Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/42ee9173-e7be-4094-ba3d-303a489030f8) ## Highlights - **Read Daily To Build Cognitive Fitness** - Read every day to train your brain like getting steps trains your body. - Cal Newport recommends a daily page goal and treats reading as foundational cognitive exercise that forges new neural connections. Transcript: Cal Newport We'll call this moderate intensity. Now, last month on this show, I described a collection of five simple exercises for your brain that I say are laying the foundation of sort of good cognitive fitness. They're the mental health equivalent of what we do in physical health where we say, like, get enough steps or eat some vegetables. Things you can do on a regular basis that will really make a big difference over time and starting to get more fit. This is our least intense tier of cognitive fitness interventions, so I want to go through these five exercises again real quickly. I actually have the prop I used in that episode from a month ago, so we can use that again. And let's just briefly review the sort of moderate intensity commitment that I'm suggesting for cognitive fitness. My first suggestion was to read every day. Consuming the written word is like getting steps for your physical health that forces your brain to work together in a ways that otherwise wouldn't do. It forges new connections. And over time, this literally makes your brain more capable. You become smarter. So you want to have a certain number of pages you read every day that you treat similarly in your physical health to getting a certain number of steps every day. All right. The second easy exercise I recommended was don't avoid writing. It is very tempting because of AI tools to offload that strain you feel when you look at a blank page by just having that chatbot or just clicking on that Gemini button in Google Doc, just Like, hey, give me a draft of this. Just put some words down. I'd rather sort of just like edit what you have to say than having to, you know, conjure de novo words from scratch. But do not flee that strain. That strain, you have to reconceptualize it. It's not a negative thing you're trying to avoid. It's the feeling of strength. It's the feeling of growth. It's like feeling a burn in your muscle when you lift a heavy weight. Head towards the strain of filling an empty page and be proud when you finish. That little high you get after you've completed the act of cognitive construction, cognitive creation. Writing is, I'm going to say, like the pull-ups of your brain, right? So if reading is like getting enough steps, sort of foundation of movement, writing is like pull-ups, a simple exercise that works every muscle and is going to make you stronger. All right. The third of my moderate intensity tier suggestions is to go on thinking walks. While on foot, try to stick with a singular thought. It could be a professional thought. It could be just an idea thought. You're trying to make sense of a complicated idea or self-reflection. You're trying to solve or make sense of an issue in your own life. Do not bring your phone or have your phone off and in your bag so that it's hard to access for distraction. Practice being alone with your own thoughts. Practice aiming your mind's eye on targets that you have intentionally chosen. We have lost the art of just long, consistent, self-directed thinking. Thinking walks will help you get it back. Four, here I said plug in your phone. What I talked about there was while at home, keep your phone plugged in your kitchen. After this episode, one of our listeners wrote in and said, hey, you should call that landlining. You turn your smartphone into like a landline because it's plugged in, and it remains plugged in in your kitchen. This means at the very least, when you're at home, you do not have the option of quickly glancing at your phone at the slightest hint of boredom or distraction. Your brain then gets used to feeling the feeling of, I'm not 100% entertained right now, and that's okay. All right, the final of these moderate intensity tier suggestions was, learn a hard skill. Just have something you're doing. You have to do it every day, but have something you're doing that forces you to actually have to concentrate. I'm trying to learn how to play the song and the guitar. I have to concentrate. I'm trying to get better at hitting a softball for my softball team. I'm going to go to the batting cages. I have to concentrate. I got to think, adjust, focus, act, focus, adjust. That's all just getting your brain going. Again, this is going to be the physical equivalent of like, I'm going to play pickup basketball. I'm going to play ultimate frisbee with like the dads in the park. It's like an activity that gets your body moving in a way that you otherwise wouldn't. You need an activity that keeps your mind moving in ways that you otherwise might avoid. ([Time 0:02:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ae8c785-f873-42d9-bf05-ae051df9caa7)) - **Write First To Strengthen Your Brain** - Do not outsource initial drafting to AI; practice filling an empty page yourself to build cognitive strength. - Cal compares writing to pull-ups for the brain and urges embracing the strain as the signal of growth. Transcript: Cal Newport It is very tempting because of AI tools to offload that strain you feel when you look at a blank page by just having that chatbot or just clicking on that Gemini button in Google Doc, just Like, hey, give me a draft of this. Just