Do I Need More Discipline? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [Do I Need More Discipline? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/cb6d1019-5cff-45f2-963d-2125bd45e644) ## Highlights - **How Endurance Sports Replaced Football Structure** - Brad Stulberg lost football’s structure at Michigan, then chased running, marathons, triathlons, and an almost-Kona qualification because consulting lacked clear feedback. - He dropped from 205 to 160 pounds, stayed injured, and realized elite endurance training no longer fit fatherhood, writing, or his body. Transcript: Cal Newport Talk about the role of sort of disciplined physical activity in your early life. Brad Stulberg Well, growing up, I played sports. I played basketball and football at a pretty high level, and it was good enough to play maybe small division one schools or most division two, division three schools. Cal Newport Right. You said basketball and football. Brad Stulberg Football was the sport that I was going to go play in college. Cal Newport What was your position? Brad Stulberg I played slot receiver, tight end, and then outside linebacker. Cal Newport Oh, interesting. Okay. So you were fast and kind of tall. Brad Stulberg Yes. And I'm still kind of tall. I'm not as fast. But so I ended up deciding to go to University of Michigan for a whole number of reasons that we don't have to get into. I was not good enough to play football at University of Michigan. So this thing that gave my life a ton of structure in discipline went away. And then in college, I dabbled in endurance sports. I started running. I was generally active, but I never had like a pursuit that I was trying to get good at that really required discipline. I call it a hobby. And then after college, I got more and more into running. Cal Newport What did you do after college? So what's the professional context now? Brad Stulberg I went to work in McKinsey and Company as a consultant because I was relatively smart, insecure, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And as a McKinsey recruiter said that we recruit smart, insecure people that don't know what they want to do. They make great consultants. Cal Newport I wrote this. I found it recently that I had written a humor column in college. And the whole premise of the column, I found this recently, no one actually knew what a consultant did yet. It seemed to be what everyone was like interviewing to go do. And the whole column, the whole premise was like, one of us is going to figure out one day, like what this job actually means, but they're great at recruiting from elite schools. Like, just trust us. All you need to know it's hard and you get a high five and a gold star if you get the job. And we're like, well, sign me up, buddy. I'm into it. Brad Stulberg Yeah. So I went to do that. And I got more and more into running. And I don't think that this was coincidental. Because as a consultant, whether or not you do a good job is very subjective. You've got the opinion of the partner that you're working for. You've got the opinion of clients. Generally, the things that you're recommending and the studies that you're working on can be multi-year transformations. So you don't get an objective, concrete sense of I put in work and here was the result, which is the total opposite of running. In running, you train, especially if you're new, and you either get faster or you don't. So I caught the running bug. I got hooked on running. I completely transformed my body to become more of a runner. Cal Newport So you had all the, the mass and muscles of being like, uh, I was 205. Brad Stulberg I was 205 pounds, uh, when I graduated high school and throughout some of college. And then as I got into running, I got down to 160 pounds. Yeah. Um, so it was, it was, I got pretty serious about it and I got pretty good. I was never great. Um, what distances are we talking? I started with half marathons and then I ran marathons, then I did half Ironmans, then eventually I did an Ironman triathlon. My goal was to qualify for Kona, which is the World Championships, and I came up just short. Cal Newport Oh, okay. With like Rich Roll? Yes, exactly. Brad Stulberg Yeah, interesting. But I was always, so there's two things about that. The first is I was always fighting against my body. My genetics are clearly those of a football player. There's a reason that I didn't run cross-country in high school when I played football. It's because I was better at football. I was getting injured. Cal Newport I was top-heavy. Your podcast co-host, our common friend Steve Magnus, that's the build of a runner. Correct. You see this guy, you're like, oh, I get it. You're a long-distance runner. Yeah, you see you and I, you don't think Prefontaine. Brad Stulberg Exactly. Well said. So I was fighting against my body. And then also, um, as I got older, I was fighting against my life because the amount of time it took to get better at long course triathlon and forget the fact that I was always injured. So now I got to do physical therapy and all this other stuff, but just the training, once you're pretty good to get better, it requires a ton of training, 15, 20 hours a week. And I realized that that didn't fit my life. And then when we had our first child when I was 30, it became very clear that I was not going to be able to pursue trying to be a world-class writer at the same time that I wanted to be a really Good father and a husband and also continue to get better at triathlon. So then I entered kind of like the dark night of my athletic soul where I decided that I'm not going to be an endurance athlete anymore. This had always been a huge part of my life. Now I've got a baby at home. I'm still relatively early in my career, right? At age 30 in this thing that had been this anchor in my life was just suddenly gone. Cal Newport Yeah. What did you feel when that disciplined pursuit was gone? How does that subjectively show up in how you actually feel day to day? What was the differences that later on you look back like, oh, this is what changed when that left my life? Brad Stulberg I felt more frenetic. I felt more distracted. I felt less settled and less situated, both in myself and in the world. Even though, again, I'm a writer. I'm not an athlete. Running should have nothing to do with writing, swimming, biking, nothing to do with writing. But that anchor and that disciplined pursuit in my day, what I later learned about myself, and I think applies more broadly, it had all these carryover effects to other elements of my Life that then that became a huge vacuum. ([Time 0:04:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50ce31d2-4e08-4917-b9df-bcafff99cde2)) - **Why A Hard Pursuit Stabilizes The Rest Of Life** - Losing a disciplined pursuit can make life feel frenetic, distracted, and less settled even when the pursuit has nothing to do with your job. - Brad Stulberg says athletic progress became another room in his identity house, diversifying his mastery portfolio when writing stalled. Transcript: Cal Newport Yeah. What did you feel when that disciplined pursuit was gone? How does that subjectively show up in how you actually feel day to day? What was the differences that later on you look back like, oh, this is what changed when that left my life? Brad Stulberg I felt more frenetic. I felt more distracted. I felt less settled and less situated, both in myself and in the world. Even though, again, I'm a writer. I'm not an athlete. Running should have nothing to do with writing, swimming, biking, nothing to do with writing. But that anchor and that disciplined pursuit in my day, what I later learned about myself, and I think applies more broadly, it had all these carryover effects to other elements of my Life that then that became a huge vacuum. Cal Newport What about stress and anxiety? Like something I recognized, like when I was in graduate school, I was doing graduate school stuff and writing books. And one of like the hidden advantages I realized about that is that it gave me, if something was going poorly, I could focus on the other thing and still feel good and like there's momentum. If I was struggling with my academic research, I could be like, okay, you know what? I'm just putting in the time there, but what I'm going to daydream about and get excited about is my books. Or if the books were doing poorly, I might be like, no, no, I'm like doing well in the research. So I mean, was it serving? Do you think like your athletic pursuits was serving as a sort of counterbalance to the other stuff that was going on professionally in your life that gave you a way to sort of even out The ups and downs, anxieties, the stresses, and did it change when that went away? Great point. Brad Stulberg A hundred percent is the answer. I was like another room in my identity house. So if the only room in your professional identity house is writer, and then you've got a family room, we don't really make concrete progress in family. But in writing, like if shit hits the fan, if I'm lost, if I'm stuck, if I have a piece that flops or worse, a book that doesn't do as well as I thought, you can feel a real sense of like stagnation. And then it's nice to be able to double down as an athlete and say, well, I'm getting better. I still get mastery. So essentially, if know that it feels really good to be making progress and to be on a path of mastery. And if you have more than one area of your life where you can do that, you diversify your mastery