The Daily Stoic - Slow Productivity and Anticipating Consequences | Cal Newport PT 1

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

In the first half of this two-part conversation, Ryan talks with computer science professor and bestselling author, Cal Newport. They discuss the facade of hustle culture, understanding what really moves the needle in your process, Cal’s latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and more. Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general-audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. He is the author of eight books, including Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. Newport is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast.Watch or listen to Cal’s podcast, Deep Questions.Subscribe to Cal’s newsletter, here. Listen to Cal’s take in The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide To Being Rich, Free, and Happy. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. Setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on,

something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you're happening to be doing. So let's get into it. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I have this very distinct memory. This would have been late 2014, early 2015. I just moved to Austin. I'd finished the obstacles away. I was living in East

Austin and I was a fan of this guy whose blog I'd read for a long time and I got his phone number from a mutual friend and I said, Hey, can I ask you some advice? And it turned out he was a fan of me and I so I said, hey, would you mind hopping on the phone? I thought we'd kick something around with you. And he was like, I had some questions for you. Anyways, I remember I went for a walk in Boggy Creek Park over in East Austin. And I must have walked maybe an hour or so.

And I got on the phone with this guy named Cal Newport. And we were both young. I think we'd both done one or two books at this time. We could have maybe seen each other as rivals. We could have been threatened by each other. But I just remember the generosity that he took the time to kick things around on the phone with me. And I was probably just thinking out loud. I don't remember really anything that came from the conversation. But whenever I think of ego as the enemy, I think of that conversation. It was instrumental as I got ready to start that book. It's flash forward now, basically 10 years later. I've become friends with Cal.

I've talked to him a bunch. His books have gone on to sell millions and millions of copies. My books have sold millions of copies. And, you know, we're peers who root for each other who help each other I remember I was I gave a talk in Abu Dhabi maybe five six years ago and Was talking to this chic a very high up in the government

And he was like, oh, you're from America. You write books. He was like, do you know Cal Newport? And he takes me over to this nook in his office that has no windows, like very little light. And it's like his deep work nook. That's where he goes and just thinks, has his best ideas all influenced by Cal's book, Deep Work. I had a US senator show me a very similar room, not that long ago, and then Cal came out to the bookstore

to do the podcast, he's on tour for his incredible new book, Slow Productivity, which I absolutely loved. The subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And by the way, some great stories in this book about John McPhee, who is one of my all-time favorite authors. My wife's been reading his book on oranges lately. As it happens, I used levels of the game in The Obstacle is the way. I used it again in Stillness. I used it at Trunk of Ed and Discipline as Destiny as well.

Sorry, I lost my train of thought. But what was cool is Cal and I were walking around the bookstore. My sister is in town visiting and she walks up and she says, oh my god, you're Cal Newport. I gotta tell you, we do all this stuff at my job based on your stuff. So anyways, it was just all a very, very, very full circle thing. I'm a huge fan of Cal Newport's books. Every single thing that he writes, I read, I've had him on the podcast a bunch of times, and he did an awesome deep dive in the wealthy St stoic challenge we did. Again, it's a different understanding of money and wealth.

It's not a get rich quick thing. I think it's one of the best challenges we did. You can check that out. I'll link to that in the show notes. But Cal's one of my absolute favorite people to talk to. And we talk a lot about the themes in my work, a lot about the themes in his book. And it's just an awesome conversation.

And I think you're really gonna like it. Cal is not just a thinker, he's a doer, he's a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is a leading scholar on distributed systems. He writes for The New Yorker, he's written eight books, he's got young kids, and just one of my favorite people, and I'm very excited to bring you this conversation,

I would tell you to check him out on social media, but he practices what he preaches and doesn't use it. But you can check out his Deep Questions podcast, which is wonderful. And I'll link to that in today's show notes. If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks.

And stillness is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of wellbeing titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you. Discover stories to inspire sounds to soothe

and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your wellbeing journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. There's a Latin expression you probably know it. You know, Festino Lente? Yeah, I wrote about it. Is it in the book? I don't know if it's in the book.

I wrote an essay about it that someone sent it to me. This is very Ryan Holiday. What's the Emperor Hadrian's favorite expression? I looked up all the different extant artwork. Yeah. The Festive Lente artwork, all the different diagrams, the pictures that people would use for it. Means make haste slowly.

I thought that's the essence of the idea of slow productivity, which is that sometimes rushing is the slowest way to do it and sometimes going slowly is the fastest way to do it. Yes, exactly. See, I think I came across it after I wrote the book. Oh, really? Yeah. So I was like, this is it. Yeah.

This is it. I was like, man, we could have had this right up front. I could have been talking about Hadrian. It'd be great. Yes. Well, no, you think that cramming it all in or like working very hard on it is going to be the deciding variable, but oftentimes it's like, it's a singular idea

or a breakthrough or a new way of looking at it that solves the whole problem or allows you to go forward. So if you don't have that, there was no point in doing any of the things before. And then also once you have that, things tend to go very quickly. Well, also this idea that you can throw a lot of business at something, that's modern. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's not, this is why in the book I do a lot of older stories because you know My contention is look at people who use their brain to create things Historically, yeah, they tended to have a huge amount of autonomy and flexibility. Yeah, which meant they could experiment Like what works what doesn't work if I'm Galileo if I'm Mary Curie if I'm George O'Keefe. I have flexibility

So what works what doesn't work they can figure that out. Yeah Curie, if I'm George O'Keefe, I have flexibility. So what works, what doesn't work? They can figure that out. Yeah. Then you can isolate those ideas and say, how do we adapt these now to, you know, like a modern world, modern jobs? So if you go back and study these traditional knowledge

workers, the idea that you would just be getting after it, you know, sort of modern 2020s email all day long, let's hop on call since, just didn't compute, they took their time. Yeah. They were making haste slowly because when you zoomed out, their production was incredibly impressive. When you zoomed in, they would look by modern standards

like they're lazy. We had seems like they're laying on their back looking at the trees or they're taking long lunches or long walks and this all seems like it's not work. But if in doing that, you have the idea that unlocks the work or allows you not to burn out while doing the work or you have the conversation that inspires, that's where the work is being done.

And sometimes just the time required, it's not even a breakthrough, just to mature something. I mean, this is Lin-Manuel Miranda, his first play in the Heights, right? Which is a little overshadowed, but it won eight Tonys, right? And the big deal play. Yeah. He first wrote that in college. He was a sophomore at Swarthmore.

He put it on, right? It wasn't very good, that first version. Took him seven years from there to it actually having its debut on the stage. And if you look at those seven years, he was working on it steadily, but not intensely. So they would come back to it. He was working with a couple of alums from Swarthmore, who had a theatrical company.