put some words down. I'd rather sort of just like edit what you have to say than having to, you know, conjure de novo words from scratch. But do not flee that strain. That strain, you have to reconceptualize it. It's not a negative thing you're trying to avoid. It's the feeling of strength. It's the feeling of growth. It's like feeling a burn in your muscle when you lift a heavy weight. Head towards the strain of filling an empty page and be proud when you finish. That little high you get after you've completed the act of cognitive construction, cognitive creation. Writing is, I'm going to say, like the pull-ups of your brain, right? So if reading is like getting enough steps, sort of foundation of movement, writing is like pull-ups, a simple exercise that works every muscle and is going to make you stronger. ([Time 0:04:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50c1c25c-e3c1-49fb-970f-e0ac1e7575cd)) - **Take Phone-Free Thinking Walks** - Try thinking walks without your phone and stick with a single thought or problem while walking. - Newport says this rebuilds the lost skill of long, self-directed thinking and trains sustained attention. Transcript: Cal Newport While on foot, try to stick with a singular thought. It could be a professional thought. It could be just an idea thought. You're trying to make sense of a complicated idea or self-reflection. You're trying to solve or make sense of an issue in your own life. Do not bring your phone or have your phone off and in your bag so that it's hard to access for distraction. Practice being alone with your own thoughts. Practice aiming your mind's eye on targets that you have intentionally chosen. We have lost the art of just long, consistent, self-directed thinking. Thinking walks will help you get it back. ([Time 0:05:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/82a5bc84-dbc3-4bcb-8272-93fed062cf50)) - **Keep Your Phone Plugged In At Home** - Plug your phone in at home (like a landline) so it's not instantly accessible during downtime. - This forces your brain to tolerate boredom and reduces reflexive phone-checking that erodes attention. Transcript: Cal Newport What I talked about there was while at home, keep your phone plugged in your kitchen. After this episode, one of our listeners wrote in and said, hey, you should call that landlining. You turn your smartphone into like a landline because it's plugged in, and it remains plugged in in your kitchen. This means at the very least, when you're at home, you do not have the option of quickly glancing at your phone at the slightest hint of boredom or distraction. Your brain then gets used to feeling the feeling of, I'm not 100% entertained right now, and that's okay. ([Time 0:05:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b99409aa-8d91-41ca-b2b6-c9df52587888)) - **Practice A Hard Daily Skill** - Learn a hard skill and practice it daily to force concentrated adjustment and feedback. - Newport gives guitar and batting cages as examples where focus, adjust, act cycles strengthen cognition. Transcript: Cal Newport Just have something you're doing. You have to do it every day, but have something you're doing that forces you to actually have to concentrate. I'm trying to learn how to play the song and the guitar. I have to concentrate. I'm trying to get better at hitting a softball for my softball team. I'm going to go to the batting cages. I have to concentrate. I got to think, adjust, focus, act, focus, adjust. That's all just getting your brain going. Again, this is going to be the physical equivalent of like, I'm going to play pickup basketball. I'm going to play ultimate frisbee with like the dads in the park. It's like an activity that gets your body moving in a way that you otherwise wouldn't. ([Time 0:06:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/516d3b72-3143-4b12-94f2-e0a0991db40a)) - **Do Immersive Thinking Excursions** - Use immersive thinking excursions of 1–4 hours in novel, contemplative places with a warm-up and a demanding writing/problem exercise. - Newport's three elements are environment, cognitive warm-up reading, then a heavy production task like writing. Transcript: Cal Newport And here's how it works. You build out a mini excursion, something that might take anywhere between one to four hours. It is designed to leverage novel environments to help push your brain temporarily into a higher gear than you would normally be. Just like going to a gym, you're going to lift much heavier weights than you're going to sort of come across in your everyday life. Immersive thinking is about trying to leverage novel environments to push your brain to a new level of thinking that you want to normally do in everyday life and therefore get both comfort With thinking and growth of thinking ability. Now, there's three elements for an immersive speaking, thinking rather, mini excursion to actually work. Element one, you need an environment that's novel and thought-provoking, so a place that you associate with contemplation and that you don't associate with other things in your life Is why your kitchen doesn't work or the conference room at your office doesn't work. You have too many other associations with that that will be distracting. The second element of making this idea work, have a warm-up routine. Now, just like at the gym, you need to do a warm-up routine before you start lifting those heavy weights. I am going to argue when you're doing immersive thinking, you need some sort of cognitive warm-up routine