The Daily Stoic - Cal Newport on Knowledge Work and Effective Communication | Don't Be Satisfied With This

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Cal Newport about his new book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, how knowledge workers can improve their efficiency and gain autonomy, why effective communication is so important, and more. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the bestselling author of 6 books including Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He is also the host of the Deep Questions podcast which launched in May 2020. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Streak is a fully embedded workflow and productivity software in Gmail that lets you manage all your work right in your inbox. Streak gives you tools for email tracking, mail merges, and snippets to save time and scale up your email efficiency. Sign up for Streak today at Streak.com/stoic and get 20% off your first year of their Pro Plan.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free.  Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.***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: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow 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 Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

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. Don't be satisfied with this. You bought meditations and you skimmed it. You read the summary of anti-fragile or essentialism on one of those business sites. You've seen a couple of TED talks on evolutionary biology and psychology. You're following politics through a couple of people on Twitter. So you've got it, right?

You're informed? No. Even as an old man, Marcus Aurelius was chiding himself not to be satisfied with just getting logistic things. Instead, he knew he had to read attentively. He told himself he needed to go directly to the seat of knowledge, and he continued to seek out tutors and mentors. He lingered, as Seneca said, on a small number of master thinkers reading and rereading

their work until he'd gone way beyond just getting the gist. The wisdom of the Stokes did not come easily. Today, in the modern world, understanding is even tougher, deluged as we are with misinformation, partisanship, distractions, and infinitely more complexity. So you can't settle. You have to really work for it,

really work for it, and that starts right now. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. My guest today is not just one of my favorite people, one of my favorite authors. Not just someone who gave me a ton of great advice when I was writing Ego as the enemy, and not just someone who is a great thinker, but someone who I think now with this episode holds the record for the most appearances on the Daily Stove podcast, even more than the great Robert Green, talking about Cal Newport, his new book, A World Without Email, Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload is great, very timely, like all Cal's books, give me a ton to chew on. We talk about that in the episode, but as always seems to go with Cal,

we get way into what I think is the pressing question for me and for most of us in this modern world, which is how do we become the best at what it is that we do? And most of us perform some form of knowledge work, right? Knowledge work is when you're using your mind, when you're creating something, making something, when you're leading in some way. And Cal, like a great performance psychologist, I had Michael Jervé on the podcast recently.

I think Cal is the equivalent of that in this knowledge workspace. How do you get better at making decisions? How do you get better at managing your productivity? How do you get better at concentrating? How do you get better at eliminating distractions? How do you get better at setting up systems? How do you get better at thinking, defining goals, coming up with metrics? These are the kinds of things that Cal thinks so much about. He's not just a great writer, written a bunch of bestselling books, which I love.

So good they can't ignore you. Deep work, digital minimalism. His time, blocking calendar is great, as I talked about in this new book, he said four years in the making. So what I love about Cal, especially, is that yes, he's an academic, he's a philosopher about these ideas, but he also clearly puts them into practice in a real way, right? He's not just talking about these things from the comfort of a classroom, but having to execute on them in real life, not just as an academic, but as a writer. I mean, he's written more books than most nonfiction authors will ever write. And he's, I think we're roughly the same age. He's got kids too. Cal has done it at an extremely high and

extremely consistent level that very few people can match. So Cal is a legit dude. We really get into it in this conversation. We talked about, you know, sort of the role email plays in our lives and the distractions that it can offer. I personally actually happen to like email quite a bit. I prefer email to phone or meetings, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem, that it's not a distraction,

that doesn't eat up more time than I'd like. And it doesn't mean that as a not a problem, that it's not a distraction, that doesn't eat up more time than I'd like. And it doesn't mean that as a business owner and as an entrepreneur, it doesn't impede the productivity of people that I pay to do stuff. So I think a lot about systems and Kowzbook gives you a lot to chew on. But I think you're really gonna like this interview. I wrote down some changes that I'm gonna make

actually in sort of on my site as far as like how emails come in, how always has interesting intelligent ways of doing it. And we nerd out about performance and investing in performance, which is what we all should be doing. So here is my interview with Cal Newport, his new book, A World Without Email, Read His Book Digital Minimalism,

definitely read Deep Work, definitely read so good that can't ignore you. I tell you to follow Cal on social media, but of course he doesn't have one. He does have a great podcast though, which you should check out. He interviewed me for it not that long ago, so that might be a good episode to start with. In any case, here is my interview with my friend, Cal Newport. I was thinking about you the other day because like a lot of people the last year of my life, as disruptive and awful as it was in many ways, was also extraordinarily productive.

Even though we had no childcare and, you know, and had to work from home. And so many options were closed. It seemed kind of like a case study in the power of deep work in a lot of ways. Well, I think that was true in particular for people who had a lot of autonomy, right? So if you were self-employed or freelancer or a solopreneur, so you could adjust.

Okay, I have a more constraints, more flexibility. Let me radically change how I work. There is a lot of really positive experiments. And I think what happened is the disruption was so intense about what happened with the pandemic is that that gave you permission to try radical responses. In a way that pre-pandemic, you know, we're much more incremental. Let me adjust a little bit how I work. I think for a lot of people who had the autonomy to say, okay, everything is blown up right now. So I have permission to blow up how I work. I'm not going to do this.

I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to work on this. I'm going to go over to these other offices to work. I'm going to change my garden shed. I'm going to not have coffees or phone calls anymore. So I'm hoping there's a lot of interest in insight. I think you're right. It'll come out of the experimentation. Now for people who had normal jobs with bosses

who had been in an office and had to suddenly switch home, it just got terrible. So basically all of the band, all of the random back and forth, the hyperactive high point stuff, it just got more hyperactive and a lot of people in that circumstance are completely burnt out.

So I think people like you and I can feel a little lucky. Yeah, did you read that New York Times piece about the Yolo economy as they were calling it, that people who have sort of gritted their teeth and just put up with it for the last year. Sort of the pandemic, plus watching people make millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies and all this other nonsense, they're just sort of like screw it,

like I'm just not gonna do this anymore, and they're quitting sort of like screw it, like I'm just not going to do this anymore. And they're quitting to follow their passion, which is funny because I was reading, I was reading that and then I thought of your other book because this is basically the conceit of so good they can't ignore you, which is that when we're dissatisfied or we feel like we're not, you know, totally locked into something we're connected with or well suited for, we can over-react and go do something wild and crazy, which also blows up in our faces. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of that and it's going to be an issue. The pressure got really intense to do some sort of deep reset, which is the term I like to use, but as I talk about in order to get the Kennaug nor you, we're bad at

that. At least our instincts are bad. One of the stories I told in that book, which I think is probably relevant to what a lot of people are about to do, I told the story about, it was a successful ad executive that was just feeling overwhelmed by work and said, great, I need to do something different. Let me quit this and become a yoga instructor. And the point of the story was that that didn't work out. I mean, it was not able to transition to that job and make a really big living. And the point of the story was that that didn't work out. I mean, it was not able to transition to that job and make a really big living.

The underlying moral of that book is that when you're thinking about what makes a job great, you have to think about it from a market economy point of view. Like the traits that make great work great are rare and valuable. You have to have something rare and valuable to offer and returns all about this exchange. Like building skills you can leverage to make your life more remarkable. If you leave out that part where you have to have something rare and valuable to offer in returns all about this exchange, like building skills you can leverage to make your life more remarkable. If you leave out that part where you have to have something remarkable to offer in return, you

say, great, I'll just go to an online yoga instructor tutorial and then just live as a yoga instructor. You have nothing really to offer this rare and valuable. It's unlikely that they're going to end up crafting a work in life that's rare and valuable. So yeah, I think suddenly that book is way more relevant that it's been recently, because everyone is thinking about these type of transitions. Well, if I was to connect them, what I would say is sort of the pandemic revealed first and foremost how broken a lot of modern work is.

And then it also revealed how broken a lot of our lives are, whether we're spending time doing something that makes you know, whether we're spending time doing something that makes us happy, whether we're happy in our marriage or not, or, you know, where we're happy. I know so many people that are moving. They just actually being forced to spend time where they live. They were like, why am I here? I have no reason to live here, or, you know, certain, certain benefits of that place, whether

it's the restaurant scene in New York City or whatever in California, they're like, I don't like where I live, so I'm gonna move. And then of course, it also revealed how broken a lot of our institutions and government is. But so it's created this opportunity for, as you said, a reset, and I think the way I think about those, a transition like that, think the way I think about those,

like a transition like that, or having a wake up call like this, you don't go like, what's my fantasy? What's my dream? I think you actually want to start with a smaller building block, which is, and the pandemic was a good refresher in this for me, which is like, what do I want my life to look like day to day?

