How To Actually Achieve Your Dream Life (Evidence-Based Goal Setting Formula) | Cal Newport

Category: Lifestyle Design

Tags: Deep WorkIterativeLifestyleMindfulnessProductivity

Entities: Brandon SandersonCal NewportElon MuskJesseJim CollinsThrive MarketTim FerrisVanta

Transcript

00:00

so I want to talk today about the desire to build a good life one that's focused on what you care about one that feels meaningful one where the appeal of zoning out on your phone or losing hours to Mindless video game playing is

00:16

diminished now I have a specific strategy for achieving this goal that I want to talk about in today's episode it's one that's going to pull from both my background as a computer scientist as well as from the habits of a reclusive writer so this should be fun I call it

00:33

the good life algorithm let's get into it all right I'm going to start and uh my apologies for people who are watching instead of just listening I'm going to draw something so this is always a risk I haven't done this in a little while Jesse new viewers of the podcast are not

00:49

used to my artistic skills but here we go I want to draw a picture that's going to help coordinate us here I have a big box on the screen okay so I want to think about this box as capturing possible lives let's say it

01:04

that way uh now within this space of possible lives that uh you could live only some of them are actually achievable so we'll draw like a region within this this bigger space here so if

01:20

you're just listening I'm drawing this region is green So within this space of possible lives we kind have a region of things that are actually reasonably achievable so for example here's a life outs side of that region that might be becoming a sa young award-winning pitcher if this was my diagram of

01:37

achievable lives I I mean I'm not quite there Jesse I still have some hope but I'm I'm rapidly getting to the point where like I'm probably not going to uh be able to make it to that I'm probably not going be a S Young award-winning pitcher so there's lives in here that are achievable all right now what we want to

01:55

do is get to the achievable lives that are deep or good so like I don't know I'm I'm drawing a couple possible lives in here I'm going to highlight one of them like maybe this life right here I have drawn up here this

02:11

achievable life that I've circled maybe that is like a really good one that's one that would satisfy our definition of deep meaning that if you could live that life it would feel meaningful it would feel interesting the appeal of being just distracted on your phone would be reduced like that that's a goal and then maybe like right now you're you're down

02:26

we like down here so circle of life you know down here on the side the whole challenge we want to think about this visually the whole challenge of trying to cultivate a deep life is to try to get from wherever you are to one of

02:44

these possible deep lives that's going to be much better that is the challenge of trying to do some sort of Lifestyle design so the question is how do we actually achieve that well what most people do is what I often call in the show The Grand goal strategy this is where you pick an appealing sounding

03:00

Grand goal and just go for it and hope that it will if achieved make your life better all at once well when we have this diagram this landscape of possible lives it allows us to visualize the problem with this strategy because here's what actually happens if you apply the grand

03:16

goal strategy you can think about each of these possible lives that I've drawn here this is a two-dimensional picture so they exist on they're going to exist on two axes right so we can think about uh each of these points as being described by two values in this particular simple example so like how

03:32

far it is on this vertical line and how far it is on this horizontal line so I don't know we can just make up properties but maybe like this horizontal line describes like number of hours per day spent reading Brandon Sanderson books so higher is more lower

03:51

is less and maybe this one over here the horizontal line represents like hours spent working per day and so like as we move over here you're working more hours and as your points over here are working less hours like every point in the simplified example of some combination in reality of course your lives will be

04:08

defined by hundreds of coup hundreds of relevant points I can't draw in 100 dimensional space so let's just use two for this example what happens when you apply the grand goal strategy is to simplify it a little bit you're basically choosing one of these axes so like one of these points you care about

04:23

and then just leaping in that direction hey this is something I care about my grand goal is going to take one of these properties and just take that singular property and try to greatly amplify that in my life so for example maybe you say

04:38

uh I really like you know I know I like reading Brandon Sanderson books I'm going to find an opportunity a big Grand goal that's going to increase that and maybe you decide I am going to start a you know a full-time business making novelty t-shirts with esoteric quotes from Brandon Sanderson books

04:54

you're going to read them all day like looking for quotes and so you make a big leap up that axis but that's the only thing whoops that's the only thing you care about so where might you end up but all you do know is that you're going to be increasing that one thing and maybe you end up like up here so for

05:10

those who are just listening I've drawn something that that is higher on the reading Brandon Sanderson scale but it's also way far over on the hours of work scale because you weren't thinking about that you were just trying to LEAP up so maybe for example you start that novelty Shirt Company and you're working 15 hour

05:25

a days trying to pay your bills because you got to sell a lot of shirts and there's not a big Market and you're really having to hustle and so yes you did improve you did move improve on this one factor but you disregarded this other Factor so yeah you're reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson in this example but you're also exhausted from how much

05:42

you're working that's what happens with the grand go strategy is it is a think of it as a blunt way of moving through the landscape of possible lives you're just picking one of many dimensions that matters and just making a leap that increases that one dimension but where

05:59

it puts you on the other dimensions might be a problem it's disregarding these other areas so what should you do instead well this is where I want to turn and take some advice I mentioned from a reclusive author I'm going to bring up here an article on the screen

06:15

and those who are uh listening I mean watching instead of just listening can see this see here okay so this article it's a podcast interview this is from Tim Ferris podcast uh episode 361 of his podcast this is from 6 years ago February of

06:32

2019 I actually remember listening to this interview I was shoveling snow I don't know I remember that Jesse but I was Snelling shoveling snow there was a big snowstorm in February of 2019 here in DC the interview was with Jim Collins so Jim Collins is a former Stanford

06:48

Business School Professor who is a very well-known Business book writer good to great and build to last are probably his two most famous books he sold something like 10 million total copies of his books which puts him in like the elite

07:04

of elite when it comes to non-fiction advice writing he left Stanford right around the time he was 38 years old so kind of similar to my age just to write fulltime and he doesn't do a lot of public interviews so this this was a big get for Tim and we got some interesting

07:20

insights into how Jim approached his life and so there's a part in here that I want to capture because we're going to bring back this idea that Jim Collins talks about in his uh in his interview we're going to bring it back to that

07:35

landscape of possible lives and it's going to help us solve this problem of how do we more systematically make our way to Better Lives all right so I'm going to quote uh I'm going to quote here from the interview let me just set this up Tim has has mentioned to Jim like hey I've heard you mention that you

07:51

use like a stopwatch to track things um and that you track in particular each day how many hours you spend doing deep work you put in a spreadsheet and you have this goal of like a thousand hours a year of doing deep work like what's going on with this JY explain what's going on here um and

08:08

so he said okay here's what he uh explained um let me find the right quote okay so he explained why he was doing that I was worried what would happen if I went from being invisible to visible and that if I was fortunate

08:24

enough to have a success that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the Wellspring of the Deep Quiet Solitude of work and then your second book is half as good right so I started as I was heading out on the thma and Louise leap he's referring here to leaving being a

08:39

professor counting my hours every day all right so that's how he got started he was counting his how many hours did I spend doing creative work every day because he he thought if that went down like you had a successful book and that went down then he was never going to produce anything good again so he was

08:55

going to track it to make sure hey it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we

09:12

talk about here in these videos you can get a free excerpt at Cal newport.com slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the video so Tim starts pushing them because Tim likes details okay but Jim like what

09:27

is in the spreadsheet is this all your tracking like every day how many hours of deep work and Jim revealed I think for the first time well actually every line of my spreadsheets one day I have three cells on each line so the first cell is

09:43

actually a quick summary of what I did that day the second cell as I talked about was the number of hours I spent doing deep work what was interesting is the third cell this is what's going to start getting us closer all right I'm going to read this there's kind of an exchange here that's worth Hearing in full so here's what Jim says

