The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Cal Newport Discuss Staying Productive in a Pandemic and How to Maintain Focus

Episode Date: May 30, 2020

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks with author and computer scientist Cal Newport about staying productive during the pandemic, how to maintain your focus on what's most important to you, and more. Get your copy of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: https://geni.us/Eh4IX2 . This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic and receive 20 free travel packs with your first purchase.This episode is also brought to you by Leesa, the online mattress company. Each of their mattresses is made to order and shipped for free right to your door. All mattresses come with a 100-night trial and a 10-year warranty, so you can feel confident in your investment in a good night’s sleep. And Leesa's hybrid mattress has been rated the best overall mattress by sites like Business Insider, Wirecutter, and Mattress Advisor. Daily Stoic listeners get 15% off their entire order with the code STOIC. Just visit Leesa.com and get your mattress today.Join Daily Stoic’s Slay Your Stress course: http://dailystoic.com/read***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Cal Newport: Homepage: http://www.calnewport.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target. The new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics.

We interview stowed philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies,

to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired

and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondering if. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, these have been some strange times, right?

Work has been disrupted how we eat, where we travel, if we can travel, how we live. All of it has been disrupted and upended. And I think a lot of us are struggling to figure out how to adjust what comes next, how to be productive, how to work, how to provide for our families. I wanted to talk to one of my favorite people. Now, a fellow author at Portfolio, the imprint that I write for at Penguin Random House, Cal Newport. Cal is an author, some of my favorite books, he wrote so good they can't ignore you, he wrote deep work, he wrote

digital minimalism. People don't know actually when I was writing Egos, the enemy, I was sort of kicking around some of the ideas. I had a really good call with Kyle several years ago and he gave me a bunch of thoughts that ended up shaping the direction of that book. So Kyle's someone who has not only become a good friend, but whose work has been deeply influential to me. I think about his theories, his insights on a very

regular basis, he's someone I'm in touch with, he's someone whose career I admire. I think anyone who is doing what CalCalls' knowledge work in the 21st century has to be familiar with this concept of deep work. And me, my entire days are organized around making sure that I have sufficient deep work time, particularly early in the mornings, to get my writing done and out of the way. And actually, one of the reasons that I've been somewhat reluctant to sort of scale up this podcast is fear that it would impede on the deep work time that I have to do my writing. But it's actually been conversations like this one with Cal, the opportunity to talk to people to learn that's actually

made me think that actually doing these interviews, recording these sessions, has been a form of deep work. If I can get something out of it that feeds back into my own writing, that feeds into my personal life, well, then it's certainly time well spent. And it's been wonderful to hear from all of you who have benefited from the episodes too But anyways, Kal is young Kal is creative Kal is hard working Kal is a great writer. He's also a hell of a computer scientist from what I've heard He's a college professor and was a college professor at an extraordinarily young age

So I think he's just someone if you're not familiar with his work You absolutely need to be and you're not familiar with his work, you absolutely need to be. And if you are familiar with his work, I think this interview is gonna be worth your time. We talk about how we're adjusting and reacting to COVID-19 and quarantines, talking about sort of investing in routine, and investing in ones sort of creative practice

in avoiding distractions, saying no, and just generally, you know, being elite or great at whatever it is you happen to be doing. And obviously we nerd out a little bit about writing because that's the thing that we share. That's the craft that both of us happen to practice, but I think these lessons apply to the rest of it. And we both talk a little bit about Rory McAroy, who's been a kind advocate of both of our books, sort of a surreal surprise to find that the number one golfer in the world, one of the best living athletes of our time, is reading reading these books that you spend this time doing your deport focusing on your craft, and you hope

it will have impact, but it's always surprising and humbling and surreal to really see where that ends up landing in the real world. And hearing from Rory has been one of, I think, the perks for both of us. So we talk about that among many other things. So here is my interview with Cal, and I look forward to talking to you soon.