Like, what do I want my day to look like day to day? Like what do I want my day to look like? You mentioned the idea of autonomy. Like to me, success and autonomy are synonyms. And if they're not, what kind of success is it? And so when I think about the other book, this is the new email book, a world without email, one of the things I think about when I'm like, what do I want my day to look like?

I think I don't wanna spend a lot of time on email, right? I don't want to spend a lot of time on phone calls. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing things that I don't like. So I think instead of going like, hey, I hate being an ad executive, I'm going to become a yoga instructor, actually sit down and think like, what do I want my life to look like day to day? And that includes where do I live? What do I do? What's my routine? What's my structure? Who am I with? That's how I would approach this sort of wake-up call that we've had over the last year. Well, I just wanna say that,

I wrote an article about this a long time ago. It's one of my favorite articles that is probably my least read among my well-known articles, because I wrote it so early in my writing career, was on my blog, this must have been 2008 or something like this, right? And it was title something like the graduate, I was at my sister's college graduation when I wrote this and it was something like the graduation advice

you never hear or the career advice you never hear. And this was exactly the idea, work backwards from your vision of the lifestyle, what you want your life to be like, work backwards from then say, okay, what are the different ways to get there? What would I have to do to get there? Which of those paths do I want to take? Okay, now I have to get after it.

Actually doing the steps of that path. And this was before I wrote so good they can't ignore you, but it was really laying the seeds of this notion of, it can't just work from, I don't know, this is the job I want to have, or I don't like my job. These random fluctuations don't happen. You work backwards from the lifestyle. As a lot of people discovered in the pandemic, the attributes of your lifestyle are often

way more important than the specific content of your work. I think that's something that we, in the last 20 or 30 years, often get wrong, especially in the American context. The passion-centric mindset is really focused on the content of your work. This particular job is what I'm wired to do. So I need to have the job I'm wired to do to be happy where when you do the exercise you're talking about, often what comes up is I want a lot of autonomy in my time.

I want to be near nature. I want to spend a lot of time with my family. I want to have seasonal work where there's intense periods and then I can spend whole summers where I'm really quiet. I want to have creativity. I want to, whatever, a lot of that is completely agnostic to, oh, are you a social media brand manager or an EVP at consumer good products? Like who cares about the content of the work?

What's the attributes of your life? And then how do you fit work into a plan of how to gain that? It's a, I think it's a much more sensical way to think about life shaping. We focus way too much on what that actual line says at the top of your resume. That's only a little piece of implementing a much bigger plan. That's interesting too. And I relate to it, which is weird, because I'm someone who has a calling. I'm a writer.

I love writing. That's my passion. At the same time, there's lots of other stuff that I do and I like doing. So what they all have in common, I would say, is that I like to be in control of how and when and why I do them, right? And so to me, that's where it comes down to this idea of autonomy. And sometimes I'll talk to people and like, there'll be so much, so successful, 10 times when we're successful, it'll be 100 times.

And I'll look at their life and I'll be like, that sounds awful because they're in so little control of their life. You know, they've got a car waiting for them downstairs, they're scheduled down in the five minute increments. You know, to me, I think what I actually like of all the things that I do is the ability to focus deeply on it. So whether I'm investing in something, whether I'm working outside of my farm

or whether I'm writing, what I like is not the specific content, as you're saying, but it's the ability to concentrate and really give myself fully over to it, not knowing that I have seven minutes to finish this task or else I'm gonna get in trouble, you know, literally or figuratively. But some people like, by the way,

this is like what's interesting about that exercise is some people look at the things that you and I like. Like I really like, for example, I wanna have a high stakes project that has to be executed over a long period of time entirely autonomously, a project in which, whether or not I do anything on it today or not, doesn't matter. But if I don't do anything on it for the next month, it's going to be an issue.

I thrive under that type of a ton of it. Okay. It's just my schedule, but done on my terms. You're going off and you're going to come back with the thing. I'm going to come back with it. Yeah. And there's no pressure for me. I like having no pressure on any particular day. Like, you know what, I call it the sick day effect. Right? If I get sick tomorrow, it's not a big deal, right? Because it's just this week I want to make progress. But if I don't do it today, I can do it tomorrow. Some people hate that. Like for some people, it is their worst fear of, wait, you're telling me I have six months and come back when I'm done. Like, and they would much rather have, no, I want to be more frenetic, like

more connected to people making moves. I'm a Steve Jobs, build gate style, let's roll, I want to be having ideas and moving teams on actions, but just knowing what it is. And some people, I don't really like working with it all. I like nature, I like having a lot of free time. There's so many options when you're working backwards from what you want your life to be like. There's many, many paths and so many options how to implement those. You get rid of all those options when you're working backwards from what you want your life to be like. There's many, many paths and so many options how to implement those.

You get rid of all those options when you instead work backwards from this job. It has to be this. Now suddenly you're left with, okay, this is my only option is to try to succeed in this particular field. And then what happens when you don't? I used to call this a number of memory to term, lifestyle-centric career planning. That was my new party and phrase for this. Well, you know, it's funny. All those things have in common. And you know, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, whether you like nature or you like, you know,

being in an urban environment, whatever, I would say the one thing we all have in common is that we all hate email. Like we just all hate having lots of emails to respond to, which of course is the concept of the new book. Yeah, my sort of magnum opus on work and tech related writing, because I've been your main project. Yeah, I mean, I've been working on this for a long time. 2016, right? So I started writing this working on this before deep work came out, right? So deep work was done, but hadn't come out yet. My initial interviews in this book take place in 2016.

I put it on pause at some point to write digital minimalism, which came out in 2019 because it was very timely what was happening with our changing relationships with our phone, and then I came back to it, right? So this is kind of my definitive word on the world of work. And yet it comes down to, we have developed this remarkable love hate relationship with email, which is so universal and so high impact that we absolutely have to unpack it. Why is that we can have a tool that we absolutely would think life would be

worse without because otherwise we're using facts machines and we're using voicemail and that sucks. And yet we hate it. It's like the bane of our existence. Like both of these things are true. It's like wonderful, confusing dichotomy that we have to pick apart or we're going to end up remaining miserable? It is funny though because I hate email in the sense that whenever I look and there's lots of emails, I'm like, it gives me anxiety and I want it to go away. I've always been, and I was probably an inbox zero person basically until the pandemic, and now I'm more of like an inbox like 30. And there's just like 30 emails that are like

too important to delete, but I'm just hoping we'll magically go away on their own, you know? Like that. So my discipline collapsed a little bit under the pressure of the last year, but I also feel like, like in the last week, like multiple people have like on like, hey Ryan, I want you

to meet like so and so and it's like some let's say an important person and the person's first impulse is like, hey let's get on the phone right and my I always I'm pretty artful about it now but I do everything I can to keep it in email. I'd rather do 30 emails back and forth with this person than get on the phone. Why is it that I hate the phone more than email? Well, this is the overhead of synchrony, right? And this is an issue, right? That if you're gonna interact with someone,

let's say to try to solve a problem or make a decision to get to know someone better, real time is way more effective. And if we're just looking at the the efficiency with which you can come to that conclusion, back and forth in real time is more effective. It has a huge overhead, however, because you have to actually arrange for that time. You have to put aside the time for it. This was really at the core of the New Yorker piece I wrote a couple of years ago, it was email and mistake, where I actually was talking about asynchronous

versus synchronous communication system. In my field as a computer scientist, we actually study these mathematically. So we're used to thinking about their advantages and disadvantages. Synchrony allows for a highly effective communication, but it is hard to set up. Asynchrony is very easy to set up, very low overhead,

just shoot off the message, whatever. But the communication becomes much more complex because you need much more back and forth through each of the decision, and these back and forth, it's going to trigger overhead, it's going to trigger contact shifting. It's a really difficult balancing act because what you essentially have to do is find out how to amortize the overhead of the synchroding so that you can prevent many of these conversations from having to be constant back and forth. Because back and forth mean every message is something you have to check. You have to check for when you see it, you have to respond.

