Your Phone Is Stealing the Life You Actually Want | Cal Newport

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All right. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about this. We've got Cal Newport in the house. Good to see you, man.

Lewis, my pleasure.

Excited.

You had a book come out a few years ago. When did that come out?

2016.

2016, called Deep Work. And it argues that focus is the new IQ in the modern workplace because we have so much social media distracting us. And focus is something that is kind of like a lost commodity, I guess. It's something that is a lost art. No one knows how to focus for more than 2 seconds.

Yeah, well, there's 2 forces going on. Focus is becoming more valuable, sort of unrelated to this other tech, just because our economy is increasingly shifting towards high-level knowledge work. Right, we sort of outsource or automate the low-level knowledge work, but the stuff that really requires some creativity or some thinking or original thought, that's getting more important in our economy, right? So if you can focus, it really helps you produce this type of value. But at the same time, sort of unrelated to that trend, we're getting worse at concentrating. Because we have this going on all the time, right? We're looking at the screens, and then also email culture within work. So it was this sort of supply and demand. Focus is becoming more valuable at the exact same time that it's becoming more rare. And so the book was about, hey, if you're one of the few people that cultivates this thing, you're gonna have a huge advantage. Sort of a disproportionate advantage.

Yeah, you're gonna be like the wealthy of value.

Yeah, it's like—

Because there's only so many few people that are actually able to focus and write a book. That's got deep work in it. And make a movie or do something that takes a year, 2 years, 3 years.

Yeah.

The time and energy that go into something, one piece of work, to make it magical is so much harder to do.

Yeah, but it's very valuable.

Very valuable.

But it's practiced as well. And so the book was sort of about we've forgotten how valuable focus is and we've forgotten what it takes to be good at it.

What's it take to be good at focus?

Well, I mean, people think about it like a habit. Right, like flossing their teeth. Everyone thinks like, I know how to focus, the problem is I'm just not doing it enough. So like I should try to make more time to do it, but it's really more like a skill. Like if you practice, it's like playing the guitar, right? You practice it, you can be better at it. If you don't practice it, you're not gonna be very good at it. Even if you put aside the time and you lock away all your devices and you're, here I am, I'm in the cave, I'm gonna write my book. If you haven't been practicing it, it's not gonna go very well.

Right.

And so there's sort of essentially like cognitive athletics. You can actually go in there and train this capability. And you kind of have to. And there's a lot of different elements to how you do it.

Training focus.

Training focus.

How do you— what's for someone who's obsessed with social media, who checks email 20 times a day, who always feels like they're behind, and they're working till 8, 9, 10 o'clock at night because they haven't done focused work during the day. What are some steps that they could start with?

Yeah, well, it's sort of like with athletics. There's general fitness, and then the actual training that you do.

Skill.

Skill, yeah. So cognitive fitness means among other things your brain needs to be comfortable with being bored. I mean, if it's been trained that every time you get a little bit bored you get a shiny treat, like the stimuli, you get this Pavlovian connection where it's boredom means stimuli, boredom means stimuli. So then when it comes time to actually focus, which is boring in the technical sense, right, because there's not a lot of different stimuli. It's not exciting. It's not exciting. Your brain's gonna say, no way. Like, I've learned it, right? When I'm bored, I get the treat. So I'm not gonna sit here and stare at the blank page for a couple hours. So in that sense, if you're constantly doing this, it's like junk food eating. If you're an athlete, right? Your fitness is gonna be bad.

It tastes good in the moment.

It tastes good in the moment, but then you get on the field, right?

You feel like crap.

You feel like crap, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then there's the training, right? There's specific things you can do, this sort of acute training. And so like one of the things I write about is something called productive meditation, which is essentially cognitive pull-ups. Like it's really hard, but it gives you big results. And the idea there is you go for a walk and you try to hold one professional thought in your head, and you try to make progress on that thought while you're walking. And just like in mindfulness meditation, when you notice that your concentration drifts, which it will do—

You come back to the thought.

Come back to it, right? You bring it back, bring it back. It's really hard at first, but if you keep practicing this, like I wanna just think about one thought, try to make progress on something in my head as I walk, you get better and better at it, and the results can actually be pretty radical. Like do this for a month, and you find your ability to sit down and go laser really improves.

So you do this a lot for yourself? You'll take walks?

Yeah.

And you'll start thinking about ideas? Give me an example of like the last few days, what was it?

Yeah, well so I write in my head. So like when I'm trying to figure out a chapter or an essay or something like this, I really, I work out the structure, and then I actually work out a lot of the wording, and that's mainly practiced. And in my day job, I'm a theoretical computer scientist, so I do proofs. So I do a lot of that in my head. So you roam, and that's literally moving the sort of variables of the equations. You know, in my hometown, I'm considered an eccentric because I'm always walking the loops. Walking around. Yeah, and people are— people talk to my wife like, where was your husband going? Like, I saw him twice, he looped back, he looped back around. But, you know, I like wandering. And something about walking, it shuts off some non-cerebral parts of your mind that makes it easier to take the thinking aspect and really focus it.

Do you take your phone with you when you're walking?

Sometimes.

Yeah.

But often not.

You just don't have social media. What about, what about texting and email?

Yeah.

Do you— because you don't have social media, you never had an account.

Never had an account.

And you and I were born around the same time, you were a year older than me. And we were in college, you know, I guess your last year of college, my junior year, was when Facebook came out.

Yeah. I think.

Yeah.

2004, 2003, something around there. 2004, yeah, yeah, I went back and looked up the timeline.

Yeah, 2004. And it was like a big deal when it came out in my college. And we were some of the first people to have it. I'm sure you were as well at your college. But you never signed up for an account and you've never had social media.

Never had it. I mean, I think what happened was sort of accidental. But Facebook was the first. Well, Friendster had been around, but— MySpace was new. Yeah, MySpace was kinda new then. Friendster was sort of about dating. I think, or more. So Facebook came around, people were excited about it, and I wasn't interested in signing up. And I don't quite know why. I think in part because, you know, I had had a failed tech company in the first boom, and, you know, Zuckerberg's a contemporary of ours. And so it's just like, yeah, who's this other kid whose website is so popular? And also my memory is, see, I've always hated listing things, right? If you tell me what's your What's your 3 favorite books or something like that? I just can't do it. I'm really bad at like listing favorites, and that's what Facebook was in 2004.

What's your favorite movie?

Favorite movie, favorite books, favorite songs. I was like, I don't wanna think about that. And so it was sort of accidental I didn't sign up for that, but then once you didn't enter that path, I had this sort of objective distance where then I could kind of observe as it changed, you know, how its role in people's lives changed over time.

Right. And the stress that people have. I think the stat is like almost 50 minutes a day people are on Facebook or social media or—

50 minutes is Facebook products.

Facebook products.