All right, so let's get into it. So, you know, I was curious, I was reading something you wrote that you were talking about sort of inbox capture and that expression was an interesting one for me because it was sort of ironically encapsulated exactly where I've been. So when this sort of first happened,

one of the good things I felt was that suddenly a whole bunch of impositions kind of magically disappeared, right? I wasn't expected to travel. There was basically no one trying to set up meetings. Everyone was sort of so inwardly focused for a little bit of time that it kind of helped me revert back to the state that I both need to be in professionally

and actually want to be in personally, which is like a hate being on the phone. I hate things that are scheduled. I hate like sort of interrupting the flow of whatever I'm supposed to be doing. So that was really nice, but I've noticed pretty quickly, it's not that things have reverted back to normal, but suddenly now things are impeding and creeping back in. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on how technology sort of does that to us. Well, I think the bigger observation is that if you think about knowledge work, what are we doing? We have a certain amount of cognitive assets. We're allocating them to certain activities and trying to get a return on it. My growing thesis, a book I'm writing

that's all about this, is that we're really bad at that. We're really bad at this task of allocating cognitive resources in a mindful or intentional way. So what do we do typically in knowledge work is we essentially let things pile have hazardly until we call uncle and then that's where we let it stand. So when you're traveling a lot and you have a lot of let's say speaking, let's say maybe you're in a book tour, you're doing a lot of publicity, well your uncle point is just earlier on the other types of stuff going on. When that stuff goes away then it just fills in the space and tell you implicitly call uncle again and one earlier on the other types of stuff going on. When that stuff goes away, then it just fills in the space and tell you implicitly call uncle again. And one way or the other, it makes sure that you're essentially filled about 5% or 10% beyond

what's really comfortable. And to me, I think that's a bigger sign of an underlying disease, which is that we don't really have a very intentional way of trying to understand, what do I want to do with my time, what do I want to do with my cognitive assets, what am I aiming for, how much am I bringing on my plate, what are my limits or not, what are my processes. When we leave that all basically implicit, we just let things pile until it becomes uncomfortable and just cut it off there, sort of maximizing the probability that we remain just more or less persistently uncomfortable with our workload.

Yeah, and I'm sure it's like a somewhat anti-social viewpoint that I bring to it, but I am so protective of my writing space, and that's like my happy place, and that's what pays my bills, that's like sort of who I am, like where I am, like on a, I sort of call it like what a Saturday is like,

like a Saturday is my ideal day, I wake up, you know, I don't have to be anywhere. I, you know, I'm with family, then I, you know, sort of step away for a little bit. I do some writing. I'm like, I'm in a really sort of like a natural state. And what I feel like is like, that's who I am. Then there are these sort of evil doers

who are trying to impede on that, to take from it, who want to sort of, you know what I mean? And when I say anti-social, it's like, they're not actually being malicious, they're not actually trying to steal from you, but I do kind of have this war of all against all mentality towards like my time. Like I feel like I'm constantly being attacked. Yeah, well, I think it was you I heard say once, this stuck with me, you were talking to maybe James, this was a altruiler.

You mentioned at some point that ironically you discovered, and I had the exact same discovery, that the better you get at writing, the more the world wants you to stop writing. That's true. It's like the world, it's not when you're functioning, like the better you get at it, the more the world seems to band together to say, how can

we prevent you from, how can we prevent you from writing? And I have the same gut reaction of antagonism. You're right. It's like, and they're not. They're not. And the reality is, the look inside the world of a writer, for example, is that as you're known, there's just many, many parties for which your time and attention is very valuable to them. That scales.

It scales pretty quickly past the amount of time and attention you can actually give. That brings us back to this quandary, which is what is our ground rules for allocating time and attention? Here again, I think that we're just not very good at it. And this is actually just a good grand theose. I think beyond just our particular setup as writers who have other obligations, I think this is the ground on which the future of knowledge work

is going to be built. I mean, I think there's hundreds of billions of dollars of national GDP at stake due to how poor we are at just understanding how to take a bunch of brains to produce values and allocate that resource. And so I'm with you. I've been thinking about this more. In the case study of someone like you or I who are writers that have something else going on, you have your company out of my professorship, what's the right way to do this?

And I mean, the answer I have so far is, well, the right way is not to just kind of rock and roll, and then after a while, just get frustrated, and then say I'm going off the radar, which is kind of what I do. And then just say no to everything, and then get bored, and then open up the floodgates, and say yes to way too much,

and then get really upset, and you just let that cycle every six months. So I think- Yeah, it's like a binging and purging thing. Yeah, it's a key question. But this is a fundamental thing. I think you and I are maybe a good case that it can be generalized to other people's situations.

There are more people for whom our time and attention creates value for them. There's more people and more requests than we can actually service. And so then the question is now what? I mean, what's the right response to that? And I think this is a place where some more radical thinking is probably needed.

And one of the things that's been helpful for me with this sort of forced experiment and basically, no, you can't go out to lunch, no, you can't run errands, no, you can't travel, no, you can't do meetings blah, blah, blah. I was talking to Buzz Williams, who's the best school coach at A&M, and he was like, I've always thought that I was pretty good with my time, that I was very productive, that I sort of fill all the space properly, and he's like, but this is sort of making me realize

I wasn't good with my time at all. And then I had a bunch of obligations I didn't actually need to have. And so obviously I'm very productive. I've written a lot of books. I've done that while speaking. I'm still married. My kids don't hate me.

