Heroic Chat with Cal Newport: Do the Work and Accrete Value

Foreign. Heroes. It is my favorite time of the day, 1:01pm Central Time, which means it is day one. Good to see you, Heidi. Good to see you, Alex. Amy, Vinnie, John, Karen, Doris, Jared, Michael, Brad. I said every time, but I so love seeing the same faces and also obviously new faces at times. Roger, great to see you. Kimberly. We have a special guest today. Cal Newport is joining us. Cal, thank you for joining us, Brian.

It's always my pleasure to get an excuse to talk with you. And we have an audience this time, so it makes it even all the more special.

I am excited. It has been officially too long, so I look forward to catching up one on one. But I'm thrilled to have you here today. And as we discussed before, and as our community knows, we're almost a month in approaching a month into these daily sessions. Every week we meet with one of my favorite heroic masters, a guide and a teacher that's inspired me and I've done it deliberately in order of those individuals who have most affected my life. So we started with Phil Stutz, my beloved coach, spiritual father. Then we went to John Mackey, you know, founder of CEO, who inspired me business wise, wrote the book on conscious capitalism, obviously. Then we talked to William Damon last week, Stanford professor, the world's leading scholar on purpose, moral development. And, and you are our fourth. And I have goosebumps. I say that fourth guest. And that's by design. You know, you, you have so deeply inspired me with your work and how you show up. And as I was joking with you before, you know, I've got Stutz at 75, we got Mackie at about 70 years old, we got William Damon at 75. You're clocking in at a young 40. But sir, you are wise beyond your years. And I am so grateful to, you know, be friends with you, to be inspired by you and to have you here today day. So. You're a good one, dude.

Yeah. Well, Brian, let me just say though, when you get down to your like 2 or 300th session like this, you should probably stop telling the guests that you're seeing people in order of how significant they've been. At some point you'll have to hide.

That piece, I'm telling you. See, this is the kind of thing I get from Cal. That's very helpful point of feedback. You kid and I kid. But seriously, dude, it's been so good. We started with so good, they can't ignore you. I read that book and it was just awesome. We connected. At the end of it, I said, hey, you know, where should people go so they can connect with you? And you said, well, they can't. Right? And actually that's the subject of my next book. I've never been on a social platform. Deep Work and then read Deep Work. And it was just, you know, obviously profound. We started to spend some more time together. Then he wrote Digital Minimalism. Taught the class Digital Minimalism one on one with us. And it's just, it's been really, really inspiring for me to see your consistency, your brilliance, and to be able to translate that into our work. Usually I do that celebration after I do the little guided meditation. So you got it before, but community. Let's do our thing. And we'll take a quick breath. Imagine guides who have inspired us as we flip the switch. Invite the best, most heroic version of ourselves to join us. Breathing in through our nose, down into our bellies, back out through our nose. Exhale slightly longer than the inhale. Always the fastest way to flip the switch. To calm confidence, energized tranquility. We are committed to being heroically wise, disciplined, loving, courageous, grateful, hopeful, curious and zesty. Targets. Why? Approximating or approaching one minute. Meditation energy is activated. Moving to work. I just celebrated one of my favorite guides and inspirations. Think of a guide in your life who has helped you show up more powerfully in your work. And this time, think of someone younger than you. I'm 48. Cal's 40. We often think of guides as those who are older than us. But think of a guide who is younger than you, who has inspired you. Bring them to mind. Think of the one thing that has most profoundly affected your life that they have taught you. The hero gets a guide on their heroic quests. Appreciate them moving from work to love. Beam them some gratitude bonus points. Send them a text or an email. Energy, work and love. Our big three Cal. I tend to do the appreciation of our guide after I do that, but I already did yours. We're set. Soul Force is activated at 101. Let's get to work. So much we can talk about, but we're going to start at the very top. Who are your heroes? I got some of mine behind me. Who are your heroes? And then we'll ask you who your guides are. Then we're going to ask you about your masterpiece days, your big three, you know, life changing distinctions, et cetera. But who? When I. When you think of who your heroes are, who comes to mind?

I mean, you know, Brian, you've heard me talk about some of these offline, but if I'M going to put them in chronological order. I often look at Lincoln, Thoreau, and then more recently, John McPhee. I have a separate reason. Each of these three people captures something different that I find to be really important in my life. And so they each three have a different resonance. I mean, I think I've sent you some Lincoln books before because, you know, you know, I'm a Lincoln, so I mean, I can start with him. I'll give the brief summary of all three, why they're important to me. Lincoln was all about putting intelligence to work in a fashion that was going to improve the world. He was very pragmatic, natural, intellectual. He used his mind as a tool. I have this mind. I'm growing up in the middle of nowhere in Illinois. I have this tool. I can develop it with discipline and apply it to try to push forward change in the world and the way he did it. So he deployed his intellect. But he also is incredibly pragmatic. And he would read the world as it was. He would meet people where they were. He would understand human nature and say, not what's perfect, instead of railing about the frustration of the perfection you can't afford. How can we move this one inch better this week and next year? How can we make things three feet better? And so I think there's a real pragmatic and intentional deployment of intelligence. Thoreau is, I think, the original American culture shifting idea writer. So to me, he really encapsulates that idea of using the ability to think, the right to try to understand and explain things in the culture and, and propose better ways for new ways to see life. He was exploring big ideas out loud in a way that I think is very American and really influential to me. And then finally, McPhee just captures for me craft. Purified. He has a craft he wanted to master, which was nonfiction writing. Built essentially a simple life around that craft. Whole life in Princeton, where, you know, he attended and his dad worked, lived in Princeton, had a creative writing teaching position at Princeton. That sort of smooth out the ups and downs of freelance writing. Have some health insurance and just wrote. And to this day, that's what he does. So there's a purity and deliberateness in John McPhee. Never thought, I'm going to build an empire. Never thought, you know, I want to be Grisham. I want my second house in Palm Springs, Miami. He has his turret office on an old building in Princeton. And he wants to write and keep pushing that skill. So for three different reasons, those, those three have been heroes for Me.

