The Optimization Paradox Explained

Cal Newport 0:00 A couple weeks ago, the author Brad Stulberg published an essay on his Substack that made the following bold claim: optimization culture is destroying a generation. Now, he argues in this essay that digital technology has now made it possible to measure at a very fine granularity all sorts of metrics in all different parts of our life, from our job, to our health, to our relationships, to our social life, and that it has created a culture where we're constantly trying to improve and optimize all of these other aspects of our daily existence. And he argues instead of this making us better performers or happier, it's instead making us miserable. Well, this raised a lot of questions in my mind, such as why are we doing this? Why is it causing so much harm? And most importantly, what's the way out? What is the right relationship with metrics and performance that you can actually make your life better without getting stuck in this optimization trap? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek some answers. Uh, so here's what I did, is I called up Brad, and we got into it. We get into his article, and we get into all those questions that I just discussed. We have a fantastic conversation. Um, we cover a lot of ground, and then we end up... Actually, you'll notice if you listen to this conversation, we end up at a new model for optimization, practical, realistic optimization, I call it macro optimization in the interview, that I think is really interesting and describes a lot of what I've done in my own life, and I've never put words to it before. So stick through to the end of the interview, 'cause I think we end up in a really practical, positive space. All right, so I think you're gonna like this one. If you're ambitious, but you've worried that you've become too optimized and it's counterproductive, then this episode is one you have to listen to. All right, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. [Instrumental music] All right, Brad. Well, you have a recent

Cal Newport 2:12 Substack essay post that is titled The Enhanced Self Is the Enemy of a Good Life. The subhead is Optimization Culture Is Destroying a Generation. All right, we gotta start where we always start because I'm so not properly online, I never get your, the references about what's happening in the world. So I want to start by you explaining, what is this optimization culture? How big is this? Who are these people? What are they doing?

Brad Stulberg 2:40 All right. So optimization culture, broadly speaking, at least as, as I see it and define it, is a group of individuals who are obsessed with this notion of measuring everything, and generally doing it in the guise of self-improvement. So we are measuring our heart rate variability for recovery. We are measuring our readiness score. We are measuring how many steps we take. We're measuring the power that we produce during our workout. We're also measuring every single tweet and engagement and YouTube thumbnail, and on and on and on. And the story that is told in optimization culture is if it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get managed, and we should care about our health, we should care about our fitness, we should care about our performance, we should care about our professional success, so therefore, the fact that we have 24/7 metrics and monitoring for everything must be a good thing, and it must help us perform better and become excellent.

Cal Newport 3:39 Right.

Brad Stulberg 3:39 And as I write in the piece, I think that there are all kinds of hidden traps with this mindset.

Cal Newport 3:44 And there, so there's more of this now. This is, and is more broad and on more things than it, than it would've used to been, say, when we were younger.

Brad Stulberg 3:54 That's right. I think the biggest change is the technology that enables us to track everything in real time. If you think about it, until maybe five to 10 years ago, you received your health metrics once or twice a year when you went to see your doctor for your annual physical. You understood the size of your social circle or your status based on the number of people who showed up at weddings, birthday parties, uh, holiday barbecues. If you're an athlete, you measured your success when you peaked for a marathon or a half-marathon once or twice a year, and you measured it against the field that you raced against. So we still measured things and compared to others, but the space between those measurements and comparisons was so much bigger than today, where now all of these things are tracked 24/7. And some people literally design systems where their whole life is built around tracking these things and trying to make the number on the watch or the number on the dashboard go up.

Cal Newport 4:51 You know, I thought about, when I was reading your essay, a part of my life that is super old-fashioned, and it's, it's like a good comparison, is actually writing for The New Yorker versus almost any other internet-related publishing. Because The New Yorker, if you write for them, you don't get any information. You just... The article came out.

Brad Stulberg 5:11 Mm.

Cal Newport 5:11 And like, your editor is like, "I liked it." And, and really your only indication about whether things are going well or not is like, "Oh, I got invited to do some media for this one. It must have hit a, a nerve. And do they want to renew my contract when the year is over?" And I'm comparing that to the experience of YouTube and publishing, you know, a podcast on YouTube, where you look, you know this, hour by hour or m-, 10 minute by 10 minute within an hour about exactly how things are performing, how it ranks on the last 10 things you did, what is the trajectory. And so that made me think about your piece, 'cause man, The New Yorker experience, there is no comparison stress 'cause you don't have anything to compare it on. Your timeframe is, you know, after a few years, like, this kind of petered out. It must not have been hitting a nerve or whatever. That's... I guess that's what everything was like, is what you're saying. B- before we had all this technology, almost everything was like that. Even if you wanted to compare or measure, most of the time there was nothing to compare or measure against.

Brad Stulberg 6:10 That's right, and, and I think the critical thing is you could compare and measure, but again, it, the, the timescales that this happened on were spaced out by months to, to years. And in between those comparison points, you could largely forget about yourself or forget about whatever neurosis you might have. I mean, I think about, like, I, I think the most, uh, extreme example of this is, is with health and medicine. So a lot of people get nervous when they go to the doctor. They're gonna have their blood work. You know, cancer is scary. These are real things, and we're concerned that we're gonna be sick. So you get nervous, you get your blood work back, and hopefully if all goes well, you take a sigh of relief. And then you don't think about it again for 12 months when you go see the doctor. Well, that's all changed because now you've got all of these over-the-counter, essentially medical devices, right? B- daily, weekly, monthly blood tests, wearables, on and on and on, and their promise is that we're gonna track everything in real time. And the, the benefit that they claim, which there is some benefit, is that's the whole point, is that you're gonna catch things that would otherwise go unnoticed between annual physicals. And while that can be the case, there's also research that shows that there are plenty of false positives, meaning the device or the blood test raises an alarm or a red flag, and it turns out that everything was fine. And those false positives can lead to anxiety. They can even lead to medical error because now you're getting extensive testing done, which always comes with risks. And even if you're gonna catch something, the chances that catching it early are actually going to change the outcome for a lot of these things that are being monitored are extremely small. And then you have all of these unintended downstream consequences, such as the health anxiety. One of my favorite terms I came across in researching for this piece is what, uh, scientists call orthosomnia-

Cal Newport 7:54 Yep

Brad Stulberg 7:54 ... which is this ongoing quest for the perfect sleep that produces the very insomnia that it's actually meant to prevent. People become so stressed out about getting a good night's sleep and their sleep score that they sleep worse. Um, and this is a, a, a, a pretty documented, um, condition to the point where now sleep medicine doctors and cognitive behavioral therapists are treating it.

Cal Newport 8:16 I mean, I, I don't know how many people in my life that are optimizers have told me, like, "Oh, you should track your sleep." I was like, "I already struggle to sleep. That's gonna make it so much worse." Yeah, so I'm with you on that. Well, here's what I wanna... Okay, so here's what I wanna unpack, right? We have two things here. The digital technology's probably what just enables over-optimization, right? So, like, you, you need those tools if you're gonna have so many things to track. Uh, if you wanted to track a lot of things 20 years ago, you might have been out of luck. And then there's the question of why we track so much, right? So why is that appealing? Um, then there's the question of the damage, which we've talked about, and then there's the question of, like, how do we make, what should we do instead? Um, I wanna go to that second question of why, once intensive tracking became possible in many parts of our lives, why did we start tracking? Now, I have two theories I've been toying with, but I wanna hear what you think your leading theory is, and then I'm gonna run my two theories by you, and we'll see where we end up. Probably all three will be true, but I, I wanna hear what your leading theory is for why we started doing this once it became possible.

Brad Stulberg 9:21 I have two leading theories.

Cal Newport 9:22 Okay.

Brad Stulberg 9:22 The first-

Cal Newport 9:22 So we have four. [laughs] Actually, we might overlap

Brad Stulberg 9:24 Well, well, maybe there's overlap

Cal Newport 9:25 I think it will overlap.

Brad Stulberg 9:25 Yeah.

Cal Newport 9:26 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 9:27 The first is essentially the case that you made for social media in many apps and digital minimalism made towards these tracking tools, which is that people only see the benefits, but they don't acknowledge the potential cost that comes with all this tracking. So they see that if I track my sleep, I might sleep better, but they don't see that actually it might make you sleep worse. They see that if I track all of this blood work, maybe I'll catch something that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. But what they don't see is all the health anxiety and false positives that come up in between. Um, so an over-indexing on the benefit without even thinking about, let alone accounting for the cost. The second reason I think this tracking has taken off is we live in, uh, uh, an era where things feel increasingly uncertain and, for a lot of people, out of control. And the notion of being able to put bounds around something and track it and measure it, however illusory it feel, or excuse me, however illusory it is, it feels like we're gaining some control. So a lot of times this tracking gives us a false sense of control. The, the ultimate optimizer is a fellow named Bryan Johnson, and his entire movement is literally called Don't Die. And if I can paraphrase, he's going to out-optimize death.