And what they would do is on a regular basis, we're going to bring in actors. And we're going to read your latest version of the book. But then a couple of months will go by. Then we're going gonna bring it back. So you have to keep working on it. Yeah. Keep maturing this,

but he was also doing a lot of other things, right? He was touring with his freestyle rap group, Love Supreme, he was writing a restaurant column, he was substitute teaching, but he had to take that time because he was 22. Yeah. Like he wasn't ready. If he just said, I'm gonna just go after it,

I'm gonna go in the debt. It's been six months after college. Let's make this play work. It wouldn't have worked. He needed seven years coming back to it again and again as he matured creatively, the play matured. And then when it was ready to go, it really popped off. And then it was a really quick year of development and this thing was on Broadway. In disciplines, Destiny I contrast these two Seville War generals. there's George McClellan, who's sort of always preparing, he said he never had enough supplies.

Never fought though. Yeah, and he would never sort of do the thing. He would get started, he'd start moving, and then there'd be some breakdown, it would take him like five days to cross the river. Lincoln said he's got the slows, right? And so you would think, you know, like his, the contrast would be like the one who's always aggressive,

always moving, and it is, but I was really interested in this General George Thomas, who they called him old slow trot. And he was seemingly slower than McClellan in a lot of ways. But when he was preparing or revving up, he was actually doing that. McClellan was using it as an excuse. He didn't actually believe he could win

once he was in motion. He was hoping, he kept believing there would be this one singular decisive battle that would decide everything. And then also, I think deep down, he didn't actually want the North to win the Civil War. He wanted some sort of negotiated settlement that would preserve slavery. But the point is, it was all kind of for show.

And then he didn't have the killer instinct to finish the thing. And old slow try, General Thomas, he was equally, if not slower to get going, but once he got going, he didn't stop. And I think that's, sometimes we, when we look at artists or whatever, go they're just like procrastinating or thinking or planning

and they actually could be doing that. That might be what they're doing. So there's a difference between this like, sort of like, oh, I'm just waiting for all the conditions to be right. And then the person who actually is not saying I'm waiting for the conditions to be right, but like making the right conditions.

And then when they have everything they need, it actually happens. Yeah, I like the metaphor. Right. Yeah, you're making progress towards the objective. It might be slow, but it's actually progress. And that's Lin-Manuel Miranda, if we go back to that example.

He wasn't just sitting there in those seven years thinking, I'm gonna get, I'm letting it marinate. but like one day soon, you know, I'm gonna write this play and make it right. He was working, like they kept doing different shows and they would, this is, goes through a lot of the different stories. Yeah. Pretty systematically figuring out what's not working. Yeah. Like we tried this, this is not working, how do we fix that? Like what unlocked that particular play was Miranda was good at the music. They're doing something innovative with the music, but the book wasn't very good. And they eventually brought in another playwright and she was fantastic. She went on to win her own

Pulitzer in 2012 for a completely different play. They brought in the talent when they figured out this isn't what was working, right? Then he met his music director. Okay, now things are really starting to, but you don't get there unless you're, I'm slowly but steadily, let's try. This isn't working. Let me try that, that is working. Oh, let me do a little bit more. Oh, this is a little bit short.

Well, what's the best way to fix it? Well, let's find out. This might take us a year to figure out, how does one fix this? So you never stop by like slow trot as a metaphor. You could be going what seems to be slowly in the moment, but you're advancing on that territory bit by bit. Yeah, there's a lot of people who've been working on a play for seven years. Yes.

And it's exactly the same as it was when they started. Yes. And, and yeah, there's a difference between working and working. Yeah. Well, I mean, I use myself as an example. I decided when I was 20, all right, what am I going to do? Computer science writing, right? And I sort of knew what that meant, what I wanted that to be.

My entire 20s are just slow trot, right? You know, I'm writing a paperback original books that aren't at the time making a big splash, but I'm honing the craft. I'm in grad school, right? So everyone goes to grad school, but I'm honing the craft. I'm in grad school, right? So everyone goes to grad school, but I'm honing the craft, right? It's not really till I get to 30

that anything I think that would be impressive to the outside world happens. My first sort of real hardcover idea book, front table book comes out when I'm 30. I get my hired as a professor when I'm 30. Right? So it's 10 years. I never stopped writing the next book. I take it on magazine commissions where I would try to polish specific writing skills. I thought I wanted to improve trying to pop you know as an academic and build those skills, publish new papers now try to publish papers

that win awards. It's slow and steady. Nothing flashy. You know, I wasn't getting involved in other new media. I waited to get involved in new media till after all of that win awards. It's slow and steady. Nothing flashy. I wasn't getting involved in other new media. I waited to get involved in new media until after all of that was established. I wasn't starting companies. I took that 10 years and then after that 10 years, I think you're clicking and interesting options begin to pop up. But what's weird about that is it's sort of the same contrast you mentioned earlier, which is like day to day, it doesn't look like they're being productive, but then you look at the output and very clearly they were. Yeah. So you're like, my 20s, I'm just, it's slow. But then like to be a professor at 30 is an accomplishment in and of itself to publish your first book by 30 in and of itself, like people

like you're so young. Yeah. Right. So there's this weird thing where it doesn't seem like you're being productive or you're operating quickly or sort of beating the curve. But then when the results come in, it actually does look that way. So it's this weird contrast where, yeah, the day-to-dayness of it, you can't see where it's leading, but it is leading where you want it to go. I mean, it's a time scale issue, right? What does that mean? Like what time scale am I measuring productivity on?

So when you say, I'm measuring productivity in my 20s on the decade time scale, like I want to look back in my 20s and say, I'm proud of what I did in my 20s. That makes a random Tuesday seem a lot different. And then if your productivity time scale is like this week, I want to get after it. So if that's your time scale, like I better fill today. And then you're gonna start coming up with activities that's gonna allow you to be busy, right?

Because I need to be productive today. So, okay, if I add this into my life and that in my life and have a bunch of coffees with other people and go through all these ideas, then I'm gonna feel productive on the daily scale. But when you get to the 10 year scale, you're gonna say, I had a lot of sort of like ventures and things and this and that, and then nothing really added up.

So, I mean, a lot of this, it's a time scale issue. I was thinking about that the other day, it was when I was dropping my son off at school, and he was sort of taking longer than usual. And I started, I like to be like sitting at the desk and writing by like nine-ish. And by nine-ish, I mean like nine. And so like it was like, okay,

this is gonna be one of those like nine 15, like nine 30 days because this thing that's out of my, and so I started to feel like, not insecure, but I felt like rushed or anxious about like, I have to get this thing over so I could do this other thing because it can't be late, whatever. And then I was like, okay, but what if I,

instead of thinking about this like today, like what time am I supposed to be sitting there writing? What if I just think about where I'm gonna be at the end of having written the book? And I won't be sweating whether I was there five minutes early or 10 minutes early or 20 minutes later, even if I skipped today entirely and I just decided to do this family thing.