portfolio. ([Time 0:08:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/893e4b74-a1a1-4b00-984f-f907e8db0ffe)) - **How Brad Stulberg Found Powerlifting After Fatherhood** - After his son was born, Brad Stulberg started casually lifting at the YMCA across from his apartment and discovered training could be an end in itself. - Guys at the gym introduced powerlifting, and moving to Asheville led him to coach Zach and a deliberate athlete identity. Transcript: Brad Stulberg All right. So Theo, my son is born and I remember that I just needed something physically active. I mentioned I did a lot of walking, but I needed something physically active. So at the time we lived in Oakland, we lived right across from the YMCA. So I started going to the gym and just throwing around weights. And the only time I ever trained in the weight room was always very instrumental. I trained to be good at football. Like I never trained to train, I trained to be good at football. And then in the weight room, it felt great. I felt like I was back in high school. My body just immediately responds to this kind of training. It's clear that we talk a lot about nurture your nature. My nature is built for that sort of thing. So I started getting pretty good at it. I started getting stronger. I started putting on muscle. And I realized that, which never occurred to me back then, that I could actually train in the weight room without football. Like training could be an end in and of itself. Strength training could be an end in and of itself. Cal Newport Like just wanting to have gains on what you're able to lift, for example, just like how strong you get. Yeah. Brad Stulberg Picking a couple lifts and saying, this is what I currently do. I'm going to work on the skill. I'm going to show up consistently and I'm going to get stronger. Cal Newport So what did this look like in the Oakland days? You would just, how long, how many days a week? It was just, Hey, I have a little bit of downtime. Hey Caitlin, I'm going to run across the street. Yeah. Just feel good. Brad Stulberg I'd say that was the first, the first year or the first, at least nine months of this. Uh, it was a hobby. Yeah. I'm just going to, I'm going to go throw around some weights and I knew enough from football. I'm going to do two days a week, lower body, two days a week upper body, but not a lot of thoughtfulness went into it. And then once Theo got a little bit older, he started sleeping a little bit better. I have a little bit more time and cognitive bandwidth. I say, you know, I'd actually like to have a goal here. And that's when I discovered powerlifting. Cal Newport And how did you discover it? Brad Stulberg I didn't even know powerlifting was a sport. There were some guys at the YMCA and they're always doing squat, bench press, deadlift. Cal Newport Is that what it is, by the way? Maybe you should clarify this for the audience. When you hear powerlifting is like what happens in a powerlifting competition? Brad Stulberg In a powerlifting meet, you have three movements. You have the squat and then you have the bench press and then you have the deadlift. There's also something called a push-pull meet, which is what I ended up doing, which is just the deadlift and the bench press. And a push-pull meet, the benefit of this is it takes half a day instead of a whole day. Okay. And I don't love squatting. I still squat because you have to squat to deadlift strong, but I don't like something about having 600 pounds in my back. It's a little scary. Cal Newport And deadlift is literally the weight is on the ground and you just – you pick it up. You stand up and it's at your waist. Brad Stulberg You lock – yeah. The point of a deadlift is it's at a dead stop on the ground and you need to lock it out to your waist. It is by far my favorite movement. It is a whole body movement. It's kind of the pinnacle of total strength. Cal Newport Yeah. Okay. And that's the one – is that the one where people can – if you just look at raw weight numbers for like weightlifting things, that's the thing where the numbers are the highest? That's like the – because you're doing the least motion with it? Brad Stulberg Some people squat more than they deadlift. Some people deadlift more than they squat. But yeah, you can get a pretty big number on your deadlift. All right. Cal Newport So here you are. You're in Oakland. At this point, you're done with McKinsey and working for Kaiser at this point or you're doing the coaching or what's uh, yeah. Brad Stulberg So I've, I've taken a job at an internal consulting group within Kaiser, which is a big healthcare system. And I'm still 50% Kaiser. So I'm getting health benefits through Kaiser. I had a really great boss and now my writing career is starting to look good. So I'm 50% writer and I'm slowly realizing that Kaiser is not going to pay me at 20%. I think I just need to be a writer. Cal Newport Yeah, if you want to do more writing, you're making that move. So that's the time when you start taking the powerlifting more seriously. You met some guys at the gym that were doing it. You learned about it. Now you had a number that you're going to try to increase. All right, so then how did it develop into what role it plays for you today? Brad Stulberg I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the very concrete objective progress where you put in work and you either get better or not. I fell in love with how it makes me feel. So like the feeling of putting yourself through a hard workout in an undistracted way became an enormous anchor in my day and i fell in love with the gains because when you get serious About something and we should talk about this like you actually you do get better every single day for a time and that feels really good um and then uh about six and a half years ago my family Decided that as a part of just going all in on writing we're going to move to asheville from from northern california and i'd already written the book peak performance with steve I was Becoming kind of known as an expert on performance. And there's all this BS out there when it comes to training. And I found a gym in Asheville. And I remember looking when we decided we're going to move to Asheville. I wonder what the training scene's like. And there was this gym that just seemed phenomenal. Like they really knew what they were doing. So even before I moved ashley i reached out to the gym i got a coach and we said all right we're going to try to get your deadlift and bench press and squat as strong as possible was this zach Cal Newport At this point this is zach all right this is our common common coach i hooked cal up with zach that's why cal's looking so strong between brad and i we average uh actually the average what I was going to say we average on the deadlift be a very embarrassing number i'd say we between the two of us we can max out our combined deadlift is probably quite good yes our combined deadlift Brad Stulberg Is what's your deadlift uh 530 our combined deadlift is over 600 pounds there you go i'd love to get to 600 um so yeah so i start training i start getting coached by zach and at this point Um I'm an athlete again. So weightlifting and powerlifting shifts from a hobby and something I do to a part of my identity. And I don't say I'm a powerlifter, but I'm an athlete again. And what that means for me is not that I'm going to win medals because I'm not. Cal Newport But you do compete. Brad Stulberg I've done a few competitions. Cal Newport Yeah, but that's something, right? That changes something, right? Brad Stulberg Yeah, I think so. But I think it's more just saying that that I care about this. I'm going to set a goal and I'm going to hold myself accountable to it. And this is no longer just something that I do. This is something that I do deliberately with intention and with with a kind of discipline, a discipline to show up, a discipline to be consistent, a discipline to care. That to me is the shift from I lift weights to I am an athlete. ([Time 0:15:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b6c2e3e-cc09-4fef-a18e-9efd2e6d37f8)) - **Why Discipline Pursuits Improve Work Indirectly** - A non-instrumental discipline pursuit costs time, but it improves life by diversifying identity, slowing professional obsession, and supplying a different kind of stress. - Brad Stulberg says powerlifting gives him another place for mastery, better writing ideas, and a governor against burnout and pure growth chasing. Transcript: Cal Newport Okay. So then before we get into how my audience can think about having a discipline anchor in their life, I want to sort of more fully explore what comes out of this, right? So like a common objection would be, but Brad, that takes up a lot of time, which you could be hustling even more. Like that could be time that you could be, maybe you could write books faster or that's, you know, time you could be building more social posts or you could be doing whatever. So how do you understand the balance of time required by a non-instrumental discipline pursuit and the benefits you get? Like what would your life be like if you took this completely out of your life and just repurposed the time you spend on this just for work? Brad Stulberg Well, remember, I'm coming from 17 to 20 hours a week training as an endurance athlete to in the gym. I'm in the gym four days a week for maybe an hour and a half, at most two hours a day. Cal Newport That's – yeah, so the rest of us were like, that's a lot of