HS 300 - Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World with Cal Newport

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It's my pleasure to welcome Cal Newport to the show. He is a professor of Computer SC at Georgetown University, author of the best selling books Deep Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and so Good They Can't Ignore you. Why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. Cal, welcome. How are you?

Hi, Jason. I'm doing fine.

Yeah, it's good to have you. So I finished Deep Work a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. An excellent, excellent book. Then I'm just digging into so Good They Can't Ignore youe maybe a Third of the Way through that one and Enjoying that one as well. And, and you've really taken some of the. The things that we do in the modern world and, and you've been critical of them and turn them on their head and I think, I think you're onto something. Certainly the reviews on Amazon are, would say you're onto something. Tell us more. And you know, start, start with either book or you know, feel free to jump between the two.

Yeah, I am a bit of a professional curmudgeon, it seems like these days, but it's fun to do so I mean, let me just give the log line for both books essentially. So I, I wrote this book back in 2012 so good they Can't Ignore youe, which made the claim that this advice that everyone gives follow your passion is bad advice and that it will actually hurt your chances of ending up loving your work. And then in 2016 I published deep Work which making this claim that, you know, the ability to focus really intensely is actually really valuable and it's becoming more valuable just at the same time that people are becoming worse at it as they focus instead on connectivity and visibility and busyness. And therefore, if you're one of the few people to cultivate that you're going to have a huge advantage. So it's in both cases I end up pushing back against something that a lot of people sort of just assumed was good.

Now, you know, I want to ask you, the deep work problem, if you will, or the lack of deep work that just pervades our distracted world. Uh, you know, I remember before Al Gore invented the Internet. Just kidding. You know, in the old days, before we had social media, before we had email, before we, you know, back then you were distracted by fax machines. Right. And phone calls. You know, I mean, we always had distractions, right? I remember Dennis Waitley years ago quoting an article from the 1800s in the Boston Globe about how people were overwhelmed with all this information coming at them. And, you know, this is not a new phenomenon. Certainly there's more distraction now, but maybe we are evolving and getting better at dealing with it. I don't know. Just wanted to throw that idea out there.

There's always been, I mean, any of these issues there. There's always some sort of historical precedent. And in some cases, actually, the historical precedent for worries were true. If you look back, for example, around the rise of television, especially as we went through the 60s, through the 70s, people said, well, wait a second. This thing, we're going to be watching these things all the time. Well, it turns out they were right. People watch an incredible amount of television. Actually, those concerns were right. It drastically changed how people spent their time and introduced a whole new culture where for many people, you come home from work and you put on the TV until bedtime. And that hasn't changed. So sometimes these historical concerns are true. But there's two things that I think make what's going on now exceptional. One has to do with the actual quality of the distractions themselves. And we've never seen anything that even approaches the grip on our time and attention that you see with modern digital mobile devices. I mean, sure, you go back to Thoreau and he says, isn't it distracting that you could get a telegraph coming in while you're trying to work on something?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But Thoreau was not dealing with someone having a telegraph on them and checking it three to 400 times a day. Three to 400 telegraphs a day, and rarely going more than six minutes without actually writing a telegraph. And even with concerns like television, like, we watch too much television, but we, we didn't have people bringing their televisions into their office and putting them on their desk and checking it every two to three minutes to see what was on tv. Right. Which is what's happening with these distractions. So I think the quantity and the quality of the addictiveness of this is something that we haven't even come close to seeing before with any of these other former technological concerns. And the other issue is our economy has evolved so that more and more people are in professional positions where these type of distractions directly and negatively impact what they do for a living. So there's a difference here. You might look back to the office cultures of the 60s and say, well, we used to chat around the water cooler and maybe I would get some calls. But we had much fewer people in the 1960s who were trying to do high level creative knowledge work, who were really using their brain at a very high level to create value. So I think we have two trends coming together. It's more an order of magnitude more distracting or addictive than we've ever seen at a time where more and more people are vulnerable for that to make a difference.

Well, that, you know, that's an interesting point. So as we've had the, I'll call it the crisis of distraction, we also have the greater need for creative thinking. And you know, I hate to use the sort of cliched new age term mindfulness, but for lack of a better, you know, well, I'll use deep work, that's a better term. But yeah, I would agree with you. In the old days, people did more assembly line style work. Right. And now the modern world really demands a more creative mind and certainly rewards a more creative mind, doesn't it?