And so that was helpful. It's like, okay, let me turn down the stakes here and just think about it in light of a larger timescale. At the same time, that's also the logic that people who don't get things done tell themselves, like, oh, today doesn't matter. Like the goal I set in my head or the commitment I made, it doesn't matter. And so it's, I think it's a tricky balance for people because you can say, like, look at it in terms of decades, that's also a way to let yourself off the hook right now. Yeah, but I think this is the key challenge of doing impressive work, right? So if you doubt your ability at this moment

to be able to balance those two things, tomorrow doesn't matter, but what I do this month does, right? Like a typical writer's mindset, right? It doesn't matter if I can't write tomorrow as long as I write enough this month. If that feels like it's going to be a challenge, you're not ready to be going after what you're doing. And now there's ways you build up to get ready for it. So it's why one of three principles in the book is obsess over quality, which at first feels a little bit orthogonal

to slow productivity. The other things are directly connected to pace and workload, but it's actually critical for all the other things to happen. Because if you train yourself to understand what's quality in my field, you systematically work on your craft, you build that obsession with quality,

you don't have the problem of I'm not able to write today and I'm gonna use this as an excuse because you're obsessed with I wanna write something really good. This is what I do. What's gonna make me happy is having finished this chapter this month, you probably feel the same way I do.

When I can't write for a few days, there's a compulsion of like, I can't wait to get back and like the work on this. And so I put that in the book because this I think is a problem a lot of people face. If you just jump right into like, I'm gonna be the greatest whatever. And now you're procrastinating all the time.

That might be an honest signal from your brain, which is like, we're not really ready to do this. Yeah, I find that like if I, if I'm like what they call writer's block, like when I'm sitting down and I'm like, I don't know what to do today or I don't know what to say, it's really that I just haven't done the research. Like if I, if I have found, if I have gathered the materials necessary to do the thing, doing the thing is easy. Yeah. When I am, I. When I have taken shortcuts or phoned it in or rushed things, then I'm like, I don't know. So, Stephen Pressville always talks about the resistance.

Sometimes it's not the resistance. Sometimes it is a signal that your intuition is picking up, that there's a less fun part of the process that you have to go back to first. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely right. It's a way your mind is saying you're not really prepared to do what it is that you're actually about to do. I mean, I used to get upset about this exact issue when early in my career as a professor,

they would have me come talk at what are called dissertation boot camps. It's like doctoral students as they get closer to writing their PhDs, the grad school at various colleges will often have these boot camps. To teach you how to write your... Yeah, and also to motivate each other. We'll all get together and you write, like you have writing sessions and then you'll have speakers come in. And so like when Georgetown learned about my older books, they're like, yeah, you should come and talk. And so I would talk with these boot camps. But I would get so frustrated because the only verb

they would use for work on the dissertation was writing. You gotta get your writing hours in. How many pages did you get in? How many words did you get in? And I would always come in and sort of give this righteous speech of like, well, writing is part of it, but what about the thinking? What do you have to say?

Yeah, I mean, it's not just sitting down and writing. Don't make that the verb. If you really wanna say? Yeah, that, I mean, it's not just sitting down and writing. Don't make that the verb. If you really want to be a professional thinker, which is what these students were trying to do, you have to have a much more sophisticated relationship with thought. Now I was a mathematician essentially. So writing was really kind of the last step

of that type of dissertation. Like by far the harder part was solving the proofs. The write up the proof was not... So I had this extreme vision of it that I was trying to generalize. But so we can't... The writing is expressing an idea that idea has to be interesting and right and how you form that idea. Some of it happens on the page, but you also have to think. I think very little of it happens on the page. I think this is a much more generalizable thing than maybe you're giving yourself credit for

because people are, it's like, look, you don't just start building a house. Like you have plans for the house first. You know where everything goes and you know all the materials that you need first. You don't just start like sawing boards and hammering stuff and pouring cement. Here's my shitty first draft of my house.

All right, now I'm just gonna like fix the walls. You have to crack the whole thing. And that's not to say you know, like, look, you design the house and then maybe later, you're like, actually, hey, we gotta move the refrigerator over here because like these doors are hitting each other. Like there are gonna be specific granular problems that you can really only wrap your head around or hitting each other. Like there are gonna be specific granular problems

that you can really only wrap your head around once you're in the middle of doing those things. Like it's a, you know, that's a much later in the process problem will cross that bridge when we come to it. But if you don't have a sense of the whole and you don't have a sense of how the large pieces, like nobody does a puzzle. Like I think there's this funny scene,

I remember in that show, New Girl, where this guy loves doing puzzles. And he's like, I think I figured out what it's gonna be. Like he, he- Without the box. Yeah, yeah. She was like, wait, you don't look at the box first. He's like, you're just, no, like you're making this.

You know? And like, obviously that might be a more intellectually challenging way to do a puzzle, but it's also insane. You know, like, if you sit down to write a book or start a company, and you don't know what it is that you're doing, you're just like, how can you know what the next right thing is? I'm Peter Frankapern and I'm Afro-Hersh. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled, musical genius that was Nina Simone.

Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time. Somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally flawed me. first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message. It totally floored me and the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. I think that's fair, Peter. I mean the way in which her music comes across is so powerful no matter what song it is.

So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made Badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttle cocks, you know who I'm talking about? No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? Okay, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all, but behind the trademark dark sunglasses

is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcast, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. You know who I think ruined this for people? It's novelist. Okay. Because a lot of novelists do this. Yes. Right? So it's the one type of writing.

In fact, I'm surprised the extent to which novelists do this. A lot of novelists excavate the story. Yeah. That's a right. So Stephen King famously does this, right? He talks about that in on writing. But a lot of literary novelists do it as well. They don't plan it out.

I was talking to a thriller writer who writes mysteries, right? You would think a mystery writer needs to understand in advance, like this is the twist. No, she just rocks some rules. She's like, I figure it out. I figured out as I go along, right? So I think this has pervaded culture. So anything that's adjacent to writing,

we're thinking about Stephen King on writing. Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm just gonna- Well, I think of the musician writing the song in seven minutes, but we're not thinking of like Taylor Swift who thinks not just in terms of this album and the next album, but how these Easter eggs and this song connected. Like the best stuff is for the most part, not stream of consciousness. And the fantasy is, of course, that it is, but it's almost never that way.

And even the novelists, I bet you could have sat down and had conversations with them and they would have told you more or less where they thought it was going. Yeah, because they've done it enough that they're probably just internalizing, outlining. But like inside their head, like, yeah, I know what the third act beat's gonna be.

