This Idea Will Make You Unstoppable. (How To Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals) | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So today I wanna talk about a common feature that comes up when you study the lives of people who have embraced depth, that is, they are living deep lives. And this common feature is they often are notably good at something valuable. Right? So if you can be a, a 10X coder or throw a baseball that's hard to hit or write in a way that is compulsively readable, your options for cultivating a remarkable existence expand significantly, right? Because it's rewarding to be good at something. Humans crave mastery. It can provide you financial independence, which gives you a lot of control over how you live and work. You can shape the rhythms of your life in unique and interesting ways. And mastery tends to open up interesting varieties and interesting opportunities of the type that makes your life itself more interesting. Like, let me be specific about it, because I was just talking to him the other day. Let's consider my friend, the writer Ryan Holiday. Uh, he got very good at pragmatic nonfiction writing. In fact, he basically, over the last decade or so, revolutionized how the genre of pragmatic nonfiction can function in the internet age. So I went down to, uh, Texas last spring to visit him, and he has built this really interesting life. So him and his wife own this really cool bookstore, The Painted Porch, in a quaint town in Texas that's about 30 miles outside of Austin. Uh, he works in a, an office suite that's up above this cooly decorated bookstore, and his team works up there. He records his podcast next door. They bought the building next door. It has a generic storefront, and then behind it is, like, this beautiful studio, and behind that is this space where he has his editors and graphics people are all working. They have this back porch behind. Uh, I went for a nice walk while I was there. You can just walk from this building down to the river, and there's, like, this long path you can walk on. People come from, uh, all over to sort of just hang out at this bookstore. There's a steady stream of fascinating writers, athletes, and actors that make the pilgrim- pilgrimage there to hang out with Ryan and record in his studio. And when he wants some more quiet, he retreats right outside of town to his 50-acre property, where there's, uh, cattle and a pond, and it's quiet, and you can go for a long walk without ever leaving land that you actually own. On top of that, Ryan, you know, his life has a lot of interesting adventures. He goes and hangs out with NFL teams and just got back from Australia and hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger not long ago. The point here, I'm using Ryan as a case study. The point here is that getting notably good at something valuable is a powerful tool for crafting a deep life. So let's talk a little bit today about how people get good at things that are valuable. Uh, I have three rules I wanna share. All right, so rule one is something I informally call the 10-year rule, and to make it a little bit more clear what I'm talking about, I actually wanna play a little bit of tape here. This is from, uh, the, uh, Rewatchables podcast. Bill Simmons' Rewatchables podcast, one of my favorites. Uh, they're talking here in this clip about Quentin Tarantino, uh, his rise in the '90s and Pulp Fiction. It's also gonna be a little bit about Bill itself. Let's listen to it, and then I'm gonna analyze it for you.

Speaker 3:16 Way up, and it felt like in '94, the [beep] ceiling just came off.

Speaker 3:20 It's true. I-- That's definitely how it felt and how it was narrativized. If you listen to Tarantino talk about it, he's basically spent eight years in obscurity trying to get stuff made.

Speaker 3:29 Yeah, right.

Speaker 3:30 And so that was a great story to tell in magazines about this guy who came out of nowhere to take over movies forever. But that isn't really what happened. I mean, he tried to get this 60-millimeter movie off the ground for years and years. He was shooting it on the weekends, just like Kevin Smith shot Clerks, self-funding, trying to write his own ticket in that way, and it took a really long time, and it, it took him convincing people to give him money. Like, he talks about the story about getting, like, Richard Gladstein to give him money from-

Speaker 3:57 Yeah

Speaker 3:57 ... Live Entertainment for Reservoir Dogs. Like, he worked really hard for a long time, dead broke, thinking he was gonna fail. And so there's this tension in the storytelling where you're like, "Wow, you could do it too," but you also have to [beep] for a decade-

Speaker 4:12 [laughs]

Speaker 4:12 ... and maybe not succeed.

Speaker 4:13 Yeah. By the way, I completely identify it, because, like, when I went to ESPN in 2001, I had the column, and then it was like, "Oh yeah, you were at the forefront of when the internet and sport..." And I was like, "Yeah, I [beep] from '93 to 2001, and I was on my own, and nobody read anything I did." When you read the, the stuff about how long it took him to get, even to, to get meetings with people-

Speaker 4:36 Yeah

Speaker 4:36 ... you know? And you're just like, "This guy's just going to work and..."