that should be based on the consumption of information that just sort of gets Those brain circuits fired up. Your brain activity is going. Now you're in a mode of, I want to, my brain is connected in different ways. I'm ready to start using it. And then finally, the third element of immersive thinking will be some sort of exercise routine in which you use this warmed-up brain to produce new information, information that Is a stretch for you or otherwise demanding and interesting. This is now the cognitive equivalent of actually lifting that heavy weight, trying to push things towards failure. Environment, warm-up, exercise. ([Time 0:08:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/303eda8d-ec79-458a-bed5-8a709db3dfb9)) - **Writing Routine Inside The National Gallery** - Cal describes going to the National Gallery, reading on a gallery's artists, then writing disconnected in the Cascade Cafe to produce difficult ideas. - He uses the museum's novelty, a warm-up article, and poor cell service to spark concentrated writing. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So for my example, immersive thinking excursion, the environment I used was the National Gallery of Art here in Washington, D.C. Down on the mall. So for me, I can jump on the metro where I live, go a few stops. I'll get out like in Judiciary Square and maybe walk whatever it is, third of a mile, half a mile down to the mall. I sort of like that walk, and it helps clear my mind. It's not too far away. All right, so I went to the National Gallery of Art. My warm-up routine, I would go to a particular gallery within the larger art museum. Like here is a room that has whatever, Dutch still life paintings. I would read an article about either one of the artists featured in that gallery or the style in general and then consume the paintings. Let me look at these paintings, try to understand what's going on in light of what I just read about it. This is a warm-up routine because now I'm consuming information that stimulated my brain and putting me into more of an intellectual or contemplative state. Then for the actual productive exercise, I have done this on a couple occasions, go down to the Cascade Cafe, which is in the basement of the National Gallery. It's actually on the underground tunnel that's connecting the modern from the non-modern art wing. You can see there's a waterfall that starts up top, and you can see the waterfall from the cafe, and I get very bad cell service down there. So you're effectively disconnected while you're down there. Get a coffee, sit down, and now try to write something. I would typically would be writing, like either solving a proof or trying to write some sort of difficult idea or essay. That is the brain equivalent of, I went to a gym to see my trainer, we got warmed up, and then went through a pretty hard routine. ([Time 0:10:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/64e5a038-73c7-43e3-a3af-9002c3d4e1bb)) - **Use A Point System For Cognitive Workouts** - Create a cognitive cardio point system assigning points to activities and aim for a weekly goal (e.g., 30 points) to force regular intense practice. - Newport samples points: reading, thinking walks, deliberate practice, writing, programming (no AI) and shows a 30-point weekly example. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so I got to explain what I mean here. It's hard to believe. Let's back up. In the world of physical health, it's hard to believe that cardiovascular exercise was once considered bad. And I'm talking as late as like the 1950s and 1960s. Men were advised, this is true, men were advised not to do cardiovascular exercise after the age of 40 because they thought this would avoid heart attacks. And women were told essentially avoid breaking a sweat altogether if possible. Now, the person perhaps most responsible for changing our understanding of exercise was Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who was a former Air Force doctor who in 1968 published a groundbreaking book called Aerobics, which made the case that cardiovascular activity is not a heart attack Machine, but actually a way to make your heart and body healthier and you'll live longer. And not only should you do some cardiovascular activity, you should probably do a lot. I recently read Cooper's memoir. We talked about it here on the show. And he talks about how when that book first came out, fellow doctors thought that his advice was deranged and dangerous. One of them actually said the streets will soon be filled with the corpses of dead joggers because advising middle-aged men to go running was going to cause deaths left and right. Well, of course, Cooper was right and they were wrong. We now know cardiovascular exercise, of course, is healthy for you. Anyways, if we go back and read Cooper's early work, here's what's interesting to me, how he advised people how to get enough cardiovascular activity. A lot of people have forgotten this about his work, but it's really interesting. He introduced back in the 60s and updated it throughout the years, a point system. He got lots of different activities and assigned them points. These would be like appendixes in the back of his books, even to today. And then he gave you a goal, 30 points a week. So you had some flexibility in when and how you got your cardio, but you knew your goal was to get the 30 points. And this would often require quite a bit of activity. I actually loaded up here. I mean, his systems evolve, but I have here