Cal Newport 10:42 Hmm.

Brad Stulberg 10:42 So the ultimate loss of control that religions are based on trying to solve this problem is the loss of control at the end of our lives, where we have to let go, and, and whatever happens next, people have different beliefs on, but we have no control over it. And Bryan Johnson comes along and says, "That's insane. We should control death, and we can control death. We're not gonna die because of all these metrics in, in self-enhancement."

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Brad Stulberg 13:55 Yep, it's just like, just like you said with, just like you said with social media, right? Social media is great. I grow my platform, I talk to friends, I meet interesting people, and we don't consider all the ways that it, it can lead to the complete erosion of deep work and a deep life, and I think the same is true here. Yeah.

Cal Newport 14:10 Yeah. What, what could possibly be wrong about trying to be a little bit healthier or to be a little bit better in my business, right? Okay, and then the anxiety relief one. So then here's my, my extra two. Um, so I would say partially this might be another example of what we've seen time and again when it comes to digital products, which is trying to take a natural human urge and then exploit it. And because it's in this super pure, purified form, it can get out of control. So, like, we do have a natural urge of like, okay, I wanna... If I see, you know, uh, another, another, someone with their friends over there, I wanna compare. How does my group of friends, you know-

Brad Stulberg 14:45 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 14:45 ... look? Or how far did I throw that spear? Is it farther than someone else? Like, we like to compare things, right? Like, that's a, that's an instinct we have because we care about social hierarchy. Uh, but these tools allow you to track at a level of granularity we never thought about, and things spin out of control, right? Just like, um, you know, we don't like to be bored, and then so we wanna go do useful activities, but someone puts TikTok in front of you, it exploits that urge, so now your, you know, ears are bleeding as you stare at this thing for the 18th hour. So I have that as reason, another reason. And then my other reason, this is gonna be controversial to people who track, but I'm wondering if for some people this is, uh, another example of, of a, uh, a common phenomenon that, you know, I call the productivity pron phenomenon. So productivity pron, PR0SignIN, was this sort of early 2000s movement I wrote about, where people who were fed up with work being hard had this idea of, "If I can just use computers and technology in the right way, I can automate enough things, work will just happen, and I will do well in my job, and I don't actually have to feel strain. I don't actually have to do hard things. The system will kind of take it over." We're seeing this a lot with AI. There's a whole strain of productivity pron descendants that are so, uh, convinced, "If I could just get the right agent supervising the other right agents with the right sort of skills files, work and stuff will just happen, and I won't actually have to do anything hard." Um, so it's like this fleeing of difficulty. Well, if you look at a lot of these optimization metrics, what you have is people turning the goal away from the lag indicator, which is hard and uncertain, like, "I placed well in this race," or-

Brad Stulberg 16:29 Mm

Cal Newport 16:29 ... you know, "I got... The doctor said I'm, you know, I'm healthy," or whatever. You, you turn away I... "My book sold a lot of copies." You're turning your attention from things that are, um, clear, clearly impressive but uncertain. You can't... And you put your attention on things that you can definitely control. I can definitely, like, hit metrics, right? There's no challenge, there's no uncertainty, there's no competition there. And so it turns your attention to things that are individually all accomplishable, and it allows you to sort of simulate accomplishment without having to deal with the hardness of real accomplishment, the uncertainty of real accomplishment. So it's just like people wanna flee actually doing really hard work and being like, "I produced something that did really well," and instead they want systems to do it for them. Like, I wanna focus on metrics because I can win that game. It's controllable.

Brad Stulberg 17:18 Mm.

Cal Newport 17:18 I can get this many steps. Like, that's not so hard. I don't know if I can lose this many weight or get my deadlift up to this. That's scary. But I can do this many steps today, and I can look, graph my WHOOP indicators and, like... So it's a, it's a, I think this, like, simulation of, like, breaking down hard accomplishment into easier accomplishable small steps allows you to sort of simulate accomplishment without the scariness and difficulty and uncertainty of accomplishment. All right, those are my two theories. Which of those do you buy?

Brad Stulberg 17:48 I'm definitely buying number one.

Cal Newport 17:51 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 17:51 Uh, I think that it's just, like, human nature to compare and see where we stack up and to, to be scanning for threats. Uh, I'm partially buying number two. I think in some cases for some people that might be the case. I think that in other cases what other people would tell you is, "Actually, I work a lot harder because I am tracking all these things, and if I didn't, I wouldn't feel accountability. Uh, and therefore this is actually forcing me to stay really sharp and to stay on my game." And I think that that's a, that's a valid argument, and I think for a lot of people that is true. However, to your point, I think for other people the, th-this notion of, like- Tracking the proxy and telling yourself, "I accomplished something because of the proxy," makes you feel good and almost is a way to procrastinate against the actual thing, which is more uncertain and usually takes a longer time to achieve.

Cal Newport 18:47 Yeah. Okay, I'm thinking about this in real time. I think you're right about that. Um, right, this is not applying to everyone, but I, I... There's, there's a thread here I'm trying to pull. Like I... Okay, this is a weird comparison, but I'm thinking about Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer, right?

Brad Stulberg 19:00 Yeah.

Cal Newport 19:01 He's like an old-fashioned model of, like, athletic prowess. He's just a tree trunk of a man. He's a big guy. He's great at surfing. He's alpha. He commands the waves when he was at... when he's out there. Um, and, you know, not very many people get to be Laird Hamilton, right? But if what you, you have all of these, like, athletic metrics that you're constantly, like, uh, gathering and moving and putting them in graphs or this or that, you kind of get a bit of that feel of like I'm also kind of like a, you know, specimen here because look at all this stuff I track and I care and I'm on it, and it is hard work. But it's, it's lead indicators instead of lag indicators. So, uh, the goal-

Brad Stulberg 19:43 Yeah

Cal Newport 19:43 ... is just to, I have all these things, I'm, I'm... So I also can have that feel of, you know, I am also an athletic performer without the actual part of, um, you know, I went out and I've, I'm just undeniably impressive athletically. I don't know if this is a bad thing, by the way, because again, I don't know, with the athletic stuff, it probably just makes you healthier, like you said. Uh, but maybe I'm overanalyzing, uh, because I see-

Brad Stulberg 20:04 I think it depends

Cal Newport 20:04 ... the business sometimes too. Like, people, like, wanna have optimize all these systems. I'm like, "Dude, what you need to do is, like, make a lot of money from a big audience." Isn't that the thing that matters? But you can control the other stuff, you know? You can succeed at going through your checklist and getting this and that and moving these different metrics around and optimizing. Like, it's all stuff you can control. You'll win at that game. But the game of I added 100,000 subscribers on my bo-... Like, that's a we- that's an uncertain game. That's an ambiguous game.

Brad Stulberg 20:33 I think control is a big part of it. I, I think there's also, like, the, the pseudo productivity or pseudo excellence at play, which is that if I'm tracking all these things and I make everything super complicated or, in some cases, even complex, therefore, like, I must be productive or I must be on the path to greatness, when in fact, the most productive people and the people who are most excellent tend to just simplify, and they really keep the main things the main things. It was funny, when I was working on this piece, um, or I guess shortly after I, I published this piece, I was with the Toronto Maple Leafs for their player development camp giving a talk. And I was in the, the facility all day, and I couldn't help but remark watching these players, who are the best in the world at what they do, and just watching them go through their day and how they warmed up and then the food that they ate. It would give any optimizer a total panic attack. They were eating carbohydrates. There was candy. Nobody was tracking their calories. They were going back for seconds if they felt hungry. They weren't weighing their food. Um, they were eating, like, you know, fruit, which a lot of these optimizers say it's, "Oh, it's gonna spike your glucose," so that's bad. Their warmup wasn't 40 minutes. They got on the ice, and they skated for a little, and then they started playing hard. So I do think that there's a difference between excellence and pseudo excellence or elite performance and, like, the performance of elite performance, and I think a lot of optimizers do get into this trap of, like, I call it majoring in the minors. Um, so it's just hilarious to think, like, if this Brian Johnson guy, who again, is like the pinnacle optimizer, if he spent a day eating at the Maple Leafs cafeteria, y- you know, he, he'd think that he would melt from the food that they ate.

