Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World with Cal Newport and Joe Polish - Genius Network #56

Feeling distracted? Looking for success in the midst of the noise.

In this interview, Cal Newport examines why Follow youw Passion Is Counterproductive Advice, his.

Definition of deep work, the role of.

Social media in focus, and more. Cal Newport is an Associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He earned his PhD from MIT in 2009. His most recent book, Deep Work, argues.

That focus is the new IQ in.

The knowledge economy and that individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive.

If you'd like access to the full presentation, the show notes, and the special.

Resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 56 that's geniusnetwork.com 56.

Hello everyone, this is Joe Polish and I am excited about the discussion we are about to have. I have a special guest with me by the name of Cal Newport, and if you do not know who Cal is, I'm just going to very quickly give you his bio and then I'm going to get into some questions with him. So. Cal is an Associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age, Cal also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work. His most recent book, Deep Work, which is amazing, argues that the focus is that argues that focus is the new IQ in the modern workplace and that the ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming increasingly valuable. He previously wrote so Good They Can't Ignore youe, a book which debunks the long held belief that follow your passion is good advice, and three popular books of unconventional advice for students. So Cal, first off, so great to have you as a guest here on the podcast.

Well, Joe, it's my honor to be here.

Awesome. What did I not say about you? That people really should know?

What did you say about me? That people. Yeah, that people should know.

Yeah, kids, hobbies, I mean, anything you want to talk about?

I have two kids. I don't typically work past 5:30 and I've never had a social media account.

Yeah, which, which we're going to talk about all of that because I know that's going to blow the minds of people that have never heard of you before and people that have read your books. Like I've read Deep Work and so good they can't ignore you. I'm going to ask you about the concepts and things you write about in both of them. But yeah, you are not the average. Are you still in the millennial category?

Yeah, it depends who you ask. Right at the border. Right at the border.

Right at the border.

Yeah.

So I don't know very many people that have the operating system that you write about and that you live. And I'm fascinated by it because I actually think you are in a far better position and have far greater advantages than most humans simply based on the way you think about things, the way that you operate and your success with how many people have read your books and how much reach you've had without using a lot of the channels that many people from my world of marketing and business and promotion and all that utilize it, you know, it's, it's pretty cool because I think you have something that a lot of people don't, which appears to be more peace of mind. But I'll, I'll let you, you know, share your thoughts on that for me. So let me first just ask you, before we get into it, how you ended up getting started doing what you're doing.

Well, you know, I, I do two things. I'm a computer scientist and I'm a writer. And the weird part of that equation is the writing. I mean, why, why am I writing books at the same time that I do this? And that actually predates the computer science. The whole origin story is when I was in high school in the late 1990s, that was the first dot com boom, and I was an entrepreneur. I had a company. This was a time where, you know, 16 year olds can have companies and people thought that was a good idea, which now we realize probably wasn't. But you know, it's the late 90s, everyone thought it was, you know, high tech to have a, you know, hire a young person to sign a contract and do some tech work for you. And so I was coming from an entrepreneurial mindset into college. I was reading all the classic business books, the classic advice books, classic how to books. And I got to the academic world, I got to the college world, and that was all gone. That was all gone. I was like, where's the how to book on how to study really effectively? They weren't writing books like that at the time. You know, where's the book about how to maximize my opportunities while paying all this money for college? And so in a typical entrepreneur fashion, I said, well, if they're not there, I'll write them. And so that's how I sort of stumbled backwards into this parallel life as a writer.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Well, I mean, you wrote previously to so Good They Can't Ignore youe, but I'm going to kind of jump ahead to that book because I've referred your book to many Many people, I mean, I've spoken to it and, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have heard me talk about it on my podcast. I tell a lot of young people personally, though, because I get the question all the time, oh, what should I study? What should I read? And people that are kind of like, oh, what I want to do in my life. I believe the book's so good they can't ignore you is awesome. I'd love for you to tell the origin of even that term from the Steve Martin interview where that came from. But you kind of debunked the whole follow your passion advice that is dispensed by a lot of seminar speakers and a lot of people follow your passion. So I wanted to ask you, starting with why is the saying follow your passion into your viewpoint erroneous? If that's the right term?

Yeah, yeah. Not only erroneous, but counterproductive. I think it reduces the probability that someone ends up passionate about their work life.

Okay, so explain because, I mean, again, let me tell the listeners too, I'm not going to go real deeply into this subject because I also want to talk about deep work and distractibility, which is because I just so recently have read for the second time deep work. But this is such a mind blowing way of looking at it. And it really is going to be hard for some people to grasp this because a lot of people have this embedded into their mind that follow your passion is the way to live. And that's, you know, so I just want you to talk about it.

Yeah, I mean, and to make it, you know, kind of clear to the eyes. It's not that I had a dog in this fight. I started looking into this topic because I wanted to know, how do people end up loving what they do for a living? I, you know, I wrote that book because I was at a big career transition and the fact I'd written those student books before meant I was in a position where I could actually go to a publisher and get some money to write a book. So I figured I need to know an answer to this question, so I might as well use a book as cover to go interview interesting people, talk to interesting scientists, try to figure out, okay, what's the reality here? How do people end up loving what they do? And it really did not take long into that research process to see, one, follow your passion had become the dominant piece of career advice at the time, and two, that it was counterproductive. And there's really two big reasons for it. One, it assumes that most People, especially young people, have pre existing passions that they can identify and use as a foundation of career choices. Turns out we don't have a lot of evidence that that's true. In fact, most people probably do not. Especially given how quickly the job landscape can change. The idea that you would somehow be hardwired for some particular type of work that happens to be available in our current evolution of our economy is something that doesn't really make a lot of sense. The second problem is that that advice is based off of the assumption that if you really like something and then you do something related to that for your job, you will really like your job. And again, we have a lot of evidence that's simply not true. We know so many passionate amateur bakers who are miserable right when they open up a bakery, or the passionate amateur photographer who's miserable when she opens up a professional photography studio. I mean, those anecdotes alone tells us that career satisfaction is way more complicated than simply I really like this topic. And now I do work related to this topic. It's just a much more complicated, more interesting picture.

Let me say something about that too, because you know a little bit about my story of me starting out as a dead broke carpet cleaner. And I really, there was nothing that I was passionate about cleaning carpets. I was excited about starting a business, but once I started one and realizing, you know, having a particular area and then trying to turn that area into money are two completely different things. And I just didn't like the business. Now I fell in love with market once I started applying marketing methodologies that started generating business for me. And then I went through kind of a hell. And I thought of when I first created my first marketing program that what can I create that will help save these people from going through the same pain and misery that I went through. Was there truly a way that I could help reduce the suffering of individuals and get paid in the process and give them something that really worked? And then I actually fell in love with marketing. But I had to go through a period to do what you describe of creating a skill that's rare and valuable and apply it in a manner that gives you career capital, which is the way that you describe it. I'd love to have you kind of give whatever version of that, like what is career capital? How can someone master their craft? And however you would describe this so that people kind of get a gist of what you're saying. And I will again reiterate for people to really kind of get what Cal is saying, read the books so good they can't ignore you and read all his books. I mean, you'll find them useful. But anyway. So how would someone understand the stages you say someone is best served to go through?