Yeah, I think this is absolutely what's true. So if you go back to the 1970s and say you look at someone from the typing pool who's maybe gossiping around the water cooler a few times during the day has a negligible impact on the. The output that this person does, which is more or less he or she's typing about this much stuff and maybe there's a 10% loss there. That's very different than if you're trying to do business strategy or trying to program a computer or trying to write something difficult. You're doing gist checks on inboxes and social media accounts every five to six minutes, which puts you in a state of reduced cognitive capacity. You produce worse stuff and you produce stuff at a slower rate. That's your primary obligation. The right and analogy going back to the typing pool in the 60s, it's not someone leaving the gossip around the water cooler a few times during the day. It would be like if they were gossiping with someone the whole time. While they were typing and they were making lots of mistakes and going much slower in that circumstance, we said, well, this is crazy. You can't sit here and talk to your friend while you're trying to type up the memos because you're making lots of mistakes and you've dropped your rate by 50%. But it's essentially what we're doing in the newly emerged sort of high level knowledge work economy. We just don't realize it yet. We just don't have that metric that says your words per minute is half of what it used to be. And so this is what I think is unsustainable.

So, Cal, I don't think there's anyone listening that doubts we are distracted. And one of the things I really like that you said in the book was something to the effect of if one spends their time on, for example, social media, they can leave a lot of little trails and pieces of their knowledge and creativity around in little post on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, but if they spend their time writing a book, then they will leave something big that lasts forever. Right. And it's more timeless. And maybe you want to just correct me on that quote or idea there, but I think that's a good point, isn't it?

Yeah. That idea first came from an essay that the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson wrote called why I'm a Bad Correspondent. And it hit me, it makes a lot of sense when you heard it. He says, I don't really answer people's emails and I'm not going to come to your conference and I'm not going to send you back assigned whatever. And he says, I know for each individual this seems selfish because it would have only taken me one minute to do that response or two minutes to do that response. But he said, if I do that for everyone who starts writing me, then what am I left with in the end is that there's a large group of people who got a very little thing from me and if I instead consolidate that all to write a book, there can be a lot of people that read that for decades to come. So I'm going to prioritize that. And it was an important point when I heard it that when you're measuring the impact of various communication and digital behaviors, don't just take the one isolated instance. How long does it really take me to read this tweet or reply to this email? You have to think about the cumulative impact that it has on your time and attention and think, well, what else could I be dedicating that to and how do I compare the value?

Yeah, couldn't agree more. So what is the solution to the problem? I think we all know the problem. We live in this distracted world. I mean, even our posture and our shoulders are being affected by smartphones because we're just looking at them constantly. If you're single, my God, it's impossible to meet or talk to anybody anymore. They're all looking at their stupid phone. In fact, there's a video about it on YouTube. It's called look up and it's very telling. You know, the two people, the male and the female, they go through their. It shows them going through their whole day looking at their phone and they keep passing each other and they would have been attracted to each other. It's a great video, but what can we do about this?

Yeah, well, there's several things you can do. The first thing is to break the addiction to the phone. I think is crucial. And keep in mind, if this helps put it into context, that the way that Silicon Valley and especially social media and website media companies think about your phone and you is it's a mobile billboard device. And their question is, okay, how can we get people to take out this thing and look at our ads in places that we can't otherwise put billboards? How can we expand where we can actually do advertisements? So the whole key to their industry is how can we convince people to, wherever they are, take out this phone and look at our ads? And they realized the way to do it is to make the products addictive. If you can foster a behavioral addiction, now you have someone who, in the bathroom waiting in line in moments of downtime at a movie, are going to continually pull out your thing and load up your app and look at your ads. You've just solved the massive problem in advertising. You can now put billboards everywhere that person is. So it's a great business model from the perspective of these companies, but it's a terrible bargain for you. I like to think about it that way because I think it changes the feel you have towards your usage of these devices. Away from. I'm high tech, I'm a first adopter, I'm a digital native, I'm on the cutting edge and instead see it more. I'm being exploited. I'm having my attention just mined out of my head by these companies so that they can increase that profit margin. My advice for the first step, which is breaking free of the diction of the phone, is take all those social media networks that you're convinced are crucial to your Business, your life and your place in the world. You don't have to quit them. Take the apps off your phone. If they're really that important to your life and to your business and your place in the world, then you can very easily log on to your computer when you happen to be at your computer at home and do all the very important things you do on them. But it takes away the addiction machine off your phone, it takes away the apps that they have people engineering to be as addictive as possible. So that would be my first recommendation, is take every one of those apps off the phone. Just access them through a web browser.