Cal Newport 22:14 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 22:14 Yet these are the, the greatest athletic specimens in the world, and they're eating bread, and they're not melting.

Cal Newport 22:20 So I, I like that phrase, majoring in the minors. So, like, for the, the hockey players, right? What is the actual thing they do? Like, what is the actual thing that matters for them?

Brad Stulberg 22:30 It's time on the ice and time in the weight room. So it's skating really-

Cal Newport 22:33 Over a long period, over a lifetime

Brad Stulberg 22:35 ... over a lifetime, and innate talent, right? It's, it's always innate talent-

Cal Newport 22:38 Yeah

Brad Stulberg 22:38 ... and hard work and then nailing the fundamentals. And the fundamentals of hockey are tons of time on the ice, becoming a great skater, um, becoming physically really strong, which you don't get by the latest, you know, nutrition hack. You get by spending an hour to two hours in the weight room every day, um, and then drilling the fundamentals really well, uh, stick handling, uh, the ability to find open space on the ice, the ability to work with your team, so on and so forth.

Cal Newport 23:06 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 23:07 Uh, but there was very little to no, to no measurement happening at the Maple Leafs facility. And I've been around pro sports. That's true in many pro sport environments.

Cal Newport 23:15 Yeah. I mean, I've heard that, that, like, what... Obviously, natural talent is really big for pro sports, and then it's, it's a lifetime of being at the right, um, competition level throughout your whole life, right? It's not so much like I play baseball 12 hours a day and no one else did. It was like I had skill early on, which I pushed into, and I was constantly being moved into, like, the right league that was constantly challenging me with new skills and pushing my fundamentals and, uh, and then as soon as I started getting good with that, I moved up to the next one. And so I was just constantly in a state of deliberate practice. And they take care of their bodies, yeah. They, they, you know, they, they lift weights. They rest. But, but you're right. It's not, it's not... Everyone's not Tom Brady with their own guru trying to make their fascia whatever. It's, it's not rocket science obviously. It's like, "Okay, I've lost this much muscle mass over a long season in my quads. Here's what I wanna get. I'm doing leg presses." Like, [laughs] it's, it's, it's gonna, uh, I don't need to overthink it. So it's like focus on the main things, which are hard. I mean, that's part of it, right? Like, let's be honest, is it's easier to precisely track your diet than it is to just I'm getting up and playing hockey at a high level every day for the last 15 years, right? Or it's like, it's I need to work on my upper body strength. It's, it's gonna be not a lot of, like, all day long, but it's gonna be heavy lifting. It's gonna be... It's not gonna be pleasant, you know? And I'm gonna have to do that every day th- in this off season to get stronger again. So, like, often the major things are not They're not fun, and this other stuff maybe often is.

Brad Stulberg 24:43 Or they're fun, but they're fun for a certain kind of people that learns to enjoy working really hard.

Cal Newport 24:48 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 24:48 Um, but they don't have the... I, I think it's less that they're not fun. I actually think they can be a lot of fun. I think it's they don't have the veneer of complexity. Um, and I think the veneer of complexity is like a bright and shiny object, and it makes you feel like you're in the know. And oftentimes what it is, it's a way to procrastinate doing the simple things that are in your face that keep you accountable. Now, maybe we should have said this at the outset, like pro athletes do track some things. I mean, I track some things.

Cal Newport 25:14 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 25:14 I'm sure you track some things. It's not that tracking is bad. It's that this optimization culture where tracking is no longer a means to an end, but an end in and of itself that I, I think is, um, is deleterious to performance.

Cal Newport 25:28 There's an interesting, uh, athletic analogy here I was thinking about. The sport I know most about is professional baseball. Um, and the new way of like managing these teams, like the way the Washington Nationals is managed right now, um, is very analytics based. It's very like computer based or whatever. But what's interesting is what I've learned following this transformation of our team to be much more analytical is that a big part of it is hiding the complexity from the players. So they don't actually want the players drowning in all of these metrics and things that are tracking. It's actually the goal of the... It's the hitting coach's job, it's the pitching coach's job, it's the manager's job to, uh, simplify that down to like a really simple recipe for each player. Like, "Hey, just trust us. Here's what you need to be doing. Um, you're swinging out of the zone. So all we want you to think about is like this one thing. Like when you're up there, it's all about if it's not in my spot, don't swing." And they've been talking a lot about this, is that even though there's a lot of complicated analysis happening to get that extra edge, if they give all that information to these professional athletes, they freeze. It's too much for them to keep track of. So these are people who make a living just doing this one thing at a high level. So imagine, I suppose, the rest of us, if you give us so many different metrics that we're trying to use to manage our life, like we're gonna have a much worse time of it than a professional athlete. And they already for the professional athletes have to, uh, synthesize, uh... They have to synthesize it. They have to simplify it. We have an assistant pitching coach, you know, Sean Doolittle, whose whole job, he's a data whisperer. He used to pitch for us, and he can talk baseball, and he can talk in the way these guys, these kids talk. And then on the other side, he's also a really smart guy. Uh, he can understand the data, and then he translates it to just like the simplest messages so that you can just focus on the main thing, which is hard enough.

Brad Stulberg 27:11 I love that. And, and that's a really nice segue, too, into I think the, the biggest hidden cost of all this tracking is that it by definition makes you focus on yourself. And in some cases it can make you like neurotic and self-obsessed. And what we know from all of this research on performance is that we perform our best and we feel our best when we are not focused on ourself.

Cal Newport 27:38 Mm.

Brad Stulberg 27:38 Uh, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow, a foundational book in, in, in performance psychology, defines a flow state as when we completely enter the zone, when we feel one with our activity, when we're really at our best. And a defining feature of fol- flow is a sense of selflessness and loss of ego. Uh, Abraham Maslow, you know, it's ironic that people think self-actualization means optimizing. No, at the top of Maslow's pyramid, he used this term for a peak experience, and he defined peak experience as, I'm quoting him now, as, "characterized by feelings of integration, egolessness, and deep connection with what you are doing." So if you think about it, in the case of an athlete, and I think this is true for all of us, if you are really focused on the metrics, on the spin rate, on the velocity, on what your last pitch did, on your heart rate variability, on your blood glucose, you're constantly thinking about yourself. And if you're constantly thinking about yourself, you're never gonna perform your best. And this is true in sport, this is true in creativity, this is true in public speaking, um, this is true in romantic, in, in, in intimacy. Like you name it. Generally, when we're self-focused, we don't feel our best and we don't perform our best. The opposite is true, right? Think about the moments when you're in the zone writing or, um, if you just like lose it on the tennis court or you're playing the best basketball of your life or you're public speaking, um, or you're in the bedroom, right? Like y- you know, you're, you're getting intimate with someone. When we're self-focused and we're neurotic about like how we're doing, we don't perform well. When we let go of all that, we perform at our best. And I, I'm by no means perfect. I experience this all the time. Like you and I talk about this offline. There's this terrible thing for authors called an Amazon sales rank, which is essentially Strava, the app that runners use to track how they stack up in real time, except for authors. So every single day, five times a day, you know exactly how well your book is selling relative to your competition. And I have periods of time where I fall into the trap of checking my Amazon sales rank way too much, and I can correlate my crappy work and my not having good thoughts and my not writing well with the days and weeks when I'm spending too much time thinking about my Amazon sales rank. When I write my best, I'm not concerned about how many books I'm selling or how many clicks I'm getting. I'm just writing. Same thing is true for me as an athlete. I used to rely more on wrist-worn devices to help me try to, um, optimize my training, and what I found is that they actually just got in the way of training well. The best thing I can do to train well is not wear anything on my wrist, use an old school stopwatch to time the rest in between sets, and leave my phone in a separate room from the room I'm training in. Why? Because instead of focusing on myself, I'm able to just lose myself in the act of training, which leads to the best workout.

Cal Newport 30:21 So where else are people... Like if you're not into athletic pursuits, this type of optimization still lurks everywhere. So for people who are thinking, "I don't train, you know, I don't use Whoop, so this is not relevant to me," what, where are the other places where this type of thinking is like creeping into a lot of people's lives?

Brad Stulberg 30:38 I think real-time dashboards So, you know, I talked about the sales rank that you and I deal with, but I know so many people that work in more traditional knowledge work jobs who are individual contributors or middle management or even executives. And you used to see these things on a quarterly re- report, or maybe a monthly report, and then Excel came along with macros, and you could automate things, and then maybe you got a weekly report. But now you have predictive reports that not only tell you exactly how your business unit is doing, but what the AI predicts your business unit is gonna do tomorrow. So you can spend all of this time looking at these reports and kind of freaking out about these reports and, and putting yourself into almost this, like, threat state where, "Oh my gosh, I need to make that number or that bar on the graph go up." And the more time that you're freaking out about that, the less time you're actually working on solving the problem that's gonna make that bar on the graph go up.