to load up a version of his system from 1982. So he kept updating it just to get a sense of what we're talking about here. I don't know, Jesse, we'll see how we stack up. All right, so at the top here, he's talking about points for various walking and running sessions. So if you run a mile, how fast would we run a mile, Jesse? You think between 6.41 and 8 minutes? Or are you faster? Yeah, that's probably over 7 now. All right, so over 7 would be 5 points. If you can run a mile under 543, that's seven points. Uh, look, he goes, if you run two miles, let's see what would take your, if you can run two miles, oh man, I think that'd take me 20 minutes. Uh, if you could get it under 20 minutes, you could get nine points, but between 20 and 24 minutes is, uh, seven points, right? Walking is going to give you fewer. What do we got here? Look how detailed this is, Jesse. It's like every distance you might go and every time he tells you how many points. Oh, look, all you got to do is run 15 miles under an hour 25 and you get 120 points. It wasn't just walking, running, like here's cycling. I don't know cycling well, but look, if you do a two-mile ride in seven minutes, you get 1.5 points and so on, right? So he had all these different mappings of activities to points. And maybe you like cycling, maybe you like running, maybe you like walking, maybe you like doing high-intensity weight training. You would add up your points and try to get to 30 in a week. And it would take a non-trivial, like you really had to be putting aside time and training in order to hit the 30 points. So that was a good way of conveying. It takes a lot of exercise to get as much as you need. I think we could use, here's my idea, we could use an equivalent point system for cognitive fitness. That we could have a collection of assignments of points to different types of cognitive fitness activities and then following Cooper's model, say your goal is to get 30 points a week As a way to get you past just doing some basic activities and actually doing a lot of the stuff you need. Now, I came up with a sample point system. I'll read a few of these ideas off here. Maybe get one point for 20 pages of easy reading, two for 20 pages of moderately complex, and three for 20 pages, just say pages, not minutes, of hard reading. Maybe two points for a 30-minute thinking walk, two points for 15 minutes of deliberate practice, five points for 20 minutes of writing, five points for 20 minutes of programming, No AI, maybe do three points for 30 minutes of being immersed in a craft-based hobby, and so on, right? So we can imagine a system like that. So if we use the sample system I just talked about, here is an example of a collection of activities that would get you to 30 points in a week. Reading 100 pages of a moderately complex book, which gets you 10 points, taking a 30, I think I'm thinking here, two different 30-minute thinking walks, six points, an hour total of Deliberate practice on guitar, eight points, and an hour spent working in the garden, six points. I might not have got that exactly right, but something like that adds up to something like 30 points on my scale, right? So that's like a non-trivial amount of cognitive fitness work. So you would have to actually put aside some time and have some intention to actually get there. Now, I don't have like a final definitive point system to recommend yet. And I think that's something I might actually work on for an upcoming episode. But for now, you might consider doing something like this on your own. ([Time 0:15:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f7fcbcab-2577-4f97-b629-9e672c498e32)) - **What A Cognitive Fitness Industry Might Produce** - A cognitive fitness industry could spawn high-end thinking trainers, non-instrumental courses, and standardized cognitive endurance testing. - Newport predicts training for peak thinking, process-focused courses, and tests used in hiring and education to measure focus. Transcript: Cal Newport And what I want to do here is look to the future. So the first two tiers are things you can do, very intensity of things you can do right now. But if cognitive fitness really becomes a massive industry like physical fitness, there's going to be an industry built around cognitive fitness. And so I want to put out three predictions about what we might see in the near future if and when cognitive fitness becomes an actual major industry. All right, so the first prediction is that we're going to see high-end thinking trainers. I've spent most of my life as a professional thinker, and if you're a professional thinker, there's lots of places you get informal but pretty comprehensive training. Like when I was at MIT, you're basically taught, maybe through osmosis as an example, how to think, how to do math, how to sustain concentration on complicated problems. But I think there might be great benefit to bringing this sort of professional thinking training to people in all sorts of different walks of life, not just people that prove theorems For a living. Now, this isn't fully new. So I had long heard about Josh Waitzkin, who was the chess prodigy that was featured in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, who started, from my understanding, is that Waitzkin does This type of training. He does thinking training for people for whom being able to think clear is vital to their success. I think his early clients were in finance, where if you're running a hedge fund, the difference between being exceptional