So Instagram and Facebook mainly.

Messenger. Do they own WhatsApp now too?

I guess they own WhatsApp, yeah.

Crazy, isn't it?

Yeah.

Almost an hour a day of your life.

Yeah, just for those services.

Crazy, okay. So you wander around, do you do this every day, you take a walk?

I mean, it depends on the day.

It's interesting because when I was, what, 11, 10, 11 years ago, I had a mentor. Every day he would take a walk for lunch and just brainstorm. He was an inventor and he always had creative ideas and he said, my best ideas come from walking. And I think we lose the art of getting out in nature and having space to be bored. And when we are bored, that's when some of our best ideas come to us.

It's crucial.

It's crucial, but very few of us have the courage to be alone.

Well, it's scary for a lot of people.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, so being alone with your own thoughts, right, it's scary, but it does 3 things. One, it's self-insight. So if you wanna develop as a human, figure out what you're about, grow into a new phase of life, become an adult, any of these type of questions, you have to grapple with your own thoughts. You have to process your experiences. You have to try to make sense of it, right? That requires time.

Ask the tough questions.

Ask the tough questions. You know, what are you upset about that you've done? What are you happy about? And that involves, you can't do this while you're in input processing mode. So if there's something in your ear, something in your hand, you can't be doing this type of reflection. And so, so you don't, you don't develop. Professional insight requires it, right? Creativity requires you to actually take in all this input that you've been receiving. You gotta think about it.

Mm.

So like someone listening to this podcast right now is in input processing mode. So their brain is in a very particular mode, which is I am now receiving input that comes from another human mind, which is a very special mode. Our brain takes that seriously, all hands on deck, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't then take some time to just think about what you've heard, you're gonna get a fraction of the value out of it, 'cause it's 2 different things. And then finally, there's like a maintenance aspect to it. So, you know, it's a big deal to be processing input from another brain, because again, we take that very seriously. If you're doing it all the time, so every time you have a down moment, you're looking at social media, for example, which is, you know, all input from other brains, You don't get the downtime that your brain needs just to do all the things it expects to have time to do, and this causes issues. And so I think this sort of low-grade hum of anxiety that so many people feel today, a lot of that is actually lack of solitude.

Really?

Yeah.

So if more people were actually alone, they'd be more happy?

Yeah. Now, not all the time, right? So, so I give this quote from the book. I found it in Ben Franklin's journals when he did his first transatlantic crossing, when he went to London for the first time. And so he was really thinking about—

A lot of alone time.

Solitude, yeah. So he—

so I found it in his journals. And he was talking about how, like, well, the great sages talk about the value of solitude, but I suspect that if you made the great sages be alone long enough, they would start to regret it, right? Like, you can't be— you can't have too much solitude. That's just as bad. I think he kind of hit that on the nose. And so if you're alone all the time, it's terrible. Like, the worst thing you can do to someone is put them in solitary confinement. But if you get rid of every moment of solitude, it can be sort of just as bad in some sense. Yeah.

So what do you recommend for someone who's on social media all day, email, text all day, they never have any downtime because right when they get home they turn the TV on, they're stimulating constantly. Do you recommend, hey, take a 30-minute walk and just start with that?

Do something without your phone once a day. That's the easiest way just to get comfortable. Like when you walk the dog or you're whatever, going to the drugstore, just leave the phone at home.

You see so many people walking looking down at their phone everywhere you go. At the grocery store, at the gym. It's funny because 2 years ago, maybe it was 2 and a half years ago, I had a realization that for 15 years I'd had my phone on me every single day for 15 years.

Yeah.

Since I was 19, or no, the year 2000 I got my first cell phone.

Yeah.

I was a junior in high school. And I realized there was not a day that had gone by that I didn't have my phone on me at some point in the day.

Yeah.

And I thought to myself that that was wrong. I was like, this is horrible.

What a radical change too in terms of all of human history, right?

Before that, never had a device on me. Maybe a Game Boy every once in a while or something or whatever it may be. But now 15 years of my life I had this on me. And so 2 years ago I made the commitment. I said, I'm going to Hawaii alone and I'm leaving my phone at home. So I went to Hawaii for, I think it was 4 or 5 days. And the first day it was terrifying because I rented a car and I forgot like my confirmation number and I forgot which car rental service I got it from.

Yeah.

So I'm going to each rental service saying, do you have my confirmation, right? And I finally get the car and now I need directions. I'm like, how do I get to my hotel?

Yeah.

I started asking people, where's this at? I stop at a gas station like we used to do in 1995 or whatever. And I was like, wow, this is actually really scary. But I remember on day 2, I was at the beach and I was thinking to myself, I was laying in the ocean and just like looking up. At the sky and hearing like the birds and nature, and I had zero anxiety because I wasn't worried about where my phone was.

Yep.

It's just like, it's safe at my home.

Yeah.

It's not on the beach. Like, no one's gonna— I don't need to check anything. I don't need to post anything. And I remember at the end of this 4 or 5 days, I felt so much peace and calm and zero anxiety. It was almost like I didn't want to go back home to the phone.

And that, that's just getting back to our baseline.

Baseline.

That's the baseline. We underestimate how artificial it is to have a constant companion, a digital constant companion. I mean, it's incredibly artificial. Nowhere in our evolutionary past were we in a context where we had sort of this sort of constant connection to other people and ideas and thoughts. And so you faced all the worst-case scenarios, right? The stuff that makes people worried about not having their phone with them. What if I need to look something up? What if I get lost? What if I— What if I get hurt?

Yeah. I gotta call someone, yeah.

Yeah, except for this is the way we all lived our lives.

This is how we used to live.

Yeah.

And I was fine.

Yeah, so in the book I talk about, I find these stories. It's a subgenre online of people who like lose their phones or have their phones stolen and then decide, I'm not gonna replace it right away.

Wow.

And then they write about the experience. You can find all these stories online, and they often have a very similar—

It transforms their lives.

It transforms them, and there's these inconveniences, but they're not as many as they thought. And maybe there'll be like one really bad thing that happens in a month, like they're late for a meeting with their boss and— They couldn't check in. Someone was talking about she had her laptop out in the cab and was hoping that as it passed the Starbucks, she could get Wi-Fi. Wind up Wi-Fi.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, right? Okay, so that's stressful. But that's one of the things I push back on. So, I mean, you had your phone on you for 15 years. But actually, more recently is when we shifted towards not just having a phone on us, but looking at it all the time. That's like 6 or 7 years old.

Yeah, because the first, I don't know, 8 years, there was no smartphones. Yeah.

Right?

It was just like you're texting and you're calling.

Yeah.

And then there was social media, then there was, you know, Wi-Fi, there was everything else.

Social media's what changed it.

