need to do. I have this grade point average, I need this LSAT score. Practice till I get it. Now I can get in, right? No one is gonna be poring over your resume to see how hard your schedule is or how stressed you were. That became a, that became a big core of my student advocacy, stress advocacy, was avoid unforced error, students. Create schedules and loads that are very manageable, and then do what you do really well. Do a small number of things well is such a, such a more sustainable strategy, and in the end opens up more opportunities than I did a lot of hard... I, I had a hard schedule and did a lot of things okay. So that was a big part of my schedule. You know, the other part of my... This is going off tangent, Jesse, but, uh, I was talking about this at a student event the other week up at Dartmouth. We, we kind of brought up all this, I dredged up all of the stuff I used to do around student stress advocacy way back when.

Speaker 50:32 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 50:33 And I remember the other thing, uh, the other thing that came up often was when student stress became a big issue, especially at the high school level, the response, and I think this is still sort of a instinct we have right now, the response was all of these Ivy League-educated commentators who are writing about this, thinking like Alexander Robbins or Denise Pope, would then turn to these a- aspirational students who are stressing themselves out trying to get into, like, an Ivy League school and say, "Guys, there's more to life than going to a good school. You know, just chill out about it." And this was completely falling flat because here they were with their Stanford and Yale degrees saying, like, "Well, I did it, and I'm doing this kind of cool stuff and I'm kind of famous. But, like, just go to the... You're so, you're kind of, in fact, you're flawed and especially your parents are flawed for pushing you to actually wanna come here. Just temper your ambition." So it was very much this pull up the drawbridge behind you type of mentality that just wasn't working. The students who were most stressed, if you came to them with your Ivy League diploma on the wall and said, "There's more to life than going to an Ivy League," they would 100% tune you out.

Speaker 51:42 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 51:43 'Cause they would say, "I disagree. You look like you're doing something cool. I wanna do something cool like that. If the only thing you can offer me is be less ambitious, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna ignore you and go back to whatever's caused me all this stress and causing all these troubles." And so I was also back then, this 2005, 2006 period, this lone voice out there in the student stress debates, and this is when they really picked up speed, when the millennial demographic bump, uh, hit up against limited college admission slot, when the common application became widespread-

Speaker 52:11 Mm

Cal Newport 52:11 ... and now you could apply to 50 colleges pretty easily. This is when it, acceptance rates plummeted, right? So the 2000s, early 2000s, this is when it became a real problem, and I was out there, you know, as a lone voice among these other voices saying, "What you have to offer students is an alternative path to their ambitions." You have to keep the ambition in the question. Okay, you wanna go to a really good school. I'm not gonna try to talk you out of that. I mean, I, I want you to know it's okay if, if that doesn't happen, but I'm not gonna tell you you're bad or your parents are flawed for thinking you wanna go to Harvard or whatever. But let's talk about how you do that, and actually, this path of overloading yourself and just trying to grind it out is not very successful. Here's alternative paths where you could be very interesting, uh, and have a good shot at these schools, but your life is very sustainable. And I used to call it the Zen Valedictorian strategy, and I wrote a lot about and talked a lot about it. My third book is actually about this strategy.

Speaker 53:05 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 53:05 I followed five kids who got into really good schools without being stressed and deconstructed how, how in the world did they do this, right? And so I was the lone voice out there often that would say, "I, I think it's completely fine. You have to recognize and accept people's ambitions, and then start giving them more sustainable strategies for pursuing those ambitions."

Speaker 53:24 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 53:24 We're way off Loyola's question at this point, but anyways, this all... I was just thinking about this. I was talking to all these college students the other day. We did a student dinner.

Speaker 53:31 Yeah.

Cal Newport 53:31 And I was talking to a lot of them about... 'Cause they had just gone through this to get into Dartmouth. Uh, I believe Dartmouth's acceptance rate now is negative 2%.

Speaker 53:39 [laughs] Yeah.