That is awesome. And it's interesting too because we have and I did this for William Damon. Let me see if I can do it again. We share. You did send me the Let me see if I can exceed my, my skills here tech wise. So I'm showing. Is that showing? So I got, I thought you're gonna say, or when I think of that kind of American thinker, I think of Emerson, you know, and in our office wars we do remind ourselves that it was Thoreau's, you know, property was on Emerson's property. But I got these two guys next to each other thinking of my American heroes and how they came to life, etc. Anyway, kind of funny on that. And then the thing that I forgot to share was the search for Newport. So if you have not searched the app for Newport, please do that. What you will find are 33 plus ones, 51 philosopher's notes in which I reference Cal, including the notes on his book. So good they can't ignore you. Deep work, how to become a straight A student, digital minimalism, etc. And then Cal taught his own class Digital minimalism with us. But I love that Lincoln, Thoreau and McPhee. That is fantastic. And you sent me Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is an all time favorite book. I think it's the note of mine that I've reread the most times. It sits on the top of a stack of notes I've come back to again and again and again. The, you know, Lincoln's relationship to his ambition in the way she framed the leaders that she profiled Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. That the one thing they all had in common was in the words she used for Lincoln, ferocious ambition. So that book profoundly changed my life. Goosebumps again. I appreciate you sending it my way and all the other titles, but that's fantastic. I love it. Heroes, Guides, perhaps slightly different. Who have you found to be the deepest influences on your creativity, on your life in general? How do you think about that? It may be the same three, but does anyone come to mind in terms of guides, books, that sort of thing?

Well, so when I think of guides, I'm thinking about actual interaction with me, actual on the ground guidance of various aspects of my career. So I'm thinking about who are the people who through our relationship, like really did help shape my career, present company excluded. I suppose I should, I should tell people like Digital minimalism that term. I remember working that through with Brian on the, on the phone when I was working through. So, of course, Brian, you're, you have been a big guide, but, but present company excluded, there's, you know, two women in my life that played a big role in the academic and the, the writing side of the career. So my doctoral advisor at mit, Nancy lynch, taught me how the academic, the life of the mind of the academic world works. And it was a very useful guide to the art of actually applying thought in a systematic manner. How many things should you be working on at the same time? What's required of breakthrough thought if you want to have a proof that's going to be award caliber? What's really required? How much time do you have to spend? How do you manage the other parts of your life so that the intellectual part of your life has the nutrients it needs to actually make progress? I learned a lot of that, both directly and indirectly through observing her. It's not surprising a lot of the ideas from deep work, the reason why I'm the person who ended up writing that book is because I was incubated. My ideas of intellectual life are incubated in this theory group at MIT under the guidance of this, this brilliant professor, Nancy. And so a lot of deep Work actually owes back to her. And then in my writing life, you know, I signed with my literary agent when I was 20 years old. So I was after. Right after the junior, my junior year of college, I wanted to write a book. And that book went on to be how to Win a College, the very first book I wrote, which came out in 2005. So right after I graduated college and I, this was the agen I signed with, I kind of made my way to her haphazardly. And she has been a constant in my life now for two decades. And so my whole understanding of the world of writing comes from her. How that works, how career shape, the long game, which I, you know, I really played. I remember talking with her years ago, well over a decade ago. This would have been 2007 or something like this, right around then. I remember talking to her and just saying I was pointing to a particular writer at the time who was writing for the New Yorker and writing these New York Times bestselling idea books. And I was like, this is just what I want to do. And her guidance of, like, this is a slow game. I mean, you have to build your skill, you have to build your reputation. It's. You have to be a good person in the industry. And so it's telling that whatever it is, now, 15 years later, I'm writing for the New Yorker. I'm doing those New York Times bestselling books. That patience like this is how that world works. That came from her. So she was a guide. And I'm often trying to give that wisdom back, especially when I'm giving advice to people who are thinking about going to the world of writing or this or that. I remember how important it was to have a guide who understood that path as opposed to just let me go into that world and reshape it. Let me go into that world, and I just want my career to unfold the way I want it to unfold. I'm going to beat the system. And having the patient experience guide to say this is the way it works can be so powerful because it's often through, especially in writing, persistent but very intentionally aimed effort that aggregates over time, that unlocks eventually really cool things. And you'll never get there if you're winging it or if you're taking swings or just working on what you want to work on. And so I really. She guided me. And so I try to pass along to other people, expert guides who been the path you're going, have climbed that mountain, have come out of Dante's Inferno and made it up back to the surface. Trust and respect those guides, because following the right path, I mean, is almost always the prerequisite to actually get into a really cool place. If you, no matter how much energy you have, if you are rampaging up the side of the mountain randomly hoping to get to the top, you're probably not going to get there. So those two guys were incredibly pragmatically in the weeds, useful to both sides of my career.

That's so inspiring. And there's so many ideas that come up for me as you share that. That's exactly what Phil did for me on one side of things and what John did for me, Mackie, on the other side of things. And they're believable. They've been there and done that, you know, and you had something at that age that was worthy of that guidance from both people, which is also really important as we strive to be worthy of a believable guide. We've got to do the work in order to have opportunity and be ready for it and not feel entitled. And then one of the things I admire most about you is how hard you work on your craft. And I have goosebumps yet again. I remember conversations not too long ago as you were getting into the New Yorker and thinking about, I think when you were thinking about the New Yorker and gosh you got a lot going on, but you're literally incredible. I was going to say insane commitment to your craft and the enthusiasm with which. And the humility with which you told me was why you were so excited to do it and how you would get hammered by this editor who just had such huge standards and how you had to be willing to suck in order to get where you wanted to get and how deliberate you were in showing up to be so good they can't ignore you. And again, stepping it up and having the humility, 20 years into the quest, having achieved the success you've already achieved, it's like you just began. And again, that's something that I admire in you. Not just how prolific you are and the work and how it's actually impacted me personally, but who you are and how you show up. And this isn't theory for you. You've moved from theory to practice to mastery. And you know that today's the day to actually show up as a master or not. So I love how you frame that. And I want our community to know how hard you work. Like, Cal's not just saying this. He's showing up every single day and chipping away. Accreting is one of the things that you and I talked about in one of our chats of. Yeah, yeah. In any given day, you may not get anything out of it, but if you show up day in and day out, you accrete just a little bit more value. And that is what's going to allow us to succeed when we have that true long game vantage point, et cetera.