I've done a pretty good job. But I didn't quite like having seen how productive I've been over the last six to eight weeks. And just generally how like much more rarely I lost my temper and how much more rarely I was like, why did I do this? Or, you know, I don't like these people. Why am I here? Kind of things.

It's clear to me that I was, you know, sort of leaving quality work on the table, like work I actually wanted to do. And so I think it's been illustrative of the hidden costs, but I'd be curious, like, so you look at something like this pandemic, right? Like, obviously, certain people should have been thinking about different aspects of this, right? Like, people who manage money should have been more prepared for, you know, events like this. People who, you know, run companies should have been, had contingency

plans. The most obvious people in government and then, you know, public health should have, should have had a greater awareness and more preparation. It's interesting to think like, those people weren't just sitting around doing nothing the last 10 years, although look, in some cases they were probably some bad apples who were, but the reality is they were waking up every day answering emails, doing conference calls. They were, they're just, wasn't enough time to get to this thing. Yeah. Well, relevant to that, there's this story I uncovered.

I'm not really supposed to reveal these or whatever. So, so I have a book that's an editing that's supposed to come out next February or March. It's about email and knowledge work, et cetera. So there's a story I tell. I might even open the book with this, but so relevant, I'll just, no one tell anyone, okay? But we're just by the book when it comes out and you'll have a head start. Exactly. But I found this guy who had been tapped into by the White House in the Obama years to

come run a large task force. The details don't really matter. It was under commerce, a multi-billion dollar budget, but they brought this guy in and said, whatever, you're going to run this whole team and it had to do with giving out these sort of investments to spur innovation. And so he gets there, he sets up his team, they have offices. And really early into his tenure, there's a computer virus hits their network. And they're like, okay, the network hold on, we got shut it down to the computer virus, then a couple days later, the department of Homeland Security comes and takes all the computers.

Like this, this is a security threat. You can't, we got to take all your computers, and oh, for government regulation reasons, you can't use personal email, right? So they had no computers, and they had no email, and ended up lasting for six weeks. And what the guy told me, and it's just for my interview of your story, is that, okay, so we had no email.

And so what he ended up doing was basically setting up these meetings with other people in government, he would do it over the phone to set them up, and he would just go over there and he had nothing else to check and nothing else to run around on. So he would just go to their offices and have long meetings.

And just like get to know what they do and what the real problems are and trying to understand what's happening. And during this six week period, he basically came up with the ideas that was the initiatives on what's for the next two years that he had the post that they really ran with. And so he called it white space. Was it currently used? But this juxtapher machine, ECMOCana, right? My email's taken away for six weeks, you're not allowed to use anything else,

though it led to a lot of logistical influences, led them to actually do like what you're talking about. It's like, well, why don't I actually just take some space and go and spend three hours and just learn? Like what goes on in your department? What are your real pain points? Like what's really happening here? Let me really understand how this works.

Let me meet you and your staff. And it was incredibly productive. And so I think you're right. I mean, I think we're on this something which is why I was talking about a hundred billion dollar GDP at stake right here. Multiply that across 20, 30 million higher level knowledge work jobs, where so much cognitive energy

that could go towards producing new value innovation insight is instead going to, you know, balancing things out of inboxes and jumping on calls and going in the meetings. And that's a lot of actual productivity. If this was other types of capital resources, if I said you have all of this factory machinery forward and you're barely running it to make cars. Right away, I would say you're terrible at being an industrial manufacturer like you need to bring in some, you got to figure out how to build cars better. This is terrible. You're not, but the same thing is going on in the cognitive role, we just don't measure it as well. And so we don't realize that we're running these cognitive factories just terribly and efficiently.