Cal Newport 53:40 Like, they actually kick out a certain number of people each year. You have to get... I think to get into, uh, an Ivy League school today, um, you have to work really hard in STEM classes in high school, get to the head of those classes, use those technology to invent a time machine-

Speaker 53:56 [laughs]

Cal Newport 53:57 ... then bring yourself back to 1997 to... See, it's negative accept- You actually have to go back in time to be accepted. I think they, they try to reduce the number of students there every year. I don't know. Um, that's all neither here nor there. I'm just in this mindset, I don't know why I'm in this mindset again, but, uh, but I guess, Jesse, you caused all this by saying, "I talk about focus in my student books."

Speaker 54:17 Yeah.

Cal Newport 54:17 And I was like, yeah, like, in my student books, I really was trying to just be very clear about here's how a l- a lot of students do really well-

Speaker 54:25 [clears throat]

Cal Newport 54:25 ... and a lot of it's not doing too much, being organized about what you do, but keeping your load

Cal Newport 54:30 manageable, and actually this is a very sustainable path.

Speaker 54:32 Yeah.

Cal Newport 54:33 Not completely out of nowhere, though, because I think we'll see this final question I think this could be relevant to this final question.

Speaker 54:40 All right, last question from a CS student. "In a previous podcast, you mentioned not to work for 10 hours at a time like many productivity YouTubers do. Can you explain why not? These YouTubers are often the biggest names in YouTube productivity and seem like they are excellent students and are creating long-term deep life habits from it. As long as you make sure to avoid shallow work, I was wondering why is working 10 hours a day a problem?"

Cal Newport 55:04 Have you seen these videos, Jesse?

Speaker 55:06 No.

Cal Newport 55:07 Uh, people have been sending them to me.

Speaker 55:08 I, I've taken your advice, like even before I knew you, about like the no... You can't see any other videos on the homepage, and-

Cal Newport 55:16 Yes

Speaker 55:17 ... so I only go-

Cal Newport 55:17 The, uh, the plugin that takes the recommendations off of YouTube.

Speaker 55:21 Yeah.