time. So you're saying to you, you're like, oh, I'm basically barely training. Brad Stulberg Yeah, my reference point was much higher. I could give you a nice buttoned-up answer about how it's a no-brainer and powerlifting makes me better at everything else in my life, and I think there's a lot of truth, but you know that I call you once a month, and I'm like, would I be a better author if I just stopped training so hard and all I did was take long walks? So there's a real tension. What I would say is it's a trade-off and I've come to believe that, yeah, it does take time, it takes effort, it takes energy, but the benefit of having this disciplined pursuit in my life Carries over everywhere else where one, it's a net benefit. Number two, I enjoy it and I get a kind of satisfaction out of it that I don't get anywhere else. And number three, it gives me an area of life, like you were saying earlier, where if I'm in a little bit of a rut or I'm stagnating somewhere else, I can try to focus and make progress there. Cal Newport Did you notice any differences? Like when you had a surgery on your leg a few years ago, which I assume took you out of training for a little while. I was going to ask if you noticed any differences in that period where you couldn't be training, but also you're in recovery. So it was, it was not a normal. Brad Stulberg No, but I was, but I was still training. And this is where Zach is a really good coach because like the benefit of training isn't just getting under a barbell. The benefit is the disciplined pursuit in your life. So we just designed all kinds of workouts that I could do with crutches. So it was a lot of upper body on the skier. It was bench pressing. It was pull-ups. And then there was the rehab for my leg. Cal Newport Yeah, okay. And then from the outside, I see the powerlifting time you do, which to me is a lot of time. It slows you down in a good way. I want to run this theory by you, right? So it means when you're thinking about your professional pursuits, it puts a little bit of a governor on like the freneticism or speed with which you can move forward because it's like, Well, the work is a part of my life. This is another part of my life. It feels like it keeps you in this mindset of like, what is my ideal lifestyle and moving forward. I think it's beneficial. I think without that governor, if you just had a lot of time and you wanted to fill that time with everything has to be filled for my writing career, I mean you could have like a killer TikTok Channel on which you use dance to sell supplements or something like that, right? I see from the outside, but I want to get your take on that. The sort of pacing it instills on your professional life, like slow and steady. I'm working on this idea. It becomes a book when I work on that idea is like actually from a slow productivity standpoint better. Brad Stulberg I think we're practicing what we preach, even though sometimes it can be hard. I think if my goal was pure growth, and if I define growth is book sales, people who subscribe to my Instagram and sub stack, then this would not be a good part of my life. Like it would be detracting from growth. However, my goal is not growth. My goal is to do good work and to live a life of excellence and a deep life, to use both of our terms. And insofar of it, that's my goal. Having this governor is really helpful, 100%. It prevents against obsession and burnout. And even though the volume and the velocity of my writing work isn't as high because of this i think the quality is higher because even though it is quote unquote stressful to train that Hard it's a different kind of stress than the cognitive stress of writing so it gives my brain a chance to rest and it gives me cool shit to write about like the the weight room is a microcosm For life. You face fears, you're vulnerable, you make progress, you get, you have to show resiliency, you have to overcome setbacks. You're doing it with other people. You don't feel like doing it all the time. Like these are, these are all things that lead to excellence in anything. ([Time 0:21:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d65a559e-cbf4-46c1-9ce2-3ae9985243cb)) - **Choose A Discipline Pursuit That Fits Your Life** - Choose a discipline pursuit that actually fits your life instead of forcing a 20-hour ambition into a crowded season. - Brad Stulberg recommends meaningful struggle: a craft pursued because its demands shape character and help you show up better elsewhere. Transcript: Cal Newport So generalizing beyond like particular thing you do. How do we actually generalize this discipline habit? What are we looking for? If I'm an individual that says I want to have a discipline anchor so that all these benefits that Brad has, I have. It evens out my life. It gives me perspective. It prevents one part of my life from spiraling out of control. My anxiety goes down. The various benefits. What are we looking at if I'm just listening to this show right now? What am I looking at to try to do? Brad Stulberg The first thing that I would say is you should find a pursuit that you can do at the level you want to do it that fits into the rest of your life. So what I mean by that is if I wanted to keep training in triathlon, I don't have 20 hours. All of it's going to happen is I'm going to stress myself out because I'm going to feel like I'm never training close to my potential. It's taking away time from these other things. So like, what's the point here? So you have to right size what you're doing. So for me, mastering, getting better and trying to be the best is really important to be my best. I should say is really important. I know that in, in weightlifting, could I train more than eight hours a week? Of course, but the returns would be so diminishing that I actually feel like training eight hours a week hard is about like the max that I can do. And I can still be a really present father. I can still coach my son's baseball and basketball team, my daughter's soccer team. I can still write really well. So it has to fit your life. I think a huge trap is people get really inspired and they're like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to train for a marathon or, you know, the triathlon, or I'm going to start a coffee shop. And then you realize that that's a 20-hour project and I don't have those hours. And then it just causes more stress. Cal Newport Yeah. Okay. So you need a realistic target. What should you be looking for in the actual activity that it should be challenging, there's growth, and it's not directly connected to your compensation for your job? What's the properties we're looking at for what makes a pursuit a good discipline anchor? Brad Stulberg I'm going to make it really simple and then we can elaborate. Meaningful struggle. Cal Newport So it has to have struggle. And we, so we've talked about this before. So what, what makes a struggle meaningful? I think people, not to reuse the word, struggle with that concept, right? Because like why is weightlifting meaningful, right? It's not – because people think, oh, that means I need to be lifting sacks of corn that I'm loading up to the truck to go to impoverish people. Or doing it for charity. Or doing it for charity or something. So what do you mean by meaningful here? Brad Stulberg You are doing it because the qualities that you are learning from doing it, you feel, are making you either a better person or better at other parts of your life. ([Time 0:26:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f5c1e51-848f-4cbc-b9e8-50705ec71843)) - **Real Discipline Makes You Kinder Not Louder** - Doing something genuinely hard can soften people by exposing how difficult effort, failure, and vulnerability really are. - Brad Stulberg contrasts quiet discipline with performative discipline that needs parades, chest pounding, and public proof. Transcript: Cal Newport Heard this about men before. Like if you, if you talk to, like, I have a friend who's like a jujitsu black belt, or you talk to people who are like professional fighters, they'll, they'll often tell you like, Hey, For men, there's this other nice thing that happens is that it, it target, it, it aims and burns off and uses your testosterone and your aggression in a way that they become really nice Guys. Like the nicest guys you're going to meet is going to be like a jiu-jitsu black belt or whatever because they've sort of burnt off that aggression. They're not twitchy and anxious and like flying off the handle or whatever. So there's probably another thing there is like it helps you show up as a dad and show up as a husband better perhaps because like you probably have a lot of testosterone energy, et cetera, And it needs somewhere to go. Otherwise, you could be a little bit – do you buy that? I've heard that from fighters a lot. It's like fighters are nice. Brad Stulberg I think fighters are nice, but I don't think that's necessarily the reason. All right, listen. We're all on a bell curve, so I don't know my natural testosterone. I've never had it measured. I don't know if it's high, low, somewhere in between. For some people, that's probably true. I think what's actually going on though is a little bit more nuanced and to me more interesting, which is that if you train for fighting and you do it really hard, it softens you because You realize how freaking hard it is to step into the arena and try to kick someone else's ass or to get your ass kicked and that makes you a softer person i