What I'm also seeing is like, okay, so I can actually, let's say, do the day-to-day writing on a busy schedule between meetings or traveling, but the really important knowledge work, and I think this is where it connects to people of any kind of knowledge work, of any type of leadership position. Like, when I think, I was thinking about this

actually on my bike ride today, like, where was I when I had ideas for either introductions on books or ideas for whole books? It was always a weird place. Like, so the really hard knowledge work is like the coming up with the idea itself or formulating the plan or having the flash of inspiration. And I think a lot of people's schedules and a lot of people's routines are just not at all conducive to those kinds of breakthroughs. It's like you might have a pretty good routine for, you know, sitting and, you know, analyzing

numbers or reading reports. That's a certain kind of deep work, which is, you know, a phrase I use all the time from your book. But then there's almost like deep, deep work where that's like you're deciding, let's say you're an investment, let's say you're a hedge fund manager. Maybe you can do the deep work where you read a report or you analyze some numbers, that requires some concentration,

but the part where you decide what industry to focus on or what the big opportunity is or what your thesis about, you know, like a certain macro or micro trend is, that's like deep, deep work. And that requires much more discipline and white space as you called it and just general sort of freedom. Well, and I'm surprised we don't prioritize this

as much now, the people who do, and it's no coincidence, maybe you mentioned them, is hedge fund managers, actually. I mean, if you want to see where is it in knowledge work, do you actually find people who have cognitive coaches? Where do you find people where there's a whole community of using non-smart phones, just because they don't want to lose a whatever percent epsilon on their ability to have the real insights as in hedge fund money management. I mean, this is, you know, Josh Wateskin,

this is a lot of his consulting clientele as hedge fund managers. Like, let's let's let you maximize what you get out of your brain because for them, hey, that 15, 20% difference, multiply that by $100 billion of assets under management is suddenly, you know, non-trivial. And so, I'm, yeah, there's a price we don't see more of it, but I wrote recently about, like, Nick Saban, never used email. I mean, he literally got his first email address about a month ago because of the pandemic. So, you know, okay, people needed the, you know, he could have been his office with the staff or whatever. All those national championships and his time is NFL coach.

Yeah, he was pretty good at it and never had an email address, right? Because he had figured out like, this is what moves to Needle on building winning football teams. And I want to do this at the highest level and why would I waste, you know, time on these other aspects? I mean, that's not what they're paying me $6 million a year for. Well, that's what I was going to say. The only two places that I can think that it happens would one, the Abbey and Finance, and then the other would be in sports.

And I wonder if part of that is just how measurable the outcomes are. It's just so much more measurable. When I was talking to Buzz Williams, what he was saying, he was like, look, what stats help you do in sports is see what variables are correlated with winning. And he's like, so a lot of people think,

you know, it's like about this or that or it's all these factors. He's like, for instance, if we're up against an opponent, let's say, you know, you're playing, I don't know, Texas State and you're Texas A&M, and you go, hey, when we have more rebounds than they do, we win 83% of the time. Or if we don't convert on second chance opportunities,

we lose this percentage of the time. And so it's really all about which variables correlate with winning. And I think where you extend that out to what you think about and what I think about is like, sort of what variables are correlated with winning as far as knowledge work goes. And how do you build those habits or routines in your life? And so, maybe it's, hey, when I journal, I think better. Or, you know, for me, it was realizing, okay, I write better in the mornings.

So really, one of the best decisions I can make for my book is to just not schedule things in the morning. And that every time I'm scheduling something in the morning, I am choosing a variable which is actually coordinated with losing, you know. And so I would urge people to think about what those variables are in your life. Yeah, well this is what I talk about with this sort of deep life philosophy that ties together a lot of the stuff I write about that, like especially when it comes to your craft, finding the really big wins, like the things that give you the most return, the things you really want to build, your value around, you know, find ways to emphasize those incredibly deeply, looking for huge amplification, even if necessary, putting radical elements around it,

like you moving to a ranch or these type of things that actually are incredibly important, psychological cues, that like I'm taking this piece of my life more seriously, and then the flip side of that is being really wary and essentialist about everything else. And part of it is just by way, it's a nonlinear return. I mean, it's just mathematics. The thing you do best if you can do it really well is going to give you per unit time invested much higher returns than other things.

And so just mathematically, you want to concentrate as much time as you can into that high return thing. It's not that the other things aren't valuable, but it's unit time working being allocated to lower reward. Do you, this idea of cognitive resource allocation, when I talk about this sort of stoic exercise of what's in your control, what's not in your control,

I usually try to sell that to people, especially in sports as a resource allocation issue. So I'd be curious what you think of that. My point is like, if you have 100 thinking points, do you want to spend, and the average person is spending 40 of those thinking points on, what is the ref doing? Am I getting enough credit from the coach?

Does my girlfriend like me? You know, sort of things that are not up to you? In a sense, it's a very arrogant move. Like, it's a fighting with one arm tied behind your back. The idea that what I try to remind myself of is like, this writing thing is really hard and I'm competing against some of the best people in the world, people who want it really badly.