Yeah, well, and I gotta say, I absolutely true, everything is very hard, but if you learn to love the hard, then really cool stuff happens. And that's how I've tried to orient my writing career, is the process, the craft. Like, I don't like, and maybe I taught myself this or this is the way I am and I've worked backwards from it. I don't like the part where the book comes out or the article is published. I like the part where I'm up to my neck in it, you know, and I'm halfway through the 6,000 word piece and I'm a little bit stuck. I think I got to figure this out. And then when you figure it out, and now I think I've undone it, I'm happy what I do here. That actual craft part, learning to love the craft, that's how I got through 20 years, was loving the craft, loving the improvement of the craft. All that has been really useful to Me, the other. This is an idea that I didn't. I didn't clarify this into a named idea until recently. I think I talked about this on my podcast a few weeks ago. It's the first time I'd really named it. And I called it Pragmatic Ambition. And it's a strategy I've been deploying without knowing this was a strategy. And the goal is, as I'm pushing myself in a particular endeavor, push myself towards, at any one point, be pushing myself towards a difficult but achievable goal that once accomplished, I can relish in it and just have gratitude and enjoy it. And so, you know, getting into the New Yorker was like one of those goals, pushing myself to get there once I'm in there, then teach myself, have gratitude for that every day. If nothing else happens, I'm just excited I got there, you know, like, I've been able to do this. And it's like a way station on the path of the ferocious ambition that you talked about before. So instead of just automatically only looking at what's next, being able to move steps step by step, up and at each step, and I went back. And so in this podcast episode, I went back and traced very early parts of my career, the steps I would aim for. And then when I got there, I'd be really happy. And I remember during this exercise, like, one of the big initial steps early in my writing career was I wanted my blog to be popular enough that the affiliate links. So back then Amazon, you could. They would pay by default, your affiliate link income in gift certificates, Amazon gift certificates, they would send you, like, a code. And I said if I could get to a place where the affiliate links were enough, that I could essentially just afford to buy books on Amazon for free whenever I wanted. So, like, this would be a few hundred dollars a month. I was like, that would be the greatest thing. I'm a poor grad student. I could just buy books without having thinking about my finances. And I remember that was like one of the very early steps on my career. And I remember hitting that step, wringing every ounce of gratitude out of that. That even as I was moving on to try to do the next step up, the next level up, I really tried to revel in, like, this is great. You know what? I don't have to pay for books. And I think I enjoyed that as much as I've enjoyed some of these more recent ones. So anyways, this idea kind of debuting here a little bit, Brian, but this idea of how do you make ferocious ambition Sustainable, psychologically speaking, is each step along the way you're aiming for is something that, you know, to use a Jewish phrase, Dianu, this would be enough if I just got there. I could, I could live on this for a while and love this for a while and be proud of this for a while. And it somehow makes that never ending quest to keep improving your craft not seem like a never ending quest, but actually a lifestyle, a character choice and approach to life.

That's so good. And again, the humility that you're demonstrating right here is such a big part of it. And then that the pragmatic ambition. I love that we like to talk about dominoes and kind of those micro wins and celebrating them throughout the process and even today. What did I do? How did I, how can I celebrate? And BJ Fogg talks about this a lot, that, yeah, we got mindfulness, we got gratitude as key practices to boost our well being and flourishing. But celebration, he says, is an unheralded, you know, get that splash of dopamine by appreciating and celebrating what you've created. I love the way you've articulated that. And then I want to come back to your love of the craft. And you and I have had those chats too. I mean, I know from our conversations that you very much prefer the crafting creative process vis a vis the promotional part of it. You know, you're like, all right, cool, I got to go do all these interviews now to get the book out. And I'll do that because that's part of my craft as an author. But the way that you celebrated the hard things is it's the, I don't know about the definition, but it certainly is an exemplary demonstration of mastery, that the master and his or her path are one. And you love that process so much. And Phil comes to mind, he says we gotta love the pain, the uncertainty and the hard work. Most people want the vacation at the end of the achievement. And for you to articulate that there, I want to just highlight as well. It's just a beautiful thing.

Yep. Well, I mean, it's like the, the basketball star, they love that extra practice because they're thinking ahead. You know, when I'm in the game, this is going to, this is going to help me make that shot, you know, you feel the same. I think often of Lincoln, I'll just say briefly, but I think often of Lincoln preparing his, the epic speeches that helped put him on the map when he began to push back against the Nebraska act and the expansion of slavery. He went to the Library of Congress and just did research that other people weren't doing, went back to the founding documents, like really built up this deep understanding of the history of the slave issue in America. And on that was able to build these, these speeches that were different than anyone had seen before. It wasn't rhetorical flourishes and references to Cicero. It was this sort of avalanche of logical inevitability, like, let me cite the source, move through or whatever. And I always think about him in the Library of Congress just doing that work and it's hard work and week after week and just reading, but enjoying every minute of it because he knew every day he was doing that, he was putting another brick into this edifice he was building that was going to be this eventually this national argument that knowing this hard work is the great part, because that's what's going to allow me when I'm doing my speech at, you know, Cooper Union, that blow people away and it's the getting that satisfaction work. So I try to remember that when I'm, when I'm like working on a hard article, I'm like, man, this is going to take forever. And I'm kind of nowhere and I'm stuck on just this one piece of it. It's like it's Lincoln to the Library of Congress. That's what I always think about.