Cal Newport 55:22 By the way, I'm a big believer in that still. YouTube is a great library. It's a terrible television channel. That's what I always say. So to use it as a library, I wanna learn how to do this thing, and I can search and find videos on how to replace the oil in my very particular type of car. It's an excellent library. Or I wanna look up, I've heard about Cal Newport, you know, I like Cal Newport. I know his podcast is on YouTube, so I can have that bookmarked, and I'm going there to look up Cal Newport videos to see, you know, his podcast. That's great. To use it as a TV channel, let me just click on a recommendation and then see if the recommendations are more interesting than what I'm watching, and click on those recommendations, and sort of following those rabbit holes, that is, that is more dangerous. But anyways, there's a whole productivity YouTube where these YouTubers do these over-the-top, I think of it as a sort of nerd version of David Blaine productivity endurance challenges, and it's, uh, I guess it's time lapse, but 10 hours studying straight, and they make it sort of heroic. I mean, this often works well on YouTube. If the thing you're doing is over the top, you take whatever emotional reaction that is relevant to that topic. So you see someone well organized and studying well, and you're like, "Oh, I kind of... That, I have an affinity for that. I wanna be a better student." And then you show someone doing it for 10 hours, you push it over the top. It takes that emotional response and pushes it over the top. That's engagement, and people watch these videos and get really into it. So it's a, it's a classic YouTube strategy being applied to the topic of productivity. So why not study for 10 hours a day? You can see in the student's question, these are big names on YouTube. These people are f- YouTube famous. They, they seem like they're really good students. Why? There's a clarity to it. There's an extremeness to it, a sort of monastic discipline to all I do is study all day. And I guess my answer to the CS student, it would be to turn the question back on you and say, uh, "To what end?" So what are you trying to accomplish if you're working 10 hours a day on schoolwork? Well, you might say, "Well, um, then for sure I'll get into med school." Okay, so then, then what? "Well, okay, I guess I would study 10 hours a day in med school so that I could graduate top of my class and get a, a really good residency." Okay, well, then what? "Well, then I would work 10 hours a day so I could do research at the... I could be the very best resident and get sort of an academic clinical position." Okay, well, then what? "Well, then I'd really wanna do 10 hours because I could... If I could fill every hour working on my medical research and clinic- clinician practice, I could move up really quickly and become an attending and get tenure at the associate university very quickly." It was like, all right, well, then what? "Well, then I could, if I really work 10 hours all day long, then I could probably, um, become, you know, chair of this particular medical, uh, department and bring in all this different money, and we could really expand the hospital." It's like, all right, and then what? You keep following this out, and you look back and say, "All I've done is just work really hard." What about all the other elements of life? So, like, the what it... Where is there in this point some sort of victory where you say, "Now I can have a full, rich experience of life"? It's just working for the sake of working because of what's next. Putting aside the fact that it's completely unsustainable, and these YouTubers don't work 10 hours all the time. They do... Again, it's like looking at David Blaine freezing himself into a block of ice. He doesn't spend most days frozen to a block of ice, but it got a lot of engagement when he did that as a, uh, a stunt for a television special. They're not spending their day doing this all the time. It's not a sustainable way to live, but even if it was, in general, this just like, let me grind and work all of my hours so I can get the next thing really, uh, you know, get to the next level at the very highest level, it's not sustainable because it keeps going. Now, there are some exceptions to this. Like, sure, some professional caliber Olympic athletes do this, but they're doing this for a very narrow window because they have until they're what? 33 before they have to move on and live the rest of your life. It's very different if you're training for the Olympics like this with this level of intensity because it's a end dated thing. But if you're talking about your career as a student into your professional career, there's nowhere, there, there's no place where that ends essentially until you die. So what type of life is that? So why don't you work for 10 hours a day? Because it's not living. It's a sort of parody of, uh, workism, if I'm gonna take a term from Derek Thompson. So what works better? Slow productivity. Working with good focus and good organization on things that matter consistently and systematically over time. This can produce work of real impact, of real meaning. It can open up all sorts of interesting opportunities in your life. It can allow you to do and accomplish very competitive things, and it's compatible with a well-rounded life. And it's compatible with I don't just work all the time. I'm not just always stressed out. I'm not just always, uh, overwhelmed and trying to keep up or, or compete with someone else. It often also produces, uh, in a lot of fields, better results, right? You don't see the very best novelists that are winning all the awards getting there because they spend more hours working on their novel every day. No, it's this sort of slow and steady work on their writing. They're very careful and intentional about their time. They think, they read, they walk, they integrate, and they come back and write. And you get really great... You know, this is where you're gonna get a Sir Colson Whitehead is out of the slow development of real talent, not out of, "I worked, I wrote 12 hours each day and the, the other writers are only writing six hours each day." Now, I think there's a comfort in this for very ambitious, uh, young people, 'cause it makes you think, uh, gives you a very simple framework. I turn this knob of hours. The higher the knob you turn up on hours, the more successful you'll be. Most people aren't gonna turn the knob past this point because they're weak. I'm not weak. If I'm willing to take the pain, it's very simple what I need to do. It's just hard. It's just keeping my hand in a metaphorical ice bucket longer than you did. I like this. I'm gonna do 10 hours. You're only gonna do four. I'll be more successful. So it makes success seem much more controllable. It's just a matter of, of raw will. But again, that's not the reality. Great work, innovative work in academia, in the arts, in business or business strategy has its busy periods, but is not built upon, I have to be working all the time. So I just think it's no real way, it's no real way to live. I just say, this is why I come back to my original question, to what end? What comes next after your 10 hours a day as a student? What comes next after your 10 hours a day as the investment banker junior associate? Because you took that job because it was the most competitive, the hardest one to get. What comes next after you get managing director at the investment bank? What comes next after you go off to start your own hedge fund? What comes next after you hit the billion-dollar valuation? I mean, there's always things you could be overworking yourself towards, but again, to what end? What comes next? These are the questions I always come back to. So I, I think it's a stunt what these productivity YouTubers are doing. I've spent my entire life in professional academia. The smartest people don't do that. They work hard. And, and undergraduate they don't, right? I mean, because it's not that hard. They work hard in periods. In other periods, they're in thinking periods. They have other types of things going on. So I'm just not a... This idea that you're gonna somehow just... I love the simplicity of it, but this idea that you're gonna somehow just outraw number everyone else, and that's where your success is gonna come from. It just is not sustainable. Goes against the, the deep life that we talk about here. It's way out of balance, over the top, and really not the right way in my mind to, to build a life of intentionality and depth. All that's new, Jesse, this, like, work 10 hours thing, it's-