Right. Well, your story, for example, is actually very typical of people who end up doing something that they really love, which is the passion, the satisfaction, the meaning. Out of work is something that is cultivated over time. That's the key inversion you have to have when thinking about passion for your work. You don't start with the passion and use that to find the job. And then you immediately love the job. You actually cultivate the passion over time. And the formula that is common, not universal, but is the most common when you study people who love what they do is step one, they master rare and valuable skills. So something that is unambiguously valued by the marketplace, something that is in high demand and the supply is relatively low, that can be a hard process. Like you were saying, you kind of went through hell trying to figure out how marketing worked. When you're, when you're working on with your own business, it's often a tough apprenticeship phase and it requires a lot of deliberate hard work to actually build a skill that the market actually values. Once you have that, you can then use that as leverage to start shaping your career in a way that becomes an increasing source of passion. And so I use this metaphor, career capital, to talk about this. Typically that as you build more rare and valuable skills, it's like you're acquiring more career capital. It's then this career capital that you invest to acquire into your working life the types of traits that makes it really compelling, really satisfying, really passion producing. The things that make great jobs great are in demand. You have to have something great to offer in return. So I try to, especially with young people, flip their mindset. I mean, this is not about, especially right out of school or right when you enter your career asking, hey, what do I get out of this job? You know, is this the right job for me? What do I like about this job? Would I like another job better? Early on you should be flipping that and thinking, what am I offering to this job? How much value am I producing? Am I getting better? What are my career capital stores look like? How can I build up career capital faster? Sort of, sort of relentless, aggressive pursuit of the skill that's going to give you actual autonomy in the marketplace.

Yep, yep, that's great. You know, I was Talking to a 21 year old girl last night who I was telling that she needs to read Your book and that I was interviewing you today. And she's like, I just want to go out and, you know, help people and do something to help people. I was like, okay, well, that's great. But, you know, you have to develop a skill that someone's, you know, going to be willing to pay you money for. And there it was kind of. It was kind of funny to. I always seek to understand, not to be understood as best as I can. And I was really trying to, like, dissect her mindset of, oh, if I just get really excited about something and I want to really help people, that somehow is going to translate into opportunities that are going to come to me. And like you mention in the book, you say, if you focus on passions, your focus is, what value can the world bring to me? Whereas if you develop a skill, it's like, what value can I bring to the world? And to use the Dan Sullivan line, all money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. And so part of it is getting to that stage. I don't know if you. And this might be semantics, but do you believe in shortcuts? Do you believe there's ways to leap over industries and things like that? Or how would you actually phrase it? Because I believe your book could, if understood and applied. Both of your books, the recent ones, I mean, I know you've written several books, but deep work and so good they can't ignore you. I really believe these books could truly shave off years of people wasting time, and especially in the realm of just simple human happiness, in how you spend your life. I think it's critical. So do you look at this as like, oh, let me provide people with shortcuts or more like skills or methodologies? How would you describe what you think you have come upon and that you write about?

I think you can get to good places much faster with these type of ideas. But I don't think about it so much as a shortcut so much as it is sidestepping a lot of what is just really wasteful or inefficient or counterproductive that most people do. Which, I mean, this is a mindset that I've been imprinted with all the way back to those early years where I was an undergraduate writing books about how to study. All the way back then, I observed so quickly around me that, you know, most students are just terrible at studying and that if you're just a little bit smarter about it, you get much better grades with much less time. And so this idea was imprinted on me when I was 19, 20 years old, that just because a lot of people are doing something a certain way or believe a certain thing, doesn't mean that that is the right way to do it, especially if you're in a situation that's somewhat new. And I think the knowledge economy, especially the knowledge economy in the digital era, is something that's just really new. We're still trying to figure out about how do you build a career, how do you build skills? How are you happy? How are you successful? All of this is very new in the large scheme of things. And so I think there's just a lot of opportunities. And if you are a little bit more systematic and rigorous in thinking about how you go about your career and how you go about your life.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you write about control traps. And so I wanted to ask you about that. What are control traps and how do people avoid them?

One of the first things you notice, okay, you study people who are very happy in their job. You find out, like I said, they build up career capital. What do they invest that career capital in to get great satisfaction in their job? And there's a few things that both anecdote and research points to as being really important. And one of the most important things, one of the most important predictors of career satisfaction and passion is having a lot of autonomy in your job, control over what you do, what you work on, and why. Having that type of control, I call it the dream job elixir in my book because it's such a common ingredient in people who love what they do. The problem with control, though, is that there are these traps surround trying to get more autonomy into your working life. And that's what I call the control traps. And the first control trap is if you try to make a bid for much more autonomy before you have the career capital to back it up. So if you leave college and right out of college, say, I'm going to start this nonprofit, to go do this, and I'm going to on my own terms, I'm going to help the world by doing xyz. But you have no career capital, no skills built up, no connections, nothing that you would need to succeed at that. You might get more control, but you don't have enough career capital. Actually succeed with that endeavor. But then you have the control trap on the other side of that, which is, typically, once you have enough career capital, that is, you're valuable enough in the marketplace that you can really set the terms of what you do. That tends to be the point where you have the maximum pressure to stay within something that's much more conventional. Right. That's the point where, oh, no, no, no, you're successful now at this. You're good at this. You have to stay in this particular path. You need to stay at our firm. You need move to this next step that's common for people in your position. So autonomy is really, really valuable, but it's really, really hard to get right. You can't make a bid for it before you have the skills to back it up. But once you have the skills, you have to have the courage to actually take those out for a spin.

Yes. Where do you think courage comes from?

It's, you know, courage is a good point. Right. Because it comes up a lot in these conversations where it comes from when applied properly. Right. Which I think is, I have the capital, I'm now going to use it to do something different that fits me. I actually think a lot of courage comes from, in that context, being informed. I mean, this is one of the things I was trying to do with my book is understanding the dynamics. This is how people build really interesting, really satisfying careers. Seeing examples of it, understanding the mechanisms. Suddenly it's not so scared. Right. It's not actually that scary. In fact, I even say in the book sometimes if you're really nervous about making a big change, you might want to second guess that change. That might be your mind saying, like, wait a second, do we really have the skills to pull this off? It's not necessarily a bad thing. And so, I mean, courage tends to be when you're. If you know what you want to do, that this is the right type of thing to do. You know, I talk about different ways you can measure to make sure you're in the right place to make a big change. Courage is not as. I don't know if it's as emotional or as scarce of a resource as people sometimes think it is in those situations.

Right, Right. So let's talk about the title, so Good They Can't Ignore youe. Because the interview with Charlie Rose and Steve Martin, which I think was in 2007, that you talked about, where you got the title for the book. Because I think there's a good lesson there.

Yeah. One of my favorite quotes. So Charlie Rose asked Steve Martin about his advice, what advice do you give? And Steve Martin said, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but he said, essentially, you know, people are always coming to me, especially young entertainers, saying, what's your advice for making it big? In this industry. And he said to Charlie Rose, you know, the answer I give them is never what they want to hear. They always want to hear about, you know, here's the secret to getting the right agent or, you know, breaking in. But what I always tell them is just be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, all the other good things will come. And that basically became the central philosophy of sort of my life and my writing. Probably one of the most important quotes I've ever encountered.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it led to you writing an entire book on the subject. Is there anything else related to this that before we jump into me asking you about the topic of your latest book, deep work that you'd like to share, to kind of put a bow on anything I'd asked you about, related to first, starting with why the same follow your passion is erroneous.