That's so cool. And then I think of Lincoln literally training himself on war and he had to be the strategist who could actually win the war. So he's a self taught strategist who's become the Commander in chief, spending equal amount of time studying in that regard. And then I just got struck by Lincoln's purpose. And then I got struck, which was really his fuel, you know, because ultimately he wasn't trying to impress anyone on the floor per se. He was trying to preserve the Union, you know, and there's that deep, deep, deep, deep, deep purpose that drove him. And then of course, William Damon and his work is what we discussed last week. What's your purpose? How would you frame that? Because I think that when we unpack all of this, and I know this from our chats, but how would you frame your purpose that drives you at just kind of that fundamental core being.

Reshaping aspects of our shared culture for the better. This idea, which I'm very, I find to be so exciting that mind matter, like thoughts, ideas that you just come up with in your brain promulgated through the world, can actually change the way people understand and act in the World for the better. So, so for me I'm always thinking about intellectual impact and you know, and I do work at different types of scales. So in my really academic work it's about trying to have academic ideas that are influential and are cited and then those spawn other ideas and these ideas filter down and have an impact on how we understand the world. And in my popular facing work it's I want to just change individuals lives. I mean, how many people can I change the way they understand some part of their world? I mean it's why for example my career you can kind of understand I'm writer, professor, I'm a technologist, I computer scientists, I do academic work and articles and books vaguely in the space of like technology and its impact on culture. And what happens when we throw email into the office or you know, smartphones show up in our pockets and we weren't really prepared for it. And so I do that work and I plant those ideas and you know, let's think about the workplace and attention and let's think about digital minimalism, et cetera. But spun out of that is this movement. So like one of the things I write about is like this movement to just have your life be deeper, to craft a deeper life in a world that's trying to pull you into the shallows. And so that for example, I think of as this deep life movement as something that has spun off of my work. And then I'm trying to help support and push with my podcast and videos or this or that. And but to me that's really exciting because that's directly affecting individual people's lives. And then on my books and articles that are affecting directly people, but also the way their organizations run, the way, you know, their school thinks about their policies for phones and their kids. And then my academic ideas at the other end of the spectrum and, and there it's, it's ideas that are at the sort of in the academic world but that eventually does trickle down. So it's all impact that you can just have neuronal activity here that 10 years from now can actually affect how let's say a couple hundred thousand people experience their life. I just continue to be amazed by that. And I don't know how else to do there except for by craft and quality. Better ideas, sharper ideas, better craft for writing, better delivery of ideas. And just you want to hone that tool, hone that edge so that like your ability to have this effect repeatedly is stronger, it's more consistent. So it's all about intellectual impact. For me?

Yeah. Yeah, brilliant. And then I can also see that the, the kind of parallel track of your pragmatic ambition and also your pragmatic purpose and how that's evolved since you were 20 to, you know, 25, 30, 35, 40. Like you can feel the iterative nature of it. And you didn't need to have it all figured out. You don't need to have five years from now and 10 years from now and 20 years from now figured out. But you've shown up to what was present and you've done your absolute best with each of those next steps. But let's go there. So then let's talk about you, Cal Newport, and how you get yourself into the peak, you know, condition to show up. We'll start by talking about your masterpiece days. And I requested the team to make sure that I share that my masterpiece days are, you know, Cal's fingerprints are all over it. So, loading the app. Let's go, hero. All right, so then in my philosopher CEO mode, Cal, you're our shutdown complete. So my pm. Thank you for that. I remember reading shutdown complete. Oh, that's a good one. You know, I got that. That's, that's completely changed my life and how I show up. And then of course, deep work is another huge facet there and I can go off. But tell us your, how do you think of your days and how do you architect your days? Am, pm, how do you frame it?

Well, you know, so there's different types of days, obviously, because as a professor, the real distinction is is this a teaching day during an active semester or is this by contrast a summer day or, or a day when I'm not teaching? So, so teaching days I treat very differently from non teaching days. The days I love are the non teaching days because these are the days I can really go deep. And for me, an ideal one of these days is it would, you know, a masterpiece day would be a weekday. You know, I'm up, I, I walk my older two boys to the bus stop. It's about half mile away. So it's a great. Let's just get started. Let's walk there, talk to my boys, drop them off. Now I have this nice half mile walk home. So you're starting to load up. What am I going to be thinking about? What am I going to be working about? You're working your brain up. This is your jumping jacks, your cognitive jumping jacks before you actually start the heavy lifting. Then I would work on a masterpiece. They ride in the deep Work, writing or maybe thinking and research. So if I'm writing, I'm doing it at my desk. This is part of my escalation of Brian and I's office wars. So you haven't actually seen the latest escalation, Brian, but we renovated the study in our house to be a library with all built in bookcases. And I had a custom built library desk from a company in Maine that just builds desks for college libraries.

I see how it is. I got you.

I just want to say, I mean it's cute what you have there in Austin, but I'm talking about a serious, a serious, right? So it's either. So I want three to four hours then of deep work. So I'm either writing at that desk and there's no computers in that room. If I'm going to write, I can bring in a laptop, there's no permanent screens in that room. Or if I'm thinking, I want to be on foot. So I would be doing that thinking on foot, but writing would be great. So I'm there, I'm writing then, then we're going to have lunch and check in on things and then on a perfect day, I would then go outside and this would be more speculative thinking. The, the, the prep work to the big ideas that I'm going to write about next. I love to do that. I would like to be on foot, preferably somewhere forested if I can get to it. Now I'm just, I'm thinking but, but it's more relaxed than in the morning deep work session where it's craft now. It's let's get the mechanisms rolling, let's have insights or whatever. I would then after this point, I would usually exercise before, right before I'd go to pick my kids up from the bus stop and now we're transitioned in the family time. And so to me, you know, that would be, that would be the, that's the ideal day. And that's like my day almost every day during the summer, during the semester. It just depends. Is it a teaching day? Is it not a teaching day? But that's always the day I'm pining for.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And that also answers the question we get often, which is, yeah, yeah, but what about days when I'm traveling? Or what about days when I'm doing this perfect, have this masterpiece day, have that masterpiece day, find the structure, allow for the spontaneity, etc. Some questions arise for me as you share that man, again, love it all. Don't forget the fireplace in the library. Right?