Speaker 1:02:58 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:02:58 ... and because it worked on YouTube.

Speaker 1:03:00 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:03:01 And I think for young people, they see it, they don't realize how new it is. It's someone just figured this out a few years ago, that it's very compelling content to be like, "Man, I just studied 10 hours." And they, you watch them doing it, and you're like, "Man, they did it. They stuck with it." And look at... That's great. It just seems so simple. I don't know. It's like the productivity equivalent of David Goggins doing-

Speaker 1:03:18 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:03:18 ... he just ran all day long or did push-ups till my arm fell off, you know?

Speaker 1:03:22 It's like when we heard MrBeast talk about if you want a compelling video and you don't have a lot of money, you can put together paperclips for multiple football fields and people will watch it.

Cal Newport 1:03:31 Yep. Or what Boba says, like, how high can he count?

Speaker 1:03:33 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:03:34 He counted to, like, a million or something, and it took him 12 hours. Yeah, it works on YouTube. It's not actually a strategy for productivity. It's a strategy for getting good views on a YouTube video. So I don't know. Maybe our YouTube videos will be the, the counterpoint for the youth out there, or, or old man videos. Um, I want to move on to Something Interesting, but first let me mention a sponsor that makes this show possible. That is our friends at LMNT, L-M-N-T. LMNT is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt, but no sugar. Why salt? Because you need electrolytes as part of keeping a good, healthy balance. So if you are dehydrated partially because, let's say, you've been talking all day, or you've been sweating a lot because you

Cal Newport 1:04:22 live in DC, the humidity is roughly all the percent. I don't know the exact term, but it's just terrible here right now. You lose a lot of liquids, including a lot of salt, so you can't just drink water. You need water with electrolytes. That's what LMNT specializes in. Has a science-backed ratio of 1,000 milligrams sodium with 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams m- magnesium, but no junk, no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers, no BS. I also really like the taste. Uh, I'm a big LMNT fan. This is what I use after my workouts. It's what I use after my long thinking walks, especially in the summer. I like the strawberry... No, watermelon, not strawberry. It's a, a watermelon flavor is my favorite. They were a sponsor early in the show, and I got hooked on it by the samples they sent us. So I had been buying and using LMNT on my own until they returned as a sponsor, so I was happy to have them return because this is one of these products, uh, it's what I use. Just open the packet, add it to a water bottle. If I'm really sweaty, I do the whole packet. If I'm somewhere in between, maybe I'll do half a packet. And I can, I feel as if I can tell the difference, but I like that there's no sugar, so I don't have to worry about drinking it unlike other types of sports drinks. So it's perfectly suited if you're on a keto, low carb, or paleo diet, or if you just don't want a bunch of sugar, but you do feel like you need more than water after some heavy activity. So right now, LMNT is offering a free sample pack with any purchase. That's eight single serving packets free with any LMNT order. This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share LMNT with a salty friend. Get yours at drinklmnt.com/deep. This deal is only available through my link. You need that /deep to get the free sample pack. So you must go to D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com/deep. Keep in mind this is totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you can just share it with a friend, and they will give you your money back, no questions asked. You have nothing to lose. Speaking of exercise, and I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founder, for many years. He was the original fitness advice guy on my Study Hacks blog. His company, My Body Tutor, is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency. You sign up for My Body Tutor, you're matched with a coach who helps you develop a fitness and nutrition plan based around your goals, your lifestyle, your context, you in particular, and then you check in with this coach using an app on your phone every single day. That's where you get the consistency. There's another human in the loop who you feel res- you, a responsibility to, to follow the plan, and who can help you adjust on the fly as life circumstances necessitate it. This is why I think My Body Tutor has been such a successful program, is because it gets results. Information is easy. Follow-through is hard. My Body Tutor solves that problem. So if you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving Deep Question listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join. Just mention Deep Questions when you join, and they'll give you $50 off.