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So not just social media, it was the Facebook IPO. So if you go back to the, the beginning of the consumer-facing smartphone era, so like the iPhone in 2007, I went back and talked to the original development lead for the first iPhone. And what he confirmed is there was nothing about this tech that meant for you to look at it all the time, right? Steve Jobs was a minimalist, right? His whole thing was, I want to take something that's really important to you, and then I want to make the experience beautiful. And so for him, it was playing music. Music was incredibly important. Huge, it was big. Yeah, and everyone was listening to iPods, right? And so the, the iPhone had a touchscreen, and he was like, look, I can make the experience of playing music even more beautiful. And he was offended by the interfaces on cell phones at that time.

Wow.

He's like, phone calls are important. I wanna make that a beautiful experience. I wanna put them in one device so you don't have to have an iPod and a phone both in your pocket. And that was from like 2007 to 2012, that was smartphones. It was this beautiful tool that you brought out occasionally to do specific things. Like I wanna listen to a song, I wanna call my mom, I wanna look up directions, right? Around 2011, 2012, the social media companies We're now past the stage of just we're trying to grow and saying we actually have to get our revenue up because it was the Facebook IPO in particular, right? How are we going to get people to engage much more on our services? Because the Facebook.com is pretty static, right? I mean, you would go check your friend's relationship status, but if you checked it in the morning, it was probably not going to change that day. It's not something you would you would spend all day looking at, right? And so they completely re-engineered. the experience to be not about posting and reading other people's posts, but instead about social approval indicators.

Wow.

And this is when we got the likes, and the retweets, and the favorites, and the photo auto-tags. So now every time you hit this app, you could see some indications. Are people approving of me? Were people thinking of me? And that's what changed our relationship with the phones from this Jobsian vision of this is a beautiful object, That does a few things really well into I have to look at this when I'm walking the dog, I have to look at this, you know, when I'm in the bathroom, I have to look at this when I'm in the line. There was nothing fundamental about the tech that said we need to be looking at this all the time.

Wow.

That was essentially a business model that was proved very effective.

Very effective, very addictive.

Yeah.

And this, you know, as that expands and grows, the more likes you get, it's almost like you feel less worthy of yourself. It's like you have less self-worth because you constantly need to be reminded that or liked or what you posted was cool or interesting or, oh, you have cute kids or a cute dog. And so we have to constantly remind ourselves like, yes, I am worthy. I am enough. Look, it keeps growing. Let me post more to remind myself that I—

I need the likes. I need it. Except for when you're hunting the likes, then what you're not doing is actually sacrificing your time and energy to be with a close friend or family or community.

Or create something meaningful.

Or create something meaningful. Like the things that actually we've evolved to crave to feel sort of accepted and connected and impactful. And so it's this irony that you're doing this because you're like, I, I want to feel accepted and connected to people.

Mm-hmm.

But by doing this all the time, you're actually feeling less connected and less accepted because our social brain, it doesn't really know what to make of like a number next to a thumbs up icon. It knows about this. It knows like I'm sitting across from someone and I'm looking at someone, I'm seeing facial expressions and And I've made time to be here, and we're interacting. It knows about that. That's connection. But without some sort of sacrifice, like I had to go and be and spend my time with someone, if you take all the friction out and you just hit happy birthday or like or something like that, it's not a strong connection.

So how do we build stronger connections?

Well, I mean, when it comes to social life, we kind of know. We've known for a long time what makes people feel connected. strong relationships with sacrificing time and attention for taking on responsibility on behalf of family, close friends, and community.

Mm.

I mean, there's no shortcut. I mean, if a friend has a baby, you could send them like, congrats, 3 exclamation points. But what you really should do is go over there and say, here, I'm bringing you, I'm bringing you a box full of like, this is, you know, it's snacks and food and towels. It turns out towels are really useful when you have babies. Yeah, this is something I've discovered, right? But, and that, and that's hard, and it just took an hour of your time, right? But that leaves you feeling connected. That leaves that other person feeling like you're connected. The congrats with the 3 exclamation points, it's not bad, but it's not giving you what you need.

And it's not like a deep work of building relationship.

Yeah.

It's the small attention that's not as meaningful as showing up. Even a phone call is better than—

It's a lot better.

Than just a like or congrats. It's taking the time. I try to go even a step further with people that I'm really connected to and send them just a video message.

Yeah.

And they're always in shock 'cause they're like so used to someone just sending a quick text.

Yeah.

And I'll send even a minute video message of just acknowledging them for what I appreciate about them or congratulating. They're just always like, wow, I'm so thankful, a video.

It probably hits you instinctually, something about it when you do it, it probably feels, something about it feels more real.

Absolutely. It's more attention, it's more time, it's more a piece of quality, I guess, communication, right? But showing up is really the key in person if you can. But if someone's not in your city, then it might be harder. So do you feel like our quality of our life is diminishing because of social media or because of the lack of our attention to deeper work in our work and our relationships?

This is what I've been hearing, right? So I wrote Deep Work, which was really about tech and its impact on the professional world. And what I kept hearing when I was on the road was readers saying, yeah, but what about tech in our personal lives? Right, there's something going on here. So you start— So tech in the work life meaning Like the distractions like email and Slack and how that's keeping people away from doing highly concentrated work and how this is probably a mistake.

Yeah, just doing meetings all day and communicating but not actually creating work.

Yeah, we're really bad at knowledge work.

Right.

So that was sort of, that was Deep Work, right? So a lot of the readers say, yeah, but something is going on in our personal lives with tech that is sort of arguably more important. And so you look into this and you see there is this unease. Maybe around 2 years ago, people really started to shift from this sort of self-deprecating mode to like, wait a second, there is a problem. But if you talk to people, it's not utility, right? So it's not that they say, this is useless, I hate what I'm doing when I'm on my phone, right? It's not like cigarettes or something where like most people who smoke would just say, I just wish I, I wish I wasn't smoking.

There's nothing good that comes from it. Yeah.

There is, right? I mean, there's good things happening.

Yeah.

The issue is autonomy. So people were feeling like I am losing control over my life, and that's why I'm upset. Not that this is always bad, but it's that I'm doing this more than I should. I'm doing this more than is useful. I'm doing this more than is healthy. I'm doing this to the exclusion of things that I know are much more meaningful. I feel manipulated, like how I feel, my emotions, that somehow these algorithms are changing how I feel. And so the, the argument is I'm losing my autonomy as a human being. That's what was making people concerned. Now the social media companies for a long time, because I've been a long sort of public critic of some of social media, they would always push back with the utility argument. They would say, wait a second, here is something useful that someone is doing on Facebook. Stop criticizing.

Right.

Checkmate, right? Like we've, we've won. And what I was finding is that's not really the grounds on which this argument is occurring. It's not, is this useless or useful? It is, am I in control of this and using it for good means, or is it in control of me? I think more people feel like, okay, it's shifted and now it's in control of me.