Okay, so before you go on, Cal, let's just play devil's advocate with that one for a moment. I see what you're saying, and you know, I kind of brought that issue up. So, you know, I agree. However, there's a good side to that, too, right? Because in the old days there was a lot of downtime where you're waiting in line, where you're waiting for something, you know, now there's virtually no downtime, which one could certainly argue means that we're not having any freewheeling thinking time anymore. But also it's certainly more efficient that we can look at our email, manage our social media, you know, during this kind of downtime, you know, rather, I mean, if we take it all off our smartphone, won't we just be sitting in front of our computer more and doing it at home rather than paying attention to something else?

No, I don't think that's true. Well, first of all, the. But what I found is when people bring their social media off of their phone is they use it drastically, drastically less. Because you tell yourself the story that this is a crucial part of XYZ in my life. That's why I'm using it so much. But the reality was I like the quick hit of entertainment when I'm bored. This thing is engineered to give me quick hits of dopamine. It feels good, it helps alleviate boredom. So when you actually put up a little bit of barrier to use it, you say, well, I'm not going to go log onto my computer to go to Facebook. I don't care that much. I mean, that's too much of a border. So I don't think that's going to add more time. But more importantly, I think that downtime is crucial not just because it supports your brain to rest or recharge, to do free, willing thinking, but what happens, or what I've seen happen is that when people fill every Moment of boredom with a quick hit of entertainment coming off of their phone, it builds a Pavlovian connection in their mind that at the slightest hint of boredom, I get relief. Once you've built that Pavlovian connection, when it comes time to actually do something hard, something meaningful that's going to create value for your life or your career, your brain won't tolerate it. Which is why the very first thing I have to do when I'm training people to get better at concentrating and producing cognitive output of real value is I say you have to embrace boredom. You have to have lots and lots of time in your life where you're bored and do nothing about it. Because until you break that connection that your brain has between, I feel bored, I get a treat, I feel bored, I get a treat. If you don't break that connection when it comes time to do the serious stuff, you're not gonna be able to do it. And I think we have a whole generation who has that connection so strong that they are unable to even. You locked them in a Faraday cage with no electronics and said, here's your notebook and just no option. Produce work. They can't do it. The brain won't tolerate it. I like boredom. To me, the discomfort of boredom is like the slight discomfort you feel when you're exercising. You're like, well, yeah, it feels uncomfortable to be lifting this weight, but it's making me stronger. And so I'm happy and motivated to be doing it.

Right. It's just hard to quantify that gain, if you will. You know, when you go to the gym, the endorphins are pumping. Afterwards, you, you know, you feel the muscle soreness, which sort of feels good if you didn't overdo it too much. I mean, you know, it feels like you've accomplished something, but if you. If you take your stuff off your phone, I mean, you gotta. It's not just entertainment, it's email, it's text. It's functional stuff, too. That isn't always, you know, business, but sometimes it is, you can't really notice the gain. Is there any way to quantify this?

Well, I think what you'll notice once you. Once you build a deep work habit. So once people have started to hone their ability to concentrate. So partially by embracing boredom and partially by doing exercises for it, and once they've started to systematically block off time to do this type of deep thinking, there is a sort. Sort of positive, almost addictive type feeling you get once you realize, oh, this is what it feels like to produce for three hours at a high level of uninterrupted cognitive state. When you see what you produce, when you feel the satisfaction of keeping your concentration on one product and actually making progress with it, that actually becomes addictive. Just like the athlete who feels motivated to avoid the junk food because they really feel good when they have they know they're going to have a good workout the next day or good performance on the field, you can get that same connection with deep work. You start to see the stuff that's engineered to be distracted or the really addictive behaviors as cognitive junk food. It becomes easier and easier to be proud about the fact that you avoid it or that you don't make it a major part of your life. And I think this is such an interesting topic because a lot of what people think they're filling this downtime for, a lot of the stuff that people think is making it more productive I think is largely inventive. I mean, almost no one I know is paid on the basis of how many emails they send. No one I know is making a lot of money from if you check this many social medias versus this many social media accounts. But I know a lot of people that make a lot of money for things that require very long uninterrupted concentration. And whether or not they're easy to reach via text or email between that is not as important maybe as we think.

So Cal, any other tips on the deep work habit on developing this muscle?