And oh, this guy, okay, let me set him up now because I wanna twist him to be the MacGuffin. Or maybe once you have developed characters who have a logic or a set of values, you have effectively outlined the project because it is clear what they would do in a situation, right? You can talk to, you talk to novelists or TV writers or whatever and they're like, well, they would never do this.

Like, or Jim would never do this to Pam. Or of course, you know, the season, the show is gonna end with this relationship or this action, right? Kendall was never gonna be the CEO, right? Like, you know this, they know this stuff because they have developed the ethos of the people and then that's deterministic. This is Lee Child, right? He knows what Jack Reacher, because someone wrote a book about

how Lee Child writes his books. I don't know if you've seen this before. Yeah, it's really fantastic. He spent a year following Lee Child while he wrote a Jack Reacher novel and then wrote a book about it. It's all very interesting. But he knows Jack Reacher so well. Yes. Yes, he doesn't have to. He has to come up with a set up. A plot. Yeah. And then every time a scenario happens, like, I know exactly what Jack Reacher is going to do here. Yes. You know, like, he's not going to get beat up. Yeah. He's not going to be a, he's going to probably crack some skulls. And, you know, we know what he cares about, what he doesn't. You know. But I think something that was an advance for me that I then tried to convey when other people are thinking about creative processes. So going back to the idiosyncratic field in which I came

up in. So coming up in a theoretical computer scientist before I became a known writer, mainly those who applied mathematics, the core of that is proofs. And there's this feeling that our brain is wired for when the pieces click together. So you get very familiar with this feeling of the pieces have clicked together, oh, that works. Even if you haven't worked at all the steps, it's like, boom, right?

That exact same feeling is how I approach writing, right? It's the same thing when I'm walking and thinking like, how is this chapter gonna work? Oh, I see, if I move this here and bring this thing here, and I pull this out, it clicks. And it feels the same as when a proof clicks. Nothing about that process involves hands on a keyboard. But it's something I think that's foreign sometimes

when people are new to writing. It's this sense of you are planning and going for a sensation of rightness before you even are looking at a sheet of paper. You're thinking about this will follow this. Does this idea make sense? Is this a bit of a McGuffin? Is there a red herring here? Like all these movie terms show up

in nonfiction writing, as you know, right? I mean, why am I introducing this concept if it contradicts what comes later and there's no resolution of why it does? Like that's gonna sit in, just gonna be grit in the gears of someone who's meeting. And so when all that clicks in your head, then you know, okay, now I'm ready to.

Well, I've been thinking about this because I've been doing, this is the first time I've ever done interrelated books. So like most authors, especially in nonfiction, you're doing on independent self-contained projects. So I'm doing a book about this, I'm doing a book about this. And perhaps you might sell one or two books at the same time, or two books at the same time,

but they're usually two unrelated books, right? That I just had two ideas at the same time, they wanted to buy them. But to sell this series on the Cardinal Virtues was weird because first I've had to go, okay, the next four projects I'm doing are outlined. The order I'm doing them is outlined. And then I had to think on the first one,

okay, how do I crack this book on courage? Who are the first, the first thing was, what are the three parts? And then who are the main characters in those three parts? Cause that's the structure I was doing. But then I had to go, okay, does this thing that I think is an important trait of a virtuous person, is this actually in courage or is this actually in justice?

Is this a self-discipline thing or is this more rooted in wisdom? And so, because if I make a decision in book one, it has implications for book two, three and four. And that's something I've decided, I came up with it maybe in the discipline book, but I decided to move maybe in the discipline book, but I decided to move it to the wisdom book, which was a form of wisdom and talent. And I think it

fits into this idea of like truly being productive is like an awareness of downstream consequences or how moving this thing changes these other things. And people who don't, who are too rushed or frenzied or they haven't stepped back and gotten a larger perspective are not able to do that. So you could be talking to an employee and go, ah, sorry, Tuesday's thing isn't gonna work, the email or that thing isn't gonna work. And you take it for granted that

because you've touched this thing, all these other things now have to change, but they just do this thing. It's like, hey, if I like, hey, you're doing my calendar and then I just told you like actually I have to get on a plane on Thursday, you have to cancel everything that was in the calendar on Friday, right? And that requires an ability to see how things

are interrelated and you have to have a sense of the whole what you're trying to accomplish to know what they're related to and leading up to. Yes. So now we're getting really far away from let's just rock and roll. Yeah. Just what are you doing right now? You know what's, this is a bit of a divergence, but I've been working on this article for The New Yorker, an artificial intelligence article. But this exact distinction comes up. And maybe this will be out by the time this interview airs. But it's an exact distinction between what large language models like the GPT models that power chat GPT, what they can and can't do. The number one thing to can't do if you're looking at it from an actual engineering perspective is look into the future and understand, simulate possibilities in the future. So it can only look at what you have right now,

knowing what it knows, but out some good words that matches this. And so the future of AI are these systems where you have a language model and then you have these simulators. And the technology comes out of game bots. This is how you win at chess. It's how you win at Go.

It's how you win at Checkers with a computer. You have to look into the future. Well, if we do this, what might they do what might I do? And so generalizing that is what's needed for AI to look anything like we might actually think it was a human intelligence Right so like in 2001 Hal right the supercomputer Won't open the pod bay doors, right? So the Dave is like open the pod bay doors and Hal knows like this, you wanna disconnect me. How does he know that?

Well, he has to be able to simulate, well, if I do this and you're gonna do this and this is something I don't want you to do. So actually the kind of the takeaway here is simulating the future in the article is core to how humans think. And it's like one of the reasons why there's a big gap between chat GPT and a human is seeing the implications of things in the future. A bit of a divergence, but

it's interesting though. I mean, you'd think like game theory would be this thing that Aristotle was talking about, but it's like really recent. It's von Neumann. Yeah. Yeah. I talk about, I tell the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis and so this is the key, which I think is another example of this idea of stepping back and seeing the big picture. Like the military advice to Kennedy is unanimous. Like bomb Cuba and like you cannot wait one more second

until you do this. Like the future of humanity depends on you basically wiping Cuba from the map. And only Kennedy who's not trained in these things goes, but what will the Russians do? Yeah. And the ability to just think like, well, I'm going to do this and then what they are going to... He's thinking, what are the people in the room with Khrushchev telling him?

Yep. Right? And obviously they gave him bad advice because the idea that the United States is just going to allow there to be missiles on Cuba was ridiculous on its face. But Kennedy realizes he has the same hard line advisors that I do. And he steps back and to his credit, we call this the 13 days, it could have happened in 13 minutes. You know what I mean?