Especially when you, now on the iPhone, you can track to see how many hours you spent on an app or social media account. And you're like, wow, I just spent 20 hours this week on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. It's just like, what could you have done with all that time? I'm guilty for this too, you know.

But you split that, take 20 hours, right? Split that between some like strong Interaction with people, self-reflection, and let's say some like skill building or creation.

Yeah, or working out or nature.

And multiply that by what, like 5 or 6 weeks even, and it's a vastly different outcome. And then think about, now think about the compounding return, right? Now you take those 20 hours and you repurpose it week after week, and now you're growing off a bigger and bigger base, and you go 3 or 4 years down the line, it's a completely different life.

Completely different. And people who complain about wanting to write a book but never have the time, or wanting to learn a new language or a new skill, Yeah. Just look at the amount of time you spend on social media.

Yeah.

Or your email, or on nonsense.

But this is why people are getting upset about social media. Again, it's not that they think it's— what they're actually doing is evil, or like what they do when they're on these screens is, you know, you're looking at baby pictures of your niece or something. It's not bad. What they're upset about is that it's keeping them from getting after it in these other aspects. So like this isn't bad, but not learning the language Yeah. Not learning the skill, not getting healthy, not taking on responsibility, right? Like becoming a figure in my community, right, that people respect. Like these things that we actually crave, that's what people are picking up on.

Yeah.

Is that there's all of this stuff over here that instinctually I know, like if I'm doing this, is key to flourishing as a human, and I'm just distracting myself with this so much that there's nothing left over for me to do that. And the fact that, why am I so distracted on this is because they tweaked it so that I would do this a lot. It's so that the real estate prices in Northern California can be really expensive.

Crazy.

I mean, it's not like I'm curing cancer over here and I'm making sacrifices over there. It's they tweaked this so that I would use it 20 hours a week.

And you said before we jumped on here about, you know, the deeper conversation of what's the void we're trying to fill?

Yeah.

What's the thing that people aren't willing to look at within themselves that makes them so distracted? Have you been having those conversations a lot lately?

This is a lot of what surprised me Right, when I was working on the book is that I did this experiment where I put out a call to my readers and said, I'm experimenting with this idea of a digital declutter where you, 30 days you step away.

Wow.

30 days you step away. And this is kind of the core sort of suggestion in the book. Like 30 days you step away.

From all social media?

All social media.

Email too or no?

No, all optional technologies in your personal life. So I can't get you out of answering your boss's email, but online news, social media, games, streaming media, YouTube, Right? Almost everything you do in your personal life with tech, for one month.

TV as well?

It's a—

Like movies and TV?

Well, yeah, so different people had different rules for that. Like one of the rules I liked is people said no streaming media by yourself. So like, yeah, I can watch a movie with like a friend or whatever.

Not just in bed streaming a movie.

But I can't just, you know, watching The Office or whatever, yeah. Which is what everyone does. And that's the idea was that you do this 30 days, then when it's over, you rebuild your digital life from scratch, right? So it's like, Marie Kondo, you clear out the whole closet.

Yes.

Right.

And what brings you joy and—

Yeah, you figure it out and then you, and then you rebuild it from scratch, right? But I kept getting these reports from people, especially younger people who did not have an adult life before social media.

Wow.

That it was terrifying. That taking this away that first day was really terrifying for them. And I had underestimated the degree to which for a lot of people That this is a serious escape. It's not just like, this is dumb, I spend too much time on nonsense. Like, it's actually an escape from hard things they don't wanna deal with.

Like what?

Well, it can be a lot of things, right? I mean, for some people there's actually hard questions about their life. Like, what am I, what am I supposed to be doing? What's my purpose? Am I really living up to my potential? Am I really happy with like the type of person, you know, I am? Am I just going out partying too much or this or that? And this stops them from having to confront that. And it's incredibly, you know, it's incredibly uncomfortable to confront. And for other people, just, they don't have high-quality analog leisure options in their life, which is another thing I learned about. It seems sort of superficial, like, you know, leisure activities, but it's actually really important to have things you do.

Like what? What's some of the examples?

Like things you do in your time outside of work that requires skill, something you can get better at, something that maybe connects you to other people as you do it. It could be like athletics for a lot of people, like even, even like their pickup basketball game or something like this, but also skilled hobbies, community or church group engagement. Like these type of things that we always used to fill our time with outside of work are really important, but it takes some practice and it's harder, right? And so getting back into that if you've never been there before is difficult.

I think you said in your TED video that you like read a book every night and you relax like on a rocking chair and you're like—

I'm such an old man.

Yeah.

And I read a newspaper at the table with my kids in the morning. Like that's how it goes.

That was like my dad. My dad would read the newspaper after, either in the morning but after work. He'd come home and just read the newspaper just sitting in the room with us while we were watching TV or playing video games. He was reading the newspaper. And then I would see almost every night he would just like fall asleep in his like chair reading the newspaper or a book and just like pass out. And I'm like, man, he just looks so restful.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'd be a good farmer 100 years ago.

Right, exactly.

I could just sit on a porch and whittle or something. But again, it sounds superficial but I get into it. Like we go all the way back to Aristotle writing the Nicomachean Ethics, and you see that it's crucial to have activities you do just for the intrinsic quality. That's crucial for making it through the inevitable ups and downs in life, right? That you have activities that you do that you do just because you appreciate quality, right?

Yeah.

If you have that, it's kind of a buffer against various ups and downs, right? If you're, if you're really good at cooking or playing music, if you're a musician, even amateur, you can really just appreciate a good piece of music, or if you're a knitter or something like that, and just constructing something good. It all seems superficial, but it's actually a really important buffer. Really?

The in-between times?

The in-between times. And so maybe you're having a hard time in life at the moment. Having this sort of anchor of, but there's things I do that I just appreciate them for their intrinsic quality, is like deeply human. We take it for granted, but having the screen, I mean, you can avoid all of this. Because it's easier in the moment.

And more rewarding.

More rewarding. It's this algorithmically optimized content. You've been reduced to a data tuple of 19,000 data points. Statistical algorithms are processing and they're feeding you. Like, look at this nugget, look at that nugget. It's reduced you to a statistical gadget. It feeds you these isolated nuggets that— and it's just optimized so that you'll wanna keep— it's the same as processed food.

Yeah.

Same idea.

You want more and more of it.

You're never satisfied.

You want more, you're never satisfied. But if you move away from a real food culture to eat McDonald's, Like, you're not going to be happy in the long term.

Wow.

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So this void that we're trying to fill, you're saying that when we have hobbies or other things that we can do that add value to us, the buffer times, as opposed to going on the phone, yeah, to try to fill the void, that what will that do for us emotionally, mentally? You also talked about how a lot of professors, or maybe, what is it, the therapists on college campuses or professors in mental health are saying that mental health is rising.