That was a fireplace. I do it. Yeah, that's right. The fireplace is there.

I got an outdoor restaurant burner. Keep me warm in my outdoor office, but it doesn't compete with the fireplace. You're out thinking, you've done the craft, you've done the hard work in your am. You're out thinking, do you have anything that you can capture ideas with, like, tell me what, what you do in terms of, oh my gosh, this is a great idea. I don't want it to slip. How do you approach that?

Yeah, so that's going to be in a notebook I'll bring with me. So there's two notebooks that are relevant to my life. So there's the notebook that's relevant for ideas about my life. Right. So ideas about my goals, how I'm living, my ambition. So. So for ideas about how I'm living, I have a black Moleskine notebook and I've been using these since 2005 for ideas that are professional. Article idea, book idea, proof idea. I have a notebook. I don't know the inches, but this is probably three by five. I'm sort of showing up on screen. Grid paper, double spiral bound. I have a whole stack of these notebooks. My backpack's over there. You know, there's, there's one in there now. That's what I'm going to bring with me to the capture notes. The capture notes on the fly. Eventually I'll transfer those, you know, where they need to go. But it might not be that day. I sort of trust if they're in there. I use this notebook that's with me all the time. I'm not going to, not going to forget about it. I'm not going to leave it. And so, so much thinking happens there. So for example, we were just down in Florida on a family vacation over the President's Day weekend. I was doing some beach walking because I have a. Submitted the manuscript for my next book and we're in the middle of editing. And what I'm really working on for this book, more so than I have in the past, is taking the editing process seriously. I'm really taking the feedback from my editors and really just wanting to go, let's, let's fine tune this thing, you know, like, let's get this engine going, you know, not in the past. I've put a lot of effort into the book and it's like, it's, it's, it's fine. Yeah, like tweak a couple things. So I'M really focusing on that. And so I was on foot doing these long walks on the beach. My calves are still sore and I'm filling up this notebook page after page. But it was me working out how I was going to update or rework the whole chapter second part of the book. So I'll really fill these notebooks with a lot, a lot of text. So it's from my brain to the paper and then at some point from the paper into some other system and maybe that's when I refine it.

Perfect. Absolutely brilliant. So three by five. And this is back and literally this is weeds now but back pocket kind of thing or front pocket and you got like a little pen. I'm going to get the actual pen from you. And it's actually we're going to try it after we get ship this but it's that simple.

Backpack. I always walk around.

You always have a backpack.

I have a day pack. I'm looking at it right now here, I'm gonna grab it. Here we go.

Yeah, we got. Let's go Cal. Newport approved. And just the Amazon one. We'll get you some. We'll get you some affiliate credits.

Let's go to buy some books. That's an Osprey day pack. So it's un. Loosely structured. It's loosely structured and it's very lightweight than notebook.

Okay, cool. So I'm going to grab my Osprey bag just because we're.

Ryan and I are going to try to out notebook each other.

No we're not, dude. I'm going to go next level. But I do need to hold up my Osprey bag because apparently we're twinsies.

There we go.

I had not been bringing that out though. So I'm going to have to bring that out. And you know what I'll do? I'll one up you on that. One of my targets on heroic is to rock. So I carry heavy weight. So what I'm going to need to figure out is how to rock with my notebook just to make sure I can plus one count Newport.

You could be. You could be filling your rock with heavy books. So it's kind of a even better here we're talking about synergy. So you could be pulling out these tomes to read.

The peripatetics would be proud.

Perfect.

So good. Okay, cool. We went into the weeds on that but that was awesome. Email. Tell us about your relationship to email briefly. When, how often.

It depends on the day. So for example, in the semester, the days I'm teaching, I Just give over to, I call them Georgetown days. And like between my classes I'll go. I'm on email. I'm trying to catch up with things, but if it's a deep work day, I might not check it. And so it really just depends where it shows up. So on a deep work day, I want to have minimal interaction with email. If it's a, I'm on campus, I have meetings, then I'm going to have, you know, one or two sessions where I'm going to check in. I fall behind because I schedule time to do email on those days and it's not enough time to keep up with what we get in the modern world with email. And I fall behind. So typically once a week I have to put aside, you know, on Monday, a big chunk of time to kind of catch up on the stuff where people are yelling at me. So email has a very small footprint on most of my days, which means I'm terrible at email, but it allows me to be better at everything else 100%.

And this is, you know, the subject of your great book, A World Without Email, in which we talk about different communication channels, how to maximize systems, etc. And then just to say it out loud, social media never had a presence, never will have a presence. And yet somehow here you are with the impact that you have. Comment on that briefly, because so much we hear is, oh, you have to do this or you have to do that in order to have impact.

No. And what you have to do to have impact is do things that are too good to be ignored. So the bad news is that's hard. But the good news is if it can't be ignored, it won't be. So interesting stuff, interesting ideas, they find their way out. I mean, I think social media is good for bringing a lot of attention to yourself for the stuff you're doing on social media. It's very circular. So you can build a big audience on social media doing social media stuff, and that's fine, but it's connection to the other stuff. I mean, great writers sell their books because they're great books, you know, great musicians. In the end, people like their music because it's really good music. Now if these people turn around and also have a social media presence, it might be big, but that's just a side effect of what they're already doing. That's really good. So I've never had a mainstream social media account and I haven't missed it. And I don't know, I mean, maybe it. I don't know the impact. But I do know it hasn't stopped me from being able to sell a lot of books and do interesting things and have it, have an interesting life. So to me, it's one of the best, best decisions I've ever made. My phone is boring. There's not unless there's a baseball game going on and the MLB app is open, there's really not much on my phone that attracts my attention. And not having that lure constantly pulling at my attention hour to hour, day by day, I think has unlocked so much cognitive potential that I've been able to aim at other things.