think the people that go around All machismo and are assholes part of the reason is they've actually never done anything meaningfully hard in their life i think when you do something that's meaningfully hard it softens Cal Newport You and makes you kinder it's like this paradox of becoming a humble badass it's funny if you if you ever hear like joe on his podcast talk about fighting because he was a kickboxer and A fighter for a long time. He hates it so much and he's so obsessed with like, I don't think you realize how easy it is to injure your head. Like he's just terrified by all fights. Like you could fall and hit your head. Like you could die, you get brain damage or whatever. So it's funny, the more someone fights, you're right. The more like fighting's terrible. Brad Stulberg Yeah, well, I think doing something really hard and with integrity makes you a more compassionate person i truly believe that because you see how freaking hard it is to give something Your all and to try to get better and to fail along the way and then you get kinder and you're probably not as tuned in in every conversation about like i need to prove myself i need to like Cal Newport Make sure that people know that like i'm an impressive person and then you're kind of bragging it's sort of it's a quiet discipline. Brad Stulberg In the book, I talk about the difference between, um, like performative discipline and real discipline and performative discipline is you're pounding your chest. You're giving a hype speech. You require a parade to tell everyone how disciplined you are. That's not discipline. Discipline is showing up at the gym when no one else is watching and doing the workout and then going home and not needing to tell everyone about it and showing up for your family or your Job or whatever, whatever else you have to do. Like that's actual discipline. Cal Newport Yeah. It's like how I always thought about writing. Like when I started was I was like, okay, step one, write for 10 years. Step two, put your head up and say, Hey, can I do something interesting yet? It's just like the long sort of unromantic. It's not a slog, but it's time consuming. Brad Stulberg But I think back to the initial premise about discipline versus distraction, I think if you actually commit to something like that, it simplifies life in like the best of ways, because You're not so worried about the constant velocity and freneticism in the latest trend. You just have your thing and you go do it. So what's so great about powerlifting is you've got all these bros talking about optimizing this and supplements and protocols and new ways to train. And it's like, no, like I'm just going to show up at the gym and work these lifts and do it with a good coach and a good community of people. And I don't have to pay attention to any of that. And that is so freeing to not have to pay attention to any of that. It's like it's calming. So ([Time 0:29:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/55fc0bad-a97f-4d18-8e6a-624c4a8721b7)) - **Find One Hour For A Real Craft** - Make room for roughly an hour a day if your season allows, because many people can recover that time by cutting social media or low-value overwork. - The pursuit need not be physical; Brad Stulberg names gardening, bonsai, quilting, music, and woodworking as equally valid crafts. Transcript: Cal Newport Going back then to the first point, choose something that actually fits within your life. How do we navigate the tension between, okay, maybe very little fits in my life right now. And actually what I need to do is actually free up some more time, like make some sacrifices versus this would require too many sacrifices, right? So I assume in some people's lives, like actually you should give some things up so that you can have a disciplined pursuit. But also if it's, I need to train 20 hours a week, that's giving up too much. So how do we, what's that tension between you should sacrifice on behalf of your disciplined pursuit, but it shouldn't be unrealistic sacrifice. Is that the right way to think about it? Brad Stulberg That is the right way to think about it. And I think that it's obviously going to differ based on an individual circumstances. There are some people I want to couch this that probably truly don't have an hour a day for a disciplined pursuit. In a fellowship as a transplant surgeon, if you just had twins, if you are somebody that is working two jobs just to pay rent and make ends meet, then you probably don't have an hour in your Day. And this just might not be the advice for you at this season of life. However, if you don't fall into one of those small categories, I think a lot of people think they don't have an hour a day. But if you were to take social media off your phone, or if you were to not be so neurotic about studying that 11th hour and say that 10 is probably enough, and maybe the 11th hour actually Has a negative return, then you would get that hour back a day. So I think part of discipline is actually making it the hour. Now, there's a big difference between an hour and three hours, but I think most people can find an hour a day or an hour five days a week. And I think that most crafts, if you actually show up with deep focus for that hour, you can get pretty dang good. Yeah. Cal Newport And we're talking, and just to be clear, this is not physical is one category. It doesn't have to be physical, right? Brad Stulberg So it could be an intellectual watercolor woodwork um get into gardening bonsai trees um you you joked about crocheting but like quilting um make art make music learn learn guitar like The the physical stuff sure if you're a dude that played football and maybe you're just tossed your own hypothesis like it has these um these other kind of benefits but i really just think Like i'm inclined for power sports. Some people are inclined to grow orchids. Great, grow an orchid. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that you care about it. You show up with deliberate intention. It's a long game that you're playing. And you realize that to get really good, this isn't like I'm going to do 30 days at 30 minutes a day and then be great. This is like I'm going to do this for 30 months and maybe 30 years. ([Time 0:33:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7ca3718f-5433-4ff2-b880-360bbd771bf4)) - **Turn A Hobby Into A Disciplined Practice** - Move a promising hobby into a disciplined practice by making it important enough that other things sometimes lose. - Brad Stulberg distinguishes casual exercise from training: a real practice has commitment, regular showing up, and often a concrete goal. Transcript: Cal Newport Right. So let's get into the traps then. So we were talking about this a little bit offline. We were able to come up with several ideas you were telling me of, these are the things that trip people up after they commit to what you just said. After like, you know what? You're right. I want to discipline, pursue it and anchor. It's going to anchor out my life. I'm going to be less like distracted and restless. It's going to, I'm going to, it's going to fit into my life. I'll sacrifice not too much. All the things we talked about. All right. So we have some traps. What's the first one that's going to trip a lot of people up? Brad Stulberg I think the first trap is the hobby trap, which is that you're doing it and you like it, but it's just kind of a hobby. And there's not that intentionality. Maybe there's not a goal associated with it. And there's nothing wrong. I think most things start this way. This is how my, my pursuit of really power lifting and strength training seriously began, but you can also get stuck in that hobby phase. And I think the challenge with that is then things always come up. And when things come up, you just don't do it because that's just a hobby. Cal Newport So it's a hobby. If you're not, what, if you don't have a particular difficult goal you're working towards, you're just sort of like putting aside time and doing it? Brad Stulberg Yeah, I think it's a hobby if you, it's a little bit about the goal that you're working towards, but I also think about it's where it fits into your life. So I think a hobby, you have a much easier time not showing up for or letting go. I think a disciplined practice, part of what makes it a disciplined practice is that you actually say, no, this is important to me. I'm going to do it. And even if that means letting other things go. Cal Newport So if you're like, I try to get to the gym three days a week because exercise is good for me and I like lifting weights or whatever, that's very different than these three times a week, I'm Meeting a trainer at the gym because we're trying to get my deadlift up by 20%. So you have like set times you have to be there, set goals you're moving towards, not just, I try to put aside time for this on a regular basis. Yeah. Brad Stulberg I often think about it like there's exercise, there's training, and then there's training hard. Exercise is what you first described. Training is when you're like, no, I'm training. Like this matters and I'm going to do it and it's going to be important to me. I mean, training hard is a whole other thing. Cal Newport And then, all right, so what is training hard? Do we need to get there or is that? No, I don't think we need to get there. I think if you get there, you'll get there. Yeah. Brad Stulberg And that's probably true in any pursuit. Training hard goes from, you know, now it's this