Cal Newport 31:30 And, and what about social media? Is that... Even if it's not-

Brad Stulberg 31:34 Oh, 100%

Cal Newport 31:34 ... a number, like looking, you're on Instagram, you're on Facebook a lot, kind of seeing what other people are doing. This some- this somehow seems comparative and metric-y.

Brad Stulberg 31:43 Oh, 100%, right? Because what are the comparison points there? It's how many likes or shares or retweets a post is getting. It's what are people commenting. And back to your early point about why people do this is a technology company is taking a natural inclination, um, and, and just putting it on overdrive. It used to be that I wanted to compare myself, I'd compare myself to people in my community and to people that I saw. And if I wanted to know h- if my deadlift was good, I'd know based on the other people in my gym. Well, now, for everything, you can compare yourself to the seven billion plus people in the world, and I just... Like, the human brain is not meant to do that. And you always feel behind, you always feel like you're not enough, and then you can get into this cycle of compulsively checking your social media stats, your followers, if people are liking your post, instead of actually living your life. Um, or even if you don't care about living your life and all you want to do is perform well, well, thinking about how you're doing and measuring how you're doing and comparing how you're doing is not the same thing as actually working to do better and making progress on the thing itself.

Cal Newport 32:46 Yeah, like actually-

Brad Stulberg 32:46 And I think that-

Cal Newport 32:47 ... just doing it

Brad Stulberg 32:48 ... doing it. I think now more than ever, the, the timeshare that we spend looking at metrics, analyzing metrics, and thinking about metrics is greater than ever before, and in some cases, we spend more time doing that than doing the actual work. And that's when this becomes really freaking problematic.

Cal Newport 33:03 Uh, and it's hard, it, it's hard to avoid, uh, because, uh, the social media case is one I've written about before, and this was, like, the first accidental attention engineering. That my understanding is the Like button being added to Facebook, um, done for an innocuous reason. I've talked about it before. They added it because there was too many repetitive comments under certain posts, like congratulations or yay, and they're like, "Well, let's just consolidate that into a Like button so that we can leave the comments for longer things," right? So it's just an engineering solution to try to make comments more useful. And they noticed soon after they introduced that button this massive increase in engagement because it, what it gave us was a metric intermittently reinforced of social approval, and it was just irresistible. It was like every time I click on this little F on my phone, I'm gonna see a number that's gonna give me some i- information that I don't know now about how much people are liking or disliking me at the moment, and that proved irresistible. And then that was the, the, the boom of all sorts of other, uh, attention engineering. Of course, now I think it's, you know, if you're in the TikTok line, it's much more just about views. They purposely make that intermittent. You could be putting up the, the, the worst stuff on TikTok, they'll still occasionally show it to a lot of people because then you just never know. There's that, that, uh, lever being pulled at the slot machine. This could be the one that's gonna take off. And every once in a while you get 10,000 views on one of your TikTok videos, and that's irresistible. So it's interesting. Like social media success is built on this idea that certain types of comparative metrics, if we know that number is sitting somewhere that I can access, it is incredibly difficult to stop me from accessing it. So that must, that should be an indication for all of these metrics that we, we are in dangerous territory when we get to having ubiquitous access to numbers that tells us something about ourselves, especially if it's, like, ourselves in comparison to others.

Brad Stulberg 34:57 Yes. It is an existential slot machine. Um, more and more of life feels like an existential slot machine. And what I mean by that is we're pulling a lever, we're sending a tweet out into the world, we're refreshing our weekly blood work, and the answer that we're

Brad Stulberg 35:12 getting back is some version of, like, your existence is on track. So in the case of health optimization, your numbers are good. You're not gonna die. In the case of social media, you've got this many likes or this many followers. You matter in the world. People care about you. And when our numbers aren't good, we become really anxious and nervous, and maybe we do something about it and take action. And in the case of health, that's a good thing, but then it's not until next week that we pull that lever again. Um, and I think all of these technologies are essentially, you know, using these behavioral addiction techniques to, to, to make us pull that existential slot machine. Um, and I think that's why it's so important that we need to, like, think long and hard about what do we track, why do we track it, is it actually changing our behavior, and what's the cost of this tracking? And that's gonna look different for different people at different points of their life.

Cal Newport 36:05 So how do we figure out the balance here? Because, like, I wrote about in Deep Work this, uh, this framework, uh, 4DX from the Covey company that it's a, it's an interesting framework, um, for l- helping teams get things done. And, like, one of the big ideas from the framework which resonated was that if you're only looking at lag metrics, like how much money do we bring in, it's, it's, uh, it's hard to use that to guide your actions because it's j- it's after the fact. After you've done stuff, you get an assessment of how well it is. And so this framework said you also have to find the right lead indicators, the things you can focus on now And measure that will then make the lag indicator better. So if you simply say there is an example in the book about, like, selling more cakes at the bakery counter in the supermarket. And they said s- if, if the only thing you have up on the board in the back room is how many cakes did we sell, it's nice to see, but you're like, "I don't know what to do to make that change."

Brad Stulberg 37:00 Mm.

Cal Newport 37:00 But if you can find the right lead indicator, like how many times did I, uh, you know, put a new cake design out front or something that's connected to... Then you can actually have something to make progress on, right? So this idea of, like, the concrete and measurable and proximate, y- you need something to focus on you can measure so that the important stuff that follows will lead. Like, it's a simple idea in practice, but w- how does that actually play out in reality? Is there some notion of that that is right, but you don't want to go overboard? Or is that maybe that even that whole concept of lead indicators for lag indicators isn't quite right? Like, how do we think about this, this issue of I don't know, I need something to focus on that I can control because if I'm just focusing on the long-term outcome, I don't know what to do?

Brad Stulberg 37:43 I think that's 100% right, first off. So I completely agree with that. That is, you know, process and outcomes, and the way that you get the best outcome is by focusing on the process. So if you want to run a marathon, you'd be absurd to think, "I'm not gonna track any of my workouts. I'm just gonna run, and then I'll be ready for the marathon." No. Like, you want to have monthly goals, weekly goals, daily workouts that you want to try to tick off, and not only does that help you perform better, but it also keeps you motivated because you get these small milestones and these small wins along the way. Um, so I think that's absolutely right and true. I think that the 24/7 nature of it is what really has, has, h- has, I think for a lot of people, caused more harm than good. Again, because it makes us self-focused when we know that the best experience and the best performance comes when we're not self-focused, and it allows us to perhaps overcorrect too soon the minute that something goes wrong because we get this instant feedback instead of a little bit more elongated feedback. So I think that, again, for everything we track, we have to ask ourselves, "Am I actually changing my behavior as a result of this, and at what cost?" So maybe you're tracking your link clicks on a social media post, uh, or your likes or comments, and maybe you are changing your behavior and you're saying, "Hey, if this does well, uh, it's gonna tell me something about what the algorithm wants, and I'm gonna change how I post a little bit," and that's great. But if the cost of that is that you're a creative and you're not actually doing any creative work, then you have to evaluate is that cost worth the benefit? And maybe the answer is, "Hey, instead of checking in every hour, I'm gonna check in two times a week," or, "I'm gonna check in once a week, and I'm gonna make adjustments on that timescale." Um, and I think the same is true for all of these health metrics. Uh, sleep tends to ebb and flow based on all kinds of hormonal changes that you simply cannot control based on what's going on, uh, externally in your life. Do you have a kid that's up at night? Do you have work stress? If you're stressing out about sleep night in and night out, not only, as I mentioned earlier, might that be disrupting your sleep, but you're kind of playing Whac-A-Mole. I think it's much better to track sleep on a weekly or monthly progression. "Hey, did I sleep a little bit better this week? Let me, let me run an experiment for a month and see what happens if I only have two glasses of wine a week. Is that gonna improve my sleep or not?" Um, and there's even research that shows that, yes, we all crave that perfect eight night or eight-hour night of sleep every, every night, but generally speaking, like, sleep, you, you can actually catch up for sleep. So over the course of a month, you just want to sleep okay. Like, th- that's generally good enough for, for most people. And then the final thing that I'll say is that, um, we haven't really talked about the validity or the reliability of all of these markers.