Yeah, and I actually wrote about you again on the subject of being a cognitive athlete who smokes. So you had that great, you know, metaphor of look. An athlete, an Olympic athlete who relied on their cardiovascular system would not smoke if they were serious about being their absolute best. Yet we as cognitive athletes smoke all day, every day by flitting, you know, splintering our attention with whether it's social media or a constant email or constant addiction to the phone. Brilliant. Got it. So much we can talk about there, but let's step back. You didn't mention yet the shutdown complete. You kind of did, implicitly where you said you went from work to love time or family time. But can you just talk to that briefly? Because it's such an important anchor, I think, in creating a masterpiece day.

I mean, it's so ingrained in my life that I almost didn't even think to mention it. It's like, well, of course that's how the transition from the workday to the non workday happens. I have to remember, not everyone says this weird phrase, but it's so core to my core, to my routine is you shut down work, you got to shut it down completely. There's no open loops I have to worry about. I've checked my plan for tomorrow. There's no emergency that came in. We're set. Let's say the weird phrase. By saying the weird phrase, if I have a anxious thought later in the night about work, instead of actually trying to respond to that, the details of that thought, I can just say, wait a second. I said schedule shutdown complete. No one in their right mind would just say that randomly. I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't actually checked everything and said it was okay to shut down work. So I'm not going to entertain you rumination. We can do business tomorrow. And I actually invented this. That's completely part of my. My day to day. I invented that in Grad. School. It was actually when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I was having room. The issue would be proofs that weren't, you know, proofs are hard. And, like, something wouldn't be working. And I would ruminate on, like, oh, my God, I gotta keep thinking about this proof. Because if this falls apart, the whole thesis could fall apart, and then I won't get my doctorate, and then I'll, you know, fail out of school, whatever, right? And so I. That's when I invented it. Like, I have a plan. Here are the things I'm gonna try tomorrow to fix this proof. Schedule shutdown complete. So it was actually forged in the fire of doctoral dissertation mathematical rumination. And as I moved on to have, you know, from there in my life, it's worked for all the other types of work stresses that emerge. So, yeah, that's. It shouldn't be implicit. I should say it clearly. Schedule shutdown complete. You know, every night your work is done, and you got to keep those thoughts out of it. You got to have the clear separation.

That's so good. I didn't realize it was. Schedule shut down complete. Even more robust. Let's.

That was the original. That was the original. I mean, it was too. I think it was too embarrassing for my readers, so I shortened it. But my whole point was it should be embarrassing because it can't be something you would normally say so you won't forget the fact that you said it, because it's got to be crazy. So, yeah, it used to be. Schedule, shutdown complete. That was the original phrase.

That's brilliant. And then I recently talked about Steven Pressfield's newest book where he talks about the office is closed. It's kind of his thing that he says to himself, the office is closed. He won't talk to other people about what was going on. He's not going to talk to himself. And I just love that. No, no, we had that discussion. We made the decision. Let's go. And the repetition of that, you accrete, you know, the neuroplasticity of clarity by repeating it again and again and again and again. You don't do it once in a while. You're doing it day in and day out, such that that becomes the habitual norm. Love it. Moving on, knowing we have a hard stop so you can go to the afternoon pickup of the boys coming up in 18 minutes here. The big three. So, as you know, not a huge fan of Freud, but I do like his insights that a good life comes down to work. And love you And I have talked a lot about the fact that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if your energy isn't where it needs to be, good luck showing up powerfully in your work and your love. So that's our big three that we've architected the entire app against, etc. Etc. Energy, work, and love. What are the top things? Perhaps the number one thing that you've kind of distinctions you've made theoretically that you have applied in practice that have led to a level of mastery that has changed your life that you think would benefit our community. Let's start with energy.

With energy. Two things I'll mention that have been effective for me. One is my. My food. I call it food automation. But at some point I realized breakfast, lunch, all the food until you get to dinner, I want to expend zero thought on that. Just have a system for what that is. That is just fuel, healthy fuel maximization. I don't want to waste one ounce of thinking about, like, oh, what should I go do for lunch or breakfast? I want to just have that be automated and have whatever I'm automating there be, you know, jet fuel for my brain. Clean, healthy, and then let dinner be the thing where you can enjoy food in the sense of you can cook something, you know, about the ingredients. It should be good, it should be healthy, but it's where you can actually get enjoyment out of food. Right? So that was very helpful to me, being like, lunch and breakfast are not about, oh, I enjoy this food, or I'm looking forward to this. That's. It's. It's fuel. You're an athlete, you're at training camp. Concentrate, like, oh, this is great flavors. And I love this, you know, this chicken we got from the. The local whatever. Let that be dinner, and then give dinner attention and, you know, and make that be healthy and fresh. That was very useful to me. So to the point where when I'm on campus, I know exactly this is the thing I eat. I go to this, this buffet right next to my office where you can, like, fill your plate 50 with vegetables and there'll be some sort of like, chicken you can put in there. And then I put it olives. Like, I. I know exactly what it is, right? Like, and I don't even want to think about. It's gonna be the same thing, even down to, like, what water bottle? I get this water bottle, then I refill it and bring it to class, right? Have that automated. The other thing that's been useful for energy is this has been a little bit More recently, every single day, non trivial muscle activation. And you know Brian, we used to, the way I used to do it was like pretty concentrated with just a pull up bar and push ups. At some point during the pandemic we, my wife and I realized that you could get gym equipment very cheaply because the gyms were shut down. And so we sort of tricked out our whole garage with a bunch of dumbbells. And I wanted 20 to 30 minute program every day. I feel bad if I miss it. Lifting heavy things. I'm not so young anymore, I need to be lifting heavy things. And so that's been big for energy. Work is all about deep work, right? The deep work is the stuff that matters. The other stuff keeps the lights on. Keep the lights on, but be very efficient about that. Be very indulgent terms. The deep work, like knowing what is in the end, what is actually bringing the, the proverbial, you know, moviegoers to the theaters is the stuff that's produced in deep work. So for me, prioritizing deep work hours at the, the most cognitively effective times of the day, which for me tends to be the morning, keeping the shallow stuff controlled in terms of quantity. And then once you let something in, be very organized about it to minimize its footprint. So to me that's the, that's my key work idea. And then with love, it's quality time with people you care about. Completely undistracted. How can we do that? You know, three kids, have a wife. How do we do as much of that as possible? That's what you're looking for. That's why you want the clear shutdown from work work. When you work, focus, melt your brain, be done and let that, let that be the full attention. And you know, one of the ways I've really worked on that recently is to have projects I'm working on, you know, with the kids. So, so here at my, my offices, my deep work offices, we've been building out a maker lab. And this Thursday, whenever, so today, Thursday after I get the kids, we come back here and we're doing microelectronics, we're doing 3D printing, VR rigging here we, we have these, you know, projects we're working on. It's one on one time, full attention. I think there's probably nothing more important, especially for elementary school age kids. So those are kind of my big heuristics that probably the last year or so I've been deploying in each of those areas.