discipline practice to I used to think that there was easy, medium and hard, and this is true in anything. And now I realized that there's easy medium in 10 different gradations of hard. There's nine, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, and all those have a different feel. And when you talk to anyone that's on the path of mastery, they, they feel this in their own craft too. ([Time 0:35:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7374fd0c-6ab9-44c5-b085-19bf4d96b551)) - **Why 1 Percent Better Eventually Stops Working** - The 1% better every day mindset works early, then fails when visible gains plateau and progress becomes slower, subtler, and more internal. - Brad Stulberg says long-term motivation must shift from observable improvement to curiosity, like Lane Norton needing eight years to add seven deadlift pounds. Transcript: Cal Newport What's another trap that we have to worry about? Brad Stulberg All right. The other trap is one of my favorite. It's the 1% better everyday trap. Yeah. So this term was popularized, I believe, by James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits. And it is a great mindset. And I completely agree with James on this. So get 1% better every day means consistency over intensity, which I literally have a chapter about in my book. So I agree. And it means that you don't have to hit home runs. You don't have to be a hero. You don't have to train till you puke. You just need to show up and get a little bit better every day. And as a mindset, could not agree more. The problem is when you are new to something and you have that mindset, you actually do get 1% better every day. And that is a really strong, gratifying source of motivation. Now, what happens, and this happens in every single pursuit, and it's generally after anywhere from nine months to two years, you stop getting 1% better every day, and you have these Plateaus. The honeymoon phase of progress is over, and if the only thing that was bringing you back to the gym or back to the garden or back to the studio was the fact that you were making concrete Progress, observable progress, then you're going to quit. So many people quit once they stop getting 1% better every day. So the way that I've come to think about it is 1% better every day works for the first nine months to two years of a disciplined pursuit, but then you kind of have to get rid of that altogether. Cal Newport Interesting. But then why, I mean, just from an athletic training perspective, just to like put on that type of lens, what's the goal when you get to that plateau period? Why do you keep, like, what would happen? Why do you keep training? Is the idea like eventually now it's just slower gains or you're going to lose gains or now you have to start finding like much more, like what happens if you're like, you're an athlete, What happens when you hit that plateau? What are you trying to do? Brad Stulberg Two things happen. The actual reward is that you showed up and did the work workout. It's purely intrinsic. Cal Newport You exerted discipline. But why do you need to show up and do the work? Like if I'm just an athlete, because otherwise you're going to start losing. Brad Stulberg Oh, yeah. Well, one, you're going to start losing. Two, it's a part of your life. Three, you train at that point not just to put more weight on the bar to make the table more elegant or to grow the orchid more beautiful. You do it because it's like this process of like discovery about the craft and self-discovery and curiosity. I think that that's how I like to think of it is that the motivation has to shift from 1% better every day to curiosity. Yeah. And you see this in, there's this great quote from Kobe Bryant. And whatever you think about his off-court life where he had all kinds of struggles on the court, he's one of the best players to ever play basketball. And before his tragic death, he was asked, are you the kind of player that plays not to lose or are you the kind of player that plays to win? And Kobe Bryant said, I'm neither. I play to figure things out. I play to learn something. Cal Newport So you're still looking for progress, but it's different. Brad Stulberg It's different. It's felt. It's not as observable. Like in power – give me an example. Cal Newport Oh, I'll give you a great example. From your own lifting. Brad Stulberg So, well, forget my own lifting. Let's talk about an actual world-class power lifter. Lane Norton, who I spent a lot of time talking to for the book, he is the world champion deadlifter for his weight and age category. And Lane Norton, it took him eight years to move his deadlift from 716 pounds to 723 pounds. Cal Newport So can I just say for the record combined Lane Norton and I can combine deadlift over 750 pounds. Love it. Brad Stulberg So Lane, Lane got less than 1% better every year. Cal Newport Wait, so say it again. Brad Stulberg Seven years, eight years, eight years to gain seven pounds. Yeah. So what kept lane going back it's exactly what i said he's just like this this is a part of my life exerting the muscle of discipline and showing up that is the reward the work itself is the Reward and i'm endlessly curious if i make this little tweak that would be imperceptible to anyone but me like this could be instead of having half a percent of weight on my pinky toe when I'm pushing the floor at the start of a lift, I'm going to put three quarters of a percent of my weight on my pinky toe. Like what would that feel like? What am I going to get out of this? So you're running all these little experiments and it's the little experiments in the feedback loops that you're getting from those experiments that are every bit is addictive is Adding weight to the bottom. Cal Newport So it becomes a more nuanced type of progress. And it might be like the same metric that you were getting better at automatically by just training. Now you have to do a lot more thinking creativity to make it better, but it could be other things as well. Like, okay, actually, I can make my training sessions much better or something like this, right? Like, oh, it's, it's less injury prone or less exhausting. I'm smarter about how I do it. So if you're learning guitar, for example, there's probably a period where you're just, I am getting better at guitar every week and I can play more songs or whatever. And then at some point you get to a place where you've mastered all those techniques. And now you might just be like, hey, there's like a particular picking technique. And if I could really master this, it's a little subtle, but it'll allow me to do like this little thing or something. That might take six months, but you got to learn to make that be just as exciting as it was when you were six months into guitar playing. And you're like, oh, I can play the F chord really well now, which like opened up a bunch of songs. Brad Stulberg Yes. And that endless curiosity becomes like the ultimate fuel for motivation. And you can have this professionally too. One of my best friends is a really well trained and fine emergency medicine doctor. And he talks about how now he's not chasing better outcomes. What he's chasing is like the feel of a better, he calls it being more efficient. But efficient isn't even spending less time with a patient. Efficient is quickly sizing up what the patient's real problem is, getting to a diagnosis and doing it in a way that like feels really good. But the outcome on the quality board at the hospital is going to be the same. But if he doesn't have that feel, then he could very easily get bored on this plateau. But instead, it becomes much more intrinsic, much more curiosity driven. Cal Newport I mean, this is just mastery, right? So like mastery goes through phases. And when you get to these, like the levels you actually call mastery, you have like a huge acquired body of knowledge and technique and skill. And now you're kind of perfecting its application. Yes. Brad Stulberg And I think that that is one of the most, like for me, that is one of the most motivating things about mastery in any craft is when you start to combine thinking and feeling. And sometimes you think your way to the right answer. Sometimes you feel your way to the right answer. And it goes from being cerebral to like a nervous system thing. My sense is even you with writing and you are, and I say even you, because you are so skilled, but you are, you are so intellectual and cerebral. My guess is that oftentimes when you have a great turn of phrase, you know it in your body before you know it in your mind. Oh yeah. Cal Newport And I do exactly what you're talk... ([Time 0:39:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f07c1470-3675-4f06-a884-5fb6186ff98f)) - **Avoid Mistaking Optimization For Discipline** - Avoid the optimization trap by ignoring most hacks and returning to the few actions that directly build the skill. - Brad Stulberg says deadlifting improves by lifting heavy regularly; obsessing over sleep gadgets, breathing tricks, and protocols can consume effort without adding pounds. Transcript: Brad Stulberg Think there's one other trap. Well, there's two. The eyes bigger than your stomach trap which we kind of already talked about which is uh i'm going to go from running a 5k to an ultra marathon even though i've got a stressful job three Kids at home and there's no trails near my house yeah like you're just it's you're going to burn yourself out it's never going to last i think i have an example like that