The idea that I can compete at the professional level using only 30% of my resources is probably an overestimation of how talented I actually am. I think it's absolutely right. I think you see this a lot, especially in more free independent type endeavors, like writing how quickly and how easy it is to quickly pivot into all of these surrounding brand activities. We're like, okay, yeah, I'm a good writer. Let me think about like this and doing this activity

and my email list and this and that. And all your time now is going to these other things. When you're right, you have the central competition of, I'm doing something incredibly competitive in a winner take all field. And if we use sports as the analogy, it's very clear in sports. The people that become the superstars start from a foundation of talent and then are just relentless. Like, relentless, like I am going to be the best at this. You know, Kobe Bryant was relentless. Tiger Woods was relentless. Rory McElroy, you know, we've, who was all the success to you and I, of course. But he is relentless, right?

I mean, just like the way he trains, the way that he reads books like ours, I'm going to do every, I'm just obsessed. The Michael Jordan, if you watch the new mini-series on the ESPN that everyone's watching, the Michael Jordan mini-series. Just, this like relentless push to be better at their craft than anyone else, to be putting more hours

to their craft than anyone else. And it's really hard to distill that. And that's it, like that's the game. I think you're right. You only have so much energy to devote to work. So what you wanted to vote it to. And that's the whole premise behind deep work was basically given X number of hours

you're able to spend on work, what ratio of that you want to be deep to shallow, all things being equal, more deep to shallow is probably going to end up being better than going the other way. And for a lot of people that somehow manage just to anger that. I don't know why. But it's really, it's, yeah's, it's, yeah, it's really not simple. Okay, simple to say, almost impossible to execute. But and, and so it's weird, because it sort of swing back and forth. So totally true.

And that, that, that, you know, it's going to require, you know, more resources than, then, like, that you're not going to win this thing, you know, half resources than, then like, you're not gonna win this thing, you know, half committed, you're not gonna, you're gonna fall, you might be able to get one book out or one project or win one tournament, sort of with bad habits or, you know, with a bad work ethic. But ultimately, you know, it's about how many hours you put in, you put the deep work, et cetera.

Then the interesting thing that I think you find is like, I don't know about you, but like maybe it only takes me two hours of writing a day for several months to produce a book. Like, I think people also think, because you hear, you'll hear like a rapper talk about, you know, it's up in the studio, it's like four in the morning, and it's like having actually worked with some rappers,

it's like, yes, but you rolled into the studio at 2 a.m. right? Like, I find very few people who actually do a lot of deep work, do it for the kinds of hours that you think they do it for. It's almost impossible to do it for, you know, eight consecutive hours. It's much more intense, but it tends to be more like sprinting than marathon, or do you disagree? I agree with that. I would say the acute application of skilled activity

is relatively limited. Usually you see a two to four hours and that holds over athletic and cognitive pursuits for various reasons. So that's true. But then, you know, there's also the recovery and white space requirements, right? Like probably ideally, if all you wanted to do was, right, you could look to like the Dave Eger's model is probably optimal. So, you know, Dave Eger's setup is, he does eight hours a day in a house where he has no Wi-Fi. He works on a computer that has no internet. And so all he does during like the normal work hours

is, I mean, some of it's writing, some of it's thinking, you know, he's just sort of thinking about things, he's writing things, he's reading, but it's just a whole space is just for novel creation. And then at the end of the day, checks in with a team. Like, okay, like, what do I need to know? What's going on? Do you need to sign something? What are the blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Whatever, whatever, you know, that's all consolidated to the end of the day. So he works about eight hours in the absence of internet. You're right that he's not novel writing for eight hours. That's impossible. I mean, you're, you know, nothing, whenever I hear, like a first time writer talking about how, and I almost died getting up to that deadline

because I had to do 10,000 words a day or something like that. It's like, you're, that's not writing, you know. That's cool or if I blog post, you can't, you know, that tells me not to read your book, basically. But the professionals don't write, they don't talk about, you know, I had the right 10 hours a day for the six weeks before a book, you know,

that's not how you write a book. But what he's doing is probably optimal. It's like he's completely in that space without context shifting. He has very little other things pulling from his attention. All he's doing is immersed in thinking about the novel and the book and writing and thinking and editing and reading is probably the optimal thing. If all you want to optimize was production of the best possible novel in this case. But almost none of us get to do that.