It's off the charts.

Because of social media anxiety.

Yeah.

So do you think if we were able to eliminate some of that to do more arts and crafts, music, other buffer-type experiences, that anxiety would go down?

Yes.

Really?

Yeah, it would definitely go down. So for young people, so Generation Z, which is the first generation to have sort of ubiquitous access smartphones, social media, as they entered their young adolescence. This generation, that's where anxiety, anxiety-related disorders were literally off the charts. So the demographers that measure different traits of generations and see how traits change from generation to generation had never seen something change that severely.

Really?

So it was off their charts.

Wow.

Looking at anxiety and anxiety-related disorders, and the turning point from this was if you were born just late enough to have social media and smartphones, like when you enter junior high.

When you were like 10. Yeah.

And, and so this is off the charts. I had been hearing this informally from mental health experts on college campuses where they would tell me like it was crazy. It was overnight. They used to have the standard array of mental health issues, sort of a cross-section of what you would expect, like country as a whole, and then it just shifted overnight. It was all anxiety, anxiety-related disorders, and it was like 5x more students coming in than they ever used to got before.

Wow.

And they would say it was the students who started arriving on campus with smartphones. It was like that year because we're not wired for it, right? So what do we need to flourish as human beings? You take on responsibility for friends, close family, close friends, community. Take on responsibility, commit to them. You know, I'm gonna sacrifice for you, you'll sacrifice for me, I'm gonna be involved. You do activity that, that has intrinsic quality, right? So you go out there to I want to do things with my time that itself is high quality, and there's value in just doing that. And then in your professional life, you look to make impact. You do these things. It's not a secret formula. This is what we've always needed, is the nutriments of human flourishing.

Right.

And so this is the issue with the phone is— and again, the social media companies want it all to be about utility. It's not useless to be on Facebook, but it's not the issue. It's that this has become so compulsive. That it's taken us away from these things that we absolutely need to flourish. So you take those all away, and you just do this instead, you're gonna be anxious.

You're gonna get dumber.

You're gonna get dumber. You're gonna— it's gonna impede professional progress, and, and then life gets really hard, and then you need this more and more to escape. I mean, when things become dangerous in our life is when you start using them to escape harder things you don't want to confront. And so then it becomes a cycle. So then you know, like, I'm not— I'm probably not doing what I should be doing with my life.

And you feel guilty, you beat yourself up.

You feel guilty, and so you escape the guilt by—

Wow.

By going back to this, and it's a cycle.

What's more addictive, social media or smoking?

Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. I talked to psychologists about this. It's a different type of addiction. Smoking is a substance addiction. So there's actually chemicals that can— nicotine can get through the blood-brain barrier. And it can mess around directly with your neurons. So that's really strong. And when you have a substance addiction, you can feel strong physical withdrawal symptoms, for example, if you stop using it. Phone addiction, psychologists tend to categorize as a moderate behavioral addiction.

Mm.

Which means, okay, if I take away your phone, like, it might be difficult, but you're not gonna have the same type of withdrawal you would have if you were, like, an alcoholic and you were being taken away from alcohol. But moderate behavioral addictions lead you to using something much more than you know is healthy if you have access to it. So it's just like if I put the bowl of potato chips in front of you every day, you're gonna eat probably way too many potato chips, right? But if I don't, you're not gonna sneak out in the middle of the night to go buy it. So that's where we are with probably with the phones is that if we have it with us, we're gonna use it more than we think is healthy.

On the phone, okay, so let's, Let's make this scenario. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen, a lot of people that have products and services and companies and trying to build their brands and get exposure and build a following. What would you say to the people that their business is mostly online?

Yeah.

And is evolved around building communities on social networking platforms? How would you suggest they manage their time on social media? Can they eliminate social media all in all or let someone else run it for them?

Yeah.

What's your recommendation?

I mean, all those are possible. Right? So I definitely recognize in the professional context there's certain things that social media enables that's really powerful. I mean, there's a reason, for example, why Facebook is worth $500 billion, because let's say you're trying to advertise. It's crazy. This thing can pinpoint exact human beings that you wanna try to sell to. I mean, I see why they're making lots of money, and I understand why people would use it to advertise. I also understand having some sort of presence in social media is useful in certain industries.

Mm-hmm.

And so what I typically advise is if you think social media is very important for your business, treat it as something important. Like actually get after it and understand where am I really getting value, what activities really matter, do they really matter? Make sure you're not telling yourself a story, right?

Mm.

Treat it like any other tool. Then once you've really figured out, okay, these are the ways that social media is helping me professionally, then use it like a professional. So there's no reason for it to be on your phone.

Really?

Yeah. Doesn't, don't—

Email's on your phone, right?

I don't use email on my phone.

Really?

Wow. Yeah. I deleted the app.

You only open the computer to do the work on email?

Yeah.

And on your phone you're not checking or being notified?

No. So do the same with social media. So once you've identified X, Y, and Z on social media is a big ROI, do it like the pros. So I interviewed some sort of social media brand managers for major companies in the book to be like, okay, how do the professionals use it? It's on their desktop. They've got tools. They've got schedules. They've got systems. They often have staff that helps them. And it's a completely different interaction than I'm in line at CVS. Right.

Or I'm on the toilet for 20 extra minutes, which I do all the time.

Right. So like a lot of people sort of tell themselves the story. They allow the sort of professional use to completely change what's happening in life outside of work. And so those are the 2 things that happen. So sometimes people just generically see professional social media as like, I don't want to think about it more than just in general being on here and using a lot is beneficial. I think we got to think about it sharper than that. And then 2, they let it infect over. But like, if a friend of mine was running a business and we were out to dinner and he's doing QuickBooks, whatever, I was like, well, why are you making QuickBooks invoices? Like, I don't doubt that maybe QuickBooks is useful for your business, but this is weird that you're you're using it on your phone all the time.

At dinner, yeah.

Yeah, it's not just enough to— if he came back and said, but my business needs QuickBooks, that's how I invoice my clients or whatever, I'd say that's true, but like, do you need to be writing up invoices on the toilet, right?

And at dinner and at the movies.

At dinner and at the movies, yeah. So when I talk to professionals, I'm like, if you need social media, use it like— if you're using it professionally, use it like a professional, and it should have very little to do with your personal life.

What are the non-negotiables for you every day in terms of screen time and your phone?

That's a good question. Well, I don't really need that many non-negotiables because it's—

'Cause it's never there.

So I don't have social media accounts, so I'm free from that re-engineering. So when you don't have that re-engineering towards the compulsive use model, the phone just goes back to the way it was in 2007. So it's like, great, I need to look up, you know, looking up like whatever the address of where I'm going or something like this.

You use Maps?

Yeah, I use Maps or I'm gonna call my wife and see how the kids are doing or something like that. But because I've never been exposed to the constant companion model, it just is never something that I worry about. And then online, I had trained myself not to web surf.