in the new manuscript Cal Newport I'm working on um where it was a someone who wanted to surf, right? And living in San Diego, which is like people surf there. And the idea was she was like, I did it. This seems like really meaningful to me, right? But the reality was you don't live particularly close to the ocean, right? Surfing is really hard. It's really hard to pick up like later in life. Like you really have to be doing it all the time. You don't have the ability to do it all the time it's actually those those lineups are also kind of stressful because all the locals are there this just doesn't make sense even though On paper you're like wouldn't that be great if I was a surfer and then I think in that example what ended up happening was she realized and this is actually hypothetical but I was like making A point in the book that like well you know what there's like a group of people who ride they like mountain bike we do have trails right near me and kind of, we go on rides and I sort of can go On rides with them over time. And then they do, we do trips every once in a while. And like, it was much more tractable and it still got to the same place of like, I want to be outside in nature doing something physical. But the first idea, it just didn't make sense. It would just take way more time than you had, way more skill than you could build. So, so I guess that's the part of the eyes are bigger than the stomach just because you want something to be true. Doesn't mean that that's like the right pursuit for you. Brad Stulberg Yeah. It's got to fit your lifestyle and you might have to make some changes, right? Like it's a struggle, but the changes can't be drastic. You can't, um, I mean, I guess you could unhave kids. That's called leaving your kids, but we're not recommending that. That's not, that's not the deep life or excellence. Cal Newport No, it's your next book. Drop the dead weight. Brad Stulberg Yeah, literally drop the dead weight. A plan for rediscovering. Deadlift more. Yeah, no, we're not going to do that. All right. The last trap that we haven't touched on at all is what I call the optimization trap, which is when you think that discipline means rote optimization. So controlling everything that you eat, staying up on all the latest protocols and hacks and fads. And what ends up happening is you're chasing all of these bright and shiny objects. But so often, this is just like performance art. Masquerading is actual progress, where you'd be better off to ignore 99.99% of that stuff in discipline means focusing on the main things. In performance talk, we say don't major in the minors, keep the main things the main things. So if you want to get good at deadlifting, you got to deadlift a lot of weight. Sure, do you have to eat enough in sleep? Yes, but optimizing your nutrition, optimizing your sleep, optimizing your breathing, you could spend all of your time and energy worried about that and not deadlift any more pounds Than you were because what actually matters for a deadlift is showing up at the gym three to four days a week and training hard. Cal Newport And this probably comes partially from, we see this focus on like pseudo productivity in the world of work increasingly. So it's just a mindset you have where you're like, oh, the key is in this new pursuit I want to do, because I've learned this from like knowledge work, is like always be doing things like New ideas, trying things, lots of action. I have all these tips. I'm doing it. I'm checking this off. I'm taping over my mouth. I'm putting my face in cold water. Like I'm doing all these different things because in the world of work, visible activity is sort of roughly associated with usefulness. But in the world of disciplined pursuits, there is no boss to say, wow, you really answered those proverbial emails fast. You must be productive. The boss is the weight. And it doesn't really care that you taped up your mouth or whatever it is, or took alpha quick or something like that. It's how many times have you lifted me? And is your muscles wired in a way to lift this now? It's just moving weight. Yeah. Brad Stulberg It takes a lot of discipline to get in there and move the weight. And it also takes discipline not to have every bright and shiny object distract you. And it's not to say there's not a time and a place for like innovation and tweaking your technique. But I think that a time and a place means maybe once a year, you try something a little bit new. ([Time 0:47:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd4727d1-a510-4128-8e75-35344a753f60)) - **Real Crafts Crowd Out Fake Productivity** - A real disciplined pursuit satisfies the urge for agency, making fake-hard checklist productivity and digital pseudo-control less appealing. - Brad Stulberg says real crafts are grounding because unlike internet activity, the weight moves or not, the tree lives or dies, the table stands or not. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, let's get back I have this term for this sometimes that's relevant. I call checklist productivity, which there is a real attraction to making progress on something by doing a bunch of steps that if you look at any individual step, like you know for sure You'll be able to do it. Like nothing is just like do this for a year, put yourself out there. It's like, no, I learned this information and I can do all these things. Set an alarm, take this supplement, you know, to the show. Sure I get this much sunlight. Like everything on that list is doable. And you're like, I'm going to get a sense of progress out of like checking a lot of things off of that list. And almost always checklist productivity for like almost anything that's hard and valuable doesn't really do much. Right. And so like, I don't know the world of fitness optimization as well as you do, because you and your podcast like talk about it a lot, but I was thinking about it. Like, you know what? I do see this a lot, like in the writing world, there's a lot of checklist productivity for people that want to be in writers. So like, I really want to focus on optimizing my sub stack. I really want to focus on like using AI to build a custom idea management system that helps me more quickly make connections between different concepts. I really want to focus on the workflow I use for having like the right social channels and stuff. And it's all stuff that nothing in there is like competitive or requires long skill acquisition. And that is a lot more satisfying then you got to put pin to a blank page and push past that stage where your mind wants to resist and build the best thing possible and then have someone tell You later what's bad about it and then get one percent better the next time until that stops happening and then you have to get more creative so i i get it now i so i don't know the that just Brad Stulberg Clicked for you i can tell and you're you're 100% right. Because it is a lot easier to do checklist productivity. Like anyone can optimize themselves to death and burn themselves out by trying to micromanage and control every single part of their day. What's actually a lot harder is identifying what really matters, showing up, doing what really matters, committing to it, doing it for over a year, doing it through plateaus and coming Back again and again. And that's what's actually going to not only make you better, but that's what leads to satisfaction. There's some fascinating research that has recently been published that shows that perfectionism, which is very close to like row optimization, it actually leads to decreased performance, Not increased performance. So it's not even neutral. It makes you worse. And the researchers say there's two mechanisms for this. The first is it's exhausting because once you open up Pandora's box to optimization, your checklist can grow to infinity. And the second is that it's kind of lonely because it's all about what can I do? So now I have to write this certain way. Well, I can't go to the coffee shop to write, or I can't have a glass of wine with my significant other because that's not a part of my optimal diet plan. And it just contracts your life more and more and more. And we know that when we're tired and lonely, we don't perform well. All right. Cal Newport So let's go back to benefits then because this brings me to another benefit. I really want to try to hammer this home because I want people to understand what we're selling here basically. Because it seems to me when you have real, a real disciplined pursuit in your life and doing all the things, the way you talked about it, a lot of that optimization stuff that you might Have elsewhere in life, that desire goes down because that desire of like, I have all of these like very careful rules and checklist. It's all just trying to scratch the itch of like, I'm efficacious. Brad Stulberg Exerting agency. Cal Newport Yep. Exerting agency. Look, look, I'm able to like do voluntary things that are hard or whatever, but they're, they're fake hard things that aren't really leading you much. But if you have an actual thing you're doing, like, no, no, I've been working really hard on this. Then you don't really feel that urge anymore of like, oh, I better have like 17, you know, my aura ring to make sure that my steps are done and just the right sunlight hours or whatever. Like I'm already scratching that itch of being efficacious and agency. Um, so I'm just going to have the glass of wine with my wife because you know, I'm happy