But you also don't want the overhead of, okay, I have to have a completely separate meeting for this. Like the middle ground I use, for example, is I'll deploy first line of the fence as office hours. Office hours is like a classic way to amortize the overhead of synchrony. It gets rid of the overhead. Here are times I am available. I'm on Zoom or my doors open at the university and you can just deflect. This is what I

do for students at Georgetown. I'm happy to talk to any student at Georgetown about anything but it has to be in my office hours. You know, like great, you use my office hours whenever you want to stop by, whenever you want to stop by. Works out great, very effective communication, very little overhead because it's office hours. And then the second line of the fence is the highly restricted scheduling slots that you control with, you know, callingly or schedule once. All right, fine, grab a slot when you can, but these highly restricted slots just for that purpose. All of these techniques make more sense when you realize here's what I'm trying to do,

is I want real time back and forth when possible, if I'm actually trying to reach a decision or get information, I want to reduce the overhead of setting that up. Now, you might also have the other problem of, I don't really actually want to talk to these people. Yeah, I was going to say, well, that's a real problem. I don't want to be rude, but I also don't, it's like, what's that Drake thing? No new friends. As like an introvert who's also busy, I kind of have like a no new friends policy and I feel like email is a way to not be rude and be helpful, but also not,

it's like not breach the defenses. Like it's in kind of like a quarantine like safe room. Like I'm entering the room, you're entering the room, but then I can leave like, or I think about it, you watch the crown where she presses the button when she wants the person to leave the room. She's just like, the meeting is over and she's like, so I feel like on email, I can get out in and out much easier. Even if I have to do it multiple times, okay, I got a drive here, then we meet, and then you're 20 minutes late, and then we have to do pleasantries,

and then blah, blah, blah. That's true, right. But what you could, the layer is something on top of that, you have a good out. So like one of my good outs is often, I'll say, oh, I'm off the grid, or I'm in monk mode because of, and I'll tie it to some sort of stage

of the book writing process. Yeah. I'm trying to finish up my manuscript on a monk mode. You know, I'm publicity mode, so I don't really have time. Yeah, I'm just overwhelmed. Or I just finished publicity mode, and now I'm taking a break. So now for you, because you're on an even faster publishing schedule than me, every moment counts.

It's one of those probably. So maybe that's what you need is the clarity. It sounds like you're doing the soft note. Like I don't want to just say, I don't want to meet in a nice way. So you do, you need is the clarity. It sounds like you're doing the soft note. I don't wanna just say, I don't wanna meet in a nice way. So you basically just meet poorly. I'll just email you back, but kind of with long delays and not send you very good emails and hope eventually that you're like, all right, fine.

So I have started to be a bit more honest to you where someone will be like, so someone connects us and they're like, so and so is working on a book and they wanted to ask you some questions. And they go, hey, it's great working on a book and they wanted to ask you some questions, and they go, hey, it's great to meet you. I'd like to ask you some questions. Like, when can you get on the phone?

And I'd just reply, oh, you know, like, what are your questions? Like, just give me the questions, I'll answer them. And then they're like, well, I have a bunch of questions. Let's get on the phone. You know, like, after like three or four sort of not reading the rooms, I usually just go like, literally,

there's nothing I hate more than getting on the phone. There's nothing I wanna do less than that, but I'm happy to answer your question over email. And then usually, it gets to the point, and the question is always like, will you blur my book? It's like some three second question that could have been answered over email to begin with. And I think other people either,

they're very sort of extroverted or gregarious, so they're impulses to talk, or they think it's rude to just get to the fucking point. You know, so they're not getting to the point and just making the ask. But also it's really cool to talk to Ryan Holiday. So you have that factor going against you as well. Like in their mind,

or like it's not sure, this would be more convenient. It'd be like one of the, it's a cool story to have. Like I, I, you know, I get some of that too. I think people are just like, I think it would be cool just to talk. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. The Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for?

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and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freeed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today. on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Do you get that email from like younger people who are like looking for a mentor or whatever? They'll go like, Hey, I'm a huge fan. Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, can I ask you a question? And I'm like, I sometimes if I'm in the mood, I'll just be like, you just did. I'll talk to you some other time. You know, like, like, you just wasted your question asking if you could have a question. If you would just said. You know, like, you just wasted your question asking if you could

have a question. If you would just said, you know, if you'd shot me of a seven-word question, I could have gotten you a response back very quickly. But instead, you decided to ask if you could ask. And, you know, here we are. But so you still have a general purpose publicly accessible email address. So I used to do a ton of questions because of the student focus back in my early writing days. Sure. I would answer questions from students because I was writing books for students and I actually really enjoyed doing it.

I felt like it was a service and then it got out of control and doing it half-assed was worse than just being clear. And so I got rid of all my general purpose public-facing email addresses. So I don't get this as much because now, if you go to my contact page,

there's channels for particular purposes. Like, oh, if you want to talk, book a talk, talk to this person, if this is about an interview, talk to this publicist, if you want to send me links or tips or ideas, I love to see them, but I'm not going to respond, send them here, and that's it. There is no actual,

and so no one actually expects that I'm going to respond, and therefore I get a lot less of those messages. And if I get them, there's somehow resetting expectations goes a long way. Like we assume that people just want you to be accessible. It's not really they want you to be accessible. It's that if you seem accessible, then they might have an expectation of, well, then you should respond. And if you don't, that's a problem.

But if it's clear you're not accessible. Then there's really less bad feelings than you would expect, because there's not an expectation actually being ported. Yeah, this is something you talked about in the book that I got this advice from Steve Cam who runs Nerd Fitness. He's like, just have rules. Like, don't say, like, don't ignore it or don't not do it.

Although, I'm also a big fan of just the ignore. You know, like, I think that's, that's hard for people. But like, you know, if I were to email the president, I would just not get a response. Right. He wouldn't be like, I can't respond. Right. Like, and I think having interacted with busy people, you get used to the fact that like, oh, they just didn't see it or they just, they couldn't even give you a no. And so you have to get to a place where you're just comfortable like pocket vetoing stuff. But, but, one, if you are gonna say no,

if it's someone that you can't just sort of like, do that too, having a rule is really important. So mine is like, hey, I just don't get on the phone, or hey, I just don't give book blurbs, or hey, I just don't do X, Y, and Z. And you talked about like having quotas. Like I only do three of these a year or six of these a year. Like James Clear was telling me he, he sets aside like X speaking spots per year. And then that's also how he decides what his fee will be. But I did like the idea of like a certain amount of slots or a certain amount of nights away from home or a certain amount of,

you know, I don't know, things that you do, you know, maybe you're really important and you you agree to sit on one board per year or you make two investments per year, having a rule sort of takes the willpower out of things. Yeah, you need controlled serendipity because people often argue, well, if I go complete Neil Stevenson and it's, you know, you can't contact me. I don't hear from you. I don't talk to the public or whatever.

If you're in more of a nonfiction role, you have more of a business aspect to your right business. Like, wait a second. I might get interesting ideas, meet interesting people or whatever, but controlled serendipity works great. And, you know, the two things I think work well for authors is A, have a no response expected incoming tip line has really been great for me. Articles, interviews, books you think I should know about my address I use is called

Interestine at CalNewport.com. It just says, it's not my name. That's crucial, right? Name gives someone, if it's Cal at calnewport.com, people think it's a person, why is this person ignoring me? If it's an abstract entity, they don't expect that. And I get fantastic links and interviews and books that I follow up on and learn a lot about it.

And I just say, I read these but I can't respond. And then the quota system is great. My only addition to that is the quota should be at a time scale maybe quarterly or monthly, right? Otherwise, you'll fill the whole quota in the first month. Like, if James was just saying, I'm going to do five talks a month, well, he would fill that by February. Sure. So it's like, yeah, I do, you know, I'm going to meet with a couple entrepreneurs a month. I'm going to do one coffee with a new person a month or whatever, you know. And it's great because a serendipity is great. I've met a lot of

interesting people, but yeah, take the willpower out of the equation. I love it. met a lot of interesting people, but yeah, take the willpower out of the equation. I love it. The other rule I'm having trouble figuring out how I want to slash enforce slash talk about, like I got a text, which I don't like, unsolicited texts from people that I don't know, but I got a text from a mutual friend

who was like, hey, I'm in town getting together with all these people. And it's like, I happen to know that like, you know, let's say three to four of the people on the 10 person list are all not vaccinated for, you know, deliberate reasons. So it's like, first off, I was probably not gonna go this random get together, you know, originally.