at thinking and kind of good could be like a $500 million delta. Like, it really matters. Of course, we're going to hire a trainer. We don't want to leave any stone unturned. You know, I think this is going to become more common. Why don't we actually load up his page, Jesse, just to see what he's talking about. So he calls his company now Stoke Ventures. He's very into foil surfing, so it's probably connected to that. Let's read his quote here. At the razor's edge of peak performance and decision-making, athletics, business, finance, chess, or anything deeply nuanced, the greatest insight is often right next to a blunder. Our genius is often entangled with our eccentricity, our virtuosity, springing from what might be disguised as dysfunction. The path to self-expression is fiercely subtle and individualized. If you're pushing yourself to your outer reaches as a way of life, you can dance on that edge with somebody. All right, that's pretty flowery, but let's go and talk about what their training actually includes. Areas of focus and training with Whitskin's company involves training to love training and the growth it unlocks, embodying quality as a way of life, cultivating presence and mindfulness, The systematic cultivation of the art of focusing on what matters most, developing introspective sensitivity, identifying, supporting windows of peak creativity and flow, developing, Let's see, non-local and parallel learning, training to learn the many from the one, and so on, right? So this is just an offering where they're going to help you get more out of your brain. I think weights get on to something because in a lot of industries, that is a huge difference. We'll pay money for software or tools or productivity ideas, but getting your brain sharper is the ultimate productivity hack. I think for a living, I don't use social media. I was trained professionally to be a thinker. And because of that, to use myself as an example, I can, for example, write incredibly quickly. I can sit down and have an idea and 30 minutes later have like a polished newsletter article or draft of an op-ed or a script for a podcast. That's an incredible productivity boom that I've gained, not by using like AI, but by training a brain to produce better. So I think that's going to be something we see. Another thing we're going to see as we get to sort of insane mode, cognitive fitness industry is going to be the rise of non-instrumental courses. People taking classes in person or online, like learning languages or hard math or training about puzzles or mastering difficult crafts just to get their mind sharp. Like the whole point is this is going to push your mind. It's going to be hard to do. Like your hardest course you took in college, you're doing it now as like a middle-aged man because you want to make sure you keep pushing your mind, not because the skill you're learning Is instrumental, but because the learning itself is going to get your mind sharp. I think we're going to see this process-focused marketing as opposed to skill-focused marketing for courses in the near future, all a cognitive fitness play. Finally, I want to elaborate an idea that was mentioned in that article that we opened this episode with. I do think cognitive endurance testing is going to be something that actually we do more often. It's going to be numbers we know, and it's going to be numbers that we are going to use, which will completely change our conception of cognitive fitness, how to quantify it, and its value. There'll be some sort of standardized test that gives you a number that I think might play a role in hiring. I mean, why wouldn't it? If you're in a non-trivial knowledge work job, what is your capability of sustaining focus on a hard task and actually making progress through complexity? Can you resist distraction and actually use your brain to add value to information? This might be like a primary ability we're looking for if I'm hiring in one of these jobs, right? And that we might like give you a test right there and see what your score is. This might also become not something we use to gatekeep, but also a measure that we aim to improve. I could imagine, and I think I would approve of this, a world in which we're thinking about schooling instead of our standardized testing notions all being content-based. We want to make sure that our students know all of these things from some sort of list that experts produce is like, this is the knowledge you need to know. You need to know about Andrew Jackson's presidency, but not Calvin Coolidge's presidency. You need to know about Euclidean geometry, but you don't need to know about calculus on the trigonomic functions. We have these big lists that we're just like, these are what you have to know and not, and let's test everyone and see where they are in knowledge. Imagine instead schools are saying, we want to see kids improving in cognitive endurance. That's just as important why they're here. Can you deploy your brain with intention? If you're cognitively fit, then no matter what you go off to do, you are going to have a more success professionally. You're going to thrive more personally. And we want to train your ability to focus and use your brain. And we're going to test your cognitive endurance. And different people will be at different places, but we want to see years go up. Improvement in cognitive fitness is maybe going to be the number one sign that a particular educational institution is actually delivering on its promise. I