Really?

So I don't have a cycle of sites to go through. Now in part I can do this because I have a lot of autonomy in my job. So as a professor and a writer, it's not like, I never have to just be at an office to be there. I can decide what I'm gonna work on. And so because I have kids, I tend to tightly schedule my workday. And so I don't want time to web surf during my workday. It's like I'm doing this for 2 hours and then this. Like, I wanna be trying to work every single minute. Get done, get home. I'm working so I can be done and then I can be home. And then when I'm home, you know, I have 3 kids running around.

So you're just a present dad.

That's what I wanna do.

Wow.

Yeah.

You're just hanging out, throwing a baseball in the backyard, you're whatever, getting dirty, whatever it might be.

Yeah, we literally do that, yeah.

Just like the old days. I remember after work my dad would come home, he'd be in his suit, he'd roll his sleeves up, he'd get 2 mitts, and we'd go play catch in the backyard.

Yeah.

For 20, 30 minutes. It was so powerful in the summer in Ohio, just like the smell, the grass, just like throw and catch, you know?

Yeah.

Simple little things that build connection and it's a memory.

It's a memory. And it's physical and it's tangible and you're taking responsibility for a relationship. My oldest is only 6, but So we're working on swings.

Wow.

Yeah, he's getting better. All right.

Is he gonna be doing T-ball soon?

He did T-ball last summer.

Really? Are you coaching him?

I'm not the coach. I'm not the coach. Maybe I should be.

But you go. Now it's interesting, when you go as a parent to see, I guess, T-ball, and I'm sure you'll be doing more activities with your kids as they get older.

Yeah.

Do you see all other parents just on their phone the whole time?

There's a lot of that.

Really?

Yeah. And playgrounds too.

Really?

This is one of the sources, I think, of the pushback. that I've been picking up on in the last couple of years on our digital lives is that our generation, like, so people like us who were exposed, the social media generation, right? We got it when we were like in college.

20s.

We were the first adopters basically, right? Is we're starting to have families. And so it's interesting, a lot of the unease is coming from like new moms and dads.

Wow.

Right, because now suddenly you have to confront, like, it's pretty clear that This thing in front of me here is very important and something that I wanna dedicate to and take responsibility, and then they're like, then why am I looking at this?

Right, well, my kids are the most important thing.

Yeah, and so it's one of the source of the growing unease is that the social media generation, the first adopters, is now getting old enough that it's not just, you know, we're in our 20s and we're going out and hanging out with friends and who cares, you know? And so I think that's part of the pushback.

So for people who are entrepreneurs that use social media to build their business, what do you recommend? Do you recommend them deleting for 30 days? Do you recommend them saying, okay, you're only gonna be scheduled online for these hours a day like a working professional would?

Yeah, put fences around it.

Okay.

Yeah, so take it off your phone and put fences around how and when.

Man, that's scary.

Yeah, yeah.

Take it off your phone.

And then have how and when. How and when, yeah.

Wow.

Which is, so a lot of the digital minimalists, right, like a lot of the people who go through this process, Like of that 1,600, probably 50% added some social media back into their life after the 30 days.

So you had 1,600 people go through this process?

Yeah.

Okay.

And they would send in reports. Of the reports I got, about 50% were saying, okay, I can't think of any huge wins I'm getting out of social media. Because the whole minimalism game is just about focus on the big wins and ignore the rest. And so the whole idea is you go through all this tech after the 30 days and say, if it's a big win, I'll bring it back in, and if it's not, I'm happy to miss out. So about 50% When they did this calculus for social media, like, I'm not getting a big win, and I'm a minimalist, I'm gonna focus my attention on the things that really matter, so that's okay. 50% had big wins, right?

What do you mean they had big wins?

There was a value, something they really valued for which, let's say, a particular social media tool was a big boost, right? So like—

For what? Business or their career?

Either, right? So there might be, it might be a personal thing, right? Like, this is the way, the only way I connect with these people who are very important in my life. A lot of like soldiers deployed overseas have a very different relationship with some of these social media platforms because of the time changes and the difficulty of the synchronous communication. That's really important for them. A lot of visual artists told me that Instagram is crucial.

For their business, for their awareness.

For their creativity. They have to be, if you're a visual artist, you have to see other people's work. That's why they all used to live in Greenwich Village because that's where the galleries were, right?

And now—

It's an online gallery. Yeah, so Instagram has been fantastic for visual artists because you don't have to live in one of 3 cities anymore. So about 50% had some value that social media really helped, but of that 50%, probably 95% took it off their phone and transformed it into, I use it like Sundays on my desktop to do X, right? The visual artists were like, I took my Instagram followers, I went down to 10 artists I really admire, Sunday night, I go on my desktop, the password's not saved, you know, it's on a Post-it note or whatever. It takes about 20 minutes. I look at the things they posted that week. I'm getting all the value I need out of this tool without letting it turn me into a widget.

That's great.

So the how and when is sort of the secret sauce to minimalism. So it's not just the what. So they really cut down, right? It's like taking the junk out of your house. But then they have this extra element which is unique to the digital world, which is how and when am I gonna use the things that I kept in the closet?

Interesting. So in the book, Digital Minimalism, do you have a guideline for how people can do this for 30 days? Is there a process or?

Yeah, the process is you figure out, okay, what am I gonna step away from? And for the things that I do need to keep, you actually write down the rules, right? So you see it. Here's my tech rules. Then you have 30 days. So what are you supposed to do during those 30 days? Like, why is this not just like a Marie Kondo Right. Weekend type thing, right? Yeah, like what—

5-hour declutter.

Yeah, yeah, well, there's 2 reasons. So, so one, it takes about 7 to 10 days just to sort of detox from the need to compulsively use the phone. Until you get rid of that feeling of compulsive use, it's very hard to make decisions about what's important or not. So the first week or 2 is you're just kind of getting away from it. But more importantly is 30 days is enough time to actually do the hard self-reflection on these key questions. Like, what am I all about? What do I care about? What do I wanna do with my time? You can experiment and try things out. You can talk to mentors. You can go for walks. You read inspiring books. I mean, it takes quite a bit of self-work to figure out what do I really care about? And then once you know that, when you get to the end of 30 days, now you have a foundation to make your decisions.

Mm-hmm.

So now when you're like, should I come back, or maybe should I put Instagram back into my life? You can now run that against, here's the things identified I really cared about. If it really helps one of these things, yes, I'm using it for a huge win. If it doesn't, I'm really secure missing out on it because this is what I really care about. I really care about these 5 things. This is what I wanna do with my time. This is what's important to my life. I want my energy to go to that. And now you can just make these tools back into tools and not this sort of constant companion escape.

Addiction, yeah.

Wow, man.