Cal Newport 40:31 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 40:31 And oftentimes they're not very valid or reliable, so it's garbage in, garbage out. Um, and particularly when it comes to, like, the readiness scores, which none of these devices, Oura Ring, Whoop, um, none of them release their, quote-unquote, "proprietary algorithm." And I just think that... Not I think, I know. Like this, I can be very confident here. Human performance is so much more complex than an algorithm, and there are so many stories of elite performance on a day that someone's recovery score would have been zero, yet they still go out and they perform their best. And I think that we risk making ourselves fragile if we become reliant on an algorithmic black box score to dictate whether or not we're ready to perform well and, and have a good day.

Cal Newport 41:14 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 41:14 And before I get canceled, and you get blacklisted, and I get blacklisted from anything related to Whoop or Oura Ring, I've also met people that said that, "Hey, I used to have two to three beers a night, and I started wearing an Oura Ring or a Whoop, and I realized this isn't good for me, and now I only have one beer or I only have no beers." And for those people, great. Like, I, I mean, it's crazy that it took wearing an Oura Ring for you to realize that three beers before bed isn't the best idea, but if it's helping you, great. And, and I think that that just, like, that level of intentionality and deliberateness in asking what are the benefits, what are the costs, that's what I'm arguing for.

Cal Newport 41:50 Right. Okay. So metrics aren't the problem, but you need the right metrics at the right frequency of checking.

Brad Stulberg 41:58 That's right.

Cal Newport 41:58 And right metrics typically means there's like a, there's an expert wisdom behind it. This is something that, you know, someone is telling you. Like, "Yeah, this, this really matters. Like, this is a good thing to track." And the right frequency is probably honestly what's the slowest frequency possible that you're not giving up major improvements for it? Like, that's probably, like, the default there is, like, actually how infrequently can I get away with checking this without actually, um, losing adaptability or adjustability? And that's, that's not gonna be every 15 minutes for almost anything.

Brad Stulberg 42:32 Yeah, 100%. I think that's a really good way to, to put it. And, and we're being marketed the opposite story, which is the key is having the real-time metrics, so you can identify the problem in real time and immediately solve it. Um, and that's just not true. That, that, that, that ends up with a Whac-A-Mole game in, in this concept called value capture where you're captured by the value on a watch or on a dashboard in the moment- And what you need to do to make that number a certain thing in the moment might actually be very different than the long-term value you're trying to create, such as health or quality work or a high-performing team.

Cal Newport 43:07 Yeah. So, like, when it comes to food or something, it's probably like, hey, you should eat vaguely like Michael Pollan, you know, like more or less, and, like, once or twice a year you get, you know, uh, you're getting biomarkers checked, and they'll let you know if there's a problem, like if something's too high, and if that's fine, then, like, okay, that's fine. Or, uh, you know, you kind of notice, uh, once a, once or twice a year when the seasons change, you're like, "You know what? My pants don't fit after summer's over." You're like, "Oh, okay. Um, there's something probably off in what I'm doing with my nutrition. I, I... There we go. So now I'm gonna make an adjustment for the next few months to see if that gets better." It's a, it's a, uh, a grosser granularity. And but, I mean, I could imagine this even for YouTube or something like that, that, like, probably it's best to be like, yeah, y- what matters is whatever it is, views or something like that, and, like, once a month you wanna, like, sit down and, and do a, a deep dive on what's going on and come up with a, a process for the month that follows to learn from those lessons and see how things shift, you know? And i- that's probably, maybe that's, like, the right granularity because you're chasing algorithmic, you know, um, uh, chimera if you're trying to, like, day by day, "Why did this do well and not that, and this and this?" And, and next thing you know, you're, uh, giving a prize to whoever keeps their hand on the car longest, you know? Um, so, so I like this idea. Like, for the right metric at expert... What's the expert say is the thing that really matters, like, the most at the right frequency, which is really, like, the biggest possible frequency where you're not missing major improvements? Uh, and that's maybe a good way to think about it.

Brad Stulberg 44:38 I'd like to add two things, if I may.

Cal Newport 44:40 Okay.

Brad Stulberg 44:41 The first is I think that there is a time and a place for what I'll call, like, a, a tracking sprint, and I'm thinking of the person that is a newly diagnosed diabetic or that has prediabetes-

Cal Newport 44:55 Yes

Brad Stulberg 44:55 ... that wears a glucose monitor and just tracks the reaction that they have to every single food they eat so that they can learn about how their body reacts to food. Maybe you do this for a week or two weeks or even a month, but then at the end of that month, you've probably learned what you need to learn, and then you can let go of this device-

Cal Newport 45:10 Yeah

Brad Stulberg 45:10 ... and live your life with the new behavior. I think in the case of YouTube, maybe there's a case to put on your, your data scientist hat and say, "I'm gonna religiously track everything hour by hour for a week just to really try to understand if I'm overlooking something." And then after that week, you let go and you start running longer experiments. Um, so that's the first thing that I'd add. The second thing that I would add that is so important is that the things that work and help us tend to work and help us until they become the very things that get in the way. And a, a, a, an explicit example of this is for anyone that is a relatively new runner, using things like your heart rate in real time or your pace is utterly invaluable-

Cal Newport 45:55 Hmm

Brad Stulberg 45:55 ... because it is teaching you what a hard workout feels like, what a medium workout feels like. It is ensuring that you don't go out way too fast and burn out or that you don't hold back because you're scared of being uncomfortable. Utterly invaluable. And then you get to a point where maybe you've been running for a year or two years or five years, and the heart rate or the pace is actually the thing that holds you back because what you actually need to do is go by feel, and on your best day, the pace is saying, "Oh no, you're running a six-minute mile. That's too fast," so you, you pull back and you freak out, when on that day you probably could have gone 5:40 if you would've had the confidence to let go, or the opposite. On a day when you're about to get sick, the watch says 6:30, you're like, "I must run six," and then you train yourself into the ground. So I think that for a lot of these metrics, when they're providing education in a way that is helping you learn what something should feel like, then they're valuable.

Cal Newport 46:47 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 46:47 But once you've learned that, then the next phase of mastery is actually to let go of the metric and to trust your body.

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Brad Stulberg 49:20 And what's funny, Cal, is every single expert coach that I've spoken with about this, and I've spoken with countless, you know, probably over 100, uh, they all say the same thing, which is that they, they have their athletes stop wearing whatever device they're wearing during their workouts.

Cal Newport 49:35 Interesting.

Brad Stulberg 49:36 Um, and it's for this, it's for this very reason. Like, they don't want the activity intermediated by technology because they know that the best workout comes when the athlete's not focused on themself and a number on a screen, but when they lose themselves in the training.

Cal Newport 49:51 All right, I like it. So we do need, we do need more coaches. All right, we're getting... I think we're getting somewhere, right? Because, you know, there's also... So, like in this piece and in our conversation, right, we're talking about digitally enhanced optimization taken too far is counterproductive, right?

Brad Stulberg 50:09 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 50:09 Um, but there's like another strain of this which I don't think we're saying, right? I think there's like an anti-optimization strain that is really just sort of cover for, uh... It's almost like a communitarian like anti-accomplishment, anti-ambition. They're like, "Ah, stop trying to... Everything is you're just trying to optimize yourself-

Brad Stulberg 50:27 Yeah

Cal Newport 50:27 ... because of capitalism." Uh, and what they really mean is like, "Don't go for runs because I don't run and I feel bad about it," or something like that. And I feel like we're doing something very different, but it's probably important to separate out, just like the audience knows there's like another strand of anti-optimization that sort of sees it as a, um, you know, like a late stage capitalist mind virus or something like this, and that's, that's, that's a different critique. It uses similar terms, but there... It's, it's really a different type of critique which I think sort of, kind of ignores people's natural ambition and other sorts of issues. You probably deal, come up against this more often given that your content and your books and your articles talk about performance a lot more and athletes a lot more. Am I getting that right? Like there's a... We have to separate out, there's a sort of another strand of anti-optimization that's really saying something quite different.

Brad Stulberg 51:15 I think that's, I, I think that's a really important and astute observation, and that is right. Um, I think that optimization actually just means to make something its best, and I think that that's a great thing to try to make something its best. Uh, I think the problem is when you end up making something worse in the name of making something its best, and I think that there's then this other strand of individuals that, um, that just like are allergic to any kind of self-improvement or ambition. Uh, and that's not at all what I'm arguing for. Uh, and then there's even like a third strand of people who are just so gifted, you see this in sports a lot, where they're like, "Ah, you don't have to measure or try hard. Like, just do it by feel. Like, relax-

Cal Newport 51:56 Yeah

Brad Stulberg 51:56 ... and win." And if you have the most freakish genetics, you know, I think about Allen Iverson, like, "Practice? What you talking about, practice? I don't need to practice." Well, that's 'cause you're Allen Iverson. You're once in a generation genetics. Most of us don't have that. Um, so this is not anti-hard work. This is not anti-ambition. It's not even anti-optimization. It's anti the bastardization of optimization. I think we should work hard. I think we should measure what matters. I think we should focus on improvement. I don't think that we should do it in a performative way where the measurement becomes the end in itself. The measurement is always a means to an end, which is a faster marathon, a better company, uh, better writing, a bigger platform, whatever it might be.