I think the simplest piece of advice I sometimes give about this is just force yourself to go through your career thinking. Without being allowed to use the word passion, we have overloaded it. We've abused a term. It's become ambiguous and problematic. So if you just banish it from your vocabulary, you're not allowed to talk about my passion or what my passion is, and you have to just use other terms. Just making that simple change. If you do nothing else, I think will lead you towards a sort of much more sane and effective way of thinking about your career. Gotcha.

Yeah. And I like that. And I completely agree with and endorse that line of thinking. When you hear, like, my buddy. I mean, you know that I'm personal friends with Tony Robbins. I've interviewed him on stage at my annual event for the second time in a couple of months from now. He for years has said, live with passion. I mean, when you hear things like that, does it make you cringe or do you be like, well, it's not always necessarily. I mean, living with passions, perhaps not bad advice. It could be wonderful. It just depends on the setup.

Well, you know, let's put it this way. The word passion by itself is okay, but if you pair it with my. That's when I start to cringe. So, like, I think passion, I like to think about passion. It's like an adverb, right? You can do something passionately. You can live your life like Tony with a ton of passion. In fact, that's. That's admirable. What I. What I don't like is when it gets turned into a naff. My passion. Like, if your head, your hair color, your eye color, or you know, your height or something like that. Like I have a passion. And that I think is what's throwing people off this phrase, my passion because it just assumes that we're wired to do a particular job. It assumes that if we match our job to this pre existing thing, that's the key to happiness. So that's the way I'd revise it. Live passionately, seek passion, approach things with passion, but never use the phrase my passion or think about passion as like a noun or an attribute that you possess.

And I'm going to ask you, this is going to be kind of funny because I normally don't do things like this, but I want to see if you could literally coach me live on how to think about something that before we even started recording we were talking, I was telling you about the stuff I've been doing on addiction. And what I described to some people is I'll say my passion project because I don't know, I haven't thought of another way to describe it. Is changing the global conversation about how people view addicts with compassion instead of judgment and then find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share that with the world with the goal.

Of.

Changing the worldview about how people view what is the causation and the treatment of addicts to reduce suffering and hopefully save lives. And so I refer to it as my passion project. But as I. It's very hard. I mean, what I've decided to take on is difficult and requires me to either develop or hire skills and capabilities that I currently don't and have at the level that they're needed in order to even, you know, put a dent in what it is I'm trying to do. So how would one describe something that they're like, oh, this is because I.

Hear people all the time say, oh.

Here'S my passion project, here's my moonshot, here's my this, here's that. And the word passion seems to come attached to a lot of these things. So yeah, how would you suggest. So it's even better for me and more descriptive of reality on how to talk about or think about that.

Honestly, my reaction would be don't use the phrase passion project to describe it. I think when we attach passion to actually can put the project into a sort of diminished category psychologically. Right. Like, well, it's not. It's somehow different than maybe another business venture or something like that. And because there's something maybe more quixotic about it or because it's attached to a passion, I Have. It's, you know, it's in a different category. I can. I can give it more sort of leeway. We don't have to take it as seriously. My advice would be just, this is a very important project I'm working on, and I'll tell you why I think it's important Project xyz. And it's something I'm devoting a lot of time from because I think this is an important outcome. And I'm trying to get it. I like terminology like moonshot, or like, this is a very bold project or dynamite the term, or this is a risky project or a big venture or high risk, high reward. But I know if you're going to do something, I tend to think you treat it like any other big venture you would do in your life. Again, the passion as a term, when applied as this is a passion project or my passion, I think it might put it in a psychological space that makes it sort of harder to deal with the hardness of doing something. Hard to say, this is a big project I'm working on. It's hard. I'm working really hard on it. Here's why I think it's important.

Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense.

Great.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Awesome.

So let's do this. Let's move on to the subject of your latest book, which is called Deep Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. And like I was telling you before we got started, that. And I'll tell all my listeners, most of you that listen to my podcasts and kind of know my background. No, I'm a huge reader and I've read over a thousand books, mostly business, and this book is one of the most profound and important books that I have read in a decade. It could change your life. And it's more needed right now, and I think it's going to become more increasingly needed as the world is just sucked into massive forms of distractibility that are all around you. And if you do not manage modern life, it will manage you. And it does manage most people. Most people don't use social media. They're used by it and many other forms of distraction. So, first off, Cal, how would you even define the term deep work?

So it's my phrase for the activity in which you're focused without distraction for a long period of time on a cognitively demanding task. That type of activity. That's deep work.

Yeah. Cognitively demanding, meaning it just. It causes a little bit of brain damage.

Or. How would you.

How would you describe that?

Well, you know, that it's hard. It requires you to strain your brain. It's using, you know, a hard one skill at its fullest extent. Right. Not something you can do casually or that someone else could easily replicate. You're taking this tool, you have the primary tool in a knowledge economy, which is your brain, and you're trying to push it pretty close to its limit to produce new value.

Yeah. So this is more. Do not take the path of least resistance. Or how would you describe it? Because I know for a lot of people this the starting point of grasping this, doing this, thinking about this requires. I don't know if sacrifice is the right word. Some people may perceive getting rid of social media, which I'm going to ask you about, not for everyone. I know you're not saying you, you have to do this, but you're giving a lot of evidence as to why this may be a good idea. And it applies in different contexts of people. But like most humans are creatures of habit. They want to take the path of least resistance. I mean, certainly for me, you know, I have to really like, I work out almost daily and I have developed that as a ritual. You know, I'll go through stages where I'm doing better than others. But I've never really liked working out. I don't really enjoy it, but I like having worked out. And I think it was Somerset Maude that said, I don't like writing, I like having written. And so I tend to think about that when, you know, when I read your book and when I think about deep work. So how does that tie into getting ourselves to do difficult things that produce, I guess, rewards or progress?

I think that's an important way to think about it. Deep work, like physical activity, like lifting weights, is very energy intensive. The brain uses a massive amount of energy. And when you're trying to focus very intensely on something that uses a lot of energy, which means it's hard. And our body and our minds in general, shaped through evolution, are suspicious of, okay, we're about to expend a lot of energy. I don't see a tiger about to chase me. I don't see a lion coming after me. That's always a hard sell. It's why it's hard to get yourself to start exercising. Your body is thinking, wait, why am I going to expend all this energy? And it's a hard sell. Same thing with deep work. It's sort of an exhausting, hard thing to do. But just like with exercise, once you really get into it, you can feel a sense of satisfaction that you're doing something that's hard but also useful. And when you're done, it produces results that compound that and build the sense of satisfaction. And the way I like to to sell it to people is especially in knowledge work, there's two types of efforts. There's the deep work efforts which is where you're really pushing your mind to your limit and trying to produce rare and valuable output. And there's everything else which we call shallow work, which is anything that's not cognitive, man, anything that's easily replicatable, sending and receiving emails, doing coffees, writing PowerPoints, you know, updating social media posts, stuff that doesn't require hard one skills pushed to its limit. The point is it's the deep work that's going to move the needle, right? So one way to think about like the shallow work might prevent your company from missing payroll this week. But deep work is what's going to get you to the big acquisition or if you're employed, shallow work is what's going to keep you from getting fired. But deep work is what's going to get you the big promotion. And once you have this mindset of deep work is the only thing that's going to move the needle, that's going to make me better, that's going to produce more value, that's going to help me move forward. And that shallow work is important, but it's not going to do that. It changes the whole way you think about work. Right? It's not just business is busyness, work is work. It's there's the hard stuff that matters and then the kind of logistical stuff that I need to sort of do but want to keep reasonably contained. Gotcha, Gotcha.