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This is powerful, powerful stuff. How many people do you think actually, after reading this book, will take on the 30-day challenge?

They seem to be doing it.

Really?

Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a 30-day challenge is a little bit more self-helpy than I normally am. I mean, right? I mean, I was a little bit uncomfortable. My books tend to be more a little bit more like idea books that has practical things, but like, I'm an academic, right? We don't do 30 days. You're a researcher, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we don't do 30 days, but it's what works. And, you know, people want there to be, I get asked the question a lot, like, but can you give me instead like some tips? Like 5 things I can do or whatever. And I was like, I can, but—

Just delete your accounts.

But you gotta do the 30, like something about this 30 days, this declutter, it does work. And coming up short of that, trying to kind of do it piecemeal, it doesn't seem to be as effective. And so I was like, all right, I'm putting it in. I'm gonna Marie Kondo it. I'm gonna have a process, you know?

I love it.

But that's the feedback I'm getting. So that's why I tell people, it's like, you can do things to get in shape, to prepare for the 30 days, but rip the bandaid.

Yeah, I really feel like when you do this 30-day challenge, I had another friend, Baratunde Thurston, who did this a couple years ago. And he wrote a whole article, I think in like Fast Company, about like, What he learned about himself in 30 days.

I wrote about him in Deep Work.

You did?

Yeah, 'cause he stepped away from Twitter.

I think he stepped away from like every, was it just Twitter?

Yeah, maybe everything. But then he went back to it all.

And now is he back like—

Well, I don't know. I just remember at the time I wrote the article, I went and looked at how much he was using that.

Yeah, 'cause he stepped away for 30 days, or maybe a month or something, yeah. And then he did like a whole article about what he learned about himself.

Yeah.

I think he was able to do the deep work finally.

Yeah.

On certain projects or connect with friends more.

Yeah, you have to have the time, right? It can't be a weekend closet clean. That's the interesting thing about it. If it's just like, okay, this weekend I'm gonna just step back and figure out, you know, what do I want on my phone? Like, I'm gonna delete apps and stuff like that. It doesn't get it done. Like, you have to have that space.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's the same. Honestly, I think what's going on here We've seen in health and fitness, right? We got highly palatable processed foods.

Yeah, get it out of your system.

Yeah, and everyone got, you know, obesity epidemic. Take the grains out. Yeah, and we tried tips, just, you know, the banal stuff, right? Like eat less, move more.

You gotta get rid of it though.

The food pyramid, yeah, and what works is the people who have like a whole philosophy, right? They're vegan, they're paleo, they're whatever, but they've got a whole philosophy based on something they care about. And so that's why this book is not about tips. It was like, what's veganism for digital life, right? Like what's the philosophy, what's the philosophy that can be based in values that allows you to make like consistent decisions about what you do?

It's interesting, my COO who manages my business, he doesn't have social media. He has a Facebook account 'cause he got on in 2004 when we were in college. But he never uses it. I don't even know if he knows his password. He's not on Instagram, Twitter, nothing. And he's probably the most productive person I know.

Yeah.

He's got a daughter, you know, a year-and-a-half daughter. And he's not anxious a lot.

Yeah.

He's calm and he can think clearly.

Yeah.

And it just kind of, he's my inspiration because I'm probably on it too much promoting, you know, my show or whatever it may be.

Yeah.

And, but I realized after this conversation, like, I could just be on the desktop for an hour a day doing what I need to do on social media.

With some professional help probably too.

Yeah, with some systems, some software, some team, you know, around that. And I've been doing that more and more, but I still feel like there's a couple things I hold onto for whatever reason. And maybe I get to reflect more of like, what's the void I'm trying to fill?

Yeah, well there's a lot of—

Or is it just an addiction now that it's just like, maybe there's no void, but it's just like you're just so used to it.

That's the complicated thing, right? But you can't figure out the void unless you do the whole Nietzsche thing, right? You have to confront it, right? Okay, I feel really uneasy because I don't have the thing I normally look at. That uneasiness is good because now you have to figure out why do I feel uneasy and how do I make this go away? And, and that's where actual development comes out of. Yeah, you got to be uncomfortable sometimes.

I love this. You know, my, my mom who lives a few blocks away, she has been knitting her whole life and she still knits, I don't know, 2, 3 hours a day.

Yeah.

There's a blanket, a huge blanket, a scarf, a sweatshirt every week that she finishes. And she always shows me like her masterpiece.

Yeah.

I'm like, that's so cool that she focuses so much on her craft and she has that as her buffer time. She's always knitting in the car when someone else is driving. She's knitting in the car when there's a movie. She's knitting. She's always knitting.

Yeah.

And it brings her a lot of peace. It helps like her mind. I'm sure she's probably thinking a lot during those times.

Yeah.

It's just like reflection time. And I just continue to think about what are all the things that we could be mastering with this buffer time.

And it's primal, right? There's something primal, let's say, about knitting or—

Using your hands.

Woodworking.

Yeah.

'Cause what differentiates, there's maybe 3 species, let's say like chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans. Like what, one of the things that differentiates us is that we can plan. So we can have an intention. and we can manifest it in the world.

It's crazy.

Right? So I can think about, you know, a spear, and I can take the rocks, I can do the different things and create it, right? And that really helps us succeed. So we're wired to be very fulfilled when we can take an idea and manifest it in the physical concrete world, which is why there's a type of fulfillment we get when you knit something or you carve something or whatever it is that you don't get on a screen, because seeing our intention manifested in the concrete world is something that's primal. It's something that we're wired because that's what allowed us to stop being tiger food.

Right.

Once we could start doing that. And so like someone I really admire is, I don't know if you've met Nick Offerman.

I haven't met him.

He plays Ron Swanson on Parks and Rec. Yeah, I've heard of him. Yeah, but he's got this somewhere around here in LA.

He's a woodworker, right? Doesn't he have a shop?

He's got this shop around here, yeah. And he spends, it's gotta be the most healthy way probably to be in Hollywood.

Amazing.

A screen star. But he's there all the time. And it's a serious shop. Like a light industrial warehouse type thing. And he's a really serious—

I also look at like Jim Carrey. I don't know if you've seen his work. He had a video last year that was like the most viewed video on Vimeo.

Okay.

He's a master artist.

Interesting.

He has this huge warehouse in, I think, New York City and in LA where he just goes and paints something new every single day.

Yeah.

And he's an unbelievable painter.

Yeah.

And he just has all these colors and he's just painting whatever he wants. And I actually have one of his paintings 'cause I was so inspired by it. But here's a guy who's probably He's been wrapped up in the Hollywood scene for a long time, but to have like a craft that you can keep focusing on, yeah, probably gives him a sense of peace as well.

Yeah, because we're wired for that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to do that more in my own life.

Really?

Like what? Well, so I'm getting back into my guitar playing.