and I had a hard day. Brad Stulberg That's it. A hundred percent. I couldn't step better myself. Like that, that is a huge value of, of a disciplined pursuit. Like it is grounding. It helps you immediately not waste time on all the exhausting distractions. It's focusing and you get to exert agency in an increasingly chaotic world which has its own intrinsic benefits. Cal Newport Do you think this helps with technology? So to go back to our original premise, like a lot of my listeners feel like they're losing more of their life to screens in a way that's like not adding. It makes them stressed and it numbs them but in a way that like you feel worse about it afterwards. Does it help? Like do you think the fact that like you are getting after something like this on a regular basis makes the allure of the numbing or these other things less appealing? Brad Stulberg I don't know is the honest answer. I can tell you that the hour to an hour and a half that I'm training, I'm not looking at my phone. So at the very least, you're building an hour, an additional hour into your day of a non-alienated pursuit where you can get really close to the craft that you're working on. And that in and of itself is valuable. Whether or not I would use my phone more the rest of the day if I didn't train, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, maybe insofar as I'm doing something real. And that's another value. Everything on the phone is digital. It's ephemeral. It's quasi-real or pseudo-real. It's real on the internet. But it is not as real is picking up a weight because you're either going to make the lift or you're not the, the, the orchid that you're growing, you're either going to get the flower or You're not, uh, the table that you're making, it's either going to stand or not in the garden. Like that, that tree is either going to die or it's not. Um, that is something that is so real. And maybe when you have the satisfaction of doing something that is that real, some of the like ephemeral internet pseudo real, it loses its edge because like, you know, it's not as good As the actual thing. What ([Time 0:53:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/de902011-beb6-4bea-b593-1de3005db275)) - **Pursuing Excellence Matters More Than Winning** - Disciplined pursuits build self-reliance by teaching that you can start weak, face fear, persist through plateaus, and still improve. - Brad Stulberg argues excellence is the pursuit, not the medal; even an ordinary powerlifter can get groundedness and spillover benefits from chasing it seriously. Transcript: Cal Newport About your ambitions and other parts of life? Is this another benefit where if you have something like this going on outside your professional life and now maybe like the move you and Caitlin made when you moved to Asheville and You sort of redesigned your life. Do you have more confidence, more ambition? If you're like, oh, I'm used to pursuing hard things, doing the work, I believe in myself, I can make change happens. Now you have like a professional opportunity of like, I'm gonna leave this job, I'm gonna change this here. I'm gonna make some sort of significant, like whatever leap. Does it open up more possibilities in other parts of your life? Brad Stulberg I think so. I think it gives you, I mean, Matt Crawford has written so well about this. It gives you a sense of self-reliance that is hard to come by, which is I can take on a challenge. I can start as not being very good. I can put in work that I can trace back to myself. I can get better. I can ride out plateaus. I can face my fears that I might fail, and I can keep showing up and doing it. Cal Newport Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then final question. I feel like I need a better discipline. You got to help me here, Brad. I'm thinking about it because writing is like my main career now, right? It's not an aside. I have some things I do as hobbies. Maybe I should be turning one of those into a discipline anchor. Brad Stulberg I mean I would love that. I think you should try to deadlift more. Cal Newport Yeah, you think it should be weights. Brad Stulberg Well, I don't know. I mean you're already doing it. So you're already putting time into it. It is extremely concrete. And your training age, you're a good rower, but your training age for like true strength training is still very young, which just means that you actually will get those 1% gains for a While, which is fun at the start. So I think that that's a good option. I'm curious what else. So I recently started, it's so funny, my friends joke that I started a YouTube channel that's all about deadlifting and bonsai trees. So I've mentioned bonsai trees a few times. I recently got into bonsai. And this might be half eyes bigger than your stomach, half eyes not. The half eyes bigger than your stomach is I thought that I'd like go to the bonsai society monthly meetings and like help people repot their plants and like really get good at it. And I just don't have time because it turns out to get really good at bonsai takes a shit ton of time. But it's only half eyes bigger than your stomach because i've now had bonsai trees for a winter and they're all alive they all came back to life so like i'm doing enough um but that still Is like hobby not really disciplined pursuit and the reason is because i my disciplined pursuit is strength training i have my craft and i have my family there's not enough room in my Life yeah so i think you got to pick the one thing that you actually like really want to do if you're going to do this because your life is already pretty full. Yeah. Cal Newport Yeah. Well, our common trainer has been, because I told him, I was like, okay, we need to add now. I need to add some sort of goals because later I want to be training for something. I don't know what yet. So we just started adding, you'll appreciate this, what Zach calls indicators. Let's have a couple indicators. Like KPIs, he calls them, key performance indicators, yeah. And let's just have a few that just get better at. And really, it's just about the exercise of, all right, I had a sort of fitness goal, and we did some specific training for a goal to get better. To me, that's just a mindset shift. Now, ultimately, I don't know if it's going to be fitness will be in my discipline anchor. I want to have something I'm training for that involves being outside. I don't know exactly what it is, but I really like that idea. But I was like, let me just get used to it. Let's go after some indicators for like six months and just get better at them. That's just like practice for like while I'm trying to figure out what to do. But I also have other interests like my super elaborate Halloween animatronic displays. I just bought a bunch more equipment. So maybe that's where I need to make my, my graduation into discipline. Brad Stulberg I'll tell you what, you'll get more status that way. Nobody in Asheville cares what I deadlift, but there's a house on Vermont that is the best Halloween house. And everyone knows that house and they talk about it all year long. Cal Newport It does it. You're more known, but probably lowers your status as like a reasonable human being because you're the guy who's building really elaborate. It doesn't exactly make people be like, Hey, if we go to war, that's my leader. Yeah. All right. That's good. So I need to, I need to think about this a little bit more hardly, but I've been convinced, right? Like reading your book, talking to you about this, like this is really important. I think it's important for my audience to think about, this is like a really good buffer against almost all the issues I talk about, whether it's the overload and pseudo productivity In work, whether it's the addiction and digital diversion that's trying to numbing out your life outside of work, whether it's falling into rabbit holes of outrage and anxiety down On Twitter or something like this. Yeah, you need the discipline. Brad Stulberg You need the discipline. It is a big part of why I wrote the book is like the pursuit of excellence is just this fundamental human need. And I think that people sometimes confuse an excellent result or a standard that is set by a lineage and a craft and has very objective measures. Like I am not an excellent power lifter by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm pursuing excellence. And I can still get all the benefits of the pursuit, even if I'm never going to win a gold medal. And perhaps the foremost benefit, I think there's a reason that people keep coming back to this chapter, is when you have a disciplined practice in your life, you feel grounded, and It has all these spillover benefits. And yes, you're sacrificing, but that's part of what allows the benefits. ([Time 0:59:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33747792-0341-4178-8dea-e71a1136ba05)) - **Use Monthly Themes To Beat Streaming Paralysis** - Use themed constraints to reduce media overload instead of endlessly browsing for the perfect option. - Listener Kathleen and her husband pick monthly movie motifs like westerns or historical figures, then watch three to five films within that frame. Transcript: Speaker 3 Right our first message is from kathleen it isn't a question but instead a suggestion for our audience all right i like suggestions we get some advice from an audience member here all Cal Newport Right let's see here kathleen says i recently listened to deep questions episode 394 in it you mentioned