Cal Newport 1:07:38 All right, Jesse, our final segment is Something Interesting. This is where we talk about something interesting that you, my listeners, have sent in to my interesting@calnewport.com email address. So I wanna load... Remember my password. So I wanna load up now a short post that one of you sent in that I thought was interesting. Okay, so here we go. Here's the post. This was posted on, I suppose, uh, LinkedIn. I have it up on the screen, so if you're watching, uh, it's youtube.com/calnewportmedia, episode 256, or thedeeplife.com, episode 256. All right, this is about Harrison Ford. I thought this was, uh, appropriate because there's a new Indiana Jones movie in the theater, which I'll be taking my boys to shortly. Here's what this post says. "Before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter. In 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor. 'But I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition,' he said, so he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition. As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, he became aware of something. Most of them were in a hurry. They were in a hurry to make it or to make lots of money or to prove something to someone. Whatever the reason, most were on a tight timeline, so Ford's plan was to do the opposite, to lengthen his timeline. To do so, Ford said, 'I had to have another source of income, so I became a carpenter. By doing carpentry,' he explained, 'I was able to wait it out. As, as the years went by, the attrition rate eliminated many of those people from the competition pool until finally, there were only a few of us left on the bus from the entering class. I always saw life that way. You just have to find a way to stick it out to prevail.'" All right, I like that story because it's a great vignette of slow productivity in action. There's something that's both effective and sustainable by working on a small number of things over a long period of time consistently. This is the definition of internal powered goals, the, the theme that unifies this episode. I'm sticking with this, even if I'm not excited about it every moment, even if my motivation goes up and down, even if my success or failures have periods where one is big and the other's down and that s- flops back and forth. I'm going through a hard period now. I consistently make progress, and not just working blindly, but really getting feedback, adjusting. You can imagine Harrison Ford struggling with roles early on, pivoting when he sees a different type of role, seeing he needs a special type of training. It's this relentless return. What can I improve here? What's not working? How can I adjust my trajectory? You're making adjustments. You're letting evidence come in. You're learning more, but forward momentum always, always continues. Steps every day. So you're moving in the right direction, adjusting your path, always moving. This, more often than not, is what unlocks really interesting impact and interesting opportunities, a slow productivity approach, a small number of things that, through internal power, you keep pursuing over time, just relentlessly. I'm, I'm sticking with this, updating how I do it, but sticking with it over time. Small number of things done really well at a reasonable, sustainable pace really is, I think, a very sustainable strategy for a deep life, a very sustainable strategy for eventually doing, uh, achieving deep accomplishments. So I thought that was a good story to end on. Productivity doesn't have to be fast. Productivity doesn't require, uh, constant intakes of motivation, inspiration. Productivity doesn't require these 10-hour YouTube productivity YouTuber style, uh, binges of, "I'm just out white-knuckling everyone else." Sometimes it's as, uh, boring as, you know, Harrison Ford saying, "I'm just gonna take my time and keep working on this craft, taking feedback, adjust, taking feedback, adjust, having a second trade to support myself," until finally American Graffiti happens, then Star Wars happens, then Indiana Jones happens, and the whole thing breaks open. So sometimes slowing down is the right way to actually make it farther down the path, as paradoxical as that can seem. All right, so that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'll be returning to the Deep Work HQ headquarters north for another month or so, but the show will, as they say, go on. So I look forward to doing the next show and seeing you then. And until then, as always, stay deep. [outro music]