Cal Newport 4:40 All right, so that was, uh, Bill Simmons talking with Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey on the Rewatchables. All right, here's what was important about that clip, why it caught my attention when I first heard it. Tarantino took about a decade to get to where he was going. The myth, as Chris made clear in that clip, the myth is 1993, this guy comes out of nowhere, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, boom. But the reality was almost a decade of him out there working, trying to make, uh... They were filming Reservoir Dogs on 16 millimeter. They were trying to make it work. They were trying to get funding. He was selling some scripts. He was doing anything he could. And then Bill Simmons spoke up and said, "Yeah, that was the same for me." People remember him in Grantland at ESPN like, "Oh, Bill Simmons came out of nowhere and sort of revolutionized sports coverage and using podcasts and blogging for doing so." And he's like, "Well, wait a second. I was at this for eight years before that, before things really started to click." So 10 years more or less, uh, is what it took Tarantino, 10 years more or less w- is what it took Bill Simmons to actually start to make a mark in what they were working on. This rule, which I call the 10-year rule, give or take a couple years in either direction, is pretty ironclad when you look at people who do really cool things. I mean, this is true of my own life. When did my first book come out? 2006. When was my first hit book? 2016, right? 10 years. Steve Martin I recently reread his professional memoir, Born Standing Up. I wrote a whole thing about it for my most recent book, Slow Productivity, which I cut, but I did all the math for this section that I cut about Steve Martin, and it took about a decade after he quit his comedy writing job full-time to do stand-up to really begin to, uh, explode in the stand-up world. Now, sometimes you will find people who, uh, make their move faster. But oftentimes in these stories, what you'll realize is they're doing basically 10 years' worth of work, but they're just, like, combining it like a madman into a shorter period of time. Michael Crichton's a great example of this. There's only a three-year gap between the publication of his first book in 1966 and his first hit book, The Andromeda Strain, which came out in 1969. But during that three-year period, he published five books before he got to The Andromeda Strain. They were all published under his pseudonym John Lange. They were like potboiler spy adventure thrillers. Uh, so that's like 10 years' worth of writing. He just collapsed like a madman into three years, but he was doing 10 years' worth of work. And honestly, there was another three years after that before his next book under his own name came out, so you can really think about it as really like a six or seven-year period before he was regularly writing books under his own name. All right, so the conclusion here for this rule is that getting good at something that, uh, is unambiguously valuable, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort. In some sense, that's the bad news. You're not gonna be able to have Ryan Holiday's life next year. But in other ways, that's the good news because most people are not willing to stick with something that long. So when you're thinking about the odds of success in one of these interesting fields, there's two odds to consider. The odds of just anyone who starts down this path, what are their odds of succeeding, versus what are the odds of someone who sticks with this seriously for a decade, what are their odds of succeeding? So maybe, for example, one in a thousand people who, uh, set out to become a writer and write novels actually becomes, like, a sustainable professional novelist, right? Next month, or maybe November, I guess, is National Novel Writing Month, and all over the country, people will sort of try to kick off their writing careers, and maybe it's like one in a thousand of them are gonna actually succeed. But what are the odds if you say, let's just consider people who give it a decade of concerted effort. What are the odds that someone in that position succeeds in professional writing? I bet it's like one in three, right? So your odds radically change if you're willing to stick with something over a longer period of time. So you could see that as bad news because it takes more time than you might hope to get good at something, or you see it as good news because that's a barrier that's gonna squeeze out ninety-nine percent of people who might be competing for those same limited slots. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right, rule number two. You must relentlessly expand, explore, and exploit. I'm trying to be alliterative here, so I'll have to explain what I mean by each of these words. All right, so to understand expand, I, I want you to think about a common observation. If you go to a gym, like a normal gym, there's usually a crowd of guys in their, like, upper forties, uh, and fifties who are just cycling from machine to machine, and they're sort of going through the motions with, like, a moderate amount of weight on, just, like, knocking out their reps and then moving on, uh, to the next machine. Sort of like checking things off of a list. If you talk to these guys, almost always they're there because their doctor said, "Look, we're looking at these, these numbers from your blood panels. Like, you gotta exercise because, you know, we worry about your heart." Very common. Like, they're cardiologists, mid-forties. "You gotta go exercise." So they're kind of doing, like, "Look, I'm here, I'm exercising, I'm doing lots of machines." The thing here, of course, is, uh, what they're doing's not gonna make them super strong. It's not gonna make them much stronger at all. Uh, we know what's involved for, like, muscle growth or strength growing, and you have to, like, make a concerted effort to exhaust muscles. It's difficult, it's uncomfortable, um, but you have to do that if you wanna get stronger. These guys aren't getting stronger. It's not bad they're doing it, but they're just sort of going through the motions. This applies to when we think about the 10 years it takes to get good at something. If you spend those 10 years doing the equivalent of the middle-aged guys on the machines in the gym, nothing's gonna happen, right? So if you're just sort of, "I just kind of have my writing, my writing time every morning, and I get my pages in," and you're sort of just doing this, uh, year after year, you're not guaranteed to get much better. You're not guaranteed to actually increase your odds. What you actually have to do during those 10 years for them to actually be useful is you need to deliberately improve your skills. That's what I mean by expand. You have to expand your actual, uh, abilities, and this requires that you, uh, look to relentlessly stretch yourself beyond where you're comfortable on the areas you need to get better at, right? Just like if you wanna make that muscle stronger, you can't just sit down and, and do the butterfly machine with twenty-five pounds and move on to the next thing. You have to do, like I was doing the other day, and I hate... [chuckles] You just have to do is you have to get on an incline bench and get those forty-five pound dumbbells and just do set after set, and it really kinda stinks, but, like, you're putting the real weight on the real muscles. You gotta do the same thing with whatever it is that you're trying to get better at. I mean, look, I'll go back to our example before of Ryan Holiday, right? Uh, 2014, he published his Obstacle Is the Way. This kicks off what's gonna be his career, uh, where he finally succeeds is writing about stoicism for a big audience. But that book doesn't do great out of the gates. People forget that book doesn't hit a bestseller list until five years after it comes out, after he's already sort of off to the races. So he's right away sold his next book, uh, Ego Is the Enemy. He was like, "I'm gonna give this a try." And I remember talking to him during this point. He was very systematic about, "How do I make this better?" Like, "What is it that's... Where can I improve myself? Where, where are the points where I have actual ground I can make up that's gonna make this book better than the last one?" He was stretching, like, "Where I wanna not just be working towards this goal of being a, a professional nonfiction writer, I need to be working at getting better." There's a sort of relentlessness there. Uh, Crichton was the same way. He relentlessly wrote these thriller novels under pseudonyms. This was like a lower barrier of entry, and it allowed him to practice the different elements of writing, like, a really high-quality, uh, thriller-type novel. I, I own a lot of these. They re-released them not long ago. I own a lot of these, and they're not like a later Crichton book, right? They're much simpler. You can see he's working. They'll, they'll have technology in it. He, you can see he's still working with how do you bring technology into these books. They have, uh, some preposterous characters that are, that are cardboard. He gets better at making the characters a little bit more interesting. You can see there's plotting, pacing elements that he starts to get better at. Even with his first book, The Andromeda Strain, he wrote that book, and his editor, the, the, the famed, you know, editor, Robert Gottlieb, who, who, uh, before that ran The New Yorker, uh, basically said to him, like, "We gotta rewrite this from scratch." And so he went through this whole training process where he wrote The Andromeda Strain with a lot more interiority and psychological realism, and he... They said, "Look, you're not, uh, you're not Tolstoy. We gotta rewrite this book. It's not about the psychological life of these scientists who are fighting this virus. Uh, it's about the fact, like, this virus is getting through the seals," or I guess it's a bacteria, "and everyone's gonna die, and the clock is ticking. Rewrite this like a New Yorker piece, like you're, uh, you know, Richard Preston reporting on the Ebola outbreak in Reston, Virginia later on. Write this like you're reporting on something that happened that was exciting." Had to, had to rewrite that book from scratch. This is all deliberately expanding skills. So yeah, it takes 10 years, but it has to be 10 years of getting better. [lips smack] All right. Explore. That was the second piece of our alliterative trio here. Explore. The other thing you notice when you study people who go through this period of becoming good at something notably good is that they're constantly looking around for opportunities within the general direction that they're pursuing. There's, like, this paradox to this. You need to stay focused on one thing for a long time, but within this one thing, you have to be incredibly agile, looking around. "Where is my traction point?" And usually this means finding places to actually, like, produce and ship something that other people are gonna see or care about or pay you for. These are the traction points you can actually move. If you don't have traction, you can't move forward. And you see this a lot. It's like Crichton trying with these thriller novels. He also wrote a lot of nonfiction books, and he was trying to figure out where his niche was as a writer. He was trying lots of things. Ryan Holiday tried lots of things. His first book was about marketing. The same year that Obstacles The Way came out, he tried, uh, publishing digital-only book called Growth Hacker Marketing. He was thinking, "Am I a marketer? Is that my space? Is the stoicism thing gonna work?" He was trying, uh, lots of things. My similar in my career is I'm, "Let me try this book. Let me try that. Let me write for this place." It's all within walls of, like, "I wanna be a writer." But you're exploring. You have to keep looking for, uh, opportunities within, uh, the field that you're in. And that brings us to the third element from rule two, which is exploit. The people who really make their move, when their exploration finds something that has traction, they mash the accelerator. "Oh, this is working? Let's get after it." Right. So I'm gonna follow these same examples. Uh, Ego Is the Enemy, Holiday's second book, does better. There's traction here. He's like, "Okay, we're doing the stoicism thing." Traction point number two, he starts a daily newsletter, The Daily Stoic, based off of the book he put out called The Daily Stoic. That model takes off. Now he's off to the races, right? He's like, "Oh, I see." Daily newsletters, he now has three: Daily Dad, Daily Stoic, and one called, like, Daily Philosophy. And he ramped up, like, these, this format for stoicism, the story-based format built around a single principle. Let's go. And, and he's, you know, uh, seven books since. Just boom, boom, boom. Let's go, right? Uh, build the audience, find the thing that work, let's go for it. Uh, for Crichton, it was really Terminal Man, his follow-up to Andromeda Strain. He kinda gets... He's getting... He's like, "I think this might be it." He experiments with his third and fourth book are out of the techno-thriller genre. He write The Great Train Robbery and Eaters of the Dead. These are books that, like, no one associates with Crichton. Um, after that, it's all Michael Crichton techno-thriller, one book e- every year, every other year. "I'm going to war with Clancy and Grisham. You know, let's go." And then he just mashed that accelerator, and that's where he was going after then, right? So when you discover what's working, you're like, "Great, we have to give that a huge amount of effort. We gotta really push that." So it's not just taking 10 years, it's what you're doing during those 10 years. Well, that's a lot to handle, so that brings us to rule number three. You must abandon distractions. Like, the core of this podcast, of course, is cultivating a deep life in a distracting world, right? It's i- in this world with largely digital distractions at both work and our life outside of work, how do we navigate and build full human lives? That's what I care about. I'm a computer scientist. I'm a digital theorist. I care about that angle. It plays a big role here. You cannot succeed with all of the expanding, the exploration, and the exploitation for 10 years within a narrow field if you're looking at your phone all the time. If you're looking at highly engaging, sort of addictive social platform or content platforms all the time, it is just stealing the brain cycles you need to actually build the cool thing, to do the thing that's gonna allow you to actually craft the cool life. Right? We're talking TikTok, we're talking Instagram, um, we're talking YouTube recommendation wandering, wander from recommendation to recommendation. We're talking Twitter. Now, there's a couple forces at play here that makes these particularly pernicious. The first one is the obvious one. You spend more time looking at these things, that's time you could've been spending on your pursuit. It just steals time, and we know that to be true. This was actually, and, and I, I've made this point, I wanna keep preaching this point. The, the point I had in my book Digital Minimalism, which was, uh, a little bit counter-cultural at the time and remains counter-cultural today, I said, "Hey, when we're thinking about digital distraction in our personal lives, like what's happening on our phones, don't get so sidetracked by the what of what people are looking at. What matters is the how long." All of the interest in this topic was, "No, what matters," and it continues to be this way today, "what matters is what's distracting people. It's their, the, the content is, the, it's bad content. It's the wrong people putting out content. It's misinformation. It's making you mad. It's making you crazy. It's all about the content is what's wrong." And I said, "Forget that. This is not what I'm picking up from the average person." The average person's not on Twitter yelling at people. The average person's upset by how long they're looking at these things. That's what matters, and it matters because it takes away time from other things, and in particular, none of these people I talked about spend a lot of time looking on their phones, 'cause they're building the stuff that made their life cool, right? Ryan doesn't look at social media. They have this team that, like, puts stuff out on all these channels. I don't think he knows how any of that stuff actually works. I don't think he cares. I don't use social media, right? Uh, I don't have enough cycles for that to, to, to lay claim to my life. But there's a less obvious harm as well if you have a lot of these highly addictive digital distractions in your life. It's not just that the content distracts you. It's that the tools trick the people producing things into thinking the tools are productive things to do. So if you're in, especially in some sort of creative field, these tools have this insidious way of convincing you that spending time on them is actually part of what you need to be doing to build up your really good skill, to get an audience, to get noticed, right? Uh, it tricks you. You say, "Look, I'm not just being distracted. I'm on here, like, posting and engaging because this is a key part of me being someone doing something creative." That is you just being tricked by these companies. It's just a great way to get a lot more of your attention, to convince you that that one or two hours per day you spend working on these platforms, they want you to think that's productive because it's fun. It's a simulation of actual hard creative work. It's like going to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland instead of going to the actual Caribbean. It kind of feels like you've gone to, uh, the Bahamas. But in reality, you're in a blacked-out warehouse in Orlando, right? That's what happens when creators get sucked into the social media world. It tricks you into thinking you're doing work, and it's the best, most fun work you've ever done because it's not too, it doesn't require much of you to concentrate. It's interesting. It's pressing all these buttons. It's low friction. It's high energy, and you can check things off. I've been maximizing my account, and I'm doing these, these Twitter threads that people told me I need to do, where the very last, uh, tweet in the thread says, "Thanks for listening. If you like these type of things, please subscribe." And I took some course online that said, "This is how I'm gonna build up an audience, and I'm gonna do these stupid articles on Medium. They're like 400 words." And I'm convinced that it feels good because it's easy, and you can check it off, and it exposes you to all these distractions. It's, that's, the, the robotic pirates are funny. But it's not the same as being on the beach on, you know, Eleuthera. So you gotta be careful, especially if you're trying to do something interesting, that you gotta hold these, like, digital distractions at bay. To use them all the time, you're not being savvy. You're clocking into a factory that's owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. You're clocking into the factory to do your shift, and they're not sending you a paycheck. All right, so those are my three rules. To get good at something, uh, notably good at something that can help you unlock the deep life, you have to, uh, follow the 10-year rule. It's gonna take a while, but use that to your advantage. During that time, you need to expand, explore, and exploit, and that is gonna require that you significantly reform your relationship with digital distractions. Here's the good news about that last piece, by the way. If you're thinking to yourself, "Man, I'm gonna have a really hard time not look- I, I do all the stuff on my phone. I'm gonna have a really hard time not doing this," you know what makes that a lot easier? To be getting after something you care about. The people who are locked in, doing something, like, "I'm starting to get some traction here. I'm exploring. Uh, I'm, I'm shipping things. I can feel myself getting better. I'm being deliberate about it," they have a pretty easy time not spending all day on Instagram, because they have something else capturing their attention that seems even more rewarding. So that w- final rule won't be as hard as you think once you actually get going. So there you go, Jesse.