10:00

now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about because people know about the hours things somewhat but what I started to do is I started creating a code which is+ two + one 0 minus one

10:15

-2 and the other thing I put in and the key on all of this by the way is you have to do it every day in real time you can't 5 days later look back and say how did I feel that day and what this is is a totally subjective how quality was the day or like a plus two is a super positive day so

10:31

Ferris interrupts and says you're talking about emotionally speaking and Jim Colin says exactly just like was it a great day A plus two is is just a great day doesn't mean it wasn't there might not have been a really difficult day it might have been a day of total really hard rock climb it might have been one of really hard riding but if it

10:47

felt really good right I'd put that down plus one is another positive Day Zero is meh minus one is kind of a net tone negative and minus two is bad days and so you can say over the Last 5 Years what's going on on in all of the plus two days so Tim comes in and says oh so

11:03

this is why you're writing a description of those days as well and here we get to the punch line Jim says yeah exactly and Over The Last 5 Years what's going on in the minus two days and now as I navigate it's kind of like the Simplex method in operations research where you find Optimal by never knowing what optimal is

11:20

ahead of time you do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step this is where we get to the magic of Jim's advice I'm going to load back up my uh diagram here all right this is where we get to the magic of his life he is saying if I

11:38

track every day here's what I did just a sentence or two and here's if it was a A plus two day A plus one day a zero day A minus one day or a minus two day he can start to gather data right he can start to gather data about what am I doing on

11:54

the plus two days also what am I doing on the minus two days like what are the days I come away from saying that was really good and what are the days that I come away from and saying that was really bad and I can learn over time the type of stuff that makes me happy and over time the type of stuff that doesn't make me happy and he says I can use that to make

12:10

iterative changes in my life now this is where my computer science hat comes on he references the Simplex algorithm the Simplex algorithm if you do any sort of like mathematical theory is like an algorithm you use for finding feasible solutions for linear programs so linear programs is just basically where you say

12:25

maximize this value or this Vector of values given a bunch of constraints on them so you're trying to figure out like a really good uh answer to a question think about it that way there's a lot of possible values you can assign so how do you find like a a set of values to assign that's really good the Simplex

12:43

algorithm is a solution to that the details don't matter I mean as you probably all know and Jesse is shaking his head like a course you're moving through a multi-dimensional polytope which we understand through the vertexes of the the multi-dimensional polytope we all know about this that's fine but the

12:58

key is uh it's if you actually look at the Simplex algorithm operating it's iterative so you're sort of moving ever closer towards the optimal solution uh so you don't know in advance where you're going you're moving there so if we come back to our diagram here

13:14

looking at the uh land landscape of possible lives and we have the circle down here where we started the Jim Colin Simplex algorithmic approach is as you learn about what days am I happy what days am I not you make a little change well I'm

13:30

going to do a little bit more of this because I associate this with plus two days and I'm going to do a little bit less of that because I associate that with minus two days well let me look at what's possible and let me make this change here all these changes are small

13:47

and they're within the realm of what's possible given just your current obstacles and opportunities right so there's no big grand scheme here you're not going off to start your brand the serson shirt business small changes to get more plus twos and less minus minus tws and maybe some of these H that

14:03

didn't work out but that's okay if it didn't work out because it's not a big change in your life maybe we go over here and you work your way iteratively towards that optimal solution you make your way towards a much better life this I think is a it's not the only

14:21

way to get to a deep life but I think when we look at this diagram of the the landscape of possible lives and we imagine it is existing on these multiple dimension we really begin to see the difference between evidence-based iterative changes versus gut based Grand leaps it's just

14:37

really hard to make a grand leap because you you make one thing much better you might make another thing much worse also you don't have a great understanding of the full landscape between here and there what's actually around here maybe there's a lot of challenges around here or this thing here is in some sort of

14:53

Fitness lull it's not as good as you think there's traps around it the iterative approach is not exciting this week but over five years it leads you somewhere really cool and Collins is built as like really cool life I mean he he he left Academia and formed this like really cool life

15:08

that's built on doing this deep work and these other activities and he's built these books that matter but has not fallen into the typical traps the time traps that authors fall into so I think it's really interesting the iterative approach so anyways I have a friend who has been doing this for the

15:25

last it might have been five or six years he has the spreadsheet he has the plus and minuses he has the short description and he has been changing his life bit by bit based on this data I talk to him all the time I've heard him do this and right now he has a very he's

15:42

ended up in a really interesting I I'm going to say idiosyncratic because it is never something that he or anyone else would have come up with from scratch if he was just thinking 10 years ago what do I want to do with my life but he has a fantastically deep and interesting admirable life I'm actually going to go interview him uh for my deep Life Book I'm gonna have him come on the podcast

15:58

soon we'll do like an in-depth episode to really get into it but he was the one who really helped me come back to this concept of actually the databased evidencebased iterative Improvement of your life is much more likely to move you towards the good life than taking these big gut driven swings those could

16:14

work but often they don't they make one thing better while making other things worse and then it can be just sort of a wash in the end so for now let's just sit with this idea the path to depth is sometimes iterative and not the result

16:30

of major leaps so I call that the good life algorithm like it I actually I met Jim I I probably I don't remember how I got in touch with him but it was probably after listening to that interview but we had a good talk good advice when I talked to him I was like the exact age he was when he left

16:46

Stanford so he was like you know you like works out pretty well if you go and just become a full-time writer I didn't but he did make an interesting pitch well you like teaching right I do like teaching yeah he he was in the business school kind of different I think too yeah it's its own it's its own sort of I

17:01

mean around some pretty smart kids it keeps you pretty young people leave Business Schools I think more than other type of academic schools because there's a lot of like going out to start businesses or coming back to Business Schools after you've done something in business I think there's more of a revolving door than though though I

17:17

would say at MIT in the theory group in the computer science lab where I worked people came and went they would go and then they would come back like $250 million richer that there's a lot of that there is a lot of like Robert Morris would go invent the first

17:34

shopping cart for the web and then come back with a lot of money Ron revest would go sell RSA for $ 1.7 billion do and come back and start te so there's more of a there was more of a revolving door just because and then he'd buy you coffee in the break room they did Ron

17:50

revest uh his personal secretary B was in charge of the coffee and we had a lot of coffee in that floor it was was none of this uh like little pot nonsense we had the professional Brewers and the big giant carfts and we just had uh thing

18:07

after thing of Pete's Coffee and like the big where you could Brew like 20 or 30 cups at a time and fill up one of those things you you know like you would have at like a conference yeah yeah we had a lot of coffee the good coffee machine was actually the the floor below where the the WC3 Consortium is so Tim

18:23

burner Le's Web Consortium so the Tim burners Lee is the GU invented the HDM HTTP in the worldwide web so he worked on the fifth floor and he's uh I guess he's English he's a sir sir Tim bernsley and they had a fancy uh espresso machine

18:38

like a really nice one were you able to get any of that we would go down there sometimes he'd go down there sometimes uh anyways so there we go we'll call that the good life algorithm all right we got a bunch of questions we're going to cover a lot of topics but first here for one of our sponsors want to talk about our friends

18:55

at Thrive Market here's the thing my wife and I we do a lot of online grocery shopping like we learned this during the pandemic like oh you can do this and now it's become a bit of a habit because of the convenience of it the problem is you

19:11

don't always know what you're going to get or the stuff you really want is not always available with the sort of standard online shopping stores you'll often have this experience where you'll say like I don't know uh can we get some bananas and they bring you a can of pineapples and like well it's also