Cal Newport 52:38 Now, a, an element of that strain that I do think is like worth bringing into this is understanding when enough is enough, which I think, uh, plays an important role here. Like in my world of algorithms, my computer s- if I put on my computer science hat, optimization has a really, uh, clear definition, right? An optimization algorithm, you have a large set of possible inputs, um, to the problem, each of which puts out, uh, an output that you can measure and you can rank, and optimization is how do I find the input that gives me the output with the, the highest value? And there's like lots of ways to do this and, you know, in mathematics you get things like the simplex algorithm that try to move through this space and find it. Um, but it's often very hard to have a optimal algorithm because to find the exact best result, uh, could be computationally infeasible. So then we have something known as approximation algorithms, where you're like, "What I'm gonna guarantee you is like I don't know if this is the best out- the, the best possible output, but I'm gonna find an input that gives an output that's like within some bounded factor of what's best. Like, it's good enough." And you can actually tune that bound. It's a bound into the algorithm, is how approximate you want to get, and the, and the more approximate it is, like the less time the algorithm takes. I always think about this in this sort of world as well, is that, um, you need some notion of what's your approximation bound. In other words, like as an individual, you could just endlessly be, "I want to do even better in this mile and better in this and higher and higher." And so like that's another thing I think a lot about and I struggle a lot about, is like what's the right way to think about what enough is enough is. And I have a theory that it probably has to do with lifestyle centric planning and working backwards from your vision of a good life, not working forwards from if I can j- if I accomplish more on this metric scale, then I'm gonna be happier. Like working backwards, and if, and if what you're doing is delivering that vision, you can be happy with it even if you're not the best or whatever. But how do we think about that a- aspect, about you want to do better, you want to optimize right so you're not being counterproductive or wasting your time, but you also don't want to, you know, be endlessly trapped, "Well, what's the next level? What's the next level?" Whether my metrics are right or wrong. So how do you think about that issue?

Brad Stulberg 54:48 I think about this issue a lot, and let's start with the maybe, um, more bounded example of a high-performance athlete, just using it as an example, and then we can get out to life as a whole. So for a high-performance athlete, uh, I think of something that I learned from a mentor of mine, a guy named Stuart McMillan, who has coached over 35 Olympic medalist and 100, uh, world champion medalists, so probably the greatest sprint coach currently at work. He coaches sprinters in power sports. And I was once talking to Stu about, um, his, his kind of approach for training athletes, and what he said is that- At that high level, you have to acknowledge that performance is a complex system, meaning there are all of these variables that go into performance, and if you pull a lever on X, it's gonna have some kind of effect on Y, and those effects are interacting. So you literally cannot control, right? Regardless of what Whoop or Oura says, there's no controlling a, a for elite performance.

Cal Newport 55:48 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 55:49 And what he said is, what we have to do is we have to identify all the things that we can that go into elite performance in the system. So training, sleep, mindset, um, nutrition, social life, temperature, muscle mass, heart rate, on and on and on. And then what Stu said is, once we have all the variables, we just try to get a 7 out of 10 on every single variable. So we're not striving to optimize any of the variables, 'cause if we optimize one variable and we focus too much here, it's gonna have a, an effect somewhere else in the system that could be deleterious. So he said, we just try to bring the floor up to 7 out of 10 across the board, and if we do that, then the emergent principle is a 10 out of 10 athlete. But if we ever try to get 10 out of 10 on one thing, 10 out of 10 on nutrition, or 10 out of 10 on sleep, or 10 out of 10 on training, then it has all of these effects that we can't predict for that actually make the emergent principle, which is the athlete's performance, worse. So I really like that. I think it's saying, let's identify all the inputs to performance, or zooming out, let's identify all the inputs to a good life, and then let's try to have, like, this floor that we don't fall below. And maybe it's a 7 out of 10, maybe it's an 8 out of 10, but let's not obsess about being a 10 out of 10 anywhere, because once we do that, the actual thing that we're striving for is, is gonna fail. Um, and I think that's, like, a really interesting way to look at it. Now, there might be a week where you emphasize, or a month or a season where you emphasize one component of the system, but to try to be 10 out of 10 on everything always, like, the system's just not gonna work.

Cal Newport 57:19 That's interesting. That, I mean, that really does align well with, uh, my motivations for lifestyle-centric planning, right? Because there's, I think it captures two effects that I've seen before in people's, not athletically, in people's lives, right? That, um, if you're below a seven in something, like, if you're, if you're neglecting an important area of your life, like, that could bring you down, right? If there's a, there's a, a, one area that's neglecting you. But also, if you push too much on one area of your life, make it your sole focus, it's gonna lead to neglect of other areas, right? So it's-

Brad Stulberg 57:47 That's right

Cal Newport 57:47 ... that's why you can't, you neither want to neglect something, nor do you want to over-focus, because that also leads to the same place. Like, so in lifestyle, uh, people pursuing better lives, we see this all the time. Like, the, the, the common trap would be, um, I want a 10 out of 10 on my, uh, success in my job, because it's obvious and I can measure it, and I'm getting these promotions, and so I'm gonna put all of my eggs in doing that thing as well as possible. But then you have, uh, you know, you have your health, you have your connection to other people, you have your enjoyment and celebration of the world, you have transcendence. Like, all that stuff starts to go down because you're working 12 hours a day and constantly traveling or whatever, and the net performance of life is bad. Um, so I, I get that, if you over-focus on one thing. Whereas, like, with lifestyle-centric planning, you're like, I have a vision of my life, uh, where all the different attributes I care about are cooking, you know? And if I'm there, this is gonna be an interesting, meaningful life. And, like, I actually, I'm not neglecting anything, but I also can't get too obsessive about any one thing, because the other things are gonna suffer. Uh, so I see a lot of congruence there between athletics and then people just in general trying to cultivate a deep life.

Brad Stulberg 58:55 And the biggest counterargument that you're gonna get, and I'm sure you already have, is, well, you know, you're just setting us up for mediocrity. And if you really want to be great at something, you know, maybe your marriage is gonna implode, maybe you're gonna be a shitty mom or dad, uh, maybe you're not gonna have any hobbies, but y- you know, you just have to be obsessed. You have to be all in. That's the cost of greatness. And what the research actually shows is, like, that's just simply not true. That's a myth.

Cal Newport 59:20 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 59:20 Um, individuals with self-complexity, which means there are more than one source of meaning in their life, they tend to perform better at their main thing. Why? Because they're not so fragile. If all you have is your job, and something goes wrong at your job, it's an attack on your entire identity. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna cheat, you're gonna lie, you're gonna engage in fraud, you're gonna have a panic attack, you're gonna become depressed. Those things don't correlate well with peak performance. Uh, you have to care deeply about what you're doing if you want to be great at it. It might be the room of your identity house that you spend the most time in, but if it is the sole thing in your life that you care about, it's actually gonna make you worse at that thing.

Cal Newport 1:00:03 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 1:00:03 Um, and this is really tricky for people to wrap their head around. But, like, you have to be a little bit crazy and a little bit obsessed to be great, but if you're too crazy and too obsessed, it actually backfires.