But now I'm definitely not going, right? I might as well just get COVID, you know, at home. Then go, then to go into this, you go into this infectious disease room. But I think the pandemic has also helped give me some clarity on who do I want to spend time with or not. I think some certain crises or situations, one of the upsides, downsides is that it reveals character. And I think it helps me get some insight as to like,

what people do I want to have in my life? What people do I not want to have in my life? Who am I on the same wavelength with? And who am I very far apart from the wavelength on? And that's given me some clarity, too. Well, yeah, like getting more serious about social connection, which again, is one of these things I think the pandemic helped underscore is that sociality is complicated and requires

time. And like one of the big ideas and sociality is that actually non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of someone else, I'm going to spend a lot of my time, I'm going to sacrifice a lot of time to come see you and come do something with you. Like really just help engender a sense of strong connection, connection activities that don't require a lot of effort or sacrifice, like just shooting off a, whatever text message or social media thing, does very little in terms of your brain

actually feeling socially connected, but that's a really limited pool of people, you know, to which you can actually sacrifice non-trivial time and attention. So if you work this all out, the like the optimization strategy for feeling connected is to have community federally connected in with a relatively constrained number of people that you're deeply involved with them and their lives is like actually the human optimal

strategy. And maybe the pandemic helped make that clear, like what you were missing and what wasn't helping because we all went through a period of like, what if we all just did the lightweight easy communication for a year? Oh yeah, that doesn't cut it, you know, I think it made that, it made that really clear. Or it's also the thing that's resetting. Well, it's also like social media allowed you to have connections with a huge group of people who you were maybe loosely affiliated with in career or lifestyle or industry or

you met at a conference or whatever. And then the events of the last year, politically, socially, public health was really helped to see who these people were, and whether they actually was a shared world view or priorities or principles. So I think the other thing that it's done is it's helped sort of generate kind of a friend purge or an acquaintance purge where it's like, look, I don't like hate this person, but like, I'm not like, it started because like,

hey, you got to keep this buffer to keep your kids and your family safe. But then it's also like life is too short to humor, you know, a person who's, let's say, full of some darkness that maybe you didn't know, or, you know, maybe operates under a certain set of priorities that you find to be repugment. Yeah, you got, you got a lot of clear, well, you got a lot of clear indications. I mean, basically also what social media gave us during the pandemic, it's basic pitch was like, do you worry that you don't spend enough time just yelling at people and being completely angry? We can help you.

If you, if you missed during the pandemic, what it feels like to, you know, be on a civil war battlefield and bayonet charging the, the enemy, if you've missed that in your life, we can, we can digitally recreate it. Which by the way leads me, here's my unrelated to email. But this is my big idea I'm just stating right now is that we're social media, it's dead. We just don't know it yet.

I mean, there's a lot of momentum going here, but there is a downslide happening in sort of digital culture that is now is not what I would agree with that. I looked at like, because as we're talking today, that Facebook upheld the ban against Trump, and so a bunch of right-wing people were like, you know, Facebook is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

but all that aside, what I thought was interesting is somebody posted in response to this idea that Facebook is bias against like conservatives or whatever. It was like here, the 10 most popular posts on Facebook right now. And it was like- From all Ben Shapiro probably. All Ben Shapiro, then some other right wing guy I didn't know about. You know, anyways, it was all right wing stuff, but not right wing, like, like center

right stuff, but like extreme right stuff, but not right when like, like, not like center-right stuff, but like extreme-right stuff, basically. And you're like, if this is the 10 most popular things on Facebook, Facebook essentially already is dead to 50% of the population, and it's just overrepresented and overly popular with, essentially, people are parents age. Well, yeah. Well, it's just like, and like Twitter, for example, is it's incredibly over representative of a very small, in a very small group of people, but those people happen to be on the other end of the journal list and people who have like large, you know, public. So it seems as if like Twitter is at the, but okay, so here's the foundation of my, my, my, my social, my social media is dead theory. So here's my, here's my

idea. So social media pivoted away from the original selling point, which was network effects, right? The people you know are on here. And this is an easier interface to connect with the people you know than to try to build your own blog or do this or that, right? It pivoted away from that between 2012 and 2014 to go towards the newsfeed model that Twitter

innovated and then Facebook followed, which is we will mine your connections, what you look at. Definitely. Yeah, the give you distraction. Like it's interesting, like really engaging content because we can mine this, socialization, digital socialization

moved increasingly to things like group chat and instant messenger tools like WhatsApp. Like actually, I don't need Facebook's interface to talk to someone. I'd rather just have them on a group chat, right? So now the network effects go away. It doesn't matter that my cousin is on Facebook or not. If the main reason I'm using it is because it selects

the Ben Shapiro article that thinks that he's gonna press my buttons in the moment. Right. Once that becomes its main selling point though, it's like we're offering you entertainment. Well, now you're competing against all the other sources of digital entertainment. And now you're competing against podcasts and now you're competing against all the other sources of digital entertainment. And now you're competing against podcasts

and now you're competing against the rise of the streamers and you're competing against audio books. It's such this really innovative, really high quality, long form, short form. Like all this interesting innovation is happening. And you go through something like the pandemic, and like actually the content that you're offering with your social media,

algorithmically is increasingly just leaning too much on either the absurd or the outrage. That's seeming lower and lower quality to me when I could listen to like a podcast conversation or go from Disney plus to peacock over to HBO Max. And all this stuff is so much more interesting and higher quality. I don't think they can win.

They at least they can't survive at that scale. At a sort of $500 billion scale, if that's their main play? Well, and I think about it, it's like, do you feel better after using it, yes or no? And I would say Instagram, I feel okay, but the other social networks, I'm very rarely ever thinking like, I'm so glad I did this. You know what I mean? It's not a pleasant experience.

So you're trapped in it in some way, just in the way that you're trapped, you know, you had to have cable because network television sucked or whatever, what you're somewhat trapped in it. But but I would agree that I guess it's really just a question of how long is the half-life of the decay? Yeah, well, and you don't need the scale anymore. They're losing that there's no more network effect advantage, right? So there's not a huge event. So Facebook has however many billion users or this or that to produce the content, but you could produce content that is as engaging without needing a billion users.

There once you lose the network effect advantage, now you have to compete against everyone else who is trying to produce interesting cuts. I didn't look at like TikTok came along. It was like, we didn't need the same user base. Okay, if this is the game we're playing, content algorithmically selected that is going to like press some buttons. And then also we're going to be very careful about doling out likes to you algorithmically. So you feel like you're always right on the brink of breaking out.

You know, we'll just distill that down to its essence. Who cares if your cousins on it, right? We'll just like purify that element and they're blowing up past those. So the competition becomes fierce when it's no longer everyone you know is on here and there's no way that you as a competitor can get nearly as many people on your platforms you won't be as valuable. So yeah, that's my theory. And then the pandemic reduced the quality of the content. People came out of doom scrolling on Twitter or fighting on Facebook from the pandemic feeling like, I just really I'm associating it

with negativity. I'd rather watch a daily stoic video and then an episode of the crown and then get inspired by listening to a Jaco podcast maybe instead of looking at an Instagram influence, fitness influence or right. I just think, I think it's dead, they just don't know it yet.

That's my theory. So I'm curious because it probably pertains to you professionally both as an academic and as a writer, when you start to have something like that, like you have a theory or you have an argument or a thesis. And I noticed this when I spend some time with Peter Teal as an investor, he's always kind of coming up with like a thesis or a, uh, uh, forget what what did he call it? You sort of have like an argument or a or a supposition about something. How do you then develop that? So like, how would this idea that social media is dead? They don't know yet. How does that turn into an article, a book, an academic paper, a talk, or even just like,

you know, one of the, I don't know, just a pillar of your worldview. How do you take a germ of an idea and develop it? Well, it's all I talk about it. That's my first step. So, like I'm talking about it with you, I'll talk about it on my own podcast. I've written about aspects of it. I bring it up in conversation. I talk about it. Talking about it forces you to structure your thoughts. The mental scheme is associated with the idea,

get more definition to them when they get more definition. It's easier to bring new information and put them on the schema. If it feels stable after a while, I'll usually pitch it as an article. So like, this is where I'm getting with this concept. Like, do I want to pitch this to the New Yorker, for example? Do I think it's there? Once you pitch it to a bigger venue, now that's going to require like a much more studious level of research to really bring in the pieces and then you see if it, if it's it's, you get buy-in from someone else, right? Yeah.