19:26

yellow so isn't that like a reasonable substitution so you know we kind of have trouble with them sometimes but we're used to the idea of shopping doing grocery shopping online this is why I love Thrive Market because what they offer is a a really good online shopping experience that is focused on in

19:42

particular getting you healthy stuff right so they they you can go online and buy stuff and you know that you're going to get uh healthy essentials delivered one of the things in particular where this is really useful for us is that you know I have three boys and they eat a

19:58

lot of snacks we have a snack box they grab their snacks in the morning the pack for school or when they get home the snack box plays a it's a high throughput food distribution service in our house and we don't want them necessarily just eating a bunch of processed stuff this is like a perfect use of Thrive market like oh

20:14

I'm going to go find snacks on Thrive Market I know they're going to be healthy uh it's a no junk online grocery store and they'll just get sent straight to our house and then we can uh keep filling up the snack box for it so that's like one of the ways uh I have been using Thrive Market they have a cool feature on there right now called

20:31

healthy swap scanner you can scan a product and it will recommend a healthier alternative to it which I think is a great idea uh what they the main way you can navigate is they have these on-site filters so if you have particular things you care about I want high protein right um I want none of

20:48

this AB whatever is you're searching for you can filter real quickly to find those as well so if you want the convenience of online grocery and you also want healthy stuff you got to check out Thrive Market so uh if you're ready to make the switch go to thrivemarket.com to get 30% off your first order plus a

21:07

free $60 gift all right that's T HRI i v market.com thrivemarket.com deep I also want to talk about our friends at Van vanta trust isn't just earned it's demanded whether you're a

21:25

startup founder navigating your first audit or a season security professional scaling your GRC program proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex that's where vanta comes in businesses use vanta to establish trust by automating

21:40

compliance needs over 35 Frameworks like sock 2 or ISO 271 I like to say o because I'm a pretty hip computer scientist the Nerds out there might say 271 I say o centralized security

21:56

workflows complete questionnaires up to five S faster and proactively manage vendor risk vant can help you start or scale your security program by connecting you with Auditors and experts to conduct your audit and set up your security program quickly plus with Automation and AI throughout the platform vanta gives your time back so

22:12

you can focus on building your company join over 9,000 global companies like alassian Kora and Factory who use vanted to manage risk improve Security in real time all right here's the deal my listers will get $11,000 off Fanta if

22:28

say go to v.com deeps that's V n.com questions for $1,000 off all right Jesse let's do some questions all right first question is from Chris how should I navigate The

22:45

Barrage of negative news as a federal worker I feel like I should stay informed to understand how my livelihood might be impacted but it's very stressful well here's what's going on here if you're a federal worker and half the people I know are I live in Washington DC at the moment when we're

23:01

recording this uh Elon musk's doge is trying to do among other things psychological warfare right he wants to terrorize the federal Workforce because he is essentially a kind of a broken person

23:16

inside but B he's mad about having to deal with Federal Regulators with some of his companies right so he wants to Beyond just finding inefficiencies or trying to save money he wants to add a a note of uh Terror about it if you want to hear more about this by the way I

23:33

wrote an article for the New Yorker last week uh last week it came out I think on Tuesday or Wednesday that looked at Elon musk's two weeks ago email that said send me five things you did yesterday which any manager will tell you is like what insecure managers do who are just

23:49

trying to be you know a-holes I went through the whole history of not just musk but productivity in Silicon Valley and saying look they don't exactly have this figured out yet but that's an aside he's trying to tear terrorize you so I'm saying don't give them the pleasure if you're not a congressional or potey or a probationary worker you're

24:06

most likely not in an imminent threat of your computer's going to be shut off at any moment so what I would suggest is you have a couple set checkin times what do I need to know about what has happened it could be every day for 10 minutes what's happening on the times or

24:22

maybe even like every other day you just check in to see what's going on but anything that like directly you need to do something also going to hear from your supervisor you're going to hear from your agency heads right so extremely limit the time you check and when you check and do not give it other

24:39

time do not be online following it do not be on social media don't be like sort of obsessively talking about it why because that is allowing must to live rentree in your head right so if you actually want to do

24:55

something here that is going to frustrate the person terrorizing you as hard as it might be it's just don't look I'll check in briefly to see if what's going on if I need to know something and otherwise I'm going to do

25:11

I'm going to do my job I'm going to live my life you don't get a lient free in my head so that's what I would suggest it's it's uh it's chaos and it's it's a bit of psychological warfare going on um let's let's not give him too much of the pleasure all right what do we got next next is from Anthony can you give give a

25:28

preview of your thoughts on relationships for your upcoming deep Life Book what about if your partner does not like to geek out on systems values and stacks what you're talking about your partner might not enjoy references to the Simplex algorithm as a way of trying to navigate iterative Improvement of your lifestyle

25:44

configuration parameters I don't believe it um I I will give you some reassuring words I do like to geek out um the the Deep Life Book which I'm working on now and just for a timeline purpose uh I'll probably finish the first draft

26:00

at some point by the end of the summer so it's kind of a slow process I am not writing it in a super geky tone so I trying to write this book to be accessible even to people who aren't hopeless nerds like myself so I'm I'm hoping that's not going to be a problem uh there's no stack in it I'm not using

26:17

stack terminology I'm not going to talk about the Simplex algorithm I might talk about the landscape of possible lives but I'll do so in a I might use more of like an actual navigation metaphor like I'm I'm you're you're trying to find get to a destination on an actual physical map not in terms of like a multi-dimensional vector or a linear

26:34

program so I'm trying to Be Good Anthony about toning down the geekiness for the book which I'm usually pretty good at I think like if you if you read like slow productivity my most recent book uh it's not super geeky I'm trying to be more

26:49

accessible so like the the larger audiences so so you know audiences who do not obsessively quote random scenes from season five of The Simpsons as if that's a reasonable conversational Gambit people who think that's weird I

27:05

want to also be able to enjoy my book so I'm trying to De geekify myself somewhat I've been pretty good about it I think Jesse I geek out a little bit more in here sometimes I can't help myself but my my editors would not let me get away with it yeah oh my I publishing it's all English Majors yeah yeah like come on

27:21

stop talking about Simplex algorithms I by the way held myself back I've done some research I won an award a few years ago best p award for a paper I did on a new application of a algorithmic analysis technique called Smooth analysis which was uh Spielman and Tang eventually originally created this

27:38

method for understanding why in practice the Simplex algorithm converges faster than you might expect in the worst case and I took that same technique and applied it to some distributed system analysis so I could have gone a level deeper in my nerding but I did not so you're all welcome all right who do we got next

27:54

next question is from Rebecca I'm recovering from a health setback in struggle with creating a schedule for my projects since I may need to adjust for rest in recovery what approaches do you recommend for developing a schedule that balances productivity with flexibility Rebecca I'm I was just there and I'm

28:11

like just coming out of a relatively like still happening but better rehab about a bunch of stuff that got messed up after I went through this sort of injury and surgery recovery and here's what I basically Learned was start with like okay here's the schedule I think that like gives me some more rest you

28:27

know so it's a little bit like I'm taking my foot off the gas a little bit right so here's what I'm thinking I'm going to you know tell my boss or my supervisor like here's how I want to do it to try to prioritize rest a little bit more then take the amount of rest in that schedule and then multiply that by two like your initial reaction about

28:43

what to do here is not going to be enough rest it's going to be the sort of minimum possible change because you're very worried it seems like in the moment your brain interprets these changes that you're making to accommodate rest or rehab it interprets the