Speaker 23:52 I like it.

Cal Newport 23:53 Get good. 10-year rule. That means we have six more years till this podcast gets good.

Speaker 23:58 [laughs]

Cal Newport 23:59 We're about four and a half years in. We're getting there.

Speaker 24:02 Yeah.

Cal Newport 24:03 We're getting there. Though we do a lot of podcasts, so maybe we'll have a bit of the Michael Crichton effect, where we're kind of compressing work, so maybe, like, five or six years.

Speaker 24:10 Extend the lease on the HQ.

Cal Newport 24:12 I know

Speaker 24:13 Well, we're getting new desks. I mean, we'll have to extend the lease.

Cal Newport 24:15 Uh, we are. We are. It's very exciting. I'm buying new desks for the Maker Lab portion of the HQ, also where we do our editing bay. Big, substantial, big wood desks. So yeah, we gotta... Now we gotta make this succeed. 'Cause if this doesn't succeed now, we're gonna be stuck with a lot of desks.

Speaker 24:32 Yeah.

Cal Newport 24:32 All right, so we got some cool questions that just cover a lot of these topics, time management, career, like, a lot of stuff just around trying to, like, succeed. Cool stuff. Uh, but first, let's hear from one of our sponsors. So I wanna talk about a relatively new sponsor that I'm pretty excited about, and that is our friends at Factor. Uh, these are fantastic. I, I, I love this product. Factor provides you, they ship right to your house, these no prep, no mess meals. These are, uh, chef, che- What? Chef. I can't say... I'm saying chef. This is how you know it's Friday afternoon, folks. Chef-crafted [laughs] meals. Um, and they come from... They have these different options. So, like, whatever your wellness goals are, you just choose the option you care about. So, like, if you're trying to do weight loss, there's Calorie Smart. They're like, uh, constrained calories, but they have protein plus. If you're doing, like, a, a keto, they have keto. Um, and the thing about these meals is they get delivered to your door. They're refrigerated, not frozen. They're fresh, right? And you, you- so you just cook them in the microwave. So it's like two minutes in the microwave, boom, and you've got this fresh meal. Uh, it just makes it so simple. Like, whatever the goal you're going for, you can just fo- get the meals from that category, get them shipped to your house, not even think about it. They have 35 different meals with more than 60 add-ons to choose from every week, so you'll always have new flavors to explore. I have now tried five different of the meals. I enjoyed all five. I use them all for lunch. We've talked about this on the show before. Like, my approach to nutrition is automate breakfast and lunch, do interesting stuff with dinner. But I always e- either have no breakfast, you know, just coffee, or the same breakfast. It's, you know, it's gonna be two eggs and one piece of Ezekiel toast if I'm hungry. And I don't wanna think about lunch. I want it to fuel me and, and solve whatever nutrition goal I have. So Factor is now, uh, is a great way to do that because a Factor meal now couldn't be more automated. Boom, microwave. Boom, food. Eat it. It's great. Tastes better than what I would whip up and takes no time to do. Uh, and there you go. All right? Um, they cover, uh, a lot of meals here from breakfast to dessert. I mean, they have a lot of options here. It's really restaurant quality. I agree with that. I've tried five of these. They are. We're talking about filet mignon, shrimp, blackened salmon. Like, it's good food. Kitchen time is to a minimum. It's about two minutes. I mean, I have a terrible microwave, Jesse, so it takes me a little bit more. We have, like, a small m- I don't know why. We have a small microwave.

Speaker 26:56 Really?

Cal Newport 26:57 Yeah. For s- for whatever reason, I think it was bought on Amazon when one broke, and it was like, "Oh, this is much smaller than we thought." I mean, our microwave is basically, I think it's like there's, like, a, a, a squirrel, like, rubbing sticks together in there to create a little bit of heat. So, like, everything takes much longer than it should. But if you have a normal microwave, two minutes should be enough. So head to factormeals.com/deep50 and use the promo code deep50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month. Right? This is a good discount, so you wanna use these promo codes, trust me. That's code deep50 at factormeals.com/deep50 to get 50% off your first box of meals and 20% off your next month while your subscription is active. Also wanna talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. You need to be using a VPN. To be using your computer without a VPN is like leaving your laptop out at the coffee store when, the coffee shop when you go to go to the bathroom. Like, it'll, we'll be fine often. You do this enough, it's gonna get snagged. Well, same thing. If you're connecting to the internet, especially in public, without a VPN, you are just opening yourself up to having your information stolen or your machine being hacked. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, cafes, hotels, airports, et cetera, your online data is not secure. Anyone on the same network can gain access to your personal data. It doesn't even take a lot of knowledge. You don't have to be, uh, like one of these losers that goes to MIT to, uh, I don't know why you'd trust anyone from MIT. You don't need to be one of them. Uh, you could just buy this cheap hardware you plug into a laptop. There's scripts. It's, like, real easy for people to steal your data. And look, there's a reason they wanna do it, too. You can get up to $1,000 on the black market for the data these hackers steal. If you have ExpressVPN, they can't do it. If you have ExpressVPN, what happens is your data gets encrypted on your machine in unbreakable code. Your m- uh, traffic gets sent to a VPN server which unencrypts it and then talks to the site and service that you're trying to communicate to on your behalf, encrypts the resu- result, sends it back to you, and then your computer unencrypts it. So the people who are nearby you in the coffee shop, all they can see is you have encrypted traffic to a VPN server. They learn nothing about you. They cannot get your information. Why I like ExpressVPN is that it's, uh, easy to use, right? You fire up the app, you click a button, it's on, and you just use everything like normal. Real easy to set up. Could be on your phone, it can be on your laptop, it can be on your tablet. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers

Cal Newport 29:34 like CNET and The Verge. You need a VPN, and ExpressVPN is what I recommend. So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com/deep, and you will get an extra three months free, but only when you go to expressvpn.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we have first?

Speaker 30:02 First question's from Pete: "I've watched your time management video 100 times on YouTube. For whatever reason, I can't make it stick. It just feels like I have this insurmountable backlog of stuff that is forever in my inbox. Planning beyond a single day feels impossible. Why can't I succeed with your time management system?"

Cal Newport 30:20 It'd be funny if we looked up our time management video and it had like 105 views.

Speaker 30:24 [laughs]

Cal Newport 30:25 Just all Pete. [laughs] And there's like 20 comments all from Pete. That would be depressing. Actually, our time management video is pretty popular.

Speaker 30:33 Yeah, it's very popular.

Cal Newport 30:34 Yeah.

Speaker 30:35 It's a great video.