And I have to say, he actually even took a lot of heat for some reason for explaining that that was his method, but that's a whole other way. That's a whole other way. This is very privileged, or how could a single mom do this probably? Yeah, but you can say the same, of course, a brewery, Michael Reuer, or something,

like you're going to practice golf all day. Like, I don't get to do that. And it but which, you can say the same, of course, a brewery, Michael Reuer, or something, like, you're going to practice golf all day. Like, I don't get to do that. And it's like, yeah. No, it's, it's, the irony is, and this was sort of my point. It's that, it's that, but let's say it's two to four hours. And so let's say you're, you're, all you can afford is the minimum. Most people could find two hours a day. Like, if you really want it, you could find two hours a day. That's getting up earlier, that's, you know,

cutting out television or phone. Like you can make the time. It's probably not sustainable for 10 years, but, you know, like Brian Coppeman talks about how, you know, he and his writing partner would, you know, meet every morning for two hours for a year. And that's how they wrote rounders. Like you can do that.

And then the irony is, or the sort of the feedback loop is, the more successful you are, the more time it allows you, the more sort of indulgent and privileged your sort of process becomes. And like, you know, this year I made the decision, we moved all, like, I used to work from home and that was like a perk and then we actually decided, hey, actually know, like, we have now none of my books and I don't even have a desk at my house anymore. And I have like a whole, like, it's a building dedicated to my stuff, you know, and that's

a perk of the success I've been able to have. I don't need it, but it does make it easier and better, and I can sort of go into the, you know, it's like heading into the clubhouse, the locker room, or whatever. This is like, now it's game time or whatever. And so, yeah, that's Dave Eckers set up, is that what you get when you sold several million bucks. Well, it's also a sustainability issue. So I used to collect stories of famous, like not commercial, but like genre nonfiction writers,

how they got started. And all of the big names got started in similar, what I call, yellow notepad style, right? So, Clive Custler, he, how did Clive Custler get started? You know, his wife had to took a night shift job. So, after he put the kids to bed, he was bored. So, he was on the, at night, at nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, he would write at night.

Michael Crichton was crazy about this. He was, he was an intern and then a resident, medical resident at the time, writing under a pseudonym because he thought it would get him in the trouble and he would work on the shuttle at Harvard Medical School. The shuttle bus he would take back and forth, right? And in the room where the residents would sleep,

you know, when he had a little bit of time between your shifts, he would write. Robin Cook was in the Navy and part of an experimental dive program. And when they were first figuring out, he's an old guy, when they're figuring out scuba and decompression tables. And so he got a typewriter put in the decompression chamber. So you'd be stuck in there for four days

or a week or whatever, decompressing. And you'd be like, oh, the typewriter in their John Grisham, 5am. He was both a lawyer and a state legislature, which he would legislator, was she hated in Mississippi. And he would just, he would write from 5 a.m. The 8 a.m. or 7 a.m. depending on the day, every morning, it was just, you know,

but that's, he's like, this is what I'm gonna do. But that's not sustainable. So now John Grisham has, you know, it's on his beautiful farm. He writes in like seasons, right? He like starts it by a certain day and he finishes it by a certain day and he just does it year in and year in. Yeah.

And now Lee Child is the master of that. So like I read him, there's an interesting book about Lee Child, just about Lee Child, how he writes, the Jack Reacher guy. He's incredibly seasoned. Like it starts at this point and it ends at this point. Grisham is roughly seasonal once a year and doesn't do much by the way, he's great. He fought his assistant. He had one assistant like a secretary who left

and he ended up not replacing her because he had done such a good job of not being available. That there's no one knows how to reach him except for his friends and family. So you didn't even even be. Right. Anyways, the point being though, I take what's happening

I think in your stories like same with you know, I don't know, I read all my original books concurrently with my dissertation and other stuff and and you know really tight circumstances and very small apartments. That works. I think anyone could find that time. It doesn't work for 30 year career though because you'll be right now. So yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it is like you do the sprint at first and you do it under whatever conditions and you can ride under just about any conditions. And then if it goes well and you want to make it go at it, it's also smart to do like what you're doing or what I did when we did our lead last move and is trying to find out how to make this thing sustainable in the long term.

Yeah, it's like, look, LeBron James wasn't spending a million dollars a year on his body when he was 17 because he didn't need to, but now he does. Now he has a trainer and a chef and probably a whole bunch of gadgets that normal civilians can't get their hands on. And so yeah, I think that's another sort of key question

is you go, how long do you want to do this thing you're doing? And once you've sort of arrived, are you making decisions that actually make this sustainable? And I think that's a good question to ask about your marriage, about being a parent or whatever it is. Like, is the way you're doing it likely to hold up over time?