You know, I've got some other questions but I'm going to do them in different orders that I was going to talk to some different topics on. You have a chapter in deep work which is like just hard to swallow for some people but has really caused me to rethink a lot of stuff. And I am right in the middle of figuring out how to adopt some.

Of the.

I guess the process that you lay out. One of the chapters is quit social media. And I want to preface this by saying that after looking and kind of measuring my habits of social media, even though I'm a guy that makes money off social media, we run ads, I interact with high level clients certainly I think if I quit social media it would probably impact revenue to a certain degree and certainly some relationship things maybe. And again, this could be completely made up because one of the things that happens, I think that anyone that's a speaker or author, whatever, on some level level wants the world to admire them and probably places an importance on themselves that might not be accurate of how much the other world thinks about them. So all this commentary that I'm doing, I want to kind of paint a sort of picture what is happening though increasingly. And I believe it's why addiction rates and relapses and deaths from overdoses have so dramatically increases. We are so hyper connected. Like when you would watch the news in the past, you might watch it at 6pm or 10pm if you're in America or maybe read the newspaper. Now the news is just all day long depending on if you're staring at a computer screen or staring at social media feeds. And so the thing for me about quitting social media, when I read that chapter, I've had to read it a couple of times because I cannot deny the fact that what you are saying and writing about would have a massive, massive impact on not only my peace of mind, but most of my entrepreneurial friends, many who have millions of followers on social media. They're not just a person out there that has a Facebook account. I mean, these are people that are. So let's talk about this whole you've never been on social media and your thoughts about it and the pros and cons and how to think about this. Because I think it would be huge for people that are listening to this.

Yeah, it's a big topic. It's one I've been, I've been very public about. I'm a relatively prominent figure out there saying I've never used this. I don't say that no one should use it. But what I do push back against is this current idea that it should be ubiquitous and universal, that this is something that everyone needs to be using. That doesn't make sense to me. I think social media in my mind should be like Game of Thrones, like something that, hey, there's a big group of people that like this and get some value out of it. But there's also a lot of people who could care less. I'm very nervous about this idea that these companies are dictating that this needs to be ubiquitously used by all citizens of the world, which is where Facebook is trying to get, for example. So let's get into the conversation a little bit with social media. What's the danger? The danger is these are engineered devices. These apps and devices are engineered to try to extract as much time and attention as possible from human brains. That's the business model, Standard oil back in the old days. The business model is how do we extract as much oil as possible from the land we own. The business model, the attention economy, is how do we get as much attention as possible out of people's brains. Now, of course, this has been around forever. Advertising has been around forever. But using high tech algorithms, smartphones and apps, they're able to bring this to massively more successful level.

Right?

It's basically like fracking of the human attention by high technology. We can get more attention so that it's worrisome, right? So if you have these apps on your phone, the danger is they're engineered to make you use it way, way more than you actually want to. It's going to have way more impact on your time and attention than you think it does. And so it's very dangerous, especially for someone who uses their brain for a living. To have social media around is like being a professional athlete that has cigarettes or junk food around. It's like this stuff is engineered for me to have an unhealthy relationship with it and it's going to directly affect. So who benefits with social media? For the most part, the two people who benefit are the people who have stock in the social media companies because they're again, extracting time and attention from 2 billion people in the country, monetizing it, and then ossifying that in stock price. Second is businesses. So this is where it gets complicated in our conversation though, because there's a lot of entrepreneurs in your audience who I would not tell an entrepreneur with a company not to use social media to advertise. Actually, they're big winners in the social media age. Everyone else is connected to these things and voluntarily typing in lots of information about themselves for free demographic information into these companies databases and then agreeing to look at it. Facebook users now use Facebook products up to an hour a day on average in the US So they agree to give you all the demographic data and stare at your product for an hour a day. It's a bonanza if you're trying to do targeted marketing. And so I have nothing against that either, But I'm mainly just pretty reluctant about this idea that you should just, generally speaking, be on lots of social media applications and just use it because there might be some benefit. I think people should be much more rigorous in their cost benefit analysis. I mean, if I ran a company, I would probably use social media for marketing, but there'd be nothing on my phone, you know, I probably wouldn't. If I had a personal account like I was the brand, I would do it like a pro. It would just be on my home laptop computer. I would probably have people I hired to help me with it. There'd be a very set schedule that I went on and put my content out there. I mean, I would treat it like a pro and I would get away from this. You know, I kind of just have it and I check it and use it on my phone casually, because then you're playing into their trap. And if I wasn't running a business, when I said quit social media in that chapter, actually what it meant was, well, step away for 30 days and then say, what did I really miss? Did anyone care I was gone? Did I feel like my life was impoverished? Actually, check your assumption that these things were necessary. So basically my message is one of extreme caution around these tools. If you're a business, hey, take advantage of their reality to market, but do it like a pro. It's not on your phone. You have someone who manages it for you. It's being done on a desktop, on a schedule. If you don't run a business when it comes to your personal life, be very wary about what you use and how you use it.

Absolutely. It reminds me when I sold my carpet cleaning company in 1994. I had my first website in 1996, and people can still see the old piranha marketing website because that was my first marketing company that I had the website for. I have this prehistoric looking piranha that we had by meshing clip art together in this one piranha with big teeth and everything. Two years prior to that, I sell my carpet cleaning company so I could go full time into teaching small service businesses how to build and grow their companies using the things that I had learned and implemented to build and grow my company. After I sold my carpet cleaning company, the pager went away because back then, if someone was trying to reach you, they would page you and then you would pull over to a payphone and you would make a phone call from a payphone. So there were, you know, in cell phones, it wasn't until, you know, a few years later, carrying around a cell phone and they're like giant bricks. It was like walking around with a shoebox to make a phone call. It was pretty funny. And the peace of mind that I had for a short period of time until cell phones became the thing was when I got rid of that pager because I was constantly getting ding, ding, ding, ding, and I was like, oh, my God, there's so much freedom here. I don't have to call anyone. And it kind of reminded me when I was 10 years old and lived in Alpine, Texas, I would go out on a Saturday or Sunday and walk around in fields for hours with no communication with anyone, no way to be reached. If I got in trouble, I'd be out in the middle of nowhere. But there was a certain level of peace that I don't think people are ever going to experience like that ever again. They might, in chunks, if they go on vacation, they might try to orchestrate it, but that was just the way the world was. And now fast forward to today. It is incessant. I mean, you know, most people, if they are away from their smartphone or outside of 20ft, they feel like they've lost a limb or something. And so, I mean, I cannot reiterate just how important this is. And I'm also, as I'm having this conversation with you, I mean, one of my ulterior motives here with doing an interview with you is I'm just trying to help myself in this department. I mean, I'm like, okay, how do I interact with this really valuable method of communication? Because it does reach a lot of people. I mean, I sent you a picture of a post I put on Instagram of me reading your book. And I also put in its. You know, this is a book about distraction. And here I am on social media sharing this, and one person commented, well, thank God there's social media. So you could have told me about this book. And, you know, I thought that was kind of a funny comment. But it's true. I mean, you can reach a lot of people and all that. But for business owners, one thing you said that's really important. It's quit for 30 days. Have you ever seen anyone sort of halfway do this? Or is it like, this has got to be like quitting drugs. I mean, it's just go cold turkey or it's all or nothing. What other advice would you give on someone to kind of take this on other than. And I'm going to make the assumption that this is after somebody reads your book and they're still like, grappling with this. Because I'm still a little grappling with this. Although you have completely convinced me of many things. I'm just dealing with implementation.