28:58

as a permanent change and it begins to predict the future and say my God if I only work this much you know for the next 20 years I'm going to really fall behind I'm going to get fired I I'm not going to be able to keep up with my job but the reality is you're probably talking three months or six months or

29:14

one month or whatever it is it's not actually that much time and all the time people have to take their foot off the gas for three months or four months and then come back to it again so if you're going to take your foot off the gas take your foot off the gas enough to really rehab and recover so that's my main advice is you probably need to rest more

29:30

than your brain thinks is reasonable one of the things I actually like to do is collect just internally I like to collect stories that I encounter of real historical figures who are super accomplished and they all have these like long periods where they were barely

29:46

working you know they were sick they were dealing with this uh if you go back far enough like in American history I'm I'm sort of a a fan of colonial history and early postcolonial history history you read these biographies of like founding fathers it would be oh for that

30:04

month they were just traveling from here to there like just to get from here to there that that was like a month of time that was just like they they weren't doing anything like you read about you know Ben Franklin there would just be these like six to two month six weeks to

30:19

two month gaps where it's like well he was traveling to London and they just can't do anything you're just like on a ship and you're sick or you read about Darwin and for like a year he was basically just throwing up on the Beagle just like really seasick right and so I I find this and I

30:34

talk about this in slow productivity so if you if you want to get into these examples get my book slow productivity uh principle two is work at a natural pace and I really go through a lot of case studies here are people that we look back at the end of their lives we look back at these historical figures and say wow they produced all this stuff and it was awesome and I was like yeah

30:51

and they had all sorts of ups and downs and big long extended periods where they were doing nothing and then periods where really productive uh that is just the natural pace with which people produce things like here's another story I have so many of these Galileo I believe this was

31:07

Galileo uh he went at some point to stay with friends who had basically like a vacation home and it was up in the the Italian mountains MH and they had had this clever uh system if I understand this

31:23

correctly that in their Villa they built a series of shoots that take air from deep in a cave in the mountain side and bring it up into the Villa because that air was cool so it was like air conditioner right so it's pretty cool like they built an air condition system

31:39

uh it was pretty cool uh literally cool and also cool you know pragmatically except for there was some sort of poisonous gas that was being vented into this cave and so Galileo is sleeping in this room with his Villa with his friends on like vacation and it poisons

31:55

everybody and it kills like two of the people in the room and he barely survives and is basically like deil for a really long time and never fully recovers from it we don't know any of that like yeah Galileo we he he we know the work he did it was fantastic so like

32:10

people have this John F Kennedy you know battling Addison's disease huge issues like he'd be like look I got to just go down to the the Kennedy Compound in Palm Beach and just be there for like 3 weeks like they they called that place the the the southern

32:25

white house or the White House South or whatever because he'd be like I just can't can't I'm in pain I can't move like just weeks would be lost and then you know he do his best to work and come back anyways this is all to say we are used to the the modern pace of knowledge work that is set by the concept of pseudo productivity which is

32:41

this heris I talk about in my most recent book where we use visible activity as our proxy for useful effort in that type of mindset anytime you're not doing something is is like a disaster and that's what leads to these thoughts of like I can maybe like rest a little bit like take a little bit bit

32:58

off my plate but like anything more than that for more than a couple days is a disaster but when you do not have pseudo productivity when you're instead focused on like I want to produce good stuff this year and this decade over the next three years I have some big issues I wanted to go well the fact that these three months you're not doing a lot of email or Zoom meetings because you're

33:13

recovering from a surgery or something is not that big of a deal so if you need to get bucked up about resting more than you think you should read while you're resting read slow productivity because that's sort of at the core especially of that second principle of working at a natural pace it really is Jesse like people don't

33:29

know how artificial it is this this idea of even if I'm just finishing work at four for a few days for a lot of people they're in their mind they like this is a disaster which is crazy there's nothing they're doing where like not being there is like working to four

33:45

instead of five is going to make some sort of major difference that's just straight up pseudo productivity all right who we got next next question is from Shark Laughin I have the opportunity to lead the reboot of a one successful Aerospace company of about 100 people I've got full autonomy

34:01

to set everything from building to culture I'm going to attempt to use many of the ideas and deep work including office layout and workflow management the site is performing poorly and is best described as the most shallow workplace ever so much busy so little production any suggestions on how I can

34:17

implement this transformation well uh don't take a book out of Elon musk's strategy I actually went through this is a bit of a side but for that New Yorker piece I was talking about uh I went through and cataloged

34:32

what happened in the first few months after he took over Twitter in 20122 it just reminded me of this question and it was I would call it halfhazard random chaos that led nowhere good so don't do that that was just like I'm going to start sporadically making declarations

34:49

losing interest in that declaration then make another declaration and then kind of lose interest in that and then do this and lose interest in that and then just fire half the people for no reason so don't do that what should you do I took a couple notes but here's the big picture organizational principle for these notes I'm about to give you you

35:05

need a small number of clearly identified we'll call them North Stars for the journey you're about to take with this company that you've taken over that you want to be really clear and transparent about right everything we're going to do it's what you should be telling your your company everything we're going to do is aiming us at these

35:20

North Star so you know why we're doing it and what our goals are I'll give you a few sample northstars but I think this General approach is really important because otherwise you could end up in that sort of must taking over Twitter in 2022 territory which was more like I am going

35:37

to haphazardly do things and you don't know why haphazardness can really be a problem right that really can be a problem where it's like I don't know why you're doing this or what's going on okay what then would might these North Stars be well based on my books I would

35:53

mention three three ideas you can start with one North Start number one context switching is productivity poison this is the thing we're really worried about we are willing to go to a a pretty extreme extent to try to

36:09

minimize the times during a typical day where you have to switch your cognitive contact from one target to another because we know every time we do that there's this huge cognitive cost we're basically uh siphoning cognitive fuel out of your brain and there's only so many times we can siphon it before you're just burnt out and can't do

36:24

anything else for the day that's what we want to try to uh minimize is cognitive context switches I would emphasize here this is very different than what other people implicitly try to optimize or minimize which tends to be things like friction or response time or they try to

36:41

maximize the velocity of information you say no this is a business run on brains we want our brains to run well we're spending a lot of money on these brains context shifts is putting sand in the gears Priority One how do we rethink about how we do work and communicate Etc

36:58

to minimize contact shifts Northstar number two I would suggest make it very clear deep work on things that move the needle that is bring in new Revenue that's the priority we are going to uh make changes Bend transform how we

37:16

do things how whatever is needed to protect that priority this is what we're going to measure this is what we are going to reward this is what we are going to defer to even if deferring to this makes other parts of our Lives less

37:31

convenient even if deferring to this means the HR department has a much harder time getting the information they need for payroll because they can't just blast email everyone and say answer in six hours with uh this information so we can fill out these charts and it's going to make our job in the HR department much easier our goal is not to make the

37:48

lives of the HR department as easy as possible it's to produce Aeros space products that make money so if someone is doing that we're going to let them cook right to reference our episode from a couple weeks back about let Brandon Cook that our reference to Brandon Sanderson uh this is what matters we

38:04

protect it so if you're able to prove to me I am producing something with my brain that is directly valuable but in order to do this you have to stop I can't go to these meetings people keep sending me or I need to take these things off my plate if you can make a case this is going to produce more

38:20

cognitive output that is directly valuable I will listen to that case I will always listen to that case you got to come back to what ultimately actually makes the difference as soon as we lose sight of that we we are going to end up in a productivity Thunderdome where everyone is just trying to optimize their own