Because if it's not, way you're doing it likely to hold up over time, because if it's not, then you're corining towards an inevitable crash of some kind, and the outcome of that's probably not going to be pretty. An idea along those lines I've been writing about recently in Toine with is that once you identify that the key areas in your life, there's pretty big benefit to taking at least one big, almost radical swing in each of those areas. To have some sort of setup, habit, investment,

whatever, that is a little bit over the top. So, like, what you did, right? Well, I take my writing seriously, it's not really necessary for me to have a separate outbuilding, but it's like a big swing. Like, okay, I'm really, this is something that I separate outbuilding, but it's like a big swing. Okay, I'm really, this is something that I take really seriously, or if in fitness, like a lot of, okay, I'm not just going to exercise, I'm going to have some sort of huge ambition, just like unusually. I'm going to have a full-time trainer. Yeah, and you're going to be socially healthy.

And I'm going to do the Navy SEAL PST every year throughout my 30s type of thing. Like something like this, right? And that there's dual benefits to these, these more radical swings at the areas that are most important to you. The one is just that, yeah, it makes it more sustainable. It also allows you to sort of maximize it. You get more value if you're, if you feel like you've really, you know, sort of invested in it, but it's also the psychological signal back to yourself. This is really important to me. So I think we underestimate these big swing moves. You look out on paper and say, I don't know, is it really necessary? Probably not that you have the cabin or that you have this trainer or that you're doing

the Navy SEAL, whatever, that maybe in your spiritual or that you're doing the Navy SEAL whatever, that maybe in like your spiritual life, like you're really intensely committed to the rituals of your religion or whatever it is, but there's value in just the signal to yourself of, I take this really seriously. And so I'm increasingly liking that model, where you have a smaller number of things that you really go deep on and take big swings and are willing to do things that are a little bit exotic

or radical, the both support those things and signal to yourself that like this is really important. I think it actually makes life much more resilient and satisfying than sort of standing back. We want to just keep things moderate. Yeah, spread out my bets a little bit here. I don't want to be unreasonable about it. I think being unreasonable is a reasonably good way to make your life more interesting.

Well, I think, to me, that's probably, and I talked to Stephen Pressfield not that long ago, but, you know, he says there's sort of amateur habits and then there's professional habits. And one of the things, one of the distinctions I think I'd make is that, you know, professional habits are often very serious and seem totally unreasonable to amateur people. Like when you, if someone, when you hear like LeBron James spends

a million dollars a year on his body, if you're not an athlete, that sounds totally insane. You know, when you hear like, oh, so and so, has a personal coach, a CEO who has a coach that they pay $50,000 a month, that sounds totally insane. If you hear Bill Gates has a cabin that he goes to twice a year and it doesn't have the internet and it just sits and thinks, all these things sound crazy and a lot of the habits of professional sound crazy, but that's because it's a professional habit

and you're probably stuck in the amateur habit, which is often much more reasonable, often much more sort of similar to what everyone else is doing. It's not super disruptive. I would say it typically doesn't involve a big commitment of some kind. And I think being professional requires big commitments. Yeah, I think that is that something is absolutely right. One of

the places you see it on a slightly lesser scale is it's easy to dismiss let's say really healthy people that maybe have a like a crazy kind of supplement type game going on. Like, you know, it's it's it's it's a layered screamer and there've been greenfield style xyz with this or that. And it's easy to be like, well, look, I I know that like probably a lot of that stuff is not completely validated and it's probably not making, but it misses the point. It's a signal among other things, right?

When you have this like, really crafted your like rich role or someone or green field, where you're like, I'm very, you're lured, like I'm very careful about my food and I do these supplements, I care about these minerals and I get this thing done or this or that. Even if it's the case that like, okay, maybe this is too much, it's not as efficacious

as you really think. And this thing you're doing with the magnesium or whatever, is like, yeah, maybe if we bring in the scientists, they'll say, well, maybe that's not good evidence for that. It's a self-signal. A self-signal that they need to basically establish themselves as being incredibly fit. And guess what they are?

They're much more fit in the people. Sure, but I think about that example a lot, because us writers have similar things that seem like Financial indulgences whereas like someone to you or I when we're getting in advance for a book There's a certain percentage of that that we're just automatically earmarked You know, like well, that's not just that's not salary. That's actually like part of the overhead That's paying for the overhead of this of this you know Lifestyle I have to build around to make this weird thing sustainable, which is, you know, high stakes writing.

This is just a different way of seeing things. Yeah, and, you know, obviously in Stoicism, one of the sort of the key virtues is this virtue of temperance or moderation. And so that's actually the, I think, where maybe there's a good place to sort of wind down, is that so often though what it requires being a professional requires being sort of deliberately out of balance with one thing. And then so that's why it's important that you're really balanced elsewhere.