That is awesome. Beautiful. How many pull ups these days? I was doing my pulse this morning. I'm like, where's Cal at these days?

Oh, so this is the thing. I've shifted from just doing my 25 pull ups every day. So. Yeah, Brian, I used to have this pull up challenge. I forgot what my. I had some count. It was like a certain number of hundred. I wanted to do like a thousand a month or something like that. I've shifted now, Brian. So now what I'm doing is either a 20 or 30 minute guided weight workout. And I. I alternate through. Can't you notice how buff I am? But I alternate through. I alternate, you know, different parts.

You're looking pretty jacked there, aren't you? Look at you.

I mean, I was being facetious, but I'll take it. But, um, but so it's. It's more intense. The pull ups. I would just go in and do it. It was five minutes and now I realized take 30 minutes. And I have to work really hard to find time for that. Like, it's not just casual, do I have time, but it's actually like enough time that I think the fact that takes more than just a couple minutes is important to me now. So I'm. It's more dumbbells and squatting and, you know, whatever.

Yeah, that's brilliant. I mean, one of my targets energy wise is 30 minutes of movement. I can break it into two 15 minute segments, but show up, you know, and we can find that time. You got to work for it on certain days, but we can find it, dude. So good. I want to take advantage of the last few minutes we have here. If anyone has a question you want to ask, Cal, hit your hand, raise your hand. And we've got a few more minutes left. Let's enjoy your company. Beth, you were the first to raise your hand. If you can frame your question up nice and concisely, that'd be. Be fantastic. We'll see how many of these quick rapid fire questions we can get through.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Cal. I'm a professor too. I'm at a heavier teaching institution than you are, so most of my days are like your Georgetown days. So I'm teaching, I'm prepping, I'm meeting with students, I'm running meetings. I'm department chair too, so I've got that kind of stuff. My time for traditional deep work is super limited.

So.

So my question is, number one, I'm thinking of what else in my regular job is my deep work? I consider my teaching my deep work. I consider my, like, sitting, mentoring, Students mentoring other colleagues. Deep work I consider like coming up with ideas for cool ways to do activities at a faculty meeting. Deep work. So a my question is, in your world, would those kinds of things count as deep work?

Oh, sure. I mean, absolutely. I mean first of all, let me just say a lot of empathy for those who aren't academics. Department chair, this is a very hard job and you don't need to hear it from me, but I want to be the first to give you all of the permission in the world. Your department chair at a heavy teaching load university. You should not be expecting yourself to be doing three hours of book writing every day or something like this. Department chair takes over all of that. That. But as you're talking about, that's very difficult, meaningful work. So I think teaching, teaching very difficult. Prepping for teaching. How very difficult dealing. I mean, you know this more than me solving the puzzle of the personalities in your department. How am I going to make this work? Like get them on board with this and get consensus around this. That's using the human brain the way the human brain was wired to like the human brain and the Paleolithic was wired to kind of do two things well, navigate complex social circumstances and throw a spear accurately. And so, you know, we have a lot of our brain that is set up to how do I manage everything that's going on in my tribe? You're probably using those circuits at 150% as a department chair. And so the way I like to think about it is deep work is not a specific, the content doesn't matter. Deep work is an approach to something that's important which says when you're doing something that's important, you try to give that your full focus. So you don't context shift while you're doing it. You do one thing after another. So that's where I think deep work is relevant. You know, Beth, in your situation is you have a lot of things going on that are important and difficult and the degree to which you can be sequential. You have my full attention done. Right? This has my full attention done and not trying to interleave it. That's just going to play better with the way that the, the mind apparatus goes. But you have my, my respect and my empathy. Chair is hard and it's important work. It's important and obstacles make me stronger.

So one last question. How do I get better at shutdown complete as department chair and again, teaching heavy institution. But we still do research. I love my research. I just, you know, got a chapter out the door last week, but I had to write it on weekends and evenings because that's when I'm not getting dinged for all the department chair stuff. So I need. What coaching do you have on, like, what two top pieces of advice would you have for getting better at shutdown complete? Because it's really hard for me.

Well, a quick hack here is you. You do your full shutdown complete ritual at the end of the normal workdays. You're closing open loops, checking your plan for the next day. What you can do, and I do this as well, is you can, you can isolate and prepare a deep work session you're going to do after the shutdown. So I'm going to write, you know, on Saturday morning I'm going to write work on a chapter I'm going to edit. And it's an isolated thing that's prepared. You can do a complete schedule, shutdown complete, even if later in the evening you're going to sit down and work on, you know, writing. But the key is that thing you've isolated for later. That's all you do during that session. You do not reopen other things. You don't look at email, you don't look at your calendar. And so it's just a purified engagement with something deep. That's really common to have these engagements with something deep that you schedule and prepare to happen outside of your schedule, shutdowns, that's fine. It's like I write blog posts in the evening. That's always been my habit. It's after I've done a shutdown complete. But it doesn't throw me off my psychological game because when I'm writing a blog post in the evening, that's all I'm doing. I'm sitting down, I'm writing it. It's actually relaxing for me. It's something I've been doing for, you know, 15 years now. So do your shutdown complete and then have clarified and purified the one activity you need to do after that. And you just do that with a no email, no whatever. It's just you're focusing on just that work.