Yeah, two quick things I would recommend. One is an exercise I call productive meditation. And this is where you go for a walk. And while you're walking, you try to make progress on a professional problem just in your mind. So you just think about it. And just like in mindfulness meditation, when you notice your attention is wandering from the problem to something else, you just notice that and bring it back to the professional problem. What I found is if you do this productive meditation, it's like doing pull ups for your physical body. It's very, very hard at first and then you get better and better at it and it gives very large returns in terms of your ability to sustain concentration. The other small tip I'd recommend is start putting on your calendar a couple weeks in advance blocks of time for deep work that you treat and protect like you would any other meeting or appointment. So if someone comes up later and says, hey, can we have a call at noon on Tuesday? And that's in the middle of one of these blocks, you say, no, I have a thing, but I'll Be free again at 2. You treat it like a doctor's appointment or a meeting with clients. This just gets you into the habit of on a regular basis, applying deep thinking to things that matter. And it really requires that type of protection in advance to make sure it happens. Those two things alone, in just a few weeks, you'll notice a big difference.

Yeah. Okay. Anything else?

So another thing I like to recommend to people is when it comes to entertainment or information that can be addictive for you, we talked about taking apps off the phone. The other thing I recommend for people is to reverse the digital Shabbat idea. This idea that, oh, I take a little bit of time each week when I'm not connected to all those things and you reverse it and you say, okay, I'm going to put aside some time when I'm going to go online and be connected to these sort of entertaining but distracting sources of entertainment. You can you say, hey, tonight from 7 to 8, I'm going to go and do all my social media, no holds barred. I'm going to browse, I'm going to find fun stuff, I'm going to read funny things on Twitter. It doesn't matter, but I'm going to wait till that time to do it. Same thing with text messaging. It's very easy to fall into a series of expectations with people in your life that you're always accessible by text messages. The easy way to change it is to put aside times throughout your day to when you're going to look at what's in your text message inboxes and try to respond to people and then just not check it in between those times. At first, people will be a little bit confused. Hey, Jason, I was trying to reach you. Where were you? But you'll still get back to them within four or five hours. And people very quickly adjust to this idea that, okay, Jason is not always accessible on text messages. Sometimes he has his phone, sometimes he doesn't, and people adjust. So a couple small things like that can change this background hop of constant stimulation communication and make it into much more concentrated blocks without you losing almost any access to the good things that these networks bring you. It's just controlling how you use it more so than it is aggressively calling what you actually use.

Yeah, I agree with you, Cal. In the old days when it was just the telephone, I used to, well, on and off, I didn't do it very consistently. But there were some days when I just, just really would. I check my voicemail and do my phone calls a couple of times. A day, you know, in the morning and then in the afternoon. And what I found amazingly is that a lot of problems just solve themselves and sometimes by the time I would engage in that issue, it was, it was resolved and I wasn't even really needed in the first place. And I think it's kind of what Stephen Covey used to talk about, about this urgency addiction. And, and I mean all of this technology and social media really just add to this urgency addiction. It makes us all feel like we're necessary, we're needed, we gotta be there, we gotta be involved. We really don't a lot of times. Right.

Yeah, it is highly, highly invented. I like to talk about the distinction between productivity and true productivity. Productivity, the way that people like to talk about it, is defined very locally. I'm making progress on tasks that I need to do. Things are happening. I'm making progress on things in my life. I got this email out quicker. I have slack so I can respond to this real quick. It just busyness generates productivity. True productivity is how much value are you actually creating? How much did you create? That's going to move the bottom line on your company or the company you work for that's going to bring in more value to the company than what was there before. And the reality is those are two very different things. And at some points they can be completely unconnected. In fact, to maximize true productivity often can make you pretty bad at the other type of productivity. Maybe you're less accessible, you're hard to get in touch with, even some things get dropped, opportunities are missed. But on the other hand, the thing you produce that you're best at, the thing that brings the most value, you're able to actually do at a high level. I think we're going to see, or I hope we'll see, more of a separation in people's thinking going forward between true productivity, what do I produce that's worth dollars and cents, and this low level non valued productivity, which is a much more mixed bag.

Yeah, I think those are some very good points. We've sort of railed on technology a bit during our talk today, but there are certainly a plethora of apps out there that try and help with this stuff. Some people, people use the sort of Pomodoro timer technique. Other people use various apps that literally lock their social media on their computer and only make it accessible certain times of day. Do you have any recommendations for technology that might help solve the problem rather than create the problem?