So it's like what you can't be is have these sort of extreme commitments to 30 things at the same time or you can't be doing that and your personal life is also a mess. And your information habits are a mess, and your eating habits are a mess. In a way, it's like, you're saying, hey, I'm going to be highly specialized and targeted in this one thing.

And in a way that requires disciplined habits and balance and maybe moderation. In other ways, like, you know, when people go, oh, Warren Buffett lives in this, you know, $60,000 house or whatever, I sometimes, I mean, I think a huge part of this is just public relations, like, I mean, he flies around in a private jet and stuff. So clearly doesn't care about spending money,

but I have to wonder if part of that is just a counterbalance to the extreme sort of stakes and commitment and habits required to compete at that level. It's almost centering to come down to a small house or to drive an old car or whatever it happens to be. I think it's like you can be deliberately im moderate, but then you have to balance that out with real moderation elsewhere.

Yeah, I think that's about right. You're out of balance the thing that matters. And like the ideal setup in the writer's setup, like the ideal setup is you go out to that writer's shed and you're there for three or four hours. And then you come back and you're fixing defense with your son, like going for a walk with your wife, eating a good meal, getting in like a long run, maybe having like a, you know, a drink with a friend on the porch

before a good book at night. Like, and the thing is that, like what I'm saying right now is just resonating with me very strongly. It probably resonates with a lot of people very strongly too. And I think that's important because we should trust our instincts. And in general, we're wired in such a way that when you see that type of story or you see like the craftsman who runs his forge out of the scenic door county Wisconsin, like this guy Rick Furrow, I write about sometimes, the reason that resonates tells us there's probably something deeper down saying that that's that's probably a good configuration And it's a topic I'm really interested in. I don't know a lot of the the let's say like the anthropological details here

But you know, I think when we dig down deep humans are wired to want to do things to see their manifestations made concrete Their intentions made manifest or concrete in the world were wired for that. That's what allowed our species to thrive. But to actually tap into that drive properly, it increasingly seems like the right configuration of a life to do so is that there's sort of a craft that you do at a high level out of balance in ways that are kind of almost radical, the things you invest in to do that craft and then, and then when you're done with the craft, you're back at the fireside by the cave and doing the fundamental human things and doing it in a way that craft, and then when you're done with the craft, you're back at the fire side by the cave. And just doing the fundamental human things and doing it in a way that's slow and present.

But that's probably, I know it's almost impossible, and most people don't have the option right now, but just to look forward at what are we wired for? I increasingly think that's kind of the recipe that's in our paleolithic DNA. You know, right, it's like somebody was the hunter and somebody was the one who made the, the best weapons that the hunter, uh, like to use. And somebody was great attending a fire and someone was a cook and someone, someone was the, was the person who magically could call them callicky babies. And, you know, somebody else seemed to have magical healing powers because they

knew what roots worked. It's like, it's, it's, it makes sense that people would naturally gravitate towards mastery and specialization, but that requires, yeah, deep work, it requires focus, and I think it requires sort of balance and humility as well. What is not required or what is superfluous or when you see these sort of dream lives, what they're not doing a lot of Zoom calls. Yeah, this is where, and again, since we share an editor, I'm almost for sure gonna get yelled at

for talking too much about this new book, but I have a whole chapter where I get into like why email, for example, uniquely makes us miserable. And one of the pools of research I looked into to make that case was actually research about it comes from extant hunter gatherer tribes. And really what you come away with when you really look deeply at this is that there's nothing in our past

that kind of rewards or prepares us for the sort of constant lightweight ongoing, overwhelming, and possibly keep up with type of non-analog conversation. And it like uniquely makes us frustrating and unhappy. And it's in some sense like very non-paliolithic. It's just too novel to the reward centers that we've been evolved with. And so, yeah, a lot of what we do gets us really far from how we're wired to live.

And we've become very aware of that. I would say recently when it comes to health and fitness, ancestral health has become a much more mainstream thing. It just makes sense. The way we eat and move, probably the way we've done it for a very long time, what we've adapted for, we should be wary about drastically moving away from that. But it also has to do with cognitive activity.

I mean, we used to have things we were really good at. We would do it well for a little bit. And then outside of that, it was like a much more cognitively calm time. You're with family, you're eating, you're doing small things competently. It was much slower as much more present. And we got away from that cognitive landscape

that we evolved for. And I think we're paying a price for it. Well, I have a million questions about that. So we'll chat when the new book comes out and yeah, it was awesome for you to come on and we'll talk again soon. My pleasure. Hey, it's Ryan.

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