And each, you have to get buy-in at the dinner conversation. And then, but your friends could just be humoring you. And then to get it through your editor. Now you you not just have to it has to be more than compelling. You you have to be able to get past any reservations or debt. You have to win the argument with them because they usually sort of play the devil's advocate. Yeah, it has to be airtight then right like if you're going to publish it. If it's going to be like a New York Times op-ed, a

wired op-ed, New Yorker, like these are various places like outlet ideas, it's got to be airtight. Like you can't actually have an aspect whether that doesn't really make sense, and it doesn't really explain this. It immediately falls apart. Now, I'm used to this a little bit because that's what it's like doing the academic work I do. So, you know, I do math proofs as an academic. That whole game is you work over a long period of time

until the thing works. And it's interesting, it's a good result in all the pieces fit. So I'm very used to, like, this doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. I'm filling in the pieces, trying to make it work, bringing together the pieces. I'm used to that from mathematics.

But you can bring that over to ideas. But I emphasize this to people a lot. Don't underestimate the amount of time, like professional idea people spend thinking about those ideas. It's a lot, a lot of time. You have to think about it like an athlete doing their off-season training. I mean, for someone like me and I'm sure for someone like you, I'm constantly have to be thinking about ideas. I mean, it's hours a day, walking, sitting, reading, like constantly taking notes, thinking, taking notes, thinking, you can't get away from. And this was this article I wrote, my blog posted, thinking, taking notes, thinking, you can't get away from. And this article I wrote,

my blog post, it was somewhat controversial recently, called in defense of thinking. And I was basically arguing, we talk about writing, we put too much emphasis on the act of writing. It's all about getting in your writers' hours, you got to sit down and write

your crappy first draft. And like, you're really, this undersells the amount of time you have to spend thinking about something before it's probably even ready for that. You can't just sit down and write on a blank page, but you might take 50 hours of thinking about something before you're really ready to start trying to craft it into a written form. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. That's totally right. I never start on a book until I've cracked it. Like I have to know what it is. I have to understand the idea. Like right now, I know what my next book will be about sort of vaguely. Like I already sold that I know that the general, this is probably the vagus I've ever been on a book that I've sold. I know that I know the bucket, I could give you the word that it's about, but I don't actually know what my argument is yet. I have nerve, you probably feel nervous right now about knowing you that does that make you a little uneasy because there. Yes, it's not in the place yet. Yeah. Yes, I've it's a, you know, Keith talks about negative capability, the ability to sort of have uncertainty or contradiction in your brain. To me, this is the least comfortable

part of the project because like, not only do I know vaguely what it's going to be about, but I haven't solved it, I have in my head the day that I want to start. I want to start it on June 16th, which will be my birthday, because that's when I started the last one. And so it's like, I can kind of, it's like, I know when the plane is going to have to take off, because I can see the end of the runway, but I haven't gotten up to the ground speed yet. And so I trust the process.

I know that it'll happen, but it's nowhere near happening yet. What's the process? What's going to happen between now and June 16th? Right now, I'm doing my note cards. One, I'm still reading widely, but I'm just starting to go through what I've read, organizing the notes. I probably went through and sorted about, you know, 500 note cards this morning. So I have a huge box of the material on June 16th to go to your point. I probably won't start writing,

but I will lay out all my material on June 16th and go, this is my first day at work, you know, on this project, where am I starting to see patterns? So I'll start, I'll start in earnest really trying to crack it. But I talked to so many authors who have just, they haven't figured out where they're going and how they're going to get there. And then they think sitting down and writing is where to get that is how you get there. And it never happens. There's this great quote from Marcus Realis that I think to me is, he says like,

he says, if somebody asks you what you're thinking about, you should be able to answer. Like, you should be able to describe, so I think there's obviously a period where it's kind of just vague and ill-defined in your head, but as you're working towards the start date of a project, you know, going out for investments or pitching or whatever, you know, the sort of shit date is on your

thing, you have to be able to go like, this is what it is in clear, defined language, and here's how here's the eloquent solution or the elegant solution that you've come up for. It can't be like Lucy Goosey, like you got to know. Yeah, and that takes time and it feels distinctive. I mean, so this is what I got yelled at a little bit about. So I write that piece and a lot of people are like, no, no, no, that's the best way to work out your thoughts

is you got to write it down. It's all about because the premise of this piece is I used to go to these dissertation boot camps earlier in my academic career where I'd give advice to grad students who are working under dissertations. And I kept noticing that all the advice was about get in your writing hours, you got a write, you got a write every day, and I'm thinking,

these are academic dissertations. The writing, you know, that's in some sense, the craft at the end. You have to do the easiest part. The easiest part. The easiest part. No way. A lot of people would offend you. Yeah, and I didn't say this in the article. And I'll say it now.

This is maybe a little bit glib, but I'm like, it's almost like you're looking at training wheels. You're a big training wheel proponent on your bike. And you're like, yeah, you got up training wheels. That's how you bike without falling down. At some point, you have to say like, yeah, but if you want to be a professional bicyclist, you got to learn how to do it without the training wheels. It's like really slowing you down. And so it's an interesting point. I think we don't think enough about thinking was what it ultimately came along with.

There's like someone who's a professional thinker, all of this stuff comes into play. I really think about how and when I think. And this is a big part of my life. But for a lot of people that you're sort of doing some tangential thinking, we have no structure around it. You know, it's just like, I guess I need to write. I need to do 1,000 words a day. Nothing makes me more distressed.

And when I hear about a first time author talking about, yeah, man, that last two months before the deadline was terrible because I had the right eight hours a day to get this book done. I'm like, you didn't do any thinking. You planned poorly. Yeah, you planned it.

I'm glad you guys poorly. Yeah, you, you, you, this sort of taking you, it takes me usually on average about a year to get a book idea ready, just a sell. No, you can, you can write, I wrote the obstacle is the way in less than six months. I wrote this, the book that I is, is at the publisher now in, you know, wrote, wrote it in less than six months, but there was six months of thinking beforehand, and then, however many years of sort of marinating before, and then there was six months of refining and polishing and fixing, which goes on now.

But the actual sort of core, getting the idea down on paper, that's in some ways the easiest part if you've done the other hard part beforehand, and people don't do that. Or it's a separate hard. There's a writing craft hard. It's like a craft.

I know how to whittle wood. I know how to shape sentences. I know about rhythm and repetition. Great. But that's like a completely orthogonal skill. There's a lot of great writers who have never had an original idea in their life. There's a lot of people with original ideas who can't write it. Yeah, my wife would say like the time when I'm most testy and miserable is when I'm like halfway

done with a book proposal. I feel I'm getting like the pieces are there and they're not clicking. And for me, it creates cognitively a real feeling of distress. You know, I have these pieces, but I can't quite fit them. It really makes me feel physiologically not good. No, I know the exact feeling. I've described it. It doesn't happen as much anymore, but do you remember like you would have your laptop and you'd shut your laptop and instead of going to sleep, you'd come back like three

or four hours later and it would be like so hot. Like it hadn't turned itself off because something was operating in the background. It just didn't quite like click into like restorative mode. That's what to me sort of the gestation period of an idea is. Like you, you're not thinking about it, but you really are thinking about it because something isn't connecting, and your mind is just churning in the background all the time. And so, yeah, to me, you have to, obviously, you can't be a perfectionist, you have to be comfortable with some certain

to some stuff you're going to figure out as you go. But like, I always say, like, don't start until you figured it out. Like, you have to have cracked what it is that you're doing. Otherwise, you're gonna end up doing a lot of work and spending a lot of time that's ultimately gonna turn out to have been for the wrong thing or in the wrong direction. Yeah, you're gonna go in a random direction. Yeah, cracking is the key.

And then your taste just gets better, right? So if you've read more, you've written more, your taste gets better. So now my wife knows like when I'm working on a big article, it'll be really clear. Like I don't have it, I don't have it, I don't have it. And then I'll say, okay, I've cracked it. And then like almost always, I will then four hours later have finished a draft and it's liked by the editor, right?