He says, we need time to think about this and they both finally do. But he has both the empathy, the self-control, the wisdom, also the sense of like, hey, if we screw this up, we're all gonna die. To go like, yeah, my best option is this. But your only option after I use my best option is the worst option. And we're not gonna walk away from that. Well, I'm gonna to complete the circle then,

because so part of what Kennedy, coincidentally, compared to the last story, part of what he was doing this time is in the Kennedy White House, they were a big fan of this new board game called diplomacy. Huh. Right, which was a board game, I don't know if you know it, but it's sort of like risk. It's a World War I Europe.

But the key to diplomacy is before every move, all the players talk privately with each other, right? So you have these one-on-one private conversations, you're making deals and alliances, you're backstabbing, it's all relationships. And then after you talk to everybody, everyone writes down their move and gives it to an arbiter who then does all the moves.

And you see, hey, was I betrayed or this or that? So Kennedy was really into this game, supposedly Kissinger, the lore is, like would train by playing this game to get ready for like his real politic role as Secretary of State. You know what's funny? You can see these notepads from Kennedy

during the middle crisis. And I'm just thinking of this as you say it right now. What he writes diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy. Like he's just writing it down. He's been playing this game. Yes, he's probably, he's probably, what is he thinking of? So, but here's what's interesting about it. So in this article I was working on,

what was interesting, what it's about is, so a group of engineers at Meta created an AI that wins at diplomacy. Okay. Right? So they're using web diplomacy server. People don't know they're playing against, they don't know they're playing against a computer.

And how did that work is that the only way this could work. And I talked to some of the engineers at Meta is they at first tried to just train up a language model like a GPT-4 to just know a lot about diplomacy. And like, this is a good move based on other moves I've seen in the past. They said it's terrible, right? But when they added in a future simulator, right, because the main engineer on this had come up winning at poker. He built the first bot that actually beat professional poker players, right? So he knew, and that's all simulating moves in the future. They put these two things together.

That's how they began the win at diplomacy with AI. Interesting. Is that they had the language model that could say, here's what the other players just said, and here's what I think this means, and then a simulator model that was figuring out. So if this happens, what would they do? And if, well, if they're lying though, what would happen?

And it would work through the possibilities. You put these two things together, now you can play diplomacy well. So it all connects. Yeah, I was just, I'm writing this story in the book I'm doing now, and there's sort of a controversial figure in it, but I really want to include this story.

And so like, I think earlier on in my life, like let's say when I was obstacle, I'd just be like, I like the story, I'm including it. And now knowing that, okay, then you get asked about it, or then it doesn't age well or whatever. I'm like, okay, what is the footnote that I have to put here to anticipate the objection and address it and you have a good one.

I forget who you're talking about. Less Moon Vest maybe? Yeah, no, there's someone else. That's what we thought about, yeah. pay the objection and address it. You have a good one. I forget who you're talking about. Less Moon Vest maybe? Yeah. No, there's someone else. That's what we thought about. Yeah. There's someone else you mentioned who wasn't good. I forget who it was, but it was interesting.

You were like, oh, someone who marries their Mitch. Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming. Yeah, you're like, hey, I'm only using him in this regard. I do know about the other stuff. Not a great. Yeah. I do know about the other stuff. Not a great husband. Yeah, I know about the other stuff. I'm just choosing that dimension. This is not necessary for this story. Yeah. But like, that's to me, that's a good example of aware of downstream consequences. Like you're like, I've done this enough times. I know if I do this,

a potential reader objection is, is why. Yes. So if I do this in the interim, I can preempt that and then we can just move on. Yes, which is by the way, all nonfiction writing now is like because there's a whole segment, there's a whole segment of review strategy, which is if I have an objection, my review is sophisticated. There's like a lot of what we do these days is having to play defense against that,

but that's insider baseball. No, no, no, of course. Well, okay, so I want to talk about something that I thought about in the book, because you tell the story of Merlin Mann and he has this sort of breakdown in box zero. Yeah. I am curious, as I've read that story,

I hear people they're like, oh, I was burned out, you know, I was doing too much. But then I actually like look at what they did and how busy they were and I don't get it. And then I also look at their output and productivity after and it doesn't look that much better either. Do you know what I mean? I feel like there's almost this like competition to like claim you had this like breakdown and then you had this breakthrough. And on either side, I just go like, show me the work. Do you know what I mean?

Like what have you done? Well, you're saying someone will have like a breakdown of like I'm burnt out. And then be super hustling on the other side about the story of slowing down or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Or just like, like, I just, I guess what I'm saying is when you look at the productivity space as a whole,

the people who are writing about either like, you got to hustle, you got to work 40 hours a week, or sorry, 40 hours a day, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, show me what you do. Like show me the actual success, cause I don't see it. And then on the other hand, I see the people who are like, I was doing that, but now I'm doing this better thing

and I'm much more balanced. And I go, also show me the fucking work. And I like, to me, the people I admire aren't talking about productivity that much. And they're just like, the proof is in the pudding. Do you know what I mean? And I think you're a good example. You've written all these books.

You're talking about it, of course. But my point is like, to me, the ultimate validator of any strategy is like, what's the outcome? Yeah. You know? And there is this whole sort of guru space and I just don't see it. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like the marketing people who have never sold anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the productivity space is, I mean, I'm interested in your take on it. It's a weird space, right? And if we look just in books, for example,

it's often claimed, like you mentioned there, like, oh, there's all these people out there saying, work 80 hours a day or whatever. Actually, they're not. Like, no one writes, the last book I could find, maybe you know some others. I've looked into this, like, okay, every article about productivity starts with, I know everyone else is telling you to work all the time,

but guess what, shocker, I'm saying work, no one is actually saying that, like the only book I could find along those lines was maybe Extreme Productivity, which was this book that came out about 10 years ago, where it was just like a, actually I thought it was a good concept book. It's a busy executive.

And he just says, I'm very busy. Here's how I do it. I think the hustle porn thing. It's more online, I think. It's definitely online. Yeah, you're right. It's not in books, but there is, it's like when you see it, like, here's my schedule

and the schedule's insane. You know what I mean? It's an online thing. Yeah. And there is a whole sort of more youth oriented Instagram, YouTube, TikTok culture. And I've learned more about that. And some of that has gone to weird extremes, right? Like I used to write about how to study.

And I was in my early 20s. There's a whole study YouTube space, which is now someone will livestream 12 consecutive hours of study. It's performance art, right? I mean, it's not at this point actually. I've never done anything where 12 hours and consecutively in my life it's ever sleep.

It's crazy. And then people, yeah, the people laud it, right? So I agree that's true. The nice thing about productivity as a space though is that you can just study people who aren't writing about it. Yes, right. You can actually say, right?