Cal Newport 1:00:14 Yeah, I mean, it seems to me when I, when I, when I look at people or study their lives who are, are notably great at something, really what typically happens is they just, it, it, uh, simplifies to... Their professional lives are simplified. Like, I mean, like, the reality of it is, is, like, once it's, like, really clear, I'm trying to do this one thing at a super high level, what gives is, like, your professional life often just becomes about that one thing. You become less busy, right? It's, it's not... Yeah, people suspect, it's like, "Oh, you never sleep. You never see your family." But it's like, no, if you want to be Robert Caro, what that means is not that you neglect your family and that you don't have enjoyment in things. It's that you simplify your professional life down to, like, I disappear for three years at a time, and I get my pages in every day, and I, you know, it's... So it doesn't make him less balanced. It makes them more focused. And, like, the, it, it's actually this, like, reverse effect, is, like, the, the less you have something you're trying to do really well, if you're ambitious, then just the busier your life gets because you're hoping to pseudo productively try to transmute busyness into some indication of, like, I'm a valuable person. But as soon as something starts clicking, like, wow, you're like a great computer programmer or whatever, the more your world becomes let him cook. You know, like, let him just go and write that computer code. We don't want him in meetings and in emails and, like, doing all these other things. And so I'm with you on that. Like, that often seems to be the case. There's exceptions, like executive roles that Um, but even like executives, they get so dialed in, like top CEOs and stuff like that. They get so dialed in on their schedule and what's important and what's not that they can like turn all these knobs. Like, "No, I am going to, like, always be home for my son's game," and they have so much power and control, they can just do that. So it's... Yeah, I'm with you on that. There's a paradox there. We should write something about that, the like... Actually, I did. When I was younger, I had a, a, an essay called the, The Paradox of the Relaxed Rhodes Scholar, and the argument was, like, the very best-performing university students worldwide, I studied Rhodes Scholars, are way more relaxed than, like, sort of the average kind of I wanna... You know, I'll use, use an example, Brad. I wanna get a job at McKinsey type of student, right? Because it was almost like they were so locked in on this is what matters, and they simplified other things, and they just, you know... I, I don't, I don't quite know how it worked, but I remember thinking it was a paradox, is like they are more relaxed. The more accomplished the student got, the more relaxed they got.

Brad Stulberg 1:02:34 Right, and I think it's two things. It's, one, and it's maybe a combination, they're just really talented, so they can be relaxed, like they have an innately high IQ or they're innately good at sport. The other is they don't major in the minors, so they're not running around trying to do 19 different things in a super complex way in the name of greatness. They're like, "No, I write. Writing is the main thing, so I'm gonna keep the main thing the main thing." Um, and what I've observed in, in, in high performers, again, across fields, not just athletes, is that generally speaking, like, they have their craft. They have some kind of relational life, whether it's a marriage or being a parent or being a community member, and then they have some kind of hobby. And they don't get obsessed with that hobby, but they've got something outside of their main pursuit that they enjoy. You know, even LeBron James loves golf. Um, LeBron James is pretty obsessive about basketball. He's got three things, right? He's got his family, he's got basketball, and then he's got golf. Um, he spends more time on basketball than he does with his family or golfing, but he still has these other parts of his life that give him meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that he's staying up on prestige TV, he's following every scandal on social media, he's got a perfect house, uh, that's always clean, you know, he's a good cook. No, no, no, like you can't do everything. But I think you gotta, you gotta identify, like, what are the main things, and then just keep them the main things and then be okay with letting everything else go.

Cal Newport 1:03:51 I'm gonna use myself as an example here, right? If you go back to college me, um, I was an exceptionally successful college student, right? If you put that on paper, uh, you know, I think I got one grade less than an A in the last three years of my time at Dartmouth. I had like a three nine five GPA, you know, top 50 out of many thousands of students or whatever. Um, I got a lot of citations. So at Dartmouth, they have this indication where if you, if your performance is off the grade scale, they put a citation in your transcript so they can add in text a description of like, "This student was above and beyond, and here's why." I got a bunch of those. Got into every grad school. I applied to all the top grad schools, got into them all, right? So a very, very successful student, right? Um, I rarely studied late. I was rarely stressed, never pulled all-nighters, nothing like that. And why was that is that if you actually looked at how I approached being a student, it was I didn't major in the minors. I was like, okay, I have one major. Now we're literally in the majors and minors. It's ironic.

Brad Stulberg 1:04:51 [laughs] Right.

Cal Newport 1:04:51 But I was-

Brad Stulberg 1:04:51 Right.

Cal Newport 1:04:51 Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 1:04:52 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:04:52 One major. Um, I kept my course load balanced and easy. Anytime I had a chance to, like I had credits, an AB credit, so I could do an independent study or maybe make a course load, I would be like, "Great, I would rather take less courses than more." I want more than enough time to focus on whatever courses I'm actually doing and just like let that be the main thing I'm doing. And then I had one major extracurricular, just one, which was writing. I always had some sort of writing thing I was working on because that was my... And that was it. No, no 10 other clubs or always trying to go around and do other types of things. And so I kept my course load reasonable, as reasonable as possible. I kept my extracurricular load as reasonable as possible, and I just, like the thing that matters is the class I'm taking now to try to do as well as possible, and the more time I have to spend in that class, the easier and better that's gonna be, and that was it. So like I was never overworked. I was never stressed. I was never super busy 'cause I said, "Oh, in the end, what's gonna matter is like where'd you go to school? What'd you major in? What was your GPA?" And if that's all that matters, why have all this other stuff in my life that is gonna make me stressed out? And I, I was so... I felt so strongly about this for my first five years in grad school, I used to tour the country giving talks at elite colleges about do less things. It's not making you more impressive. [laughs] You're stressing yourselves out. I was like, "I am a super successful student, and I was way less, way less stressed than you, uh, and it's not just some magic genes. Like, you're doing too much. No one cares that you're in 13 clubs, and why are you double majoring? No one is going to assess the difficulty of your schedule and say, 'Wow, this was a hard schedule they took their junior fall.' No one cares. No one will look at that. It's just making you miserable." And I used to tour the country to try to spread that message because I was so convinced that in the student space, people were making themselves unnecessarily stressed out. So this has to probably apply to like ambitious people in almost any endeavor that's out there.

Brad Stulberg 1:06:36 And the, the thing that I love about that example is it brings us back to where we started today, which is I would argue that how you just described your academic career, that's the actual definition of optimized. Like, you were optimized, and that's the kind of optimization that we should be after. You weren't doing 47 things. You weren't tracking everything in real time. You said, "This is the thing I wanna be great at. These are the supporting structures I need in my life to make sure I don't lose my mind, and I'm gonna go be great at that thing."

Cal Newport 1:07:04 And not to stretch on this story too long, but it also matches what you said before because when I got serious about my academics, which was after my freshman year, so I rowed crew, got a heart issue, couldn't row crew anymore. That's when I got serious about my academics. Um, I did have a season of what would look like traditional optimization because I spent a quarter testing lots of different ways to take notes and study. Like, I was really trying to understand what worked and what didn't. And what I learned in that quarter is like there's a couple simple things about like how to study well, and almost all of it just came down to active recall. It was like the main thing I discovered is there was no secret beyond, uh- Don't read things over passively. You have to recreate knowledge from scratch like you're lecturing a class if you want to learn it. So, like, you need to have a blank page and try to solve the math problem on the blank page. That's how you know if you know it or not. Um, you need to, whatever, active rec- That was it. Like, that was the simple rule. So I had a couple sim- So I, I learned, like, here's, like, the simple things that work. They're hard. It's a v- you know, they weren't easy, but it wasn't complicated. It wasn't magic. And then I never really had to think about study habits. It was like, schedule your time, schedule when you're gonna study in advance, do active recall instead of passive recall, don't be too busy. So, like, I had a period of, like, let me try it, because there's no coaches on this. The books-- And this is why my first books were-- I'm sorry to rant about all this, but, uh, you've uncorked something here, Brad. You've uncorked-

Brad Stulberg 1:08:21 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:08:22 ... twenty-year-old Cal. Uh, all of the books I tried, I wanted to buy books about how to do this, and they were all, like, The Naked Roommate and, like, how to have fun at college. It's why I wrote my first books, were like no nonsense, here's how you actually study, because they didn't exist. I had to figure it out for myself. And so I had a period of, like, I'm experimenting and trying things. And there was no magic sauce. There was no secret combination of metrics and numbers that allowed me to get ahead of people. I learned, here are, like, the four things that work, and then I just did that for the next three years.

Brad Stulberg 1:08:50 Yeah. That sounds about right. Um, I think that that's it. You know, there's, there's this interesting thing, not to get us, you know, off topic here, is, um, exploration and exploitation. Have you heard of this at all?

Cal Newport 1:09:02 Oh, don't get me started. I'm gonna talk to you about multi-arm bandit stochastic optimization algorithms. I know so much about this, but okay, go ahead.

Brad Stulberg 1:09:10 Well, all right. So there's, there's this interesting research on talent development and talent acquisition that essentially says

Brad Stulberg 1:09:16 that if you look at, um, creatives, artists, film directors, their-- the way they work follows a pretty predictable pattern, where they explore different things, and then they find what's working, and then they double down and they exploit it for, like, three to five years. And then once they've exploited it for all it's worth, they come back up, and they have a period of exploration where they're trying new approaches, new lines of inquiry, and then they find something that's working, and they exploit it. Um, and I think that, you know, part of what you described, too, and, and maybe this is a part of optimization, is, like, you can explore different metrics to track and what kind of behaviors you might change and so on and so forth, but that should be a small proportion of your time. Because once you find something that works, the goal shifts from trying to figure out what makes sense. You've already figured out what makes sense. Now you double down on it. Um, and I think optimization culture keeps you in an explore mode. Like, you're never actually exploiting something. You're just measuring the next thing and trying to optimize a little bit more and measuring the next thing. What I would say is, if you're gonna use all the trackers, use all the trackers for, like, five months, figure out what gives rise to your best performance, and then shift the focus away from the trackers, which makes you self-focused, and onto the actual activity itself.