Over time you develop this sense of like it's not there, it's not there. And it's like super crystal clear. You know, it's like, nope, nope, nope, yep. All right, we're good. And you move on. And that's just, I guess that's just built through. But anyways, this is a diversion, obviously, for me, email. But I think it is interesting because there's

a general point here that I'm fascinated by, which is just the intellectual life in general is one that is completely underdeveloped in terms of our understanding of it in our culture. And it shouldn't be. So all of these type of things, thinking, gestation, cracking ideas, finding internal schematic fits of mental concepts, like all of these things, we don't have any good vocabulary for it. And we're reduced down to like, you know, I don't know,

write a crappy first draft, ship, put in your writing hours, you know, I don't know, we don't have much, we just don't have the vocabulary. And it's working. We leave it along the table. It's interesting because we both like sports and we both done a little bit of work in sports. Like you sort of, you go into these locker rooms or these front offices and it's like they know how to shape and optimize and get the most out of athletes. Are there people that fall through the cracks? Sure, but like they can take an overweight, you know, aging star, they can take a raw college recruit, they can take a, a small forward from college basketball and turn them into an NFL

tight end. You put them in the system, they know what gets the most out of performance. And intellectual life, because I think two things, it's primarily a solitary pursuit, but secondarily, the money's not there. It's not as big of a business or an industry. There's not as much writing on it, and there's not a lot of one, there's not enough competition where you can judge results. But it's always been interesting to me at how poorly sort of writer or artist athletes managed to get the most out of their talents. But I also think it's interesting that, like, say, publishers or movie studios

or art galleries or whatever, the institutions that benefit from that product, how poor they are at shaping and optimizing talent. Every sports team has a high performance psychologist that helps get the most out of their athletes. And you know, you talk to a publisher that got all these athletes and they're just like, I don't know, come back with a book.

We hope you can do it. It's interesting, the idea that talent is not enough. It has to be shaped and optimized, distractions have to be eliminated. Performance has to be enabled to get the best on field product. That was helpful for me to understand. This shit doesn't just happen.

Yeah, but it is really interesting that we don't do more of that in intellectual fields. And that's actually one of the ideas in the new book, which is an idea that I think was new. It's like a scoop, right? I don't think it was an idea that I was out there before is I looked at knowledge work in particular. So office work, it's mainly brain based. And the big point I argued is like there was this moment when knowledge work became a thing when office style work, not just in support of a factory, but companies that primarily the value they produce was knowledge base. That began growing, especially in the American context in the 1950s, and then became a dominant aspect of our economy since then. The guy who coined

a term, Peter Drucker, who coined a term in the 1950s knowledge work, and really helped everyone understand what it was and how it differed. He had this agenda of autonomy that really permeates all of his work and now completely permeates the way we think about intellectual work, which is it is up to the worker to figure out how to do their things, how to get their work done. And it came from a really good place, right? He had been working doing a wrote a real famous book of management theory book about GM before he came to knowledge working actually, he actually invented management theory. It's not just he wrote a management theory book, this book actually invented the idea that you can study management. I'm saying he's really clued in on what the industrial world was about,

and it's all about assembly line processes, right? It was making this really big point, which was very relevant in the 1950s, hey, this new type of work, like the guys on Madison Avenue riding the ad copy, the Don Draper guys, you can't break that down into assembly line steps, right? You can't do what you would do in the factory, which was have a small number of managers figure out the optimal process

and then assign those pieces to basically unskilled workers to execute something to Harry Braverman called deskilling. Oh, it's not going to work for Don Draper. It's creative, it's ambiguous. You got to just leave people alone to figure out how to execute it. And that was a big idea at the time, because managers at that point were used to thinking, what's the optimal seven steps?

And then we should plug people in. We took that too far, though, right? And we, autonomy became gospel in a lot of cognitive work. That all aspects of the work is up to the individual. That's why if you go into a modern office, they say, yeah, it's management by objectives, which is what Peter Drucker's called this. We will make it clear what you're supposed to do.

Here's your wildly audacious goal. Here's your OKR. Go do it. We won't get in your ways of how to do it. That autonomy I think has been a curse because when you leave it just up the individuals to figure out everything about their work, how they organize their work, how they train, when they work, you leave it all up to the individuals, you're never going to get the same innovation that you get when you have

an organization thinking about it. Like an MBA team, like we both done work for MBA teams, the reason why they're so good at optimizing athletes is because the organization, the league as a whole, the organizations as a whole have been really focused on what can we do to make the athletes better. If it had been entirely left up to the athlete, like, look, LeBron, here's your OKR. Try to score a lot of baskets, but otherwise, it's up to you. We're not going to get into, we're not going to get into like how you train and how you eat or whatever. Like that's not for us to tell the athletes how to do. You'd have a lot of overweight athletes out there that you know.

No, it's so funny you bring this up because you're right. Not only do they have a sense of how it works for the athlete, but they have a sense of how it works for the team and for the league. And I think I would argue that two you know, two institutions, two organizations that have dealt with the pandemic quite well have been the NBA and the NFL, right? And I on Sunday night, I went to a Spurs game. I've been vaccinated and I happen to know RC Buford, who's the GM of the Spurs, a great dude. It was amazing, you know, having seen the pandemic mismanaged essentially at every level in Texas to pull up at a stadium, everyone's wearing masks, they tested me on the way in,

gave me a thing, I sat in a section where there was no one around me and you weren't allowed to eat or drink nearby. And it was like, oh, they figured out a system. And the system is based on the information, on the facts, on trying to get to an outcome. But the way the spurs is doing, it fits inside the way the NBA is doing it, which is also the way that they're trying to get the most out of the athletes.

I think I benefited, another way this benefited me in my life is like being a research assistant before I was an author, I learned a system. Now, I probably, if I'm being honest, there's nothing magical about the system that I learned from Robert Green. It's that I didn't make it up myself. It's that he was like, here's how a book is made.

Here's how a writer does what they do. Interesting. And because I was following a system, it was, I've adapted myself to the system and, and it's pulled, you know, product out of me as opposed to me reverting to whatever, like the lowest, my lowest impulse or drive is. You know what I mean? I think systems allow us to make good decisions. Yeah, apprenticeship.

I mean, and Green talks about that in mastery, right? Like there is an apprenticeship phase that happens whenever you're gonna see someone who ends up a master at something for, I mean, you can invent it from scratch, but often that's not the way to do it. Yeah, which I mean, I guess the lesson is you have to find a way to induce an apprenticeship

and whatever you're doing because there's probably not going to be a formal system. I mean, I'm often surprised by how much of my audience coming to me for, let's say, advice on basic productivity things. How do I just keep track of what's on my plate and manage my time or this or that? I'm thinking these employers are paying you a lot of money. They're paying you a lot of money and they're getting getting a fraction of the value out of you. This is crazy that you have to come to my podcast, or something like this to figure out that maybe you shouldn't just open up your email inbox and rock and roll

and see what happens. Basic ideas about weekly planning and daily planning, quarterly planning and capture an organization. To me, why is this not, okay, you're being taught this, why you're like a apprentice, like when you, when you first get in, I agree, why are not publishers? Publishers are the ultimate autonomy engines, right? It's like, I don't know. We just like have these authors write. And it's great.

But there's like, here's a large advance. Yeah, hold on. Please come back here. Please come back in seven to nine months with something that's almost good enough to put out in the world and will make us back our investment many times over. Right. It's a good, a good, a good solution.

Probably won't work, but we hope enough works that it works out, you know? Yeah. And now again, I think it's good for like you and I because we have systems we've trained work from that sort of like professional writer class that's like, you know, you got to get after it like writers write, you got to be highly structured, you got to move. It's good for us because so many other people fall apart, you know, like because of all this, but it shouldn't be so good for us, right? It should be if I'm investing in an author, it should be, yeah, okay.

First of all, we've got you a space to work. We have you in mentor where every day, you know, every week for the next month, we're going to sit you down with like a great writer in your genre who's very successful, who's under our same imprint or this or that. And you're going to sit and kind of learn at their feet. Like all of that should be involved. I think it's why a lot of really successful general nonfiction comes out of journalists because they have training, right? They go through a much more systematic training. It's a job too. Yeah, it's like you get Robert Cara while he, you know, all the writing and he learned how to do investigative reporting for Newsday or saying with McCola or same with Isaac Stanley, you get people that had come out of a time-limited, high-standard,

with specific work structure type writing, and now when they get the right nonfiction books, they can write them like Isaacson in his spare time and, you know, with national book awards type thing. So, yeah, it's crazy. I don't know why we don't, when it comes to cognitive work. And again, we would never put up with this in an athletic situation.

We're the military. Can you imagine? They're just like, oh, athletic situation. Or the military, can you imagine? They're just like, oh, you've been in the military awhile, you can be a general. No, you have to go to, you have to go to officer training. Then you have to do postdoc work. Then you have to have a rotating series of jobs that expose you to different things.