Cal Newport 30:35 Yeah. All right. Well, Pete, I appreciate the question. Uh, a couple things here. Um, okay. So first of all, let me start philosophically, then we'll get tactically. Okay. Philosophically, when you say you have a hard time planning beyond a single day, I'm not quite sure what this means, right? So my system does not necessarily have you building detailed plans for multiple days in the future. Uh, you'll build a plan for the current day. You'll time block plan, make the most of the time you have available that day. You might have a weekly plan, but a weekly plan doesn't... probably does not mean you're making detailed plans for your week. It's you're checking in on your week. What days are open? What days aren't? Do I need to move anything? Um, your weekly plan is where you might be... you're looking at your quarterly goals. You might say, "You know what? I want to make time this week to make progress on some bigger non-urgent goal I have," and maybe you schedule some time on your calendar for that. Uh, but this idea that you're doing a lot of detailed planning to the future is not necessarily something that you need to be doing with, with my system. The thing that I think might be affecting you here is that you don't have a, a good capture board. When you say stuff is forever in your inbox, I'm suspecting what you might be trying to do is just answer all and do all the stuff in your inbox. Like, once I r- handle the thing in this message, I take it out of my inbox. In most knowledge work jobs, that's going to be impossible. It's going to be impossible to keep up. Your inbox is just going to grow longer and longer. So I want you to get your obligations out of your inbox and into some sort of capture system, and the one I recommend is using these sort of, uh, role-based status boards. So you should have a different status, uh, board for each of your professional roles. So if you have multiple hats you wear in your job, have a separate board for each. I use Trello, but you could do this in another tool. You can also do this in a shared document. You could do this with the stacks of index cards in your desk if you wanted to. I'm sort of tool agnostic here. For each role, you have, uh, a column or a stack for d- different, uh, statuses of things you need to do. So this could be like backlog, like non-urgent, but stuff I might need to get to. You can have a, a stack here that is working on this week. You can, you can and should have a stack that says waiting to hear back. It's a critical one. Um, I sent a message to this person. I'm waiting to hear back. When I hear back, here's what I have to do next. You need that to exist somewhere. It should exist in your waiting to hear back stack. If you have regular meetings with people at your organization, have a stack for things to discuss at the next meeting with that person. I'm the director of undergraduate studies for Georgetown Computer Science, uh, this year. I have one of those stacks for my associate DUS for our weekly meetings, and I have a stack for our department chair that we have monthly meetings. So I put stuff on there to remember to discuss it at our next meeting. You want to get everything into these boards. All right? So you don't have to do the things in your inbox, but you do got to process them out of your inbox into one of these status-based boards. Now you don't have the problem of I can't keep... my inbox is overflowing. I, I'll never get to everything in my inbox. When people say, "I'm just going to have to declare, you know, email bankruptcy," I say, "Oh, you don't have a capture system." Your capture system is your inbox. Uh, and the thing is, so many things that show up, if you look at your status boards, especially these like backlog or things to get to one day, those things grow really wrong, right? You don't empty these boards out. Like the stuff that you actually need to be working on is relatively small compared to the hu- the full amount of stuff that comes in. So if you're just storing your tasks in your inbox, that thing's going to grow. It's going to continue to grow. So you got to get into these status boards. Now because they're role-based, so you have a different board for each different role, this allows you now to avoid higher level context shifts. You can say, "Okay, here's one of my roles is like I'm in charge of the hiring committee at my company, and I have a board that just has the tasks for that, and it's piled by their statuses." When I'm working on hiring committee stuff, I just see hiring committee stuff. My mindset is in hiring... I've given myself two and a half hours to work on hir- hiring committee stuff. All I'm doing is looking at the task on this board, and my mind is in it. And you will find after like ten or 15 minutes, you're able to make progress through these things much faster. And then maybe after lunch, you're like, I'm working on my other role as like a copywriter, and now I go to that board, and my mind is only focused on doing copywriter stuff. And it could be a long, deep work session, or it could be churning through tasks, but they're all related to the same role. That makes it much easier. If you instead just have all the stuff mixed together in your inbox, and it's an archive that's growing longer, and it's mixing urgent stuff with non-urgent stuff and backlog stuff with stuff that maybe you're waiting to hear back from someone, and you're trying to go message by message, you're shifting from role to role, task by task, and your brain just says enough, and you get exhausted. The final advantage of having these task boards is that over time you'd appreciate stuff out of there. Your stuff you put onto these like backlogs. I often also have a stack called To Process, where I don- I, I don't even know how to turn this into a task yet. So let me just put this here as a stake in the ground so I don't forget it. Uh, but it, you know, it might just say something pretty vague like new website. You're like, this was come up in a meeting. I don't even know what this means that I vol- you know, but let me just not forget this. I'll put it over here. Over time, you're going to take stuff off this. You're like, you know what? This has sat here forever. No one has brought it up again. I'm taking this off. All right, this thing over here. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to write the person involved and like, "Look, I know we talked about this. I really don't have cycles for this right now. It doesn't seem too urgent, unless," and this is a key terminology, "unless I hear otherwise from you, I'm just going to put this on hold for now." And when people hear, "Unless I hear otherwise," they say, "Great, I don't have to reply." And so you gotta take these things off, right? So it's the other thing. It allows you to sort of over time clear stuff out of your obligations in a really systematic way. This doesn't happen when everything just exists in your inbox. It just grows, and it grows, and then you feel like you have to

Cal Newport 36:37 declare email bankruptcy and just delete everything. But the problem is, in that stack of 1,600 emails, there's probably, like, 200 that you probably do need to keep track of, and you probably still need, uh, to have that information somewhere. So it's a really stressful situation. So get your inbox empty, not by doing everything, but by getting things into these role-based status boards. It really makes a big difference. I, I mean, I really, I really have to push people towards that. It really makes a big difference. All right, what do we got next?

Speaker 37:05 Next question's from Matthew. "I'm an electrical engineer, and I'm able to work from home a lot. The phone foyer method is effective, but I still enjoy staying up to date on things like my Substack, YouTube feed, and other distraction machines. I'm looking for ways to effectively slow down the consumption of this content, especially using RSS aggregators to facilitate the way content is delivered."

Cal Newport 37:26 All right, well, Matthew, I tend to care more about the how you consume content than the when, right? Uh, so, so a couple things I would suggest here. Let's tackle these distractions category by category. I like newsletters. I think email newsletters are great. Uh, you can effectively create a custom magazine for yourself of just writers you like, just writing about stuff you care about. That's the way I think about newsletters. You need to see of yourself now like, "Okay, um, these aren't email correspondents. I am an editor, and these are my writers, and they're sending me these pieces that I'm gonna put together into an awesome issue of a magazine that I'm then gonna sit down at some point and read." So collect all of your Substacks or other email newsletters you subscribe to. Collect them in a folder or a Gmail label, and then semi-regularly, you wanna get these out of your inbox into another form to sort of read all at once. Again, use the magazine metaphor. One of the cool tools I like that's out there right now is called Newsletters to Kindle. Uh, you can Google that, and you can find it. It makes it easier for you to take these email newsletters and to get them onto your Kindle. Now, what you can do is, like, have a set time. All right? What I do is on, like, Friday mornings or something, uh, I go through my folders. I send all the interesting-looking emails to my Kindle, and I go to a coffee shop, and I take an hour, and I have some coffee, and I get a cinnamon roll, and I'm reading these newsletters with zero distraction on my Kindle, and it's great, and it's like this awesome magazine that I wish existed in the '90s, and now I have it, and it takes me an hour to read. It's not some... I'm not engaging with these newsletters a- exactly as they arrive and just seeing it as, like, part of, like, my flow of my work. It's a magazine, and I don't read magazines in the middle of my workday, and I'm not gonna read these newsletters in the middle of my workday. When it comes to something like YouTube, I think video is the future of independent-generated media. I've said this before. I'm also very suspicious of, uh, algorithmic recommendations and the idea of using YouTube as a distraction machine. So let's be really careful about how we use YouTube. Have the channels you like. Treat them like shows like you would, again, 20 years ago, uh, like shows you like watching, right? In, like, 2006, there would be shows you liked watching, and you would TiVo them, right? I... Whatever it is. I like to watch The Office on NBC. Uh, I, I wanna watch, um, The Amazing Race. I'm trying to think of shows that were around then. There was a show in 2005 or '6 that was called Kids Town on Fox, where it was there's, like, a town. It was like a, kinda like a Old West town, and they put a bunch of kids in it and said, "Okay, you guys gotta just, like, run this town by yourself." And it was like the kids had to just run the town, and, uh, I guess there was camera people there, uh, but it was like, okay, this is a great idea. But anyways, you would TiVo your shows, um, PBS shows, whatever. Um, and then, like, you would have times you sit down to watch. Like, "Yeah, we're gonna make dinner on a Thursday night. We're gonna watch Kids Town and Amazing Race," right? That's the way you should think about YouTube. And I would use bookmarks even, right? I mean, I would even, like, bookmark the channels I like. So you bookmark my channel. Um, you bookmark the, like, hardcore Kids Town fans that for 20 years have been trying to bring that show back. Whatever, right? You just bookmark these things. And in fact, you should learn. Like, I kinda know when the new episodes come out. Like, you know, Cal episodes come out on Mondays or whatever. Uh, and then you can have, like, appointment viewing, like on your iPad instead of watching TV. I'm gonna sit down and watch, like, the latest episode of XYZ, or I'm gonna load the YouTube app on my TV, and I'm gonna watch it on my TV while I eat dinner. Treat YouTube like you would TV in 2006. That's fine. What you shouldn't do is say, "In the middle of the workday, I'm gonna open up YouTube, and I'm just gonna rock and roll down those recommendation letters," right? Because you start with Kids Town clips and then, you know, 20 minutes later, you're either in unboxing videos or you're, like, watching people's videos about, like, we should imprison kids in towns, and they're, like, trying to make a case for, like, we basically should, you know, whatever. So that's the way I would suggest doing YouTube. So you just have to have care about how you do these things. In my book Digital Minimalism, I said, "Look, if it comes to a social platform, if there's a specific value you get out of it," and there are specific values you can get, have rules around it. I talked about artists, for example, uh, reducing their Instagram feeds to just other visual artists, and on Friday nights, they sit down with, like, a glass of wine, and they look at the art they posted, and they get inspiration, and that's valuable, and that's the only time they mess around with that app the whole week. Uh, another important use for YouTube for some people is exposure to positive portrayals of a goal they're pursuing. So you're getting really into, uh, rowing. Like, okay, I wanna follow some of these rowing feeds 'cause it's like seeing the workouts and the success of these, uh, rowers, like, motivates me. That's great. Like, make that your feed. Have a set time you look at it. 10 minutes before my workout, I look at these videos. So, uh, you gotta understand the value you're getting out of these things. Put smart walls around it that preserves the value and gets rid of everything else, and they're no longer distraction machines.