the struggle people have with the abundance of choice in media, and I wanted To share what my husband and I are doing this year to avoid that struggle. We call it monthly movie motifs. We came up with 12 movie motifs or themes. Every month, we choose one and watch three to five movies that fit the theme. Our motifs include things like favorite book, westerns, and historical people. Last month was martial arts, or as my husband called it, martial arts. There's a note here that says, we have since been divorced. Last straw. Speaker 3 They must have watched it in March. Yeah. Cal Newport It'd be weird otherwise. It'd be funny if it was like last month, as now ex-husband called it, Marchial Arts. We brainstormed theme movies and then narrowed down by personal importance and availability. It's been fun seeking out movies that would not have been on my watch list otherwise. We don't feel overwhelmed by our options and we're less influenced by the algorithm. I'm passing this along in case other people find it helpful. I appreciate what you do. Your books have improved my life greatly. That's a great idea. I do like any system when it comes to movies or books that gets you reading things that isn't just at the top of your list. It's like, oh my God, I'm so excited to see this. I call this Netflix syndrome. I think it really is an issue in the streaming era where on demand you can get almost anything. Is that now you set your standards towards, I don't want to watch something unless I'm very excited about this very specific thing, this solving exactly an entertainment craving I Have right now. And then people get paralyzed because, oh, I can't find something that fits that impossible criteria. And with a library of entertainment that would have exploded the head of a young Steven Spielberg. You can't find anything you want to watch. So having another thing that forces you to watch interesting things based on criteria beyond just what is my favorite thing, I think it's a good idea. I did this with Roger Ebert's collection. It's like the 100 Greatest Movies, and it's 100 of his long-form reviews of his 100 favorite movies. And I just started going through those, and I wanted to check off as many as possible. Speaker 3 How many did you get to? Cal Newport I don't know. Maybe like 20, 25. But it does get – I mean a lot of them I had seen before. But I probably saw at least 20 movies I hadn't seen before. And you watch stuff that you wouldn't otherwise watch. Like that's when I first watched Bonnie and Clyde. Critically important movie, but it might not otherwise be on your radar. That's when I watched Five Easy Pieces. That's when I watched Fritz Lang's movie M. ([Time 1:08:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9d7618bb-d216-46be-8d13-4d90698a0bdd)) - **Why A Lawyer Drafts Briefs On A Typewriter** - Attorney Elliot drafts briefs and memos on a mechanical typewriter to force original thinking and avoid screen-based distraction. - He then retypes the draft into a computer, turning transcription into a built-in editing pass, and recommends a 1950s Smith Corona. Transcript: Cal Newport Timberlake. Right. So for those who didn't see it, Amy Timberlake is an award-winning children's author who uses a typewriter. And we use that discussion to get in this idea of sometimes downgrading your technology actually upgrades your results. More friction, less options. Might not make you faster, but might make you better. All right. So Elliot wanted to share his own story of simpler technology. All right. Elliot said, I had to stop listening to the podcast this morning when Cal started talking typewriters right off the bat so I could share my thoughts without being influenced by the discussion. I'm an attorney. Yeah. He was worried by the way that he wanted to say something pro typewriter and he was worried as the interview goes on that Amy Timberlake would be like, my typewriter killed my husband. And it would be really inappropriate for Elliot to be really pro-typewriter. All right. Elliot goes on to say, I'm an attorney handling mostly complex commercial litigation. For many years, I have been a mechanical typewriter hobbyist. About 10 years ago, I started integrating typewriters into my workflow. In the AI Addendum episodes, Cal has recently been talking about the importance of staring down a blank page and getting words on it from one's own brain. This is what I use a typewriter for. As often as I can, I write a first draft of any brief or memo on my mechanical typewriter. I love that I'm away from any screens except my Remarkable, which has my research files organized on it. It helps me to focus my thoughts and power through the hard spots where it would be tempting on a computer to click over to something more distracting. I also find that as I retype the document into the computer, almost every sentence is improved. It is a built-in step of revising and editing. In other words, I would encourage anyone who thinks and writes for a living to consider trying a typewriter for first drafts. I recommend a 1950s Smith Corona. They are ergonomic, easy to type on, and widely available. So I looked this up, Jesse. Vintage 1950 Smith Coronas. It's just a variety of prices, and I'm imagining the cheaper side. The cheaper side's like between $100 and $200. Now, I assume these are probably like non-functional or barely functional, because on the upper end, for the same typewriters, it's more like a thousand dollars to like $1,300. So I bet, I don't know for sure, but I bet that gap is between like a refurbished typewriter that's going to work and a vintage typewriter, but it might not actually type. Amy said something about like replacing the pads. I don't know what that means. It does look like people are manufacturing ribbons for those though. So you can still buy new ribbon for your old typewriter. Maybe we'll have to try this out. Typewriters. I like to use the remarkable as well. I still really like my remarkable. ([Time 1:12:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b0c1080-272a-4d05-84b0-617d8e931ac9)) - **How Splitting One Phone Into Three Reduced Compulsion** - Listener Andrew split one smartphone into three devices to weaken compulsive use: a Light Phone 2, a parked old smartphone, and a work phone. - He also bought a desktop so digital consumption stays in the attic office, adding friction that sharply reduces impulsive checking. Transcript: Speaker 3 We do our next message is from andrew who tells us about a success with what he calls an information That's interesting. Cal Newport All right, let's see what Andrew has to say here. At the beginning of 2025, I went on an information walkabout where I systematically extracted myself from compulsive phone usage. In the end, I got a Light Phone 2, a small e-ink dumb phone. It does text and calls, and that's it. I still have my old smartphone, which is like a household tablet now, kept in the attic office for indulgences. It remains completely necessary for certain digital tickets to live events. I also still have a work smartphone, which is mostly necessary for authentication of other work applications. My family teases me that I tried to get rid of my phone, and now I have three. They are a bit like Voldemort's horcruxes. I've divided the multitude of tasks usually present on a single device into three, weakening the pull of the digital world. I'm not sure if that metaphor completely tracks there, but okay. On top of this, I bought a desktop computer, so digital consumption is spatially confined to the attic office. It has been a resounding success. I highly recommend it. The distribution of three phones in remote places in the house greatly reduces impulsive consumption. However, when they are around, old habits return, so you have to remain vigilant. All right, I like that story. Again, it goes to this idea we talked about in last week's episode, which is we don't know what we mean when we say productivity. The technology industry has convinced us that productivity has to do with speed, reduced friction, and options. Again, I've argued this before. This is essentially the definition of what productivity means to a computer processor. How quickly can it process through instructions and how do you make sure that the amount of different instructions that are available are as much as possible as you can get the most out Of the processor? This doesn't translate well over to cognitive human activities. That's just the reality of it. Our bottleneck on almost anything important we do is not friction in the moment. It's not having more options. It tends to be our cognitive context, actually getting our brain to cooperate, doing something abstract. So we see things like this come up time and again. You look at a setup and say, well, that's more complicated. That's going to increase more friction. That is not giving you any capabilities you couldn't already just do by having one powerful phone. Why can't you just moderate the way you use that phone? But that is a cognitive blind way of thinking about productivity, productivity while ignoring the reality of the human brain. The bottleneck, again, is often can I muster and sustain focus on the thing that's most important? And sometimes having more friction and less options is the way to actually open that bottleneck and get better work done. So I appreciate, was this Andrew? I appreciate that case study. ([Time 1:15:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/226bd9e9-43c1-4d3d-ae88-e20dfa996917))