Right. Well, the book said quit for 30 days. A lot of people were worried because they have scenarios, right, Well, I need it for this or this happens or that happens. So the halfway solution I've come back with since the book came out was, okay, I don't want you to quit any of the services. Take every application off your phone now. You're not losing the ability to use any services. You go right on your computer, you can. And whatever this crucial thing you think you need to do on social media, you can still access it, just take it off of your phone. That's a lot easier for people to handle because they're saying, I'm not losing anything, I'm not quitting anything. I haven't lost access to anything. I'm just taking apps off my phone. But what I've noticed, which has been somewhat surprising, interesting, is that when a lot of people do this, they'll come back 30 days later and say, I never logged in once on my computer. They had told themselves these stories like, it's very important to me that I'm on Instagram for X, Y and Z. And I say, okay, just take it off your phone. But you can still use it. And just that extra little hurdle of logging in on their computer, they're like, oh, I'm not going to bother. And then, so it's a reality check, kind of a safer experiment. But it can also give you this reality check. And if you're not using these services on your computer, when it's off your phone, it means that you are primarily using it as just a boredom buster, as just something to do. I can click it real quick. It gives me a little burst of these good chemicals. Not as a prime core function in your day to day life or business. So that's my halfway solution. If you don't want to quit, just take everything off your phone for 30 days and after 30 days say, okay, which services that I actually still use on a regular basis.

Right. Cal, do you think you would ever outsource your social media to another person?

I probably want it. I mean, they say these days, as an author, you have to be on social media. You're giving up all these sales. I don't have a lot of evidence that's true. I mean, you know, people like good books. There's a hundred different ways that people find out about good books. Me being not being on social media, I honestly don't think it has a major impact on my life. I mean, I sell a lot of copies of my books. I don't know, maybe the numbers would be a little bit different if I was tweeting all the time, but I would probably write less books. So it would balance out in the end. And I'm not At all convinced that it would actually move the numbers at all. And so I kind of challenge, I challenge the storyline about it, that having the platform, basically, from what I can tell in the writing world, having a large platform can help with a large burst of upfront sales if you care about list placement. But it has very little impact on the overall long term sales of the book. Whether or not the book's a hit or not. How many total copies you sell.

Yeah, makes sense and you make some great points. Well, thank you for that. So for people that are kind of like, what the hell is he talking about? Just seriously read deep work. It will make total sense. I'm almost thinking if I didn't even plan on this one, but I have a friend who runs a social media account for a very famous person who has millions of followers and I had suggested that this person read your book and this was after because I was asking this person like how now he does this for marketing purposes. Like a lot of people that follow me on social media know that my team posts a lot of stuff on my behalf. So we don't try to act like it's me, but it's really not me sort of thing. That's not my current strategy. So I'm really considering, you know, entirely removing myself for social media. I'm definitely going to do your 30 day thing. My big dilemma, not that this, it's kind of like what you say in the book. I mean, I probably place way more emphasis on this than the reality. Is anyone even going to care? It's for the last four years I post happy birthdays to people and some people are like, someone in your position, how on earth do you take the time to do it? And it just takes a few minutes, but it does take time. The booby trap of social media is once some sort of clickbait or some interesting headline or something takes you down a rabbit hole, then that couple of minutes could be a 10 minute and it could be. But the point is it's constant distraction. For the last four years I've been posting happy birthdays to people with famous people and I do videos with all my well known friends and they wish people a happy birthday and people love it. I mean, people come up to me if I speak at events and they're like, you're so cool, you've been doing. Thank you so much. So my low self esteem or something requires me to continue to do this for validation? I have no idea, but I'm trying to think like, well, I. Okay, I guess I could outsource that, but I almost feel like it's not real if I don't do it myself. So I have to go to therapy for this. I just wanted to share this out loud, just to disclose. So anyway, so I send this dude a text about how do you outsource? And he goes, part of me wants to start an agency in service and deliver on this demand. But that's another story. To answer your question, yes indeed. I run all of the social four and he mentions the person I won't say their name to keep this confidential. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and many other in a couple that I don't even know what he's talking about because they're initials outside of social media. Pardon me if I'm preaching to the choir here, but I want to add a bit of value here. While I have your quick ear, I did a quick audit of your channels. The biggest opportunity I see for you is building your LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn is gaining tremendous ground as a content consumption platform. Plus the audience on LinkedIn is your ideal client. The days have passed as LinkedIn being just a digital resume site. It's now a thriving community eager to learn and take action. Plus it's less noisy than the other networks and it favors a favorable algorithm. You're killing it on YouTube. Consider posting every YouTube video on LinkedIn. YouTube videos populate wonderfully in the feed and the user can stay in stream and watch your video without having to leave LinkedIn.

P.S.

You can now upload videos natively to LinkedIn, but I feel a two pronged approach between YouTube link shares and native uploads also, blah blah blah. So I'm reading a bunch of stuff here because it's interesting. So the thing is, here's the point I wanted to bring up. So you said take it off your phone. What I've seen more and more these companies are doing everything humanly possible to make doing it on your phone infinitely easier than doing it on the desktop. So it goes to your point of they are designing these things to keep people completely addicted to their smartphones because that's at least three device that they carry around. So then I recorded an audio to him and he writes, awesome. You're welcome. I'm getting Cal's book right now. That's an incredible stamp of approval you gave. Sounds like some of the messages might be hard for me to read and swallow because I said this is a book I'm reading I want to get. And I gave him in this audio message I sent to him the explanation as to why I'm looking at doing the outsourcing to social media. But. But the reason I bring this up is most of my genius network members, most of my friends and clients that are in this world, I mean, if you said get off social media, they would be like, holy shit. So I'm hoping that this inspires those people to go definitely, at least read that chapter of your book and put it into place. Which goes to. The main thing, which is the thing to protect for entrepreneurs, I believe, is attention and confidence. Your attention. And so let's talk about what are the best focusing strategies or techniques that you've ever discovered? Because that's really what I think you're wanting to help people with, is just focus on meaningful things that you can just, you know, create results and have a better life.