Cal Newport 42:37 They're just one of, uh, other sources of sort of like valuable, interesting information. Like, that's how you have to navigate the world of information. And if you time block your workday, then you really don't have to worry about this stuff intruding on your workday because unless you put down a time block for, you know, mess around on the, on the internet, you're not gonna do it, you know. Uh, if you really wanna end your day early if you need to and put aside 90 minutes to mess around on the internet, but time blocking will keep this out of your workday, but put walls around it, put fences around it. All right, who do we got?

Speaker 43:04 Next question's from Giacomo. "As a UX designer, I find, find it to be cognitively demanding to empathize with and persuade others. Is preparing for and attending reviews about my designs deep work?"

Cal Newport 43:18 Yeah, there's nothing about deep work that demands it be solitary. It's, it's one of the big misconceptions. I tried to dispel it in the book Deep Work. I call it the whiteboard effect. I talked about the advantages of doing deep work with other people. Uh, it's not by definition a solitary activity. Uh, the things that define it, if we go back to the original definition, cognitively demanding and you're doing it with no distraction. So it requires you to concentrate and you're not context switching. If you're context switching, you're looking at email, you're looking at your phone, back, it's not deep work. It could be cognitively demanding, but it's not deep work. If you're giving it your full attention, but it's filling out forms, that's not cognitively demanding. That's also not deep work. So there's nothing about being in front of a, an audience, for example, that makes it not deep work. So yes, if you're, you're pitching to an audience and it's requiring you to empathize and try to understand, like, what people are saying and integrate that information real time to try to adjust your pitch or, or update your ideas on the fly, that's deep work, right? I consider, for example, if I'm teaching or lecturing, that's deep work. I'm in front of an audience. I'm trying to synthesize complicated information, right? I see that as being deep work. Yesterday, I spoke on a panel with a bunch of, uh, digital legal experts.

Cal Newport 44:36 Like, that's deep work. I, you know, I had to be thinking about what they were saying. I had to adjust my stuff to fit into the context. I had to respond to the questions. We're in a room with 100 people. That's as much of deep work as when I'm sitting alone with a computer. So I think, uh, it is good to think about anything that's cognitively demanding that's getting your full focus, like, that is deep work, and deep work, uh, is important. So yeah, what you're doing is deep work even when there's other people around. All right, what do we got?

Speaker 45:04 We got from Lindsay, "My son has just entered q- high school. My goal is to help him think through the kind of lifestyle he would want in the future rather than simply encourage him toward arbitrary college and career goals. I want to ensure that his academic and career choices are intentional and align with his personal values and interests."

Cal Newport 45:22 All right, so I'm gonna give you book recommendations. Right now, uh, with your son in high school, I'm gonna recommend that you both take a look at my book, How to Become a High School Superstar. Uh, this follows a collection of high school students from the early 2000s who got accepted to good colleges but had interesting non-stressed high school careers. The, the, the terminology I use in the book is I call them relaxed superstars, and I deconstruct how do they do it, right? In particular, there's a chapter in here on what I call interestingness. How as a high school student to become an interesting person and why this is, like, a much more important goal than becoming, um, a highly, quote unquote, "accomplished person." Why this is a more important goal than having the most crowded possible resume, that there is a huge power to becoming interesting, and this is something that you can systematically cultivate, and I give ideas for how to do that. So in high school, that's what I would look at, this, this relaxed superstar model. It's a great preparation for what's gonna come next. Once you're in college, I would then recommend that your son read my book So Good They Can't Ignore You, and this is gonna change the way that they think about, uh, the career world, and it's gonna push them away from this idea of, like, you gotta choose the right job right now, and there is a right job, and it's about matching that job to you. It's about following your passion or finding the job that you were meant to do, and if you get that wrong, you'll be miserable. And it changes that and says, "No, no, no, no. Uh, your working life is a part of your bigger life, and you cultivate it to be good for you and interesting and resonant." And how do you cultivate it? You build up what I call career capital, which you build up by becoming good at things that are valuable. And as you become good at things that are valuable, you get more control over your career, and you can shape this into something cool, whatever cool means to you, and it can mean a lot of different things. So interestingness in high school, so you avoid getting caught in the trap of just more is better or professionalizing yourself at too young of an age, and then career capital training in college. Those two things together, A, your son is going to enjoy and find life interesting

Cal Newport 47:31 in high school. He's going to enjoy and find life interesting in college. Not gonna be in this grinding mindset of sacrifice now for some unspecified future later. He's also gonna be, uh, able to craft a really cool life in college and beyond, right? So I care a lot about those issues. I wrote those two books. Uh, I, I recommend them. All right, what do we have, Jesse?

Speaker 47:53 We have our corner.

Cal Newport 47:54 Slow Productivity Corner. Let's hear that theme music. [slow music] So every episode, we like to have one question that connects to my most recent book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you have not read the book, you should. It's sort of like a cheat sheet for so many of the ideas we talk about on this show. You can find Slow Productivity anywhere books are sold, including an audio version, which I recorded, so you can hear the dulcet tones of Cal Newport.

Speaker 48:28 [laughs]

Cal Newport 48:29 Uh, the Slow Productivity theme music, interesting fact, plays nonstop during the audiobook.

Speaker 48:34 [laughs]

Cal Newport 48:35 Six hours of just that theme music. And we recorded it with a live band for, so for six hours we just had a live band. There's like a guy on a guitar doing arpeggios and someone doing... I'm gonna demand that for my next book. All right, enough nonsense. What's the actual Slow Productivity Corner question this week?

Speaker 48:51 Hi, it's from Jonathan. I've been getting close to launching a new business. I've been reading Slow Productivity and applying your lessons to get rid of every extraneous project and minimize time suck when possible, but I still find it difficult to give each endeavor the attention it deserves to grow. How do I find time?

Cal Newport 49:09 Well, Jonathan, uh, what you gotta do here is like we sometimes use this phrase on the show, uh, you have to face the productivity dragon. Now, face the productivity dragon is Deep Questions speak for confronting the reality of how long things you wanna do take and how much time you actually have. We often write fairy tales where, uh, we can just go get the proverbial gold, and we don't realize there's an actual dragon there. So be really clear, like what needs to be done for this business to launch successfully? How hard is it to do those things? How much time and energy is required? You might find the answer is this is gonna take a lot of time. There's more here than I thought. There might be some of these things are gonna be sort of ambiguously long, like I have to find a partner to do this. And what I'm gonna recommend from a slow productivity perspective is to say, "That's cool. It's gonna take longer." Right, the slow productivity mindset is, is if you're willing to relentlessly stick to something, you can make its footprint in your life reasonable and sustainable. You can trust what we call the compounding interest of accomplishment. That if I stick with, let me do this thing, then this thing, and this is gonna take me a month, and this is at the time I have free, this might take me a couple weeks, and it might be four months to get this done. As long as you don't stop and you keep making deliberate progress, intentional progress, not just going through the motions, but intentional progress, it's okay to say, "This might take two years." I'm gonna aggregate up the, again, the compound interest of accomplishment. I'm gonna aggregate up these steps, and this is gonna lead to this and lead to this, and it might be two years later, and now I'm ready to pull the trigger, and it's not at all risky or weird. Everything's in place. All the pieces are here. I have my first clients. We've done these test things. We have a fallback option. Uh, and if you do this right, when you flip the switch to like switch over to the new company, it's not even stressful. The slow productivity mindset says it's okay if this stuff takes time. In fact, many accomplishments that you see that are very impressive took people a really long amount of time. I g- I do these stories again and again in Slow Productivity, the book. Hey, you know this famous thing from history, Newton's, you know, Principia, right? Uh, Galileo figuring out the, the laws of pendulum motion. It took decades. They worked on it regularly. They didn't give up, but they weren't burning the midnight oil. They weren't going in some sort of frenzy. They just let the compound interest of accomplishment accrue, and over time, they produced these things which are awesome, and we remember them for that, and we have no idea how long it took. The issue is our culture right now, especially the internet culture, and a lot of this, again, is shaped by this fool's gold that the social media and influencer community puts out there to try to get more engagement. This culture gives you this idea that inspiration plus the ability, the willingness to just like get after it and be frenzied for a few days is like how stuff happens. That you're like, "I'm gonna make this YouTube channel work," and you just sort of like get after it and record these cool things crazy. You're like MrBeast for a week, and then it just works. That like I have these pithy things, I'm sending it on Twitter, and then I'm just like a famous influencer, right? That's not how most useful stuff happens. It takes time. So slow productivity is about that's fine. That's the slow piece of it. Be fine. Life is long. Life is long. Enjoy the day, right? You wanna enjoy each day, and you want over the years to have done stuff that's pretty cool.

Cal Newport 52:38 So maybe this is just a, a matter, Jonathan, of just being okay once you face the productivity drag and being like, "It's gonna take a lot longer than I thought," but that's not a bad thing. Not a bad thing, 'cause I'm making progress on it every day, um, but each of these days is sustainable, so just gotta slow down. Let's hear that music one more time, Jesse. [slow music] All right. Do we have a call this week?