Like what, which is what I do heavily in the book. And it's why like a big portion of this book, for example, is also trying to understand, he's looking more at knowledge work, understand what we even mean by productivity now because it's broken, right? Like trying to understand how did we, what do we actually mean by productivity?

We don't really know. And if we really nail it down, it's not really working well. So what would it look like to do something different? There's a whole cultural critique aspect but even that is getting tricky because I think in response to the same cause, right, there's this growing burnout among knowledge workers. There's also been a huge rise in what I think of as the anti-productivity movement which is also heavily critical but in a way that I think is less ironically. Like the anti-work movement.

It's like an anti-work movement as a response to the burnout, right? And so it's ironically, it's had a non-productive critique of productivity. Well, workaholism and workerversion are two sides of the same coin. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. And it's culturally salient, right? So there's a certain theoretical sophistication

if you can maybe bring in like late stage capitalism or some other types of like grad seminar style critique. But ultimately those critiques end up being pretty nihilistic, right? It's like, don't work. Yeah, except for like subscribing to my sub stack that I'm working very hard on, but otherwise don't work. Well, like I like those two books,

the daily routines books or daily rituals books. They're both very good. There's the one for men and one for her. But it's like, this dude, that's the only thing, those are the only two things he's done. Like, you know what I mean? And I always go just, that's, I know what it takes to do a book,

like two books in 10 or 15 years or whatever is like, not enough, you know what I mean? Like they're not like works of staggering original genius, you know, like some like, what are you doing all day? And so sometimes I hear about these productivity experts or these people are like, this tip that whatever, and I go like, but what are you doing? And I look at it and I'm, I just don't, I don't get it.

Do you know what I mean? And I think maybe they look at me or you or something and they assume we're working crazy hours, but it's like, I'm not at all. And so I don't get, I just don't, I'm just like, I guess I can come back to this question. I'm like, what are these people doing all day? Well, I mean, I think it's why it helps me for sure

when I write about these topics, the fact that I'm a professor. The bulk of my writing, I write for The New Yorker where I'm on the contributing staff and most of it's really more about techno critique. I run the, or help found the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown. I do a lot of thinking about technology and the way it interacts with us and our lives

and do a lot of writing on it. And that's all stuff that's not just writing about productivity. And then I think it helps. Like, okay, hey, by the way, I don't work big hours. So like, how is this possible? Let's let's rethink about productivity. Hopefully that lands more as opposed to, you know, what I do is just YouTube videos about productivity, right? I mean, there's a, yeah, I think it does help. Yeah, there's just, there's something, I don't know, I've said this before, but it's

like, I feel like I said, amateurs obsess about tools and pros just sort of do the thing. And usually their system isn't this sort of perfect, sexy, like, systemic thing. That's what I like in your book. It's like, yeah, it just takes a lot of walks or she sits there a lot or actually she had this breakthrough on a vacation in the woods. It's never as complicated as the people trying to market some solution or new paradigm for thinking about it, want you to think about it. They keep shipping, right? And they don't procrastinate.

Yeah. It's kind of like, okay, I wanna keep shipping something, but it's not just putting something out the door. It's like, I really am trying to make this really good. Yeah. Like I care a lot about making this good. I'm trying to grow. I'm trying to improve my skills.

But also I'm gonna get it out the door and then we move on to what's next. And I think you probably do the same thing, but it's always been my strategy with books is the, well, the next one is gonna be great strategy. I just tell myself while I'm writing, all right, I want to do this as well as possible, but don't worry about like this has to be everything. The next book is going to be the one and then you just ship what you're doing, right? You're like, I'll do this one well, but yeah, the next one is going to win the National Book

Award, right? It allows you to, it takes the pressure off. It's like, okay, this just needs to be good. Yes. And you try to do something good and you ship it. Tap into Casino at Botano. An award-winning online casino experience with over 1,500 games. Thrill-y new slots are added daily.

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Yeah, there's some humility, but then also freedom and understanding that quantity is a way to get to quality. Right. So if you're someone who sits down, you're a musician and you're like, I have to write the greatest song of all time, you're probably not going to do it because you're not going to write enough songs. Oftentimes the hit that defines a band or a movement or you're like, this is my favorite in the catalog. It's different. It's unexpected.

It was dashed off in a few minutes as part of a larger project. And so the idea that you, it's weird, you obsess about quality, yes, but then also you do it enough that you're not precious about any one thing. And so that balance, too, very easily, I think Churchill said like, you could spell perfectionism as paralysis. And so if you're trying to make something amazing, this work of staggering world altering genius, you're not gonna do it. But if you're just consistently making stuff,

you're gonna be getting better and better. And you're also gonna be getting more and more opportunities, some of them very timely and some of them very timeless to express that talent or excellence you've developed. And you're going to increase the chances that one of those is going to be great. Yeah. I mean, my bestselling book was my fifth. My first book, Deep Work. My first book to hit the New York Times bestseller list was my sixth. This is basically my trajectory also. Yes. It gets rolling. But I think you

and I had the advantage, if we're going to think just about writers is also we started young. Uh-huh. Right. It's just like, let's just get started. And you know, I got started really young, right? I mean, I signed my first deal right after my 21st birthday. Okay. And there's very few books they're going to let, you know, a 21 year old write, but that was very free. It was like, okay, my pitch was let me write about college advice because I'm a college student and there's an angle there that kind of made sense for turning the keys over to 21-year-old. But that took the pressure off. It's like, yeah, this is practical. I'm just trying to write a book that works. It's for a very narrow audience. And then let me write, and I wrote another one right away. Like, let me just write another one like that. Let me try to make that a little bit better.

There's less pressure than if I had waited until I was in my 30s and established as a professor. And so here's my first book. And this is better be really smart and get a good review of the New York Times book review. And what if people think I'm stupid? By the time I was a professor, I'd already published four books, right? It was a different. I was like, I've been out there. I've been taking swings. So to be able to just get started when the pressure is lower. I think Michael Lewis is best book. And then I think his best selling book is the big short, right? And he's like 20 plus 25 years into doing it when that comes out. And he's been writing about finance. He's been writing about characters. He's been writing about the economy.