Well, first, I'll just say, just as a quick reaction to that story you were telling, is that I wouldn't say you're killing it on YouTube. I would say you're killing it at being one of the world's best marketers and really effectively helping other people do that really well. I mean, that's what's valuable. Oh, the fact that you go on a social media platform level, of course, if you spend time on a social media platform because you're really good at what you do and it's really valuable. Just like if you started holding open community events in your city, a lot of people would come to it. Like, of course a lot of people will come to where you show up. But that also takes effort. So I really push back on this notion of, like, there's an abstract value to killing it. On one of these platforms, there's real value in producing things that are valuable. And that brings us back to attention. Right? Which is for an entrepreneur, especially in a knowledge sector, your brain is what creates, like, the new value. It's what creates the strategy, the ideas that moves the business along. And so your attention is an incredibly valuable resource. It's one of the core resources in a knowledge economy. So sort of this deep work idea is, you know, by focusing on the things that are most valuable, doing them really well, and being willing to pass up the small values you might get with a lot of other smaller things that could distract you, you end up, above all, winning. Okay, so now that the jump to your actual question of, okay, how do you practice that? How do you get better at focusing your attention and getting the most out of this resource you have, there's really two types of things that matters. There's the sort of general cognitive fitness. Just like if you're going to train to be a triathlete, you would care about your general health. You wouldn't smoke, you would eat healthy, you'd get a lot of sleep. That's relevant if you want to get full capacity out of your brain. And probably one of the most important things you can do is wean your mind off of an addiction to distractions. So this kind of goes into play of what we were just talking about. You don't have to give up your phone. You don't have to never be entertained. But what you have to avoid is a lifestyle where at the slightest hint of boredom, you always get a distraction. So if it's always a distraction, at the slightest hint of boredom, the phone comes out. Your brain will build a Pavlovian connection. And when it comes time to think hard about something important, it won't tolerate it. It will say, this is boring. Where is my interruption? Where is my distraction? So I often recommend to people regularly be bored. Not all the time, but just have throughout your day, lots of periods where, okay, for this hour, I'm going to go run errands. I'm not bringing my phone. I'm just going to be in the car and waiting in line. So I might be bored. It's all about breaking that connection. So your brain is comfortable. Sometimes I get stimuli, sometimes I don't. Then just like training for a triathlon, there's sort of active training you can do things you can do to make you specifically better focusing. And one of the most effective things I've seen is what I call productive meditation, which is where you go for a walk, you hold a professional problem in your head, and you try to make progress on that problem just in your head. When your attention wanders off to something else, you just notice that and bring it back to the problem. I want to just work on this problem in my head. It's incredibly difficult to do if you do it regularly. However, you get massive improvements and leaps in your ability to hold and sustain concentration.

Because you write about this, obviously in deep work with productive meditation, you can do it when you're running and when you're jogging. Is that the level or is it more like just leisurely walking? I mean, how.

Either walking or it has to be a really slow jog. So something about moving is important. But if it's too physically taxing, your brain is distracted. So walking seems to be the sweet spot.

Gotcha. How would this correlate with flow states? I mean, getting yourself into a flow state, your state of being able to sustain deep concentration.

Yeah, flow state is one type of deep work state. So the difference I often make is if you're concentrating intensely in some circumstances, that'll put you into a flow state which can actually be very pleasurable. You lose track of time. You're locked in sometimes. However, when you're. When you're doing deep work, you may be deliberately practicing a new skill. You're trying to push yourself and get better at something, and that is a distinct state from a flow state. You don't lose time. In fact, when you're trying to really push yourself to get better at something, you often count every minute. It's difficult, it's hard, but that's also deep work. So I think of deep work as a. It's a broader umbrella that captures several different states, including a very pleasurable flow state, including a sort of more difficult but satisfying, deliberate practice state as well.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you know the term. Well, anything else related to focusing that you'd like to mention or talk about?

Well, I mean, I think the main point I would make about it is think about the ability to concentrate intensely like a skill. Do not think about it like a habit.

Right.

A lot of people think, yeah, I know how to focus, right. I just have to do it more. But the reality is it's something that if you practice, you can get really, really good at and be really surprised. I'm talking 2x3x improvements in your high quality output. It can be like a superpower, but that takes a lot of practice. So don't just expect if tomorrow you lock yourself away in a cave like, I'm going to think really hard. If you haven't been doing that, if you've been living a life of constant distraction, not much is going to happen. Don't be discouraged by that. Just properly think about intense concentration as a skill like playing the guitar, something that you can get really good at. But you got to expect it to take some work.

Right. And like you mentioned, is this similar to starting working out for the first time where you just kind of got to work through the burn? I mean, what are some of the. What are some of the traps that people have to be aware of when they take this on that could have them default back into. This is, you know, I'm going to get thrown off. Meaning what's the best way to keep someone on track when you're first developing this skill to where you could just want to jump off?

Right. Especially if you're New to it. Do like you do with interval training. Start with small amounts of time. Once you're comfortably hitting those small amounts of time, increase them gradually. The biggest mistake people make is if they have very little experience with long periods of unbroken concentration, they try to go away for an entire day. I'm going to go to a cabin. I'm going to spend the whole day thinking deeply to solve this problem. And that will almost always be a disaster. It's just like I want to train for a marathon. It's my first day. I'm going to go run for 20 miles. Not going to work out very well. Right. So you'll ease yourself into it. When you're comfortable, increase a little bit more. When you're comfortable again, increase a little more.

Yep. Great advice. So the whole industry of time management, which has been around for a while, when you hear terms like that, what's your perspective on time management?

I think there's two issues. There's time management and there's obligation management. And so time management is how do you best make sense of the things that you have and need to do. And there's a lot of good thinking about it. I have my own philosophies on it. I'm a big. A big proponent of doing pretty rigorous and structured planning of my days. I'll plan out a whole week in advance. I don't care if I have to Change that schedule 20 times during the week. I just think that, well structured days extract more value than just running your day off a to do list. But, you know, there's a whole discussion about how do you manage obligations. But you have to couple time management with obligation management, which is figuring out what you allow onto your plate and what you don't. And we've been ignoring, I think that second piece too much. And if you ignore that second piece, no amount of time management smarts in the world can save you from a completely overloaded schedule.

Yeah, yeah. You know, you mentioned boredom and I should actually come back to that. One thing I learned about myself, which was, I think a pretty big insight for me, is that if I feel really overwhelmed, if I get to a point where I'm just really overwhelmed, and I've somehow managed to put myself in overwhelmed states a lot in my life. One of the things that brings instant relief is to add a new project to my plate. And I wasn't aware of that. And I would like people talk about bright shiny objects, fomo, Tom's disease, terrified of missing shit, whatever. You want to describe the mechanism that Drives somebody. And I personally think almost all behavior is driven by the subconscious of things that were built into you under the age of 7 years old. But that's a whole other discussion entirely. So how people respond to life and distractibility and brain chemistry and all these other things that go into it. I mean, there's a lot of, I think, reasons why people are the way they are. So as it relates to boredom, I for many years thought, how could anyone get bored? I mean, there's so many things to do, there's so many things to read, there's so many. I live in America. How could anyone ever possibly get bored? But then I realized I got bored all the time. Not bored. As if there wasn't things to occupy my time or keep me busy or keep me stimulated. I just kept pursuing more stimulation, more stimulation, more stimulation from all of my work on myself by being in my own addiction and recovery, but also working with so many people that. That are now in the addiction field and spending a lot of time with addicts is the addict brain becomes pleasure death. And if you. The normal things for a person who isn't constantly stimulated, like taking a walk with their husband or their wife or hanging out with their kids or watching a movie or strolling down the park or playing with your dog, stimulation junkies, that will not be satiating. So they're always pursuing more and more things. They're actually very busy in a state of boredom, if that makes sense. Hopefully I'm describing this effectively and what you're saying is you're going to have to wean yourself off of that. There's going to be a period where you're going to have to really retrain yourself in that. Depending on how overstimulated and jacked up the brain is, or the brain being whatever, that's actually a state of suffering for some people. And so therefore they can't put their phone down. They cannot stop this. So any recommendations that you. I mean, you already are. I mean, all of this is a recommendation. Your whole book is filled with recipes on this stuff. I just want to kind of speak of that area of when you have to work through that pain of discomfort. Just because I'd really like people to be successful with this, myself included.