Cal Newport 1:10:27 This is smart.

Brad Stulberg 1:10:27 Um, and then do that for five years. Like, that's-

Cal Newport 1:10:29 Yeah

Brad Stulberg 1:10:29 ... that's how to be thinking about all these things.

Cal Newport 1:10:31 That's smart. I like that a lot. And the thing I mentioned, by the way, there's a whole mathematical literature. It's called the multi-arm bandit problem, because the idea is, like, you have a slot machine with different, uh, arms you can pull, and different arms give different amounts of rewards, but you don't know what those are. And you're gonna do a bunch of pulls, and you wanna maximize your total reward. And, well, how do you do that? You have to do, it's a, an explore/exploit strategy, where if you have an arm that's giving you good rewards, you wanna kinda keep pulling that because you don't wanna miss the rewards that's giving you. But you have to occasionally randomly sample other arms to make sure there's not one that's gonna be giving, uh, an even bigger award. And in the hard version of this problem, the rewards per, uh, uh, handle shift over time, and there's, there's optimal algorithms for, it's called minimizing your regret. But basically doing as good as you could do not knowing what those are in advance. And it's all exploration/exploit, like, what's the optimal way of doing that? But I love this idea because it's how I've run my career. I-- Let's call this, like, mac- Can we call this macro optimization because you're, like, optimizing at a, a bigger timescale? And yeah, I love this idea of you find something that's important to you and a way to do it that works, then you kinda wanna, like, lean into that and do that, which is much more about simplifying your life and not letting other things get in the way and leaning into it. But there's this, like, ping of exploration, and at first it could be nothing, but as time goes on, you know, that's where you're kinda sampling, like, what's gonna be my next thing, which is you and I's life, don't you think, Brad? Like, it's all about this was it, and then, like, this other thing kinda came out of it for five or ten years. And, like, this has always been, even in, like, my writing career alone is all about, all right, I'm a student advice writer, and I'm leaning into that. And then this sort of leaving that to try a different direction, and then from there to a different direction. And the timescales are measured in years. So I, yeah, I like this macro optimization idea as well, is you wanna find what works, and then you wanna just do that for a while with just, like, a base level of your antenna up for exploration. And the hard part, of course, is when you do need to change to another handle. That's h-

Brad Stulberg 1:12:31 Yes.

Cal Newport 1:12:31 I've always struggled with that. Everyone struggles with that. That's, that's the scary part, is, like, I think this, I, there's a better handle I need to start pulling, and that's gonna take me a year of, like, reconfiguring to get there, and I have to have some faith. But that's also kind of the fun part. Um, that's cool, though. I like this idea a lot.

Brad Stulberg 1:12:48 Yeah. I, I, I'm glad that you like it. I, it, I mean, it came up again and again in the, the reporting for, uh, The Way of Excellence is just, like, all of these high performers, this is how they run their life. They have these exploration of periods, and then they find what's working, and then they exploit it for all it's worth, and then they get bored or the marginal gains, uh, stop accruing, and then they go back to the drawing board and they explore again, and then they find what's working, and then they just do that thing.

Cal Newport 1:13:14 You know where in our lives the mathematical solutions to that, that problem show up is Amazon book pricing. That's what Amazon's algorithms are doing to price the books on Amazon-

Brad Stulberg 1:13:25 I'm sure

Cal Newport 1:13:25 ... is they're trying to, they're trying to find the sweet spot of volume versus profit on the book price, and if something's working, they kind of groove on it, but they randomly will sample, they try different prices. For some people, that's the multi-arm bandit problem. They're exploring, like, "Hey, maybe there's, like, actually, um, you know, we're, we're charging 19.99 for Way of Excellence, and that's, like, working well," but they explore, like, "What would happen if we charged, uh, you know, 12.99?" And they're like, "Wow, we're getting a much higher buy rate. Uh, let's move over to that handle. We're making less profit, but we'll sell twice as many books," right? So there's this, this, uh... They use, actually, 'cause I know someone who worked at Amazon, they use explore/exploit mathematically optimal strategies to figure out how to keep adjusting the prices of Amazon books. So it's all full circle, Brad.

Brad Stulberg 1:14:12 Yeah. That's wild. I, I never thought of it that way, but that, that is true. It's always crazy how price-sensitive people are around books, too. Blows my mind.

Cal Newport 1:14:20 Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Brad Stulberg 1:14:21 Like, a book goes down $4, and suddenly everyone wants to buy it. It's like, you couldn't buy it at $22, but now that it's at 18, it's just, it's interesting.

Cal Newport 1:14:28 You do literally have, like, a pile of $18. You're like, "All right. I'm gonna put it into the computer slot. I can afford this now." Like when we were kids.

Brad Stulberg 1:14:35 It's very interesting.

Cal Newport 1:14:36 When we were kids.

Brad Stulberg 1:14:37 It's very, very interesting.

Cal Newport 1:14:38 And it was, "Can I afford the chips and the hot dog?" And you're counting the money. "All right, I guess I can just get the hot dog." Yeah. Um-

Brad Stulberg 1:14:43 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:14:43 ... all right, Brad, I think we, we explored this topic well. Um, always interesting to hear about it. I mean, look, if you listen to my show, you know Brad, but check out The Way of Excellence for sure. Sweeping the world of professional sports, uh, because he's on it, and then check out his Substack, which is where this essay came from. Just search for Brad Stulberg, right? The Substack?

Brad Stulberg 1:15:03 That, that's right. Thank you, Cal. I think we came a long way. Um, I hope that y'all listeners found this interesting. Cal, I hope you found it interesting. I think that we injected some important nuance, um, into a topic that, for better and worse, is kind of all over the place. Like, you can't, you can't log onto the internet without hearing about optimization or self-enhancement. Uh, you can't listen to a podcast without being peddled some kind of digital wearable. Uh, they're not all bad. There's a time and a place, but they're tools, and, uh, you have to evaluate the benefits and the cost, and you want the right tool at the right time with the right increment of losing yourself in, in the world in between all the self-focus.

Cal Newport 1:15:39 All right. That's the way to do it, and now I'm off to obsessively optimize the thumbnail for this interview. All right, so thanks, Brad. We'll talk soon.

Brad Stulberg 1:15:48 Thanks, Cal.

Cal Newport 1:15:49 All right, so that was my discussion with Brad Stulberg. I found that really interesting, right? It wasn't just about what the problem was, it was also about what the solutions could be. Uh, so the two big lessons, I'm gonna summarize the two major practical lessons I came away from in that conversation. One, you don't want to avoid all metrics or measuring, right? As he said, if your approach to running a marathon is to just run a marathon and see how it goes and let that be feedback, you're gonna be in trouble. So you do need to have a plan. You do need process. You do need measuring. But how do you do this without falling into the optimization trap? I like this idea of right metrics, right frequency. You get expert metrics, like an expert tells you this is what matters, and then you wanna check things basically at the slowest possible rate that you're not missing out on major improvements or adaptability. The more you can wait between checks without hurting how your progression's going, the better. You do not want to be checking all the time. The second idea I really liked was the one I previewed in the intro of this show, which was macro optimization, this idea of having an exploration/exploitation dichotomy when it comes to optimization, that at first you're sort of maybe exploring a lot of things, measuring things, trying things, seeing their impact to figure out what matters for you in a particular goal, and then there's the exploitation phase, where you just put your head down and execute, get lost in your work and the process and other parts of your life. I never had thought about it that way before, but that's how I approached... I mean, to me, that was interesting to know that's how I approached my student career, that I had that one quarter of extensive experimentation with different ways to take notes and study and write papers. And I figured out what worked, and it wasn't actually that complicated, and then for the next three years, I just got As doing that and wasn't that stressed out. I like that. Exploration, exploitation. Couple months of exploration, couple years of exploitation is the right way probably to think about finding the right metrics, measuring enough, but not getting caught in the optimization trap. So anyways, uh, thank you, Brad, for, uh, joining me for that. Always a great conversation when he is on the show. Be back next week with another advice episode of the podcast, and until then, as always, uh, stay deep. Hey, if you made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com/ideas, and when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com/ideas. [outro music]