38:35

lives make their own lives easier and that's not our business we're in the business of making Aerospace and the stuff that matters matters right meritocracy in that way Northstar number three no more pseudo productivity activ visible activity is meaningless to me results matter what

38:51

are you working on that it go well good what are you going to work on next to this end team should be tracking work in a more transparent fashion so that no one gets overloaded team should have like I talk about a lot of my books slow productivity here's the things we

39:06

are working on here's the things we are we we need to work on we have a whole list and it doesn't exist distributed haphazardly through different team members email inboxes it is on this digital board or this physical bulletin board a card for everything that we need to do over here we're tracking who's

39:22

working on what right now and you can only have so many cards under your name one or two maybe that's it so we don't take all these things we need to do and just sort of spread them around everyone's plate and just start talking to each other all the time about all of these things hey what about this what about that what a that goes back to our

39:38

first Northstar that violates minimize contact shifting it also violates our second Northstar prioritize deep work on the stuff that really matters so why don't we we track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded you're not allowed to work on 10 things work on two things do those things well I don't want

39:54

to overload you if I give you 10 things you're going to have to meetings and emails about all 10 of those things which means most of your day will be having meetings and emails which means when are you doing the Deep work on the stuff that really moves to needle that's no good so let's track at the team scale workloads in a transparent fashion

40:12

so no one has to take on too much and we can allow people to be more efficient this in turn will allow you to structure communication because now you can check in on this you can have daily standups at the team scale okay who's working on what I know that actually it's on the board what do you need to get this done

40:27

all right you've been working on this since Monday what is the what is the roadblock oh you need these information you need this information from you know Bob Bob you're right here in the daily standup when can you get that information uh over to Cal you can get it okay by 11 get it to him by 11 we're

40:42

making we all agree on this great and then you're going to work on this for the four hours after that you're going to get that done great now just go work don't look at your inbox go work so those would be my three northstars if I was taking over a 100 person company make it clear that context shifting productivity poison make it clear that

40:59

the number one thing we care about is cognitive efforts to produce things that directly move the needle everything else is going to revolve around making that uh better and doing more of that that is our Northstar it's what we care about and three no more pseudo productivity we're going to track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded and so that

41:14

we can make sure people have what they need with a minimum of unnecessary activity and if you're moving things from your column to the done column I don't care about anything else I don't care about how fast you answer emails I don't care about how many Zoom meetings you're in pred versus PUD productivity so that's what I would

41:30

do all right what do we got next we have our Corner oo slow productivity Corner uh this last one could have been a part of the corner a little bit too so slow productivity Corner we specifically highlight a question that's related to my my book slow productivity uh we want to highlight at

41:45

least one question each week that is related to that wow we're running out of time on that though Jesse we said one year right yeah when did my my book came out pretty early in March last year I think it was like March 5th uh oh technically the last one technically this would be the last the last episode

42:01

with a slow productivity corner so so go by the book slow productivity we'll find a we'll find a reason to play this theme music we'll find a [Music] reason all right what's our slow productivity Corner question of the week

42:18

all right it's from Daniel are there perceived benefits to pseudo productivity in the workplace at my company being responsive at all times on email and instant messaging leads someone to being seen as dedicated to work and visible to leaders which leads to advancement how do I Advance if I don't do this well yeah I mean this is

42:34

the uh the dangerous nature of pseudo productivity is that as long as this becomes the implicit heuristic by which your company measures value it's hard to escape so again we talked about in the last question but just to reemphasize pseudo productivity is using visible

42:52

activity as a proxy for useful effort so the more visibly active you are the more useful you will be assum to be in a digital world this is a problem because mobile Computing means you can be demonstrating effort at any location at any time and mobile Communications like

43:07

email and slack means you can be demonstrating effort at this incredibly fine granularity at the granularity of like answering individual emails being involved in back and forth conversations so it leads to a sort of overload of work you work too many hours and it leads to a style of work that is very draining and doesn't produce much that's

43:23

actually valuable I hate pseudo productivity I think it is a uh cancer on employee well-being in the knowledge sector it's why I wrote the book slow productivity to say do this instead right part one here's why this is bad part two do this

43:39

instead so first of all just recognize the problem all right so what can you do if you are in an organization that still worships at the alter of pseudo productivity well most of the advice in my book is geared at least in part

43:54

towards this situation you're Behind Enemy Lines and you're trying to make your way uh towards safety so there are still things you can do one is trade Clarity for responsiveness be really clear what you're working on its status when it's

44:09

going to get done and deliver it when you say you're going to deliver it if you're trusted if that if you have this Clarity the need for you to be responsive goes down right because why do people want answers typically right away to like messages it's because they

44:25

don't know what's going on they have an open loop in their head oh yeah this project I forgot about that what is Jesse up to with that and it's this an open loop in their head and until you respond they have to keep track of it and it's a source of stress but if you have some other system they

44:40

could be like oh Jesse's on the ball like yep I'm working on it it's in position five in my queue here's what it is I think I should have it done by Tuesday and I'll tell you if that's going to shift and they trust if they don't hear from you it's going to come on Tuesday they don't have to worry about it so a lot of responsiveness is driven from uncertainty so if you're very clear you can reduce the demands of

44:56

resp responsiveness two is a big thing in the book you have to have some way of limiting concurrent workload the the kiss of death and pseudo productivity is working on too many things at the same time because everything you're working on brings with it its own administrative overhead so if

45:14

you're working on too many things that administrative overhead Aggregates until most of your schedule is servicing tasks instead of actually completing them and that's this terrible state where almost nothing gets done it's incredibly stressful so how do you do that well one thing you

45:31

can do is distinguish between here's what I'm actively working on and here's what I'm waiting to work on of the things I've accepted active waiting I do email meetings about the stuff I'm actively worked on not on the stuff I'm waiting to work on and I make this transparent and clear it's in a shared document I'll

45:47

send a link right to you oh you want to have a meeting to talk about it here's my queue it's still in the waiting part it's in position three you know I should get there in about a week or so I'll email as soon as it gets to active and then we'll talk about it all day if you want but I can only be actively working

46:02

on a few number of things at time that sort of clarity works also if you have some flexibility on what you can say yes to no to so the problem is just not yourself wanting to say no to to much use quotas yeah I do this type of thing but only this many per quarter and when your quot is fill

46:18

say yeah of course typically I would like to have a mentoring lunch or jump on this call or come to this committee meeting U but I've already passed my quota for this quarter or for this month or for this week so I can't do it this time it's a very reasonable way to moderate activities that are important so that you're still doing things that

46:34

are important but not doing too many there's a bunch of other ideas like that that are in the book but those are the the two two big picture things to think about trading Clarity for responsiveness and finding ways to manage your concurrent workloads you do those two things will be better above all else just get really good at things that

46:49

matter that's principle three of my books obsess over quality if you're doing something that's valuable they do not want to lose you I'll just make this final point because I think a lot of people have a uh an overly character tur antagonistic mental

47:06

image of their employer or boss and they really do see their employer or boss like a bond villain who is somehow converting like rapid email responses into fuel for a laser that they're going

47:21

to use to destroy the world and like that's what they care about this thing that you really makes you miserable they're like twist their mustache and they have a cat that they're petting and it's like we need you to be answering emails is what's important because we we use those quick responses my volcano layer the fuel my the fuel my laser the

47:38

reality is it's really hard to hire good people they worry about people leaving they don't have enough people if you're doing something valuable you're really good at something that the company needs you know what they're staying up late at night thinking about not hey how quickly is he responding to my emails they're thinking oh my God what if he leaves you