Well, I mean, I think if. But the cure for overstimulation. So you just, you know, maybe you've been in your inbox and on the phone all day because projects are melting down, things are being reconfigured, you feel completely overstimulated. The cure for that, the Right thing to do is solitude, which, let me define very carefully, doesn't mean you have to go up to a mountaintop somewhere. I want to use the careful definition of solitude, which means a state in which you're free from input from other minds. Your human brain needs that and it needs it on a regular basis, regular doses. Just like it needs sunlight and sleep that you just have to have periods where it's just you and your own thoughts, no input from other minds, no tv, no podcasts, no emails, no social media. And that has to become the default reaction. I'm feeling overwhelmed by work today. Don't just jump over to, you know, MLB Rumors and Twitter. You should say, I need to go walk and just be with my head, make sense of things, rebalance my emotions, just be quiet for a little bit. I mean, the brain absolutely needs that. So I've been going around recently really preaching solitude like you would preach any other type of cure. That's the Tylenol for the hyper connective age, right?

No, that. That makes, makes a lot of sense.

You know, I was, I was talking.

To my buddy Ned Hallowell, who's an ADD ADHD psychiatrist. He's written more books on the subject than probably anyone. And he was telling me about default mode network, which I'm not going to go into it. People can do a Google search if they want to, basically where it's like the devil makes work for idle hands. Meditators that have trained themselves can do well with it. If you, if you just try to stop and you're so overstimulated, that's when, you know, especially for people that struggle with addictions, they're in that place where if they're not busy, they are not very happy. And so being able to bring the solitude and bring it, you know, I mean, meditation has been instrumental to me. Yoga has been, you know, I've preached to so many people the value of doing yoga as it relates to what it did for me is it just increases the space between reacting to life and responding to life just a little bit. And when I'm not in that, when I don't give myself those breaks, then my perception of the world is a reaction. And when I'm in a place of being able to respond, and I think the beauty of deep work and what you're suggesting and recommending to people is they will be able to respond to their life. Whereas if you're constantly wired in all the time, constantly distracted, you're just going to be fatigued mentally and you're Going to be in a state of constantly reacting, almost like snapping at people. So out of all of the discoveries that you have made in all of your research, what has surprised you the most during the. During, you know, researching all of this.

When I first was writing Deep Work, there was no chapter in the proposal about deep work's impact outside of professional productivity. All the chapters were about, this is why it's. Excuse me. This is why Deep work is very valuable, and here's how to do it better. As I was writing and researching the book, I kept coming across source after source from different fields and different perspectives. And we're all making the same point that deep work is also just very satisfying for human beings. We are just happier and more fulfilled and more satisfied when we're spending a lot of our time doing something hard with full concentration. That makes us satisfied. Being reactive and jumping around the stimuli does not. And so I ended up having to add a chapter to the book called Deep Work is Meaningful. That just made that point that look beyond productivity, making more money, be more successful in your professional life. If you make deep work considered part of your life, it's just a better, more satisfying, more fulfilling life in general.

Yes, yes, I totally agree. You know, one of the things that I think is the biggest challenge for people is being able. That don't feel they have any discretionary time that they can fit it in. I recommended Deep Work to a gal who I used to date who's still a really good friend of mine, and she's super busy. And I said, really? You got to read this book. It'll really help you. I didn't give her a ton of detail on it, but her response was, yeah, I'll put it to my list of books. I just don't have the time to read it. And it's one of those things to where to do a sale job on someone to where, yeah, this particular book will create time for you, and it will. But getting someone to see that. So it's a state of. It's the overwhelm. And anyone listening to this, like, every person that's listening to this podcast, and there. I mean, this book could be one of the biggest bestsellers of every single person listening to this actually went and bought it, but many won't, which I recommend. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. And there's no affiliate thing here. I just really, I mean, I just highly, highly endorse Deep Work. It's an overwhelm thing, I believe is a resistance. Most people, you know, they buy books at Much far greater rate than their ability to assimilate them, read them. And I think people would be more well served to master a couple of books than read a whole bunch of books. So, and this is one of those books I don't think you should just read. I think you should master it to whatever. Maybe you can give me your definition of mastery. But it leads me to my question is, if someone's listening to this and they're feeling overwhelmed and the overwhelm, real or perceived, is just screwing up their ability to function and even do things like read a book like Deep Work or to make sound decisions, what advice would you give them?

Right. First, I always emphasize overwhelm is not. It's not intrinsically valuable. Busyness is not intrinsically valuable. We've kind of taught ourselves that doing more things means we're more valuable than doing less things. And so to cut back on things makes you less valuable. It's a sacrifice you're making. Essentially, the core idea I try to preach to people is doing a small number of valuable things really deeply and then being willing to have to compensate by taking a lot of smaller things off your plate, small things that might bring small value, you actually will end up producing more value. You will be net positive, net more valuable. By focusing on a small number of things deeply to the exclusion of a lot of busy, small things, then you would be just filling your day with as much busy things as possible. So, you know, if you feel too overwhelmed, whether or not you read my book or not, that in itself is a problem. That means almost certainly you are producing value for the world, not at your fullest capacity. And so this notion, busyness is not intrinsically valuable. No one ever made a fortune by being quick at answering emails. The thing you do best, the deep work, the things you do best, that's what moves the needle. That's what's going to produce the most value per time you have to spend. And if that means sacrificing a lot of the other things you get your time, that means annoying people. If that means your boss is mad at you and you end up having to shift to another type of position, whatever it means, so be it. But just objectively speaking, focusing intensely and deeply on a small number of things you do really well to the exclusion of other busy things is almost always the way to optimize the value you produce. Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. So do you dismiss a lot of the advice? Some that's given from many of my friends and people I've interviewed about the way to succeed in the world is hustle. Work your ass off, work your teeth off. There's a big following of many people, mostly on social media, that talk about how you just work your ass off and it's that whole work ethic sort of thing. Whereas in your particular case you more remind me of like my friend Dan Sullivan, which is take free days and have a life and shut things down. And so what's your thoughts on that? And then I'd love to hear some of the Cal Newport rituals of when you go to bed and when you shut down. You know, morning rituals, evening rituals, anything that you want to offer as tips or suggestions. So twofold, like what are your thoughts on, you know, the whole mantra of hustle, hustle, hustle versus, you know, is this a complete, you know, opposite end of that or where does hustle fit into your thinking?

Well, I think you have to redefine hustle. So concentrate intensely on something high value requires a lot of energy. You can do it for maybe four hours, maybe five if you're really good at it. That's about, that will, you know, that will exhaust basically all the energy reserves you have. So you have two choices in this experiment. You could spend four hours intensely, concentrate on something very high value, or you could take that same amount of energy and spread it over a 12 or 14 hour day where you're hustling around with messages going back and forth and social media and meetings and coffees and things that don't take as much energy per unit of time, that uses the same amount of energy, the same amount of what you would call hard work or hustle. But that four hours of intense focus on something high value producing, that's going to return you in the long run much more value than spreading that Same energy over 12 to 14 hours over busyness. And so I do think you have to work your ass off. But I don't think it's possible to do it more than four or five hours a day if the work you're doing is on intensely, intensely trying to do the things you do best, better. So that's why, you know, my workday ends usually around 5:30. It's why I don't work on weekends outside of book writing. I, you know, not someone that you would consider stressed out. I'm not someone you consider this busy. That's mainly because I take the energy I have and as much as I'm allowed and able, and I've designed my life to try to optimize this, I push it into the Small number of things I want to do well, and I do that really intensely. And so I think you can have both. You can be actually working your ass off and at the same time done at five every day. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, and I actually think that's the better way to do it. Deep, intense work on the things you do best and then give yourself a rest. That's going to be the right recipe.

Yeah.

I love it.