And I think also I'm hearing what I'm taking away too is, and without shame, like, oh, God, I'm still working because it's a different kind of work. It's like the more concentrated, deep work that is so hard to get in my normal Monday through Friday being department chair.

So, yep, I'm with you 100% on that.

Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Brilliant. Beth, you are great. Cal, Fantastic. We're going to go to Eric for the next one for two reasons. Eric is also a professor and Eric also rocks a bigger heroic tattoo than I do. So let's go. Let's go. Hiro. Eric, what do you got?

Very nice, very nice, sir. Thank you very much. Cal, big fan of yours that I followed for years. So I want to try and make my question super specific. Also a professor. As Brian pointed out, I have also shifted. Now I'm a part time professor instead of being a full time professor. But I've moved into the new world online remote work. Previously, when I was a, you know, when I was only a professor, I had more control over my schedule and my job didn't revolve around being tethered to staring at Zoom and or Microsoft Teams all day. So maybe some strategies to help. For those of us whose job is now dependent on using these tools, how best can can I work as I now shift into a different mindset in my career?

Well, you know, it's a great question. There's a very long version of my answer that I can, I can point you towards because it's recent. So there was a recent episode on my podcast, I think it was episode 236. It was last week and it's on. The full episode's on YouTube. YouTube.com calibermedia there's videos of my podcast up there. The, the whole podcast was about if you're a remote worker, what are the tactics you can use to significantly decrease the footprint of your work on your actual schedule. So basically to be able to attack it with autonomy and have actually quite a bit of free time because there's two sides to the remote work coin, it gives you the potential to actually have a lot more autonomy, but it's actually really difficult to fight for it. So, so that episode, you know, we have a 30 minute discussion of lots of strategies. The very short version of that answer is, I mean, to me, the killer for remote work. The thing that you have to try to exile from as much as possible from your daily routine is the, the degree to which you have things unfolding asynchronously with sort of unscheduled back and forth conversation. The degree to which you have that going on in your work, the more you're going to be tethered to a screen, the more you're going to feel the autonomy ripped from your life. So the more there's like five or six conversations going on and it's happening in email, so it's not necessarily in real time. And you're just, we're all just trying to figure things out. And what about this? And you get this, did you get this memo or what's going on here? That puts you in a mode where it's just you in the screen all day long and you're just going back and forth and it's hyperactive hive mind chatter. So almost all of my advice on optimizing remote work has to do with putting in place, implicitly or explicitly, alternative strategies or modes for collaboration that get away from you having to constantly be responding to unscheduled sort of interactions coming in and out. And there's a lot of ways that could mean office hours are a big one. So you can start to defer conversations to just like, hey, to show up on my office hours and we'll figure this out. So you can start to defer back and forth to tight amounts of time. Another strategy I talk about is like controlling meeting schedules. So just be overly helpful in people scheduling meetings for you. Be like, this is great, I love meetings. You know what I've done? I already have all my availabilities in this tool. So you can just grab anything that works. Let's definitely do it. So you're almost like over eager. But then you control where those times are. And there's, there's a whole strategy I talk about where you basically are leaving half of every day open for meetings, but you sort of shift what half that is so your availability still look like they're all over the place. So you don't see the pattern, but you're actually taking control of half of every day is, is, is mine. There's tactics like that on the heavier end. You can, you can actually suggest for your team actual processes we all buy into. This is how we do this work. In my book A World Without Email, I actually profile a lot of the processes that Brian's company put in place for this type of work. They're really good at it. So this is the whole thing with remote work. It can open up huge opportunities, but it's a subtle art to actually gain those opportunities you have to re engineer your work away from. At any moment people might need me to respond to something. You got to get away from that and if you do, you can gain a lot more freedom back.

And I appreciate that. I've been able to help hopefully develop, you know, hard stops. People know it, you know, at about 4:30, don't talk to me anymore because he's going to be either on a treadmill or you know, picking up and throwing heavy things around a gym. So trying to be very bright line. You know, take borrowing the bright line mentality, but doing it with work and same thing. With the shutdown complete, it's just been a. It's been a big transition. And I have a lot of. Coming from academia, I have a lot more respect for people that. That work in the remote world. I think people believe that remote work, that's easy. I mean, you just sit with the laptop. It really is a drain and a challenge on your time. And so that transition has been very difficult for me. And I really appreciate. I'm excited to go and take. Take a listen to the podcast.

Awesome. Eric, Bless you. Thank you, Cal. Bless you. Thank you. I want to honor your two o', clock, and I know we got a lot of hands up, but you got two kids to go pick up. Thank you, Cal. I appreciate you taking so much time and just spending the last 20 years doing what you're doing. Feels like it's just begun, and I look forward to catching up and seeing the office of yours. Let's go one up in you, man.

I got to build a tower. I'm going to have a tower of depth and we'll see. Brian, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, this was fun. All right. Love to you and the boys. Well, there we go. That was fun. My apologies to those we weren't able to connect with. And thank you so much for your great questions. Beth and Eric. That was a good one. All right, we're at almost 2. If you want to hang around and connect with other heroes, you can do so. We'll connect you. Jesse, you taking the lead today or Nat still here? Yeah, that's me. All right, Nat's still here. Let's enjoy a breath together, and then I will hand off the baton to Nat. Moving from theory to practice to mastery together today. Time flies. We're having fun with friends. Bless you all. Have a great rest of the day and enjoy connecting with one another if you stay on. Thank you, Brian.

So as usual, I'll stop the recording.