47:54

got to recognize make yourself valuable don't be a jerk about it but recognize you have value you don't have to make a big Manifesto or a big autoresponder but just like I I work differently and you know why because I deliver I produce this code that's awesome I organize these events that

48:12

kill I put together these these marketing campaigns that have the highest Roi of my entire team and yeah I'm kind of do this Cal Newport stuff that's a little bit weird and I'm my my project queue and I'm not super you know you get here for me within 24 hours but within 24 minutes when you email me and

48:28

I'm responsible but I'm a little bit off-kilter and I say no to a lot more things but if I go you're going to lose that Roi and there I you do not want that person to go so you kind of put up with it so remember that if you're doing something valuable you are really needed

48:44

you are really wanted right I mean unless again you're under the supervision of Elon Musk and the department of government efficiency uh if you're at an actual company with an actual boss who doesn't walk around holding chainsaws they are desperately afraid of

49:00

losing good people so be good and then you get a lot more flexibility as well all right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear it hey Cal my name is Joe and the majority of my work centers around

49:16

optimizing websites for clients my job is remote flexible and I have a lot of autonomy however my responsibilities aren't clearly defined since I'm on a very small team this has sort of led me to a cycle of reacting to Urgent tasks putting in a

49:31

lot of work and then taking work easier for a while until something urgent comes up again this has left me either overwhelmed and tired some days or feeling bad that I haven't done enough most others I'd love to strike a balance between client work and working on company goals while also leveraging the

49:49

sort of flexibility and autonomy at work so I can work on my personal projects like content creation while not quite going full quiet quit mode while struggling with motivation is definitely one of my problems here one of the other

50:04

thorns in my side has been struggling to Define what enough means for a work day or a work week for people with more autonomous or flexible roles or even just business owners in general how do you recommend going about defining what

50:19

it means to have worked enough thanks all we got a couple things going on here uh let's let's get to your job situation in particular um I think you need to think about your job as really being two different jobs the first job

50:35

is client responsiveness right your your first job is is uh working with clients with their their their issues or request and satisfying them then you have the second part of your job which is self-initiated less monitored and less deadlined let's just call that part B

50:52

because what that is could depend but you sort of have to think of it's like the self-initiative part of your job and you have the client respons this part of your job let's look at both of these let's do some work on both of these and then I want to talk about overall this question of how much work is enough how do I know if I'm working enough I would

51:08

look at the client piece first and even though it's reasonable right you're saying it's only sometimes there's issues that I have to deal with I would say how do I make this piece as sustainable as possible Right like let's do some optimization over there and maybe this is about uh how do I stop

51:25

crisises from curring as much as they do or how do I have more importantly maybe a way of of dealing with uh crisises that is reassuring to the client and moves us away from just constant immediate responsive communication right

51:41

so in in the lack of structure if you run like a website Dev company and there's a problem that a client has had with a lack of structure for like here's how we stay in touch and here's how we deal with crisises what it's going to be is like answer my call answer my call answer my call like this is now a big source of stress for me and I don't know what's happening until you finally like tell me what's going on so you might

51:57

want to work on that a little bit like here's our crisis response you know uh we have crisis at web development company.com you send in that email like we will we will be on it within two hours we have a daily setup call I don't know I don't want to give you the details but find a way to make sure

52:13

that's not too stressful or draining all right all the other days you're working on Part B of your job and here you have a choice you could either do a phantom part-time job this is our word for I have like a a consistent amount of sort

52:29

of unstructured time that I am going to structure for another goal something that's really important to me that I'm working on and it could be building up a technical skill or or something that might eventually become a side business or could be a self-education project or something completely unrelated Community related unrelated to your professional

52:45

job so you could do that or as you suggest build in a more sort of self-initiated sort of uh value growing project within your company like I ALS do this which is going to have value within the company so you have to make

53:01

that decision there's something to be said for if you like the general company and the client stuff's a little bit stressful you have this flexibility where you could start building a secondary Pursuit within your company

53:16

that you're initiating that you want to become so good you can't be ignored on eventually but there's no actual pressure or deadlines or close monitoring in the short term with the idea of if I keep getting better at this I can spend less time doing the client stuff and more time doing what I want to do so you can have a vision of like what

53:31

do I want my job at this company in an Ideal World to be like and start working your way towards there with this extra time that might not be a bad way of thinking about it oh I I have a vision for what I could be doing here you know I don't know maybe it's building back in tools that not only helps the company

53:47

but then like the the company can license and sell to other people and you're just on your own soft you know doing Dev and no one really knows what you're doing your particular day but like you're kind of pulling out Cool Tools or something like that right that's an example of something you could do within your company that makes you really valuable you could point to the

54:03

money you're bringing in the door like we're much better because of this and you made 500k selling licenses for this last year so like obviously my salary is Justified but it's entirely autonomous and there are no crisis days right so something like that might not be a bad idea I don't want to discourage you from

54:19

spending this time on a Content creation related Phantom part-time job but I will say the content creation world is really hard I think you'd say that's probably true right Jesse like we work pretty hard at this and I have 20 years of writing books it helps I mean it's a tough that's a tough World um and there are

54:36

traps there there's a lot of a lot of this world right now is this thin stream of people making a good living and then uh a lot of people that they're they're saying you can use similar tools and kind of feel like you're in this world you have like a substack you're used to

54:52

be like you're posting your medium post or you're doing your threads on X that are the exact same format and at the end of this last one you say if you want to find out more sign up here but a lot of that's just like getting people to churn and be online and be monetized like you're not making money you're being monetized so you know be careful about

55:08

that content creation is a rough world but you know whatever you do you with that the final question then regardless of how you choose to do through A and B is how should you feel about you know guilt or non- guilt look here's the thing if you're not defrauding your company if you are doing what they're

55:24

asking you to do and you're doing a good job at it and they're happy with you and they're actually giving you a check that has money in it and that money is enough the market is saying you are working enough as far as that employer is concerned right again this this the pseudo productive culture pseudo

55:41

productivity culture the thing I envey against in my book slow productivity pseudo productivity culture says activity is what is valuable and this arbitrary amount of activity which should be like 40 hours but really like 40 plus like you should have a couple late days somehow that

55:56

amount of activity means you you're worthwhile and anything less than that means you're not which is crazy because if you look at any sort of kind of classical value creation figure from history there's all sorts of different amounts of times they're working and it's not 40 hour that's 40 hours a week is just what the labor unions

56:12

compromised with with the factory owners for like how long can we get someone to stay on an assembly line and put steering wheels on model T's before they begin to bleed out of the eyes right and they're like well the factory own is like can't you just do this for 80 hours and the unions were like I think people will die on feet and like all right I guess 40 right it has nothing to do with

56:28

like web development it's no magic when it comes to what's the right amount of time to be a writer to be doing marketing campaigns or to be working on software Dev so what matters is is your employer happy or you making money are people paying you I mean money is a neutral indicator of value are they paying

56:46

you a good living for what you're doing and there's no deceit right you're not tricking them you're not tricking them like I making them think you did something you didn't they know what you're doing yeah we have these clients these clients are being handled the clients are happy here's your paycheck that is a free Exchange in a capitalist

57:01

Market your your labor is being valued there and it's you know one of the cool things about these sort of more entrepreneurial knowledge sort of remote work knowledge work markets is that like the market it will try to Value you properly and it's possible that like yeah this job is taking 15 hours a week

57:17

making a good living off it that's not a problem that just means you're doing something high value for this particular company you're bringing skills to the table and it's worth that much money to them so I wouldn't worry about that if they're unhappy with you you're not working enough right that's what you should but if they're happy with you