He's been writing about people, unique stories. For all this time, he wrote a lot of forgettable books between those two, and he's written some forgettable ones since, right? But the man met the moment, and that man had thousands of hours and thousands of pages of experience. And so that book probably did come together pretty easily and he couldn't have known like just where the Great Recession was going to go, just what it would mean that it would eventually be. He couldn't have known any of that, but he was uniquely suited to do that thing because

he'd done all these other things. And Louis got started the exact same way you and I did, right? So my first book, why are they gonna give me a deal? Okay, to write about students. Your first book, it was writing about your specific professional experience you had gone through. Trust me, online. Louis's first book about his experience

with Solomon Brothers. So it was like, get in the door however you can. So he did that and then that got him Vandy Fair. He was doing election coverage. People forget this, but like he was making his bones on character writing, doing, he was covering like primary elections for Vandy Fair, which had great editors and that was helping him hone his craft, right? And then he wrote the new new thing. Yes, also great. Yeah, but like people don't remember that book. No, no, no, no, no, no, Jim

Clark is. It's about Netscape. Hyperion, you know. He wrote a book called, what is it? He wrote a book that came out on September 11th, about the tech boom. Then the bubble popped and it was immediately forgotten. Yeah, he wrote a bunch of, and he was writing for Slate in the New Republic. He was just like a magazine writer. Always be working on a project. What's my next book? And I bet he had that same mentality we talked about, I want this book to be good. But the next one, that'll be the big short, right? So you ship. You try to be good, but you ship. But we can generalize this though, right? I mean, I think this is a lot of interesting production, even in a normal job, right? Even

in a normal job with a desk that you have to go to, there probably is, this is what really matters that I could do. Like this is the skill, the type of project I work on, this is what moves the needle, not the email, not the meetings, but the white papers I write or whatever. So even there, these same type of mindsets apply of like I'm going to do really well, I'm gonna produce great stuff here,

I'm gonna keep pushing myself to get better, but I'm not gonna get too precious with it. And if I just start that, I'm Michael Lewis writing myself to get better, but I'm not gonna get too precious with it. And if I just start that, Michael Lewis writing books two for six, I'm gonna end up at some point at this new level of skill, I'm gonna be indispensable, right? So this sort of slowly productive approach, I think generalized is pretty far.

That's a really important skill. Like what is the stuff that matters and what is the stuff that doesn't matter? Like how do you know what actually is important? Cause a job has a whole bunch of responsibilities. There is certain obligations that do matter, certain ones that don't, there's certain traditions or best practices that are important

and other ones are just sort of ritual or inertia or the status quo. And so knowing, yeah, hey, these are the, like one of the rules I have as a writer, instead like people go, how many pages a day do you write or how many words a day do you write? I think those are totally nonsense metrics because first off, all books are of different lengths.

So if I'm a novelist, I have to turn in a hundred or 200,000 word book, right? Even that's a huge difference, right? Like there's short novels and long novels. Like the, but every book contract has a different length, a word count that you have to deliver. And mine's like between 50 and 60,000 words. It's a very short book, right?

So if I'm someone who writes 4,000 words a day, like some novelists do, like it's not gonna take me very long to write these books. So word count doesn't really make sense. Pages don't really count because are you counting like in Google Docs or Word or that's nonsense. And so I just say I have to make a positive contribution every day.

Like I have to do something that moves the manuscript forward in some way. So that could be I generated a bunch of new pages. That also could be I figured out the subtitle. You know, that could be I deleted a bunch of pages. I moved things around. I found two chapters actually are about the same thing and I decided to combine them. And so all I have to do is make a positive contribution every day.

And so I have a vague sense of is make a positive contribution every day. And so I have a vague sense of what is a positive contribution than what's just like fiddling, but like knowing if you're a stock trader, you know, or if you run a hedge fund or you're a venture capitalist or, I don't know, you coach a football team. What is like, and you're saying, okay,

what's my positive contribution today? You actually know what that is. It's really hard. It's probably not that I was here from this time to this time, it's probably not measured by, I was in this many meetings, or I yelled at this many people. It's gotta be like, oh no, no, no, no,

I figured out that Jordan, was it Kobe or someone? They were like, I figured out Kobe goes to his left, but when he goes to his right, he shoots 11% worse from the field. And so all I have to do, so that itself is a huge breakthrough. And then the next day, I'm just gonna figure out how am I gonna make this person go to their right

instead of the left. That's what matters, not how many ways did you lift, what's the things that matter that move the needle and to be able to figure that out. That's almost everything. That is, so I think it is almost everything. And I think it is hard, harder than we think and also undervalued, right? Like it really is everything, but here's what happens. People don't even try to find it, right? Because what people do instead is they write the story of what they want to be true.

I think this is the biggest obstacle to people moving really far forward on something they care about. They write a story for themselves about, this is what I want to be true about what it takes to move to the next level. Because this is what I actually want to do, right? So I want it to be about, okay, to get my novel published,

it's about having the right scriptor or setup and national novel writing month or doing this many words a day or whatever. Set it this typewriter. Set it this typewriter. Yeah, because that's kind of fun. It's usually the stories people come up with is challenging but tractable. Yes. Yeah. Like it's gonna be a little bit hard, but I could do it. I feel good about myself. And we do this all the time. It's about this or it's about that. I think internet culture has also really, especially for younger people, inculcated this idea of the like the shortcut. Yeah. Yeah. If you, you got the right advice here and you're going to really make your way through. And I keep learning again and again in my career, like the number one thing you can do is figure

out how do people actually succeed at this. Yeah. And like you have to stare that in the face, right? It's often very narrow, like the path is very narrow, not really open to reinvention. It's like, no, this is if you wanna play, you're a good chess player, you wanna play chess at the master level, this is what the training looks like. There's no like way you're gonna get around, you wanna be a professional musician,

like this is what it looks like and it still might not succeed. You want like your podcast to be successful, right? It's probably, no, this is what it looks like and it still might not succeed. You want like your podcast to be successful, right? It's probably, no, this is what you have to do and that's really hard, right? And sometimes when you face a reality, you say, you find out I can't do that, right? Or I don't have what it takes.

Or I do, but I don't have the willingness to put in that much time. I can't do that, all right? But that's good because you say, great, so let me not try to do that and let me find something else. So we don't try to do that work. And it's really hard work.