Speaker 53:04 We do.

Cal Newport 53:04 Oh, let's hear this.

Speaker 53:07 Hey, Cal. My name is Bram, and I'm from Maryland. So I have a, a nonfiction book idea that I'm working on. So far, I've only written one chapter that captures the, the core of the idea. I also don't have social media or a blog. What would you recommend as a way to test the demand or to see if it's useful to people before actually writing the full thing? Thanks.

Cal Newport 53:35 All right. Well, I got two pieces of advice here. One is just tactical book writing advice, and then the second is specific to your question about social media or blogs and, uh, writing careers. My tactical piece of advice, stop writing the book. That's not how nonfiction works. You do not write the book in advance. Having written the book in advance is a big negative hit against you. In nonfiction, you sign an agent based on the potential of the idea and, uh, the potential of you as a writer. The agent helps you write a proposal, which you then sell to a publishing house. The publishing house then gives you an advance for the book, and then you go write it. The editors wanna be involved in shaping the ideas. Your agent's gonna wanna be involved in, in shaping your ideas. Do not try to get around this system. Everyone has like, "Well, I'm gonna get around it by writing my book, and I'm gonna do this and that. I'm gonna make an end run around the system." The system works. Everyone's desperate for good stuff to publish, right? So no one is trying to hold you out of this system, but, and it's, it's a, a, also a really good checkpoint, right? Like you don't have to do that much work to approach an agent, but your idea plus you gets a, a really good early screening Right? You gotta convince an agent. And if an agent is convinced, then they have to convince a publisher, um, so you gotta follow the real process. I wrote a blog post about this long time ago, sort of, I think just, like, two books into my publishing career. I wrote this blog post at calnewport.com. You can find it with Google. Google calnewport.com, and I think it's called, like, How to Get a Nonfiction Book Deal. And I, I go through, like, here is how this world works. Don't write your own rules. Follow the real rules of the world. If you're afraid to follow the real ru- uh, rules of the world because you think you're gonna get rejected early on, that's useful feedback. Good. How do we make sure you don't get rejected, right? It gives you feedback right away of, how do I actually make this idea ready to go? All right. So now go into the role of social media and blogs. Here's something to remember. There has been a nonfiction publishing industry, uh, in this country for a l- uh, a long time. You know, I'm reading a Thoreau biography right now, for example. Mid-19th century, he is, you know, selling Walden to Ticknor, right? Like, there's companies, they're, they were based in Boston, like people... This was big business for at least 200 years. Okay. Social media, blogs, as, like, a widespread used thing is about 12 years old. So just ask yourself this question. How did all of the tens of thousands of nonfiction writers who existed before 12 years ago, how were they able to, uh, come up with ideas and sell books? And just, you... There's your answer, right? I, I, I do not buy the premise that in the last 12 years, the way we, we did this for, uh, 150 years now no longer works, and the only way to sell a nonfiction book is to have an online platform or to... The, the test ideas out on, on, uh, platforms. Um, people have been doing this for a very long time. And what you're looking for, if we want to be more specific, and this is in my blog post, so find it. Uh, if you're a nonfiction and it's pragmatic nonfiction, not journalistic nonfiction, but, like, here's a, a book about an idea, a book about advice, like, this is where, um, non-journalist authors can write. It's gotta be an idea that people are gonna feel like they have to read, and you have to be the right person to write it. You get those two things together, and you can prove that you're a not bad writer. You don't have to be a good writer, but you have to be a not bad writer, or it can't be embarrassing. Then you've got a shot of selling that book. You don't need to test run this on social media. You don't need to have a blog necessarily. You just have to be thinking. Like, I read a lot. I know the industry. I feel strongly about this idea. I think, uh, it, it, it is an idea that is hitting my gut, as that people will see that on a shelf and say, "I have to read it," and I'm the right person to write about it. Like, that's what it takes. You know, that's how I came up with, like, my first books. I didn't have a platform or this or that. It was just, I, uh, I think about ideas and, and what works and what doesn't, and I trust my gut, and I see what's happening in the market. So don't get distracted. You want to be a writer, don't get distracted by the platform right now. We talked about this back in the Deep Dive, where I said the, the, the meanest trick that these online distraction platforms ever played was figuring out how to convince potential creators that these platforms were necessary, right? It's like tricking a, a professional endurance athlete into thinking that the, the key to their success is gonna involve smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. It's actively making them worse at what they do, and that is what happens, and it's what these platforms do so well. They want you... They want to steal this energy you have towards doing something really meaningful, like writing a book that might affect thousands of people. They want to steal that energy into you doing, uh, this, these sort of ephemeral fake activities that they've created for you, to go into their warehouse and, uh, the, the, the seem like you're being productive, then which they can just monetize. It's like a shame. It's like a tragedy. Don't let them steal your energy. Polish your idea. Find an idea that you're the right person to write. If you're not a not bad writer, become a not bad writer, which means you have to go out there and find places where you can write. You have to find magazines, online magazines, newsletters, whatever it is that people let you write for. You got to be a good enough writer. Like, all this is hard work. That's fine. We talked about the 10-year rule during the Deep Dive. That's fine. It took me, uh, you know, it took me 10 years to, like, write my first really good book. That's fine. Be willing to do the work. Get the idea. Be the right one to do it. Learn how to write. Pitch the right way to agents. Don't write your own path. That's how this all works. Don't let Instagram or TikTok or, you know, Elon Musk's Twitter, uh, steal that energy from you. They have enough money. I was looking at the richest persons', uh, the top 10 in the world list earlier today. Musk is number one right now. Zuckerberg is, like, number five. Like, they don't... They have enough money. Don't... You don't need to monetize your time on their behalf right now. You need to focus on your idea, learning how to write, figuring out the idea where you're the right person to write it. Okay? So go read that post, uh, calnewport.com and How to Get a Nonfiction Book Deal. If you Google something like that, you'll find it. Uh, and then get after it, and let those guys have their, their stock... Their stock's high enough. They don't need your help.

Speaker 59:48 So with all the literary agents you know, do they get pitched a lot by potential-

Cal Newport 59:52 They do, but not enough. It's, I mean, it's, it's... To me, it's just the oddest thing that if you want to be a writer, like, why not figure out how does the world of writing work?

Speaker 1:00:02 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:00:03 Everyone wants to write their own story to that, their own answer to that question.

Speaker 1:00:07 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:00:08 They want the world... I mean, it's usually the same thing. They want it to be a combination of, like, having the right tools and, like, writing every day, like the romantic elements, and I have a, uh, a beautiful idea notebook, and I write each morning and... But, but I spend 10 minutes each morning Instagramming a photo of my earthenware mug next to my notebook and, like, uh, and just... It's gonna... I'm just gonna have this brilliance eventually that it's gonna, like, shock the world. And no, the world is like, you got to convince an agent. What are the agents... Like, what do they care about? If you don't know the answer to that question, like, don't start yet.

Speaker 1:00:43 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:00:43 Like, that is gonna be your first step, is selling the agent, right? I'm conv... So many people try to go around the agents straight to the publishers because they're worried it's too much of a proximate rejection It's a really quick rejection with an agent. It's like, "Here's my query letter, here's who I am, here's my idea. Do you wanna find out more?" And it's often like, "No, that's not quite right." They, they don't want that rejection, it's like maybe I'll just go and send like a fully written nonfiction book, which is do not do-

Speaker 1:01:05 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:01:06 ... straight to a publisher. And why? Because I think it feels like, you know, maybe you never know. Like it, it feels somehow like the rejection won't be so approximate. Don't write your own story. Learn how the world works, right? Uh, when you learn how the world works, it's very... It's accessible. It might be hard, right? I mean, it might take years, uh, to get it done, to, to figure it out right. But learn how it works and go for it. The other problem that happens, and I see this a lot with writers, is they forever wheel spin. Especially like the potential novelist. It's just manuscript after manuscript, and they just get stuck into like, "I'm writing and I'm editing," and like, nah, get the wheels on the track sooner. Like, "Here's this thing, I'm pitching an agent, they're telling me it's not right. I'm gonna do something else and pitch that agent again." Like, be in the game as early as you can be in the game.

Speaker 1:01:56 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:01:57 Find the easiest way in, too. Like, that's another way to do this. Like, I got into book writing, uh, with student advice guides because it was the only thing I could sell as a 21-year-old.

Speaker 1:02:06 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:02:07 And they were easy to write, right? We were just... Man, those were short chapters. We were just with my, my agent, uh, w- and I were talking about my first book, which came out in 2005, I think. And we're, we're updating a few... Like, making some corrections and, uh, r- you know, there's some stuff in 2005 that doesn't exist in 2025, so we're... we just had to go through. But I'm like, man, these chapters are like, you know, a page and a half when you print them out.

Speaker 1:02:32 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:02:34 But like, that was like a very low-friction way for me into writing. Like, I could not have written So Good They Can't Ignore You, uh, when I was 21.