57:33

you're working enough now you're saying how do I now what do I want to do with my job what do I want to do with my Surplus time so that's the way I would think about that all right we have a case study here this where people send in their accounts of applying the type of advice we talk about on this show to their own lives so

57:49

we can see what it looks like in practice today's case study comes from Ariel who says I worked my butt off and grab school and landed what I thought was a dream job in biotech as these things go the dream job I'm putting this in scare quotes is turning into a career

58:05

with many flaws and limited growth potential but I've really been able to improve my productivity per unit time to achieve what I used to accomplish in about 60 hours of again scarecrow's work showing up at an office for six days a week has turned into about 10 hours of focused work that is very flexible plus

58:22

12 hours of meetings I use many of the tools you talk about as a means to be very productive but work far less than I used to but the workaholic thoughts are a daily struggle anytime I have some free time I think things like hey maybe I should start a science substack in my specialty maybe I should write some

58:38

fiction shouldn't I be busier I would love to be at peace with consuming great books and movies but the drive to create is pretty Relentless I am torn between creating things in my free time that may benefit my career or turn into a new one or maintaining this fairly stressfree

58:53

lifestyle while it lasts by question is simply why can't knowledge workers be happy just doing less if we have the means and the drive should we all just start creating content and hopes that people will consume it all right well interesting case study I want to really

59:10

before we get to the meat of Ariel's embedded question let's get to the meat of what happened here that I think is really telling he was working 60 hours a week and when he stepped back and said what actually creates value and let me

59:25

Focus on that and be careful about my time he reduced that to 10 hours of deep work and then 12 hours of performative meetings this is true of a lot of jobs pseudo productivity is different than actual productivity visible activity is a

59:43

lowrisk highly replicatable way of trying to trick people into thinking that you're valuable but again it is just rarely the case that actual value production requires roughly 40 to 60 hours a week that's like an arbitrary number so I think this has really tell him that in 10 hours of actual work he did all the

59:59

stuff he used to do in 60 that's what happens when you move from pseudo productivity to actual value production the workaholic question is an interesting one um I'm actually going to point towards the future if all things go well I believe I have an in-depth

00:14

episode coming out on Thursday of this week uh which is a conversation on exactly this question this question of of uh the pursuit of greatness and is this a problem why does it make us uncomfortable why does it also motivate us how do we navigate the conflicting constraints and the conflicting demands

00:31

of like trying to be really good uh we get into that in the upcoming in-depth episode so listen to that um my short take on this though is it usually helps right so in like this situation if you're if you're doing something good

00:49

you like your work you think it's important what you're doing it usually helps if you are doing some lifestyle C planning so what you're working towards with your time and your life is making your lifestyle closer to things to resonate in way ways away from things

01:04

that don't that might be professional it might be like okay once I've done lifestyle Centric planning I really need to get to this point in my job so I'm building up a new skill specifically because that'll allow me to move from the headquarters and work remotely out of main because I want to live by blah blah blah right or it could be

01:21

completely unrelated to your job it gives you like a real effort for a real purpose for energy that you're investing outside of your job whatever it is like with with your your kids or your health or something else that's going on lifesty Centric planning is going to give you a direction for these efforts

01:37

so it's not just maybe I'm just reading a lot of big books or maybe I'm just trying to like do more work at my job gives you a reason for why you're doing that you have a particular Target you're trying to go to so I think that might be helpful but also is okay to just have some seasonality and like my job's not that

01:53

hard right now it's kind of nice I don't know I'm exercising a lot spending a lot more time with my kids I'm like involved with a yeah I'm writing a I'm a fiction writing group just for fun no Stakes it's something to do that's not the worst thing either I really think slow

02:10

productivity the book slow productivity is perfectly time for what you're going through now because it'll continue to have strategies to help you tighten the strategies you're already doing to keep this job loads small but the seasonality you could really take advantage of the ideas of seasonality the work at a natural pace principle and the obsess

02:25

over quality like do something really well for more leverage like that also is right where you are right now so I think that book is really going to resonate but I appreciate the case study 60 hours down to 10 hours of focused work and 12 hours of meetings and I bet in those 12 hours of meetings there like 25 minutes of actual useful information if I had

02:42

the guess all right well we got our final segment coming up where we'll talk about the books I read but first let briefly hear from some more sponsors I want to talk about our friends at the defender line of vehicle The Defender 90 the defender 110 and the

02:58

defender 130 this is a classic iconic line of cars that have been reimagined to not only look fantastic but to main uh maintain the the uh the same sort of

03:15

durability that they've had before that sort of go anywhere durability they had before with the comfort of a modern vehicle I actually this is true Jesse yesterday I'm going to load this on my phone because he's not going to believe me I'm pulling out my phone here uh our friend Brad stalberg who's like my

03:31

partner in crime when it comes to Defender sent me a a picture of his from his neighbor look at that yep so it's a Defender logo illuminated on the sidewalk next to Brad's house his

03:47

neighbors just bought a Defender and you can set the car that when it is parked to actually Shine Down the sort of Defender logo just sort of uh discreetly on the ground next to it got it I thought it was really cool uh I am assuming they bought that Defender because they heard me say they should

04:02

but it's a really cool these cars are everywhere last time we did a a read for the defender we saw one right outside the HQ we're doing a read for the defender today and Brad sends me a photo of his neighbors just got one I don't know it's a really cool car but you check it out if if you haven't seen one go to Def uh

04:18

landroverusa.com and you can see what these cars look like it's an iconic car that's been updated with all of the modern conveniences drives great on road and off uh it's it's kind of like the official car of the deep questions podcast right now check that out Land

04:33

Rover usa.com you can explore the full Defender lineup when you go to landroverusa.com they also want to talk about our friends at Shopify look if you were going to be selling things online or in a store you

04:50

have Goods you're going to exchange for money you got to be thinking about Shopify the thing that anyone who is in like the online space like we are knows is like this is what people use when they want to start selling something they go to Shopify it makes it very easy to set up

05:05

you get this sort of best inclass tech the conversion rate on sales is high the experience is fantastic it makes everything simple uh people who set up physical stores they use Shopify pointa service systems it all just works really well it's basically what people it's

05:21

almost like a shorthand like in our world online world of like yeah I'm going to start selling like these whatever shirts or coins or whatever like yeah I'm going to Shopify it right it is just a it is the technology that people that we know who sell things it

05:37

is the technology that they use statistically they're the number one checkout on the planet their shop pay uh feature so this is what happens when you're checking out boost conversions up to 50% meaning that way less sharp sh

05:53

carts go abandoned and way more sales get going um if you're growing your business your Commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store in their feed and everywhere in between you need Shopify businesses that sell more sell on Shopify so

06:11

upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things uses you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com sdeep but you have to type that in all lowercase go to shopify.com deep to

06:27

upgrade your selling today that's shopify.com deep all right let's get on Jesse to our final segment all right this is our first episode of March I'm going to talk about the books I read in the short month of February

06:42

2025 all right the first book I read was moral ambition by Rucker bregman a couple people have been talking to me about Rucker he's I believe Danish maybe Danish Phil philosopher he's had a couple books that have really raised some eyebrows young guy uh I like the

06:59

idea of this book moral ambition it was basically a call to use your skills to go do things that are useful for the world I don't know if it's out yet or not I actually read this in Galley form I was I was giving a blurb for it but but I enjoyed it I read it actually read it very closely uh and so I'm including

07:16

it then on this list and you know I admire the ambition of the book moral ambition it's it's sort of nice to have someone say hey hey smart person like maybe your your your whole life shouldn't be centered on like how do I make the most money in private Equity or