Well, one thing I've seen people be successful with is applications like Freedom. And there's a lot of other variations, but it allows you to not only block particular apps or websites, but do so across all your devices, which I think is pretty effective for people who do maintain or need to maintain presences on services that are engineered to be addictive and yet they need to be on them for particular professional or personal reasons. This is an incredibly valuable training tool because you can say, I'm now locked for three hours when I'm going to work on this thing. And it takes the option off the table. And you'd be surprised by how much mental energy that frees up up for you to actually apply to the task at hand. When you don't have to service one part of your brain that's consistently saying, well, maybe I should check, maybe we should check, maybe I should check. If it's blocked, that part goes away. It knows for a fact it can't check for another three hours. So I've seen people use that as a successful detox tool.

So the app is called Freedom.

Freedom.

Yep, that's the name of the app. Okay, interesting. I haven't heard of that one. I've heard of some others. Very good. California. Well, one of the things we talked about a little bit just before we started, as we were talking for a moment, is this frustration that I was complaining about. And you know, whenever I hire a professional nowadays, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to find a person that you call in your other book so Good They Can't Ignore youe a Craftsman. And what I mean by that, I know, is a little different than what you talk about in the so Good They Can't Ignore you book. But everybody's like a marketer nowadays and they're just out there wanting to take over the world. And, you know, they're doing social media, they're doing ads, and they're doing Internet marketing and all this stuff. And it's like, could I please just have a lawyer or an accountant who sits at their desk and churns out great work? It seems like this distraction problem is just massive. I mean, the. The quality of work, the depth of thought is kind of pathetic how bad it's getting. And I'm not saying I'm not affected by it. I think I am. I gotta manage this problem within myself, but also amongst my contractors too.

I mean, I think you're absolutely right about this. I wrote an op ed about this back in November for the New York Times that created actually a lot of heated controversy. But essentially what I Said in this op ed was if you really study the intersection of social media and people's careers, we've been largely sold a bill of goods that we are wildly overestimating how much value you get in your career for slavishly maintaining these very active presences on all these social media platforms that we're told you have to do or you won't be noticed. We're wildly overestimating that value while at the same time we're wildly underestimating the impact it has on us actually doing what we do well. And the real story is in many, many different fields, social media is very new. These fields have been around for a long time. For decades and decades and decades, they've had in place very robust mechanisms for recognizing and rewarding talent. There's very few fields I can find that six years ago, when social media use became ubiquitous, said let's get rid of all of the channels we've had and have evolved over the decades that help train people and identify talented people and re telling people, let's just look at Twitter or let's just look at Facebook. That's how we're going to decide who's a good lawyer or who's a good real estate agent. Didn't happen. These fields have been around forever and they've known how to identify and reward talent. And consistently, what you find is the people who do things at a high level have more work and more opportunities than they know what to do with. The strategy hasn't really changed. If you want to excel in your career, find the thing that's most valuable in your field and really work hard to do it really, really well. I named the book I wrote two books ago so good they can't ignore you. That's a quote from Steve Martin who said when he's asked by people, how do I succeed in entertainment, how do I get the right agent? How do I get noticed? He said, the answer I give is never what they want to hear, but it's that you should be so good they can't ignore you. And if you do that, he said, all the other good things come. They all follow from that. That's where your energy should go. And he said they don't like that answer because they want to know, well, how do I do this? How do I get visible? Maybe if I have the right agent, how do I maneuver myself? He said, none of that matters. It all falls. All you have to do is be so good at the catego. That's the message, I think of the social Media age is we've been sold this bill of goods, that that's what matters. I've been studying this, I've been writing about this, I've been traveling the country speaking about this and listening to people's stories about this. In almost every field, the market is pretty rational. If you're doing something valuable, well, people want you, and if you don't, they don't. Regardless of how active your Facebook page.

Is, it almost can be this sort of counterintuitive measure of one's quality or lack of quality, because, you know, I'll give you an example. There's a lawyer CPA that I worked with for a few years, and, you know, he's just all over the place on the speaking circuit, on, you know, all the social media, doing all the Internet marketing stuff. And I just noticed after a while that the quality of work just. Just wasn't very good. But, you know, to see kind of the public image that you would see out there, you'd think, oh, this guy's got to be great. Right? You know, but interestingly, complete opposite, at least in my humble opinion. So that that can almost be a measure. But do we need to make a distinction Cal that in some businesses, the. The person who's kind of out there a lot, that that is their business? I'll give you an example. A financial advisor friend of mine, you know, she said to me one day that her job basically is networking. That's her job. And, you know, she's not the one that's going to give you great investment advice. Her whole role was to just bring money in and let the management people in our company, you know, do their thing. But someone has got to be the wonky craftsman person, right? And then there are other people who go out there and they're the rainmakers and they bring in the business. And. And I think it's very important that we don't confuse the two. The rainmaker is rarely the expert. They're just the rainmaker. They're the expert at making rain. They're the expert at networking. They're the expert at social media and branding and stuff like that. Right? But they're not the expert at the actual trade of practicing law or accounting, for example. Any comments on that thought?