You have to have a certain amount of time in. It's a system that, that that doesn't always work and certainly mediocre people make their way up through the ranks, but it does for the most part eliminate the people who are utterly unprepared. And it takes the people like you and I, if we were to go through some sort of writing system, it would only add to the original capital that we're bringing to the equation. It would just hone our natural abilities. And so, yeah, that's something I'm trying to think about now that I have a decent amount of people working for me. It's like, how do you, how do I get the most out of these people instead of just assuming they are going to produce the work that I

want to see at the level that I would expect myself to produce. Which comes back to one of the ideas from the book, which is, okay, one aspect where you can be useful if you're managing people is to say, let's actually be crystal clear about what are the things we do, and I call them processes, so you can use whatever words you want, but these are the things like you do,

or we do as organization or a team like again and again, right? This is what kind of like makes up your job and our work. Let's actually think about each of these things and say, how do we want to implement it? And like part of figuring out how to implement it is how do we want to keep track of the information relevant to this? How do we want to communicate about this thing? Like how is the collaboration going to happen? Where are we going to store things?

Answering those questions is like a small example, but answering those questions about the processes you come back to again and again can exponentially make the work more effective. Because when you don't answer those questions, you fall back on defaults. Defaults are often lowest common denominator. And in the world of work, for example, the default is often just, we'll just rock and roll and slack or we'll rock and roll an email and kind of figure things out on the fly, which is a cognitive disaster. It's a terrible way to try to organize brains to actually produce value in a systematic

manner, right? And so that's one step is let's actually write down all the things we're doing is like the case studies in the book, how do we want to do these things? How do we communicate? How do we collaborate? It's like a step in the right direction of like, let's be clear about how we, how we're actually going to work in a way that's going to be best for you. It's not going to burn you out.

You're going to produce better work. You're going to work in a way that's going to be best for you. It's not going to burn you out. You're going to produce better work. You're going to be more proud. It's going to be less ambiguous. I think at least that is a first step you can do if you're running something. With the other thing, I think about that I've started to ask more often is like and this is this came from having some people who burned out or didn't succeed or sort of problems that festered too long. It's like I want to check in on a regular basis and go like, what is not working? Like, what is taking up an inordinate amount of your time? Because invariably, it's something that is actually not important to me either.

Right? So it's like, hey, I'm spending all of my time doing, you know, having to respond to this person over here. And it's like, don't ever talk to that person again. Like they're not important at all, right? Like, like, you can just, I can cut that gourdian knot right here. Or, you know, hey, you know, formatting things this way takes, like, we're just looking at something on Daily Stoke, where the, the, we have like a membership program called Daily Stoke Life. And we were looking at the back end, like 80% of the customer service requests

have to do with people paying via PayPal, right? And because if it comes via PayPal, then everything has to be done manually. Well, so this was not brought to my attention until recently. But then my first question was, well, what percentage of the orders is PayPal responsible for? And it's like 5% or something. So it's like, if you tell me I could get rid of 80% of our problems for a trading 5% of revenue,

I mean, I'm going to take that any day, right? And so I think one of the things that good managers do is not just like, hey, I'm going to set up the system, but I'm also going to be fine tuning the system. And my job as the manager is to reduce friction for the knowledge workers as much as possible. This is why, why do you think that NBA teams travel in a private jet? It's not because, it was because they used to travel commercially and it was causing the following problems and they did the math and said, hey, for a 20% increase in our travel budget,

we can address the following problems and it's also a perk, so on and so forth. But how do we eliminate friction so we get more out of the things we're already paying for? Yeah, but sometimes it's a elimination. Like, okay, we don't take PayPal anymore, right? Yes. Or this client is just terrible. Which is don't that's the Tim Ferriss thing, right? It's the same as story. Like I'm firing this client. Like is this person is terrible? Yeah, or do you put in a system that has more cost, whatever that means, it might not be monetary?

Like another example of this is a client communication within companies. Like one example I like was the particular story was the clients were just all the time, texturing this particular company, and they were using Slack and the clients wanted them to be on their private Slack channels. Their solution was they deployed in desperation, by the way. It was like, we might go out of business.

We don't know it's gonna work, but we can't do what we're doing anymore. It was, now here's how it works. We have a weekly call. And on that weekly call, we'll give you updates, you ask any questions, and we will commit the writing to everything we said, and everything we said we were gonna do,

we'll write it down and send it to you, right? So we will get in front of what the real issue here was, which was accountability, like the client, like, are you gonna do this? Did you do this? I don't wanna have to think about this. So I have to wait for you to respond, so I know you know about it.

It got rid of that issue. Like, okay, we have this document, you guys are held to it. And all of this constant back and forth slack, hectorine. Now it's an hour once a week. And like, everything gets discussed, it gets written down, that gets sent to it. The whole team's on the call, they make their, you know, whatever, and like they're done communicating with that client. So yeah, it's another example because they lost two engineers at this company due to

burnout entirely induced by the slack barrage from clients. What about this? What's going on here? What's going on here? It's more of a cost. It's annoying for the client a little bit more overhead. They have to actually have the client sign a contract.

This is how we will communicate. And so there was a psychological cost that they were worried about what was going to happen, but the benefits were so massive. And like, the other engineers just work. It cuts both directions, too, right? As a manager, you have to manage down, figure out how to eliminate friction, blah, blah, blah. It would be nice if your manager or the people that you work for your clients were doing the same, but it's not how it works.

You also have to manage up and you have to say, hey, when you just call me out of the blue 16 times a day, it knocks me off my rhythm all the time. Or, you know, you have to say, hey, when you just call me out of the blue 16 times a day, it knocks me off my rhythm all the time. Or you have to say, hey, I don't answer emails on the weekend. Or hey, set up a system where you are, unfortunately, you have to manage yourself. You have to manage the person managing you to make sure they don't burn you out, barrage you, eat up your deep work time, whatever, you have to figure that out also. Yeah, and sometimes you have to earn it. So there's that notion of you can trade accountability for accessibility.

And Adam Grant uses the term, idiose secrecy credits for this. But I think that more is like performance credits. Like basically, hey, if you can deliver, you can be in a lot of autonomy. Yeah. You're like, okay, yeah. You know, yeah, I'm not that responsive. I only, I have office hours. I don't answer emails all the time, but like I ship stuff that's really great. You get away with it. If the reason why they're hectoring you all the time is because you keep dropping the ball. I said, number one thing I tell the new people, like young people I talk to, they're like, I have my first

job and I'm on advice. I was like, I have my first job and I want advice. I was like, you can't ever drop the ball on something. It's just, you have to say this is not an option. If something comes onto my radar, it could never be an option that I just like, I'm just gonna let that one go. Because I like, everything will fall apart if that's who you are.

You're gonna be constantly bothered by the people above you because they don't trust you to get things done. You will never build a foundation on which you can take a next step up. So you should put all of your energy, reading David Allen, like reading me, like figuring out everything you can to make sure you have very good full capture and organization systems that you're diligently reviewing, nothing gets forgotten. Even if you can't do it all, you're the one who says, I know about this, I know I committed to this, I can't get it done by Wednesday, I'm sorry,

here's why, here's my new deadline, but everyone around you trust that you will never forget something that they put on your plate. It's like the number one thing you can do in your first, you know, two years of employment, it's gonna earn you the ability now going forward to start crafting your job more and more towards what you're like. So that's like my number one advice

refused to ever drop a ball. The matter of the way. The wicked feedback loop on incompetence is that you then get ridden even harder and you have even less time to dig yourself out of this. You know what I mean? Like now your judgment's being questioned. Now you're under more scrutiny.