07:31

something go do things that are good I like when people challenge people to uh stand up do more so that was interesting book I I like the sort of the program that bregman has going on over there and then I read a thriller you got to have some Thrillers the Thriller I read was

07:46

Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morell David moral is a big Thriller writer from the 70s and 80s in particular maybe best known for Rambo first Blood so it was first blood that became the first Rambo movie which was actually one of the very first sort of modern form action movies I rewatched it a couple

08:03

years ago it's worth watching it's actually that's a very cool movie it's sliced alone uh the first one before you know the later Rambo movies is where he has like the giant biceps and the uh the headband and is firing exploding arrows the first movie was not like that it's

08:19

at the tail end of the new Hollywood 7s and it is a smaller movie and the premise of the first uh Rambo movie is that he is a Vietnam vet who's suffering like post-traumatic stress and walking through this small

08:35

town where he's being like hassled by the sheriff like hey hippie get out of here and he's he's he's uh really struggling right so he's unresponsive and he cracks and all of this training that he had as a special forces guy in

08:51

Vietnam kind of just like all comes out he goes back into like autopilot and uh you know know breaks someone nose and stabs the other and like flees in the woods and and they're they're going after there to catch them it's about it was a book about like war and its effects and it's after effects and the book has this real tragic ending the

09:06

movie is cool though because of the famous scene where the colonel who trained Rambo comes uh comes to the where they're trying to find him in the forest and I think it's Brian Den plays the police chief police chief is like Colonel we don't need you here we get it

09:22

you're worried about your man you don't want him to get hurt but we don't he killed one of us like we're gonna go get him and the colonel says I don't think you understand I'm not here to save Rambo from you I'm here to save you from Rambo it's like this kind of classic line and he does kill a lot of them um anyways different book by David Morel

09:40

another classic one Brotherhood of the Rose is about like these two orphans that have been trained by the CIA to be assassins and then they're kind of turning on them and trying to like kill them off to make them scapegoats and they're being chased and classic Thriller that was really good

09:56

um I was hearing about Morel from Jack Carr the xnav sealed novelist who wrote terminal list series of books he always talked about David Morell was like a real inspiration for him and so I had fun with it uh then I read how Dante can save your life by Rod Dreer it's an account of Rod uh Dreer

10:15

going through like a tough period in his life and Dante's uh reading Dante uh the Inferno Paradiso I forgot the one in the middle but the whole Kanto B Kanto the com the grand Comedia

10:30

what do they call the Comedia Comedia the the the grand I don't know what the right name is for the three books of Dante look that up it's the I will yeah um I'm getting that wrong and I read a whole book about it but but basically he reads Dante and it and it it brings him

10:47

out of this funk that he's in and so there like some cool history of Dante and then like the lessons he he drew out of it there's also like some Memoir going on he moves back to like a small town in Louisiana where he grew up and like things don't go well and he has like a psychological crisis that leads to like a physical Divine Comedy The

11:03

Divine Comedy yeah what's the there's an Italian name for it right that's what I was trying to say the Comedia which is not like how you say it right but I'm clearly a Dante scholar I've read I haven't read the full Divine Comedy but I have a pretty good translation the pingin LA deina comadia

11:21

yeah that's what I was thinking about l deina comia so it's pretty good um I don't I mean honestly this is probably not fair I'm I'm not the right person to read Memoirs I just you know Dreer came across as somewhat self is to reader he

11:37

feels sort of self-absorbed which I guess is just what happens in a memoir but like his whole life was just centered in this period on like I can't get past that like my family is sliding me or disapproving of me or whatever and at some point you're reading the book and you're like man get over it there's

11:53

a little bit of that going on which is not fair but anyways he ends up okay all right I also read buzza by Jesse dhy this is the Jesse dhy was the beat reporter for the Nationals in 2019 and this was the book he wrote about the Nationals winning the World Series and I

12:09

went to see him speak at the there's a new Bookstore in Bethesda so I went to see him speak and and Andrew golden and Spencer newsbomb were there they're the current beat reporters for the Nationals it was kind of cool to have like a lot of Baseball fans get together and just sort of talk about it and I felt bad for

12:25

him because his book buz saww came out March 2020 this was the only book event he has done for that book is in February 2025 so I like this is the only event she got but he had a full house so I felt I felt really good about it so I read the book

12:40

it was great I was like oh man Memory Lane like remembering that season and his style of writing the book as he explained it is like there's a this his editor at Simon Shuster told him this your book's on a highway that's getting towards them winning right you're going through the season but you're going to have offer s along the way where we get

12:56

back stories of like oh like how did this player come into this system or where what's the backstory on this like head of scouting so you got all these like side stories about the Nationals as well as you had the through line of the season and it was a lot of fun it was it was a better than I thought it would be uh Jess's a really good writer finally I

13:13

read Chris Hayes's new book the sirens call this is his big new SP Chris Hayes from MSNBC his big new splashy book about attention and the attention economy this book didn't necessarily have like a big new thesis it's doing well it debuted number one like Chris is pretty famous and he was on all the shows uh it doesn't have like a big new

13:29

splashy thesis but it's very smartly written it's just like a smart idea book there's no advice in it but it's just uh let me try to understand and he's he his research assistants are busy there a lot of things and examples they're citing and I thought it was like a a really

13:45

well-written book Chris is a smart writer we talk about these issues a lot on this show if you want kind of like a smart cultural critic take on attention the attention economy this was a good one it's a good all right so that's what I read what's this picture you've given me here Jesse it's a Sega Genesis game oh I didn't

14:02

know we were going to talk about that I'm gonna hold it up hold it up to the camera it is a a Sega did a listener send this to us yeah it's a Sega Genesis game that has the title Sigma Insidious yeah did we okay so this is about us

14:17

talking about both these terms MH oh I have I have your text here all right here's what the The Listener said um I was just listening to episode 331 of the deep questions podcast where the two words Sigma and aidus have taken a prominent role which made me think about how they perfectly align with the two Central philosophies of the deep life

14:34

putting these two words together Sigman cidus makes me think of an old RPG game where the hero has to fight the heroes of shallowness and distraction by accumulating career capital in order to live out and maintain his ever evolving ideal lifestyle I like that I love the Sega Genesis reference because that's like our childhood yeah that's like 1994

14:52

to 1997 so that's definitely a deep cut I'm gonna be honest though I don't remember what Sigma means we talked about it I guess I don't remember what he describes it in the second paragraph if you want to read it describes an individual who puts his energy into pursuit of real value rather than

15:07

relying on empty flashiness oh I like that all right man Sigma it's like the big term with young kids so it's good yeah did you know cool did you know Ohio is like a negative term yes I learned this from my kids recently so Sigma is not Ohio right I still can't figure out

15:25

if based is good or bad I hav heard of that based it's a thing that's based B first time I heard you're clearly not Sigma I know guys Jesse so Ohio a sigma is no about Bas except for I don't know what it means all right

15:42

every 10-second interval that I'm talking about youth lingo is like a thousand listeners taking their airpods off and throwing them so we should probably wrap it up there but I appreciate that PGA Genesis reference this was from from Alex thank you for that all right everyone thanks for

15:57

listening we'll be back next week with another episode and until then as always stay deep if you like today's episode you might also like episode 339 titled let Brandon Cook which is about building a company around letting people do what

16:12

they do best the Brandon there of course is a reference to the very same Brandon Sanderson I talked about in today's Deep dive check it out I think you'll like it everything in our company is built around let Brandon Cook and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't

16:29

have to think about