I love it. You know, a lot of this, it kind of reminds me of the Peter Drucker quote that goes along the lines of, there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of people that are doing a lot of things that they can. They think need to be done. But I think you help shatter a lot of those myths with the perspective that someone would gain by reading this. I've gone a little longer than I anticipated, so hopefully that's okay with your time schedule here, Gal. Because I almost feel bad, especially talking to you, because you're probably like, all right, look, it's getting late in the day here, so what's one question I did not ask you, that I should have asked you? And had I asked you that, what would your answer have been? If there is a question.

Yeah, that's. Of the questions what you didn't ask me that I would have talked about. You know, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think something we didn't get into, which I think is important often to talk about, is the social expectations around a lot of this. And so I'll just. I'll throw out that point. That that's a. That's a. That's an important point. And it's complicated. And I acknowledge that. Right. That. I mean, it's. If you cut back your availability because you're, you're. You're focusing really intensely, and then you're recovering from the intense thinking that might annoy people, that might mess up other people's. You know, that. That has. There's social expectations, There's. There's issues. Where'd you go? Why can't I find you? And then it's really hard work to adjust those expectations. And so that's a whole other topic. But I guess the pin I'll put in that now is. It is an important topic, and I don't want it to seem as if we're skipping over it. It's solvable, but it requires time and work to sort of Rewire people's expectations of you, sometimes even to rewire your official responsibilities, Rewire the way your business runs. These are big, hard changes. And so if we had gone into that, there's a lot to be said there. But the pin I'll put in it now is, yes, I think we acknowledge that there's a lot of subtleties in here that are hard. It's not trivial.

Well, yeah, and, you know, I mean, I'm grappling with changing my cell phone number entirely. Although I don't give my cell phone out freely. It's never been on a business card. I've never published it anywhere. I don't give out my personal email. I have between 50 to 200 messages a day come in that go to my team and my staff that filter a lot of requests. I think I've done a pretty good job. And at the same time, I'm known as a guy that connects a lot of people with running Genius network and doing what I do. I have a lot of people that vie for my attention. And I want to literally go into the next year with a completely new operating system. Much which has been inspired by you. And so I think what you're talking about with the social expectations is crucial because there's a part of me that's like, oh, yeah, you know, how do I nicely let people know that I'm just not going to be accessible in the ways that I was because I'm going to have very long periods of time where you're just not going to reach me. And I still. I. I mean, this last month I took a week off and no one was able to reach me for a week. And so I'm already doing more than I think the average bear. But I want to really wrap it up.

Well, just a quick point on that is something I've observed in this work is that people value clarity more than accessibility. People don't get upset if you radically change the rules of accessibility. That doesn't necessarily make people upset, as long as it's clear and they understand, like, okay, this is how I reach Joe. Like, this is. These are the new rules. And I found this in my life time and time again. We think that people want constant accessibility. They don't need that. But they do want clarity. They don't want it to be. Well, I'm just throwing a message out here. I don't know if you'll ever see it. I don't know what's going to happen. Is this the right place to send it? And it turns out people are much more flexible than we think as long as they have clear expectations. Oh, I now understand, you know, Joe's new rules.

Great.

Now I have my expectations set. I don't have to worry about that. Let me move on to something else. So I always tell people that, you know, so clarity trumps accessibility.

I love it.

I love it.

And I kind of went into another question before I gave you an opportunity. Was there any rituals that you do that you want to talk about of your sleep or when you shut it down at 5:30 on most? I mean, you mentioned some. Is there anything else you wanted to speak to as it relates to? Because you're very much about structure, which, the way you describe it in Deep Work will actually give you a lot of creativity, creative leniency, I guess.

Yeah. No, I highly structure my time. I do a weekly plan ritual where I'm essentially figuring out my hours of the days for the entire week ahead. It's difficult. It can take two, three hours to do. And then that structure, which I then try to follow as best I can and adjust if I have to, that opens up tons of space for creativity because that will put in place and protect depth. It will make sure that things that need to get done have a place to get done. It takes that all out of my mind, and it allows me just to be much more present in each thing I'm doing. It also allows me to move things around to the parts of my week where I'll be best suited to do it. I'll have the right energy for it. I'll have the right resources for it. So that's one key ritual I want to emphasize, is control your time. Like a chess master, I plan out my whole week in advance in some sort of optimal way, and I swear by it. I got to imagine it's a 50 to 75% improvement in how much I produce per week.

Yeah. What would someone need to do in order to have mastery over this? I mean, I know that's kind of a loaded question because it depends on the person and all kinds of other stuff, but if you had any way of thinking about, like, how does one really develop Deep work as a form of maybe mastery is too strong, but just as a way of life.

Yeah, I mean, I think it helps to think of it as a way of life. I mean, I. I preach the Deep Life as a completely different lifestyle than what most people do. I mean, the Deep Life is about a small number of things done with great intensity and high value to the exclusion of many Many small things and many missed small opportunities and many things that you miss out on. And that's going to give you this much higher value, more satisfying experience. And so if you want to master it beyond just the concrete tips, like having the regular boredom sessions, taking social media off of your phone to see which ones need to do, starting to schedule deep work on your calendar, building up your deep work length, I mean, all that stuff is useful. But I think you hit the nail right on the head to say that the foundation for all that work should be, I am trying to adopt an entirely new lifestyle, an entirely new approach to life. And that's the final phrase of my book, which is a deep life is a good life, which that is now the motivating philosophy for how I approach my life. It's not just, I want to be a little bit less distracted or I want to concentrate a little bit more. I want to completely rethink how you create value and satisfaction in our current world.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So. Well, first off, Cal, this has been a great contribution that you have. Your books are very meaningful. At least that's my perspective and my experience. And I mean, you definitely talk and describe things that most people do not. And I think it's so darn useful. And to everyone listening, I cannot endorse reading how I keep confusing with my buddy Hal Elrod. So if I ever call you Hal by accident or if anyone, that's why, because Hal Elrod, the guy who wrote the Miracle Morning, I'm actually doing a book with him on the Miracle Morning for addiction and recovery with my friend Anna David. So I keep like, every time I say Cal, I think of Hal, and every time I talk to Hal, I think of Cal, and it just totally messes me up. So I just needed to throw that in there. You've made such a huge impact with this book, and I really, really endorse it. Everyone listening to this, I don't give a shit how many other books you're reading. Figure out how to read this book or listen to it on audio. I've listened to it on audio and I've actually read it twice. It's that good. And there's very few books that I will devote that time to because the subject matter is so darn important. So where do people go to buy your book other than all the obvious things like Amazon and bookstores? You want to give out a website or anything else where people can read a blog of yours or follow more of your thinking?

Yes. Calnewport.com I've been blogging there for over a decade. So if you want to dive into my thinking on these issues or the passion issues, or you can dive into a huge archive there and get introduced to my ideas and then the books you can find anywhere you find books.

Yep, There you go. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners, you probably know several people in your life that would be well served to hear this conversation with me and Cal. So obviously send this message out on all social media channels that you have and then immediately remove these apps from your phone and these devices from your life after you have promoted this podcast episode and have ordered his book and downloaded it to your Kindle or whatever online, whatever it is. But in all seriousness, really read the book. Please leave your comments on Genius Network or wherever you heard this podcast because I'm going to also put it up on my other other podcast as a bonus episode and let me know what you think and if the feedback is wonderful then I will hit up Cal to do a follow up interview in the future. And so thank you Cal.

Thank you Joe. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you'd like to learn more about.

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