I think it's an important distinction, and in part it helps clarify what has happened in the professional world during the social media age, which is that it's somehow convinced most people in the professional world that they too, are rainmakers. You're absolutely right. I talk about it in the book that there's certain jobs, that being very connected is very important and deep work is not at all relevant. It's a relatively narrow slice of the economy, but those jobs have always been there. Somehow in recent years, that behavior has mutated out to now you have lawyers doing it, computer programmers doing it and authors doing it. People who have nothing to do with needing lots of context and have everything to do with. My brain creates value and the harder I concentrate, the more value I produce. I think that's the important question for people to ask. You don't want to confuse the two, but you also don't want to extrapolate and say, well, I know a product marketer who gets great success out of Facebook ads. Because if you're selling a product, Facebook ads are fantastic. You can target people. I mean, it's a huge boon for people who market products. But then don't take that lesson away if you're a CPA or a computer programmer. Facebook is also going to be crucial to my career. I think we need to be more precise and grounded in reality of the way we talk about it. For most people, these tools are not that important. Let's just use myself as a case study. I've never had a social media account. You never had a social media account? Even though I'm in fields where you're supposed to need them. I mean, how can you be an author if you don't have a social media account? And I can tell you it's had no discernible negative impact on my career. And I can think of many positive impacts I've had by freeing myself from that mental obligation because it turns out with books, actually you don't have to aggressively market yourself in social media. If you write good books, people who like them, maybe we'll talk about on their social media account, but it doesn't really matter. I'm a professor. A lot of professors think they need to be online and talking about these things. It doesn't matter. Mainly people want to know, how well do you teach? What did you publish? Did it matter? Are people citing it? These fields are pretty simple. Authors should focus 99% on writing great books. Professors should focus 99% on teaching and writing great research papers. It's old fashioned, but the old fashioned is tough stuff works. I'm not as impressed as a lot of people about this need to be on these mobile advertisement apps that we're being convinced is somehow crucial to surviving in the 21st century.

Yeah, and part of that problem is this is one of the Bad negative side effects of allowing, for example, lawyers to advertise. Years ago, lawyers weren't allowed to advertise and guess what? Their focus wasn't on advertising. And now they are. And so they're, you know, that's a big part of their focus is just to be out there and do all this stuff. And you know, that's the whole way reason that for example, the Rotary Club was created is because lawyers couldn't advertise. And so they would have to get their business through networking. You know, you could spend a limited amount of time networking, whereas now you could spend all your time on social media and advertising campaigns. So it's really, you know, Stephen Covey again, I love his work, I love your work. And, and one of the things he always said is the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And I think that's really what deep work is about. So I'm really glad you're getting this message out there, Cal. Where can people find you and find out more about it? I guess they're not going to find you on social media.

Yeah, you're not going to find me on social media. I'm not that easy to reach necessarily, but it's easy to find out about my ideas. My website, calnewport.com is where I blog. So actually there's 10 years worth of post on all these ideas you can dive into. You can also find out a little bit more about me and my books there as well.

Fantastic. Well, Cal Newport, thank you so much. Did you just want to give a quick word about the. I know you did mention it, but the so good they can't ignore you book because we really focused on the deep work. But if you just want to give a parting thought on that, feel free.

Sure. Well, let's just say if you're one of the people who's a little bit fatigued about everyone telling you just follow your passion, just follow your passion, just follow your passion. And you're one of the people who think, isn't it a little bit more complicated than that, than just I'm meant to do this and once I find it, I'll love it from day one. This is a book you'll probably enjoy checking out because I essentially spent a couple years diving into the research literature interviewing people from a variety of different fields who love what they do for a living and just tried to figure out how do people actually end up loving their work. And it turns out that slogan just follow your passion and really doesn't get you there.

I like how you're debunking that idea. That's a great book, too. Cal Newport, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you, Jason. I enjoyed it.

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