Speaker 1:02:42 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:02:43 You know? But I was able... I wrote it when I was 29, and by then I was ready. I'd written three books and done a bunch of magazine writing. I was like, I was ready to do it. So, like, find low-friction ways in, you know? It's like Michael Crichton. He didn't start with Jurassic Park. He started with these John Lang, uh, potboiler thrillers, which like back then, we don't have this industry today, but back then because there was no phones, right, there was these huge industries of just there's paperbacks everywhere 'cause that's like your entertainment. So there are these, like, kind of bad paperback. You'd buy them in the drugstore, you'd buy them at the supermarket, you'd read them in three days. Um, today, this equivalent would probably be writing online or something like this, right? But he was just like, "Let me get in there and start figuring out how to actually, like, make writing work," you know? So I'm... I, I do have a soapbox. I think writing's a great thing, but you gotta, you gotta embrace the reality of how that world works, and do not let the social media companies take that energy from you. I hate that they steal this from creative, potential creatives.

Speaker 1:03:37 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:03:38 It's such a target for them, uh, because it's a ripe target. Because if you're, if you're a creator, it is such, like, an appealing thing to be like, "I could be doing this stuff on this platform, and it feels productive, and I'm checking things off, and there's like a lottery feel that, like, something could go viral." And it's all brain cycles that could

Cal Newport 1:03:58 be going to creating something new that matters, just being stolen and ossified into the stock price of, like, a small number of these giant conglomerates. All right. Anyways, good call. Got me on my soapbox. Uh, I wanna do a case study now. This is where people send in accounts of how they put the ideas we talk about on this show and in my books into practice in their own life. If you have a case study of your own, send it to jesse@calnewport.com. Today's case study comes from Connor. Connor said, "I played in the Australian Football League for nine years. During this time, I discovered how to become a straight-A student and deep work. These books helped me complete my degree in commerce. While playing, I began to think about the life I wanted to live. I couldn't see myself wearing a suit and being inside all day. I wanted to be outside and began to appreciate my love of turf. I used my career capital of playing to build relationships with the turf managers. This allowed me to start my own lawn and garden business called Blakely's Backyards. Unexpectedly, my turf knowledge has also led to another development following my AFL career. I started playing cricket at a community level with friends. This escalated to where I'm now heading to the UK to play a season there. Playing cricket in England will allow me to further my career capital in the sports turf world. I will take back the intricacies of the English soil growing conditions and other gardening techniques to Australia when I'm done." So Connor, this is a fantastic, uh, example of two career-related ideas we talk about on here, lifestyle-centric planning and career capital theory. These go together real tightly. So lifestyle-centric planning says you need to work backwards from an image of your ideal lifestyle as opposed to trying to choose the perfect job. So Connor here knows, uh, "I wanna be outside. I don't wanna go to an office. That, that... The rhythm of that type of day feels wrong for me. I wanna be outside. I want that type of autonomy," right? So now he's working backwards from a lifestyle vision. There are many, many different ways he could get there. He's really maximized his chances of actually finding something that gives him a lifestyle that's enjoyable. This is much different than just choosing from scratch your perfect job, which may or may not work out. He then deployed career capital theory, which, uh, is a fancy term for what we talked about back in the deep dive earlier in this show. You want control over what your, your life is like? Get good at something people care about. The better you are, the more control you have. And so he realized, "Turf is something I could get good at." He already had career capital in the sense that he came out of a sports league, so he sort of have, had an entrance to this world. He's not a random person. Uh, and he's looking ahead to, like, his cricket career in England is gonna give him even more career capital. He's imagining how he can leverage this idea of like, "I know about turf. I just spent a year in England. I'm a professional athlete." Like, that's gonna come together, um, and really probably help what he's doing here with this turf business, which itself is a perfect fit for his lifestyle vision Right, so lifestyle-centric planning plus career capital theory, this is how people build deep lives. Much more so than the dominant ideas of, uh, passion theory or grand goal theory. I figure out some perfect thing for me to do, and if I succeed, I'll be happy, and if I don't, I won't. So Conor, I appreciate, uh, I appreciate that case study. Australian football is no joke, by the way.

Speaker 1:07:20 He was writing that from a UK pub, by the way.

Cal Newport 1:07:23 Oh, man.

Speaker 1:07:23 And he, like, provided some explanation. I emailed with him about it.

Cal Newport 1:07:27 What was he drinking?

Speaker 1:07:29 A pint.

Cal Newport 1:07:29 Pint?

Speaker 1:07:29 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:07:29 Pint of, uh, pint of ale? Yeah, I like that. We still... That's what we are missing. You know, we talked before about you were above a bar here, shout out to Motokat. Uh, we talked about having like a bucket system, but no, I think what we need is a, a English pub-style beer engine.

Speaker 1:07:48 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:07:50 Right? Because think about it. In the English pubs, they often have the casks in the cellar, and then the beer engine, they use just, like, pressure and, uh, hand energy to, like, pump up from whatever. So, like, we could have a beer engine, I feel like, from some cask that they keep for us down at the actual bar down there.

Speaker 1:08:06 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:08:07 All right. I think we'd get more guests on the show if we did that.

Speaker 1:08:10 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:08:11 If there was a beer engine inside the studio. That would be a great show idea, because we... You'd probably get people, if the interview goes on long enough and they're pumping that beer, you know, we'd get some interesting truths out of people after a while.

Speaker 1:08:23 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:08:23 Yeah.

Speaker 1:08:24 Like Rogan style.

Cal Newport 1:08:25 Rogan style, yeah. Let's get people... Long Rogan style interviews with a beer engine in the room. We'd get like a... I don't know.

Speaker 1:08:33 It'd be like Elon Musk smoking marijuana.

Cal Newport 1:08:36 Yeah, except for we'd have just, like, a drunk Oliver Burkeman.

Speaker 1:08:38 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:08:41 Who I'm interviewing soon, that's just why I was thinking about that. All right, so we got a final segment I wanna get to, something cool I found on the internet that I'm gonna react to, but first I wanna talk about another one of our sponsors. In particular, I wanna talk about Shopify. When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, right? Like Feastables by MrBeast or Thrive Causemetics or Silicon Valley's seemingly, like, mandatory weekend uniform supplier Cotopaxi. Uh, you think about the products and the brands, et cetera, but what's often overlooked is the businesses behind the businesses that make the selling simple. Like, what is it that helps these famous brands sell? Like, the actual mechanics of selling their products, and for millions of businesses, the answer to that question is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. Uh, it's the home of the number one checkout on the planet, and the not-so-secret secret, which is their Shop Pay feature, boosts conversions up to 50%. People do not abandon their Shopify shopping carts, which means you will sell more. I mean, it's what people use when they wanna sell things online. Of course, they also have point-of-sales. They have all sorts of other products, but, like, when you're thinking about e-commerce, you have to think about Shopify. Uh, hopefully our friend Zach, who made the VBLCCP hats, which we debuted last week and I think were a big hit.

Speaker 1:10:07 He emailed us back as well and he said that he could make it smaller if we want.

Cal Newport 1:10:10 Yeah. [laughs] I mean, I thought it looked cool.

Speaker 1:10:12 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:10:12 But, but anyways, uh, if he sets up a shop... If we were selling those hats, which maybe we should. Actually, I am gonna ask him. I want that hat with it smaller. I'm gonna talk to Zach.

Speaker 1:10:21 Okay.

Cal Newport 1:10:21 I'm gonna get that design perfect.

Speaker 1:10:22 Zach's the man.

Cal Newport 1:10:23 But if we're gonna sell those hats, don't e- not even a second thought, Shopify. It's gonna be a, uh, the same software that's behind, you know, Cotopaxi. Between Thru- Thrive Causemetics, between Feastables. Same, all of that, same software, but so easy for us to set up and, and just gonna... We're gonna, the conversions are gonna be, uh, off the charts. All the, the sort of ex-Soviet era bureaucrats that are gonna be like-

Speaker 1:10:45 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:10:45 ... "This reminds me of my days as the, uh, commissar of agricultural..." That's not a Zach thing, by the way. That's our acronym. Just to be clear, it's the CCP at the end of our acronym. Um, so anyways, businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout used by Cotopaxi and MrBeast. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, and you need to type that in all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. That's shopify.com/deep. We also wanna talk about our longtime friends at LMNT. Uh, LMNT's electrolyte drink mix is something I use every day. Um, I am often getting dehydrated. I do a lot of speaking, I podcast, I do interviews, I teach, I, I'm on panels. Like, I'm constantly... Uh, you lose a lot of moisture speaking, and it's DC, which means, like, six months out of the year, um, you essentially live in a sauna. Uh, I exercise a lot. LMNT is how I rehydrate. And I, I... What I do actually is, like, depending on how dehydrated I am, I control how much of the drink mix package I put into my water bottle. I usually use, like, a full Nalgene bottle. Uh, in the morning if I'm dehydrated, LMNT. The afternoon after a hard day of work, LMNT. After this podcast, LMNT. Right now we're using the lime. That's what I have. We kind of do one box at a time, um, which I like. The watermelon's good too. Yeah, so the drink mix is great because it, it has the electrolyte balance you need, um, but no junk. No sugar, like, no weird coloring agents. Like, you just know you can drink this and it's nothing bad in it. It's just giving you what you need. So I'm a big fan of LMNT. Um, I wanted to mention, however, they have this new product coming out which you should keep your eyes on, LMNT Sparkling, which delivers the same zero sugar electrolyte formulation you already know and trust, but in a bold 16-oun- ounce can of sparkling water, so you can just grab it out of the fridge already cold, which I think is really col- cool. Now, the Sparkling has not, uh, been widely released yet, but if you are already an LMNT insider, you can purchase, uh, LMNT Sparkling right now.