think we're going to see that. And it will completely reorient the way we think about things. We're not going to be giving everyone tablets and throwing stuff up on our smart whiteboards and we're just going to, let's just edit Google Docs instead of writing because kids these Days need computers because that's ([Time 0:21:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43b9524a-acb4-48f7-bbf8-abb1546362e8)) - **Strong Brains Trump Tool Fluency** - Cognitive fitness is not just resistance to tech distraction; it's central to thriving in the 21st century knowledge economy. - Newport argues future winners will be those who maximize what their brains can do, not those best at using tools or AI. Transcript: Cal Newport What am I trying to say here? Don't sleep on cognitive fitness. It's not something that, you know, cognitive fitness, having your brain fit, it's going to help you resist brain rot. It's going to prevent technology companies from, you know, fully colonizing your mental life. But it's more than that. Cognitive fitness might very well be the key to healthy, thriving, and, dare I say, deep life in the 21st century. I think it's an incredibly important trend that's just getting started. You could be ahead of the curve. Start taking cognitive fitness seriously now. Start with the moderate tier. Experiment with my more intense tier and be ready for the insane mode intensity that is going to follow. The future is going to be won by those with strong brains, not those that are the most comfortable with tools or using the most AI or the most up on the latest phone apps. It's going to be the people who can get the most out of what's between their ears. I want you to be one of them. ([Time 0:28:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/03808460-39a0-4370-88ef-608dd5b9767f)) - **Listener Stories Of Escaping Brain Rot** - Cal reads positive YouTube comments about reversing brain rot: people deactivating social media, writing poetry, and reading 20 books in months. - These listener anecdotes show cognitive changes lead to calmness, increased output, and life quality improvements. Transcript: Cal Newport So it seemed relevant. But Jesse, I'm a little bit nervous because reading YouTube comments, it can go both ways. All right, so I'm going to read a few of these here. I'll also put some of these up on the screen for those who are interesting. All right, this comment says, Cal, single-handedly has got me out of a major rut in life. Thanks for everything. I will forever be in your debt. The deep life is the only life. Oh, so far, so good, Jesse. All right, another one says, I boiled my own daily self-care routine down to a pithy three words, read, write, sweat. Those three things don't make my day better, but on days when I do those three things are usually better days. Another person says, my brain rot prevention practice is one, meditation guided 20 minutes, two, exercise, 30 minutes of strength training, 30 minutes of cardio, three, yoga guided From 30 to 50 minutes, four, two 90-minute study blocks, one for career strictly and 90 for math and statistics, also career related. I try to do as many of these as possible. Doing the meditation, exercise, and yoga all in one morning before work changed my life. When I do my 90-minute study block and anything involving reading, I read aloud to practice speaking when I'm thinking, when I can. I guess we can keep these off the screen, Jesse. The text is so small, it's kind of hard to see. Someone else said, I deactivated my social media account in January. My experience was profound. For my first two weeks, I was craving the apps badly. After those two weeks, my brain started dumping out all of these imaginations and words with writing poetry. Each day, I was writing a page worth of poetry. After about a month since quitting, my mind was quiet, my nervous system calm. In the past four months, I've read almost 20 books. I'm a busy mom of two teen girls who are involved with sports. These past four months have been some of the most peaceful of my life. Social media is a cancer and you won't realize it until you finally make the decision to put it down. Someone else says, the thinking walk advice made me think of a quote from Nietzsche. Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors. Oh, I love that one. Let's see here. Analogies in a Cal Newport podcast is so good well I appreciate that they're pretty positive Jesse where's the like you but you but and then some sort of like meme reference I don't understand Low-key based yeah low-key based um I've never been able to read in bed, but I do love reading in the morning, preferably with a massive cup of coffee. I can get a good 50 to 100 pages in before work. This is my sacred me time. As far as what to read, I recommend walking around your local used bookshop, library, or Goodwill and bring home a nice nourishing pile of books that look interesting. I would never trust an AI or algorithm or even a friend to recommend books. You know what you like. I think these are all positive comments, and there's a bigger thread that runs through this. Cognitive fitness matters. Like, when you start caring about your mind, people are having profound impacts. I would argue a lot of these impacts sound a lot more profound even than what people talk about when they add exercise to their life. A calmness they've never felt before. Their days are much better. And they're willing to go farther towards this. We know there's people who are really committed to