Really?

Same thing, right? You, it's, you have inflexible metal strings and a piece of wood, and you're sort of trying to manipulate this real-world thing to make it somehow sound good.

Yeah, that's good, man. A big thing I like to do is salsa dance.

Yeah.

I love salsa dancing. I play a little guitar as well. And I just started singing lessons a couple months ago.

That's great, yeah.

So I'm trying to just use more of my body to manifest like my skills.

Yes.

And things that I'm not that good at, you know?

Yes.

Things that I'm trying to get better at.

But you can get better at, and this seems to be, it's skilled and you can get better at it and it's demonstrable that you're getting better.

It's rewarding.

You know like I'm better at this now than I was.

And I think when we do these things like guitar or whatever it may be and we get Better, that's when we build true confidence. We don't build confidence by getting more likes on social media. It might be a false sense of confidence for a moment, but we haven't really built a skill that's valuable.

Yeah.

And I think that's the thing. There's like fake confidence when we're like growing online, but when we actually do something that we know is hard, deep work, and we see the growth, that's when we have that intrinsic confidence that supports us for a longer time.

My Uber driver yesterday, was telling me that he used to do music lessons, professional musician.

Wow.

And he said this was one of the shifts he saw that kind of got him out of that industry was that sort of younger people now aren't willing to practice, and he'd been doing this for a long time, right? I mean, it's not a random sample. It's people who are coming to get lessons, and just a discomfort with the discomfort of practicing, but when you're doing something like this, like learning how to play guitar, you probably remember when you first learned. The guitar is like completely unyielding it.

Oh, it's so hard, man. It's just like a year and a half to figure out like 3 songs.

Just for like your fingers. It's to get comfortable. Painful. But we used to be more comfortable doing these things because what else were you going to do?

There was no other time. Yeah, we had all this free time.

It was free time. What are you going to do? Like, I want to play in a rock band, right? You know, girls like guys in rock bands is what I was told, right?

So I'm going to learn all afternoon.

I'm going to practice all afternoon. I'm going to put on the Hendrix and, and do, you know, pentatonic scales or whatever. But, you know, we— if you're used to that, it's Mm-hmm. You know what skill is. You don't have to be world-class at something, but you know about, I was bad at this, and then I did this deliberate effort, and now I'm not bad.

Better, yeah.

And now you know what that is. The competent person, this was Matthew Crawford said something like, the competent person who has a skill is sort of quiet and easy with themselves. The non-competent person is out there yelling into the void online, desperate to get, will someone validate?

Wow.

Will someone validate me? But when you know how to do something really well, you're quiet and easy.

What do you recommend as a parent to other parents on how they can train or teach or educate their kids to do the hard work growing up?

Yeah.

On certain skills or activities as opposed to take your iPad and iPhone and watch a movie and play games.

Yeah, well, modeling's important. So they see.

Wow.

They gotta see what you're doing.

See you reading a book.

See you reading a book.

Playing guitar.

See you doing hard things, yeah. See you doing hard things, seeing you respecting other people who do hard things. That was important to me growing up for sure. Just being exposed to that and seeing that. Just having that message. And then when I was growing up, the other rule was you always have to be doing an instrument, you always have to be doing a sport. And I was like, okay, that's pretty good actually. 'Cause those are both things that are, what's more, 2 things are very unyielding. Like trying to get a guitar to do something, or trying to get a bat to hit Fastball. Yeah.

So hard.

So hard.

That's right.

Yeah.

My dad tried to get me to do piano when I was a kid, and I went to one lesson and I just like screamed and cried about it, and he, he was like, okay, you don't have to go anymore. But I was in every sport.

Yeah.

So I was like obsessed with sports and all in.

Sports are great. I mean, this is part of why it's so great, is because, I mean, it's hard, um, and you wanna get better. It's demonstrable when you get better. Like, it's clear that you're better. And you're connected to other people.

You're learning with a group, you're getting coached.

You're helping the team as you get better. I mean, that's having that model. Like, skills matter, we respect people who do something well, it's worthwhile learning how to do something hard, hard things is what moves life forward, hard things is the foundation of fulfillment. The more I think that that is sort of modeled and talked about, the better. This is great, man.

I love this. Make sure you guys get the book, Digital Minimalism. I've got a couple questions left for you, but Digital Minimalism is out now. Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. You can't find him on social media, but you can go to your website, calnewport.com. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

You can subscribe to your newsletter there. You can learn more about you, not on social media, but on there. And then your— do you have a newsletter once a week?

Yeah, well, I blog.

Blog.

And it goes out to the newsletter. Yeah, I'm a blog nerd, yeah.

Blog nerd, love it, okay. This question is called the 3 Truths. So I want you to imagine it's your final day on earth, whenever you want it to be. It could be hundreds of years from now, it could be whenever, but at some point you gotta go.

Yeah.

And, uh, you've gotta take all of your work with you. So all of your writing, your material, the content you've created, it's gotta go with you when you die.

Yeah.

But you get to write down on a piece of paper 3 things you know to be true about all of your experiences. And leave that with the world. Your 3 lessons that you've learned that you would wanna share back with the world. What would you say are your 3 truths?

So this won't be worded elegantly 'cause I'm just, I'm thinking about this on the fly. Probably something about responsibility. So taking on responsibility, like for other people, to do things of value is in the end gonna be more important than worrying about happiness in the moment. Doing hard things is sort of the foundation for a good life. Hard things are good. Like push yourself, push yourself to do hard things. Serve other people. Family, close friends, community, I talk about these things.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, serve other people. I mean, I guess all of these, if I'm thinking about it, all 3 of these things is, and this is probably common to a lot of wisdom traditions, I'm not coming up with anything new, but all 3 of these things I guess are really about taking the focus away from yourself, what's happening to yourself, what do people think about you, how do you feel, sort of shifting the focus away from that.

Yeah.

Take on responsibility, take on hard things, try to rise to it. Do hard things, produce things that are valuable, serve other people, as opposed to worrying too much about are other people properly serving you. Are they liking the right things or saying the right things to you?

Sure.

Yeah.

Those are great, man. I love those. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Cal, for— man, you set the example for what is really hard for a lot of people right now. People are so focused on likes and being on social media and doing the easy things, and you constantly do the hard things and set that example. So I want to acknowledge you for going against the grain.

Yeah.

Because it's not easy to do that, and a lot of people are seduced with the easy out and filling the void by Getting likes and all these things. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for creating this type of work because it is the most rewarding things when we do the hard work and when we eliminate distractions and really connect to other people and other human beings. So I acknowledge you for that, my man. Um, my final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

Rising to your potential. You know, we all have a potential Like what we could be doing. And so fighting the rise for that, like, that's greatness versus throwing in the towel early. Right. There you go.

I love it, man. Hey, thank you, man. Appreciate it, brother.

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