Cal Newport 1:13:02 So there's a good offer here. You can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase you do at drinklmnt.com/deep. That's drinklmnt, L-M-N-T, .com/deep, and you'll get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase. And if you're an LMNT insider, you have first access to LMNT Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. All right, Jessie, let's get to our final segment. [whooshing sound] I like to react to things that I discover on the Internet or that people send in to my interesting@calnewport.com email address during this final segment. Uh, this is something cool that someone sent. It was C.S. Lewis' advice to a young writer. I don't know what this is from. It's from some book I suppose he wrote. Um, but I have it up on the screen here, so if you are, uh, watching instead of just listening, you'll, you'll see it here on the screen, but I'm gonna read it. All right. Uh, here's what he says. "It's very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here's my attempt. Number one, turn off the radio. Number two, read all the good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines. And number three, always write and read with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it were being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again." All right, let's stop here before proceeding because I wanna talk about those first three pieces of advice, because not only is he dead on, but the advice is super relevant to our current digital moment as well. Turn off the radio. What is our modern equivalent of that? Turn off your phone. In both cases, what he's saying is you do not want a source of context-switching distraction. You need every ounce your brain can offer to successfully write. And I actually went down this rabbit hole. I have a New Yorker piece right now in editing, uh, where as part of the piece I wrote about the neural, uh, the, the neuroscience of writing. TLDR, it uses like all of your brain. It's really hard. So don't have distractions. All right, number two, he says, "Read all the book- good books you can and avoid nearly all magazines." Yeah, that, uh, is true today as well. Just replace magazines with, like, anything on your phone. You wanna be a good writer, you gotta read good writers. Don't be d- sitting, watching the sort of hyper-palatable distractions on your phone, the, the stuff coming on social media. This is not gonna make you a better writer because it's not good writing. Back then it was magazines. Today, it's gonna be your phone. Number three, uh, write and read with the ear, not the eye. This is so critical. This is a big secret of my success, and, uh, I wanted to point this out because people don't talk about it enough. The internal rhythms of writing, which is entirely like an out loud thing, how sentence rhythm builds, how word sounds correspond with other word sounds. Good professional writers care a lot about this, and I don't think we talk about this enough. My big competitive advantage, uh, that allowed me to get into writing earlier maybe than other people is that I did comedy writing, uh, in college. I was the editor of the humor magazine at Dartmouth, the, the Jack-O-Lantern. I, I talk about this I think on maybe one of my recent Tim Ferriss episode, uh, visits. But the thing about comedy writing is, uh, it's all sound and rhythm. You, you, you, you have to take the same rhythms a stand-up comedian would have and you're, you're translating into words, but for comedy writing to work, it's the... You have to bring the writer along and set them up, and then boom, catch them from off guard. And so when you comedy write, you obsess about how the sentences sound inside your actual inner narrative. It turns out that's what you need to do to write well, and so I sort of had a little bit of an advantage because comedy writing forces the matter. You really... It j- it just works not at all. You can write okay without caring about rhythm and sound. You can't write comedy writing at all without it. By the time I got to, like, New Yorker writing, it's all rhythm and sound and, uh, commas and semicolons, and how does this unfold, and how does this word sound next to that word? And this word with this word doesn't sound right. Anyways, we don't emphasize that enough when we talk about writing, uh, but it's music, and you have to think about it that way, so great advice. All right. Another piece of advice from C.S. Lewis. "Write about what really interests you, whether it's real things or imaginary things and nothing else. Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing, you will never be a writer because you have nothing to write about." Yeah, I think this is still true. We gave this advice to the aspiring writer earlier in this show. Um, you gotta have something to say that people care about, and you gotta be the right person to say it, which means it's gotta be something you care about, too. Interesting point where he says whether it's real or imaginary. You know, C.S. Lewis was a serious professor at Oxford, and he was writing, uh, science fiction and fantasy. I think it's really cool that, that, you know, this is what resonated. His books, pre-Narnia books were science fiction, early 20th century science fiction. Uh, and then his... You know, he writes the Narnia books, which are fantasy. So I think it's really cool that these, uh, dowdy Oxford dons were like, "I'm gonna write fantasy. I'm gonna write science fiction." Like, that's what spoke to him. Uh, I talk about... Here's another advertisement for my book, Slow Productivity. I talk about the group that Lewis, along with his fellow Oxford professor, J.R.R. Tolkien, formed called The Inklings, and I get into how they, having this group of writers, like, helped them figure out, find their voice, and develop their careers. And I talk about how you should do something similar in your own life if you're working on something cool. Um, so check out my book. All right, he also says, "Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn't, and a single ill-chosen word may lead them to... him to a total misunderstanding." I'm all the way on board with this. Uh, I think about this all the time in my writing. How can I not only make this clear but, like, perfectly clear? And you have to be careful about, um, red herrings and MacGuffins as well. Right, so what that means is, uh, you introduce something that doesn't pay off. You can't do that in nonfiction writing. You can't... Like, if I, if I'm, if I kind of start talking about this, it either has to be a reason I talked about it that I conclude right there, or I have to have a callback later. It can't just be a non sequitur. It can't just sit there like a red herring or a MacGuffin. I can't start going this way in the chapter and then shift gears without ever saying why. The reader's mind tries to assemble as they read everything you're saying into a pattern that makes sense, so when there's pieces that don't fit quite together, it is like alarm bells go off, and there is a intuitive discomfort that the reader develops towards what they're writing. So that's why, like nonfiction writers, we obsess about how all the pieces fit together so that you don't notice anything when you read. And so you probably underappreciate a piece of nonfiction writing that just explains something and it flows. You're like, "Oh, I know more about that. That was good." It seems easy, and it's not, because every piece had to fit with no red herrings or MacGuffins or hanging... Everything comes together. Same thing with screenplays. Everyone thinks they can write a screenplay because they know movies. Like, I could write people talking, and yes, you could write a scene that could be in a movie. If you like movies, you could write a scene that could be in a movie. You could come up with a plot idea that you could make a movie about, but can you write an hour and a half worth of scenes that all click together, all the characters get developed properly, there's nothing just introduced that doesn't pay off, there's no too much deus ex machina, like everything kind of fits and flows together, no loose strings hanging, nothing that catches the attention as being out of place by the viewer. Can you do 90 minutes of a movie that has none of that? Well, that's really hard. That's what's hard. So we convince ourselves screenwriting's easy because you say, "I could see myself writing that scene," but you can't do 20 of those scenes in a row without any of that friction coming in there. So I, I think this is great advice. All right, let's see what else he has here. Uh, C.S. Lewis also says, "When you give up, uh, a bit of work, don't throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think is my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier." All right, I'm on board with that. When I'm working on a book, for example, I use Scrivener. Uh, I have more words in my cut folders than I have in the final things that I show up in the book. I save everything I cut, and I often am able to repurpose that later in the book or in later books. So I agree with that. Save, um, what you're going to save. This one's interesting. I don't know if I fully agree with this today, but it's interesting. He says, "Don't use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training." Here's how I read that. Your tools matter, and having a tool that you feel good about working with is what's important, uh, because in the end, they're all just writing going on paper. The speed differentials don't matter too much. What matters is, like, the tool that's going to produce the best work. Don't get caught up with, like, conveniences being all that important. Because writing... Look, writing takes a long amount of time. The final step of getting words onto the page, whether you're handwriting or typewriting or using a very fancy word processor, like the difference between those two things is like an epsilon on what's actually required to write. So s- hey, what works for you, feel okay with that. So C.S. Lewis handwrote, and he felt like the typewriter, like, yeah, I guess it's faster, but I don't like it. The rhythm's off. Why would I use a tool that's going to make me a worse writer? Uh, George R.R. Martin, who wrote, you know, obviously the Game of Thrones books, still uses one of the original versions of Wo- uh, WordStar, one of the original word processors. He has an old computer that runs the MS-DOS operating system, and he runs WordStar on MS-DOS and saves his manuscript files to floppy disks. Yes, Microsoft Word is more convenient. Yes, Scrivener is more convenient. That's what works for him, and that's way more important. So I think that's how I would read that tool, is, uh, that rule rather, is the tool that works for you is what matters, not trying to have the best possible tool, whatever that means. And finally, his last piece of advice, uh, timeless, "Be sure you know the meaning or meanings of every word you use." Yeah, don't try to be smarter than you are. Don't think that fancy vocabulary is going to, uh, impress people. The smartest people are often the clearest, right? They let their ideas shine. They don't try to, uh, gussy up the language. So anyways, that's a cool piece of advice. The link is in the show notes if you want to check it out for yourself. Um, but some things are timeless, and I think C.S. Lewis nailed it. Everything there I would recommend even today to an aspiring writer. [outro music] All right, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another normal episode of the show. It's the fall, so we're back in action again. Vacations are over, so we'll see you then. And until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you liked our discussion today about how to get good at things that matter so that you can take better control of your life, I think you will also like episode 308, which is called The Power of the Quiet Mind. It gives you some extra things to think about when it comes to how you produce stuff that matters. Check it out. And yet, just like with digital knowledge work, we once again have this sinking feeling that something is off, that our lives are somehow not quite right in a world in which we're looking at our phone so much. We can't say exactly why it's a problem, but people just feel uneasy when they survey the crowds around them and see everyone's face looking down.