You know, now the like the the the the people that have worked for me or worked with me that I feel like have their shit together to make good judgment calls that that that are accountable that the give it to me straight. I'm like, I don't care if we ever talk, just deliver the results, right? Yeah. And it's the one who has shattered the suspension of, like especially with work from home stuff where it's like, there's a certain suspension of disbelief in tail. Like, I'm going to assume you're working all the time, but really all I care about is

the results. I don't want to see how the sausage gets made, but I'm going to eat it, right? But if you break that faith, if you get caught not working or you make a lot of mistakes or you show, if you get a call and they go, Hey, what's going on with this? And you're not only can you not say, here's what's going on, you could be like, wait, what was that again? You know, now you're, now you're an aspiring, that it's very hard to pull out from,

because you don't have the slack you need to write the ship. I mean, I tell people, here's a hack. Like one of the things you should do early on in a new job is say, great, I will get this to you on Wednesday. And then whether or not you have time to get that done by Wednesday or not, write them on Tuesday afternoon and say, you know, like Ryan, I'm sorry, so I just get this you Wednesday. The sketch got a little tight, so it'll it's going to be Friday more and I apologize and then and deliver on Friday morning. Even if you could have delivered it on Wednesday, right? Because it shows that you are on top

of your stuff. Yes. Right. Like it's more important that people realize like Cal is on top of your stuff, right? Like, it's more important that people realize, like, Cal is on top of his stuff. He knows what's on his plate. He sees the whole picture. He's not gonna forget things. He's organized.

Oh, I don't care. If, yeah, sometimes that gets overloaded and he has to shift, you know, when he delivers, that's not the problem. It's the fact that he's organized. And there's no way, more clear a way to show that you have your act together than to say, commit to something and then come back and say, like, I know I committed to this, but I'm going to have to

shift it by two days or like by 48 hours and then hitting that new mark because no one would ever say that unless they were actually incredibly organized about what's do when am I going to be able to actually make it, you know. Again, there's a whole thing, but there's so many people who do this. There's self awareness there. There's self ownership. There's responsibility. There's self-awareness there. There's self-ownership. There's responsibility. There's street forwardness. And to me, the opposite of that, what's like the death sentence is when,

you know, they're like, hey, I'm going to get this to you by Friday. And then you're like, okay, cool. I'll see you Friday or whatever. And then like Thursday night, you know, you hear, what was the password again? You know, and then you're like, I, you haven't touched it. And now there's problems. Now you need help, but you have just, you have just shown me or whoever you're working for that you're not only not on top of it. You don't feel obligated to be on top of it. And the worst is if you then try to add an excuse there to, to, to, to, if you then try to diminish the importance of the thing, so it's not such a big deal that you can get it done. Yeah, now you're into, on my podcast,

I use this phrase facing the productivity dragon. Like it's better to just, you can see, here's what's on my plate, and if it's terrible, it's terrible. And you see the exact extent of the terribleness. This is, look at all these things I'm committed to when they're done. I can't make these pieces work.

This is on way over committed, but you see the whole thing. You see the whole dragon. Don't avoid the dragon. You're going to be much better off because now you can make it plan. I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to get rid of this. I'm going to have to lay this. I'm going to have to tell them I can't do this. I can get this done really well.

But a lot of times I think when we get overloaded, we flee. We flee it and say, I'm just going to just respond to emails. I can't, but you've got to face the productivity dragon at some point and then say, okay'm just going to just respond to emails. You know, I can't, I'm just, but you got to face the productivity dragon at some point and then say, okay, this is what it looks like. Let me figure out where I'm going to stab the lance. Like, you know, it's a terrible battle I have to do, but at least I want to come into it with my eyes open, like see what I'm actually fighting.

So yeah, but I don't know quite how we got here, but I think it's, I think it's, though, yeah. I think it's a great place to wrap up, because I think it's the thing that people struggle with. They think it's about getting your dream job, finding your passion or whatever, and all that's important. But if you can't deliver, like if you get drafted, you're playing professional sports, and then you can't figure out how to deal with the pressure, how to be in charge of your training, how to communicate, how to learn the playbook, like you're just, you're not going to make it because the stakes are too high. The competition is too stiff. You have to go, all right, I am way in it. And I'm going to figure out a way to survive. What you can't, what you can't

fall prey to in this, what most people do is magical thinking or entitlement because both those things will kill you. And just a, and we're wrapping up, it's like a quick example of that from our lives is like think about writing. And I don't know about you, but for me, it was like a big goal I had early on in my career is I want to write like best-selling hardcover idea books, right? But it can't just jump into that. Like it's probably not going to work out that way, right?

So you got to get your foot in the door where you can build your skills, earn it, move it up. So for me, where could I get my foot in the door, student books, because I was a student at the time, built my craft on the student books, built up from there to be able to make that jump. You did something similar like your first book, because it was based on your life memoir. Okay, that was a book you could get in the door with, because you're like, okay, it makes sense for you to write that, because it's about you and you had an interesting life. And then I know you did like the growth packing. I was like an ebook skill building, right? And you trained under all this under green and in Ferris and other people and you really saw

how it worked. And then you built your skills earned more and more. And then it was time to like, okay, jump in the obstacle, you know, and just like when I made the jump towards like so good and deep work. So I think there's like a nice thing to pull out of there is yeah, it's not about what's my dream job? How do I get it? It's like, how do I get started? And really systematically with systems, building skills, being responsible, being good, figuring out how to get better, ratcheting up, ratcheting up, ratcheting it up until you get to a level where now you can actually reach whatever that window is you're trying to get through. And then you make the aggressive jump.

Well, Mark Marin talks about this, I think, because you're point about performance credits to tie this back. He's like, once you've made people money, once you've made other people money, then you have that autonomy, right? And a lot of people just think, well, I have this great idea. I'm brilliant. I'm special. This is important to the world.

And it's like, no, no, no, you got to fill somebody's bank account first before they're going to give you, so some people go like, they get upset that I wrote these other books first or whatever. It's like, the other books would not exist if I hadn't laid the groundwork here. Not only would they not exist because I wouldn't be a good enough writer, but like nobody was giving out stillicism book deals in 2012. You know, it just wasn't happening. And so yeah, you've got to make someone else money,

you've got to prove yourself first. And yeah, if you want to say, hey, I'm Cal Newport, I have a flip phone, and I don't answer email, I don't have social media, that's an autonomy that comes from having earned the ability to write your own ticket. Yeah, yeah, sold the books, made the money, built the skills, yeah. And there you go. So, yeah, you got to, you have the humility to like build the skills, but then the other

side of it is, once you have an opportunity, you also have to be aggressive about it. And I think that's the other hard. I called it the autonomy traps in that old 2012 book. It's the dichotomy. It's like if you jump too soon, you're never going to make it to the window. But as you build the skills, if you don't make the jump once you get high enough, you're never going to get through it either.

And I don't know why jumping through a window is my metaphor here. Like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't analogize. It doesn't analogize to the window. And someone who's jumped out of the window to left the corporate world, there's an optimal point probably before you have kids,

before you're married, before you're too old, before your taste or too expensive, where you wanna be able to say like, hey, I wanna work from home or, hey, I'm gonna, I'll continue programming for you Google, but I'm gonna be doing it on a sailboat around the world. You have to be able, that's a risk, and you have to be at a place in your life

where you're willing to hear, no, you're fired, or that's not going to work. Like, you have to be, it's a risk, right? It has to be very confident. Yeah, and at the same time, you have to have the humility of, like, I'm not there yet. And it's incredibly, this is not very satisfying, but it's incredibly hard.

And like, that's actually, it's why I criticized back in that book, this courage culture that was really big back then, where it's all about like, do you have the courage to follow your dreams or not? I was like, that's too simplistic. It's not just about what mattered was, I had the courage to go do something.

It was like, I had the diligence to build the skill to make that possible. Plus, once I got to that point, having the courage to say, I'm close enough, let's make the jump. And both of those things are hard and so easy to just, this is the, I call it the lawyer trap, right? Like lawyers, they get better and better and better, but there's, they have no way of leveraging that skill to make their life radically better. And so their, their life just gets harder and harder and harder. And you're like, the leverage is the operative word there. You have to

have courage and leverage. Yeah. So build leverage the leverage is the operative word there. You have to have courage and leverage. Yeah. So build leverage and then have the courage to use it. But you also have the insight to know when you can use it. And it's not always obvious. I guess that's why I wrote a whole book on it. But that's the way we should be talking about this problem. Because if we just focus on the courage, then people are going to randomly be doing it. And if we just focus on like put your head down and grind,

skill building, you know, you're going to end up well paid, but overworked and miserable at some point because you never took control of your career. That's sweet spots the whole game, I guess, you know. And it's hard, but I guess it should be hard because otherwise, you know, it would be way more common, I guess, so if you're willing to study that balance, you have a much better shot of making something cool happen.

I love it, I love the new book. I think you have the most appearances on the podcast, so we'll have to keep the street going soon enough. Talk soon. All right, see you around. The Daily Stoic is today's Amazon Gold Box deal of the day. For one day, only the e-book is just 399 on Amazon.

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