I mean, one of the things I've recommended people do in like a normal job where you're doing this is temporarily make yourself a business journalist. I'm gonna like take people out for coffee who they're where I wanna be. I don't know yet how they got there, but that's my, like I like what they're doing. If I could get there, their flexibility,

this is where I wanna be. All right, let me now, as if I'm writing a Michael Lewis book about this person, like really interview them. Don't ask them, this is a journalist trick. You never ask people what's your advice for doing this. People are terrible at giving advice, right? I mean, trust me, I've been down to this,

somebody writes and interviews people about advice. They're terrible at getting advice. It puts people on the spot. And what they do is frantically try to think of something that's internally consistent. Like that's what happens if I say, give me your advice for like succeeding in a bookstore. Like if I put you on the spot here,

you would come up with something because like I wanna have an answer that makes sense, but like it could have nothing to do with what matters. So don't ask them for their advice. Ask them, well, what happened in your first year? When was the next promotion? Oh, interesting. What did you do if you think about it? What were you doing there that the other people who were sort of up for this and didn't get it? What were you doing that they weren't? Oh, so I'm isolating like that's what mattered. Okay. What were you doing that didn't really matter if you rewound that when you have these conversations, it pulls out like, oh, this is what matters. And there's usually a moment of, oh, shoot,

this is what really matters, right? Yeah. But that can also be followed by some inspiration. Like, okay, okay, this is much harder than I thought it was going to be. But at least I see the path that actually goes up hill to the top of the hill. I think Tim Ferriss told me one time, he was like one of the secrets, when he's trying to figure something out or learn something that's really hard, is he's like, I don't want to talk to like

the best person in the world, or even like the second best person in the world. I want to talk to someone who's really good at it, but shouldn't be good at it. Do you know what I mean? So if you asked Michael Jordan or Shaquille O'Neal how they got good at basketball, they're gonna tell you this whole, you know,

Michael Jordan's like, oh, it's like, he makes up this story about getting cut from the high school basketball team, which didn't happen, that's not how it was at all. But if you ask Bugsy Bugs or Spud Webb. I was thinking John Stockton was thinking about that. Someone who on paper shouldn't be as good as them. That person's clearly figured something out.

And maybe, and they've probably had to think about it more. Actually, this is an argument in Michael Lewis's money ball. He's like, Billy Bean was just not good enough at baseball that he had to really figure out the game of baseball to play it at all. Robert Greene is a good example of this. Robert Greene was Henry Kissinger. He probably wouldn't be able to write the 40 Laws of Power. It's that he keeps getting bounced around and it's not working for him, that he has to understand and be able to articulate it in a way that someone who is intuitively or naturally good

or in the room where it's happening, probably not going to be able to explain it the same way. Yeah, I mean, this reminds me, I was just, before I came here, was on Santa Monica with Mark Manson. Yeah. And so, you know, he co-wrote the Will Smith. Yes. So we're talking Will Smith, and it was a great book.

And that's one of the things that comes out in that book. And Mark and I were talking about that. Will Smith also is very unlikely to be the biggest movie star in the world when he's a TV star with a music background. But he studied Tom Cruise. So part of why Will Smith was thinking, OK, what is Tom Cruise doing? What's working?

What's not? And he figured out a lot of things that wasn't obvious. So he was studying Cruz because Cruz was older and was the biggest movie star in the world. And he figured out things, for example, like, oh, the international markets, I see international box office generates 50% more money, it gives you more clout and Cruz is going to every one of these countries and doing these international publicity junkets that no one else is doing. And so then Smith could say, okay, we want to do exactly what Cruz is doing there. And now suddenly...

So you think the Tonight Show is why he is an international movie star and it's actually some Dutch newspaper that he gave an hour to over and over and over again times every country in Europe. He's going to Asia. Yeah. Like Tom Cruise really innovated, like go to China, go to Japan. I mean, some of this was before the Chinese market and we'll put it up, but actually go to these other countries.

So he was really studied. And then of course this, you can see this becoming almost pathological when you get to the point in that autobiography where Will Smith now is so intent on winning when he plays Monopoly that he hires a professional Monopoly coach that teach them how to always win at Monopoly

to the point where eventually Jada was like, what are you doing? We're playing with like our kids. But that's the mindset, right? It's like, okay, I wanna be, you know, that case, the number one movie starring the world. I can write a story, which is like, have them write type of movie or like being good shape

He's like, but why don't I get to the core right of like what actually matters? No, that's interesting because it does come back to the idea of slow productivity Which is sometimes the thing that makes someone naturally productive naturally good is that sort of ambition that drive that sort of forward motion and That can make you successful to a point, but it's also very difficult to turn off. And if you're trying to do your things sustainably over a long period of time, if you don't wanna burn out or blow yourself up

or succeed but at the cost of marriage, family, happiness, health, et cetera, to be able to do it slowly and a bit more meaningfully and maybe obsess over quality a bit more. That's a whole other set of skills that are not as celebrated and that they're also depending on your personality type, not sort of as natural. And the other thing you notice is they're really separatable from busyness, right? So even the super hard driving, hard charging, driving ambitions like the

Will Smiths of the world, right? They are working really, really hard, but they're also not busy in the sense of, you know, a normal person might be with, I'm on an email here, call here, a bunch of different things, going a lot of activity. Another Hollywood example would be to director Chris Nolan, right? Doesn't own a smartphone, doesn't own a phone at all, right? He's a guy who works really hard, right? And it's not that he never does phone calls.

No, and he has people who have phones around him, but it's not really about, hey, who's taking your calls? It's the signal that says, which is, I don't wanna be part of the typical Hollywood chatter of like this representation calling about this and let's go have lunch. He's like, I just want to work on my movies. So sometimes slow productivity, some of these exemplars, they're working really, really hard, but it's focused and it's intentional. And there's typically huge variations in intensity. So it's six months until Oppenheimer comes out

and I'm in the editing room all day. But then like two years might go by after that when I'm gestating. So it's more balanced, but they're not busy, right? Which is that first principle in the book of doing fewer things. They're not covering their plates with lots of different things and lots of different options

because no one ever got great doing that. Yeah, I've, and this title, it's your email book, but I've, the, becoming the person who is not on top of their email was a skill I had to learn. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like to be, to, to, it feels almost egotistical or a little like, what's even the word, like it feels like self-important or dramatic to be like, no, I'm the artistic type that does it.

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that or, hey, I'm responding to this three months after you send it to me, but I was off doing this thing. Like I actually had to sort of consciously do that. Because first off, it just became too much, but also that skill, which I learned at some point of like, you hit it into my court, I'm hitting it back in your court. Like that's me getting good at a game that I don't really want to be playing. I

want to be playing this game, which is I got, I don't know what day it is. Or like I lost track of this or sorry, you were talking to me, I wasn't paying attention. I have to almost cultivate the, again, this is somewhat of a stereotype of the artist or the professor or the finger person, but like, no, no, that's the game that I wanna be playing. That's the world that I wanna be living in. And there's almost an affectation to it

that is the opposite of what most people are doing or what you grew up doing or what you are comfortable doing. And so I'm just like, I just have to go, yeah, I have 400 unread emails, like real emails, not like thousands of newsletters, but just like there's a bunch of people, some of them very important. I'm not saying like screw you, I'm not gonna get back to you.

I'm just saying like even thinking about what I'm going to say and replying is taking me away from this thing, which is where I should be. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out dailystowek.com slash email. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stowek early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus and Apple podcasts. Experience college hoops like never before with BedMGM, your one stop shop for your favorite March match-ups! Ready to shoot your shot? Tap into every game on your mobile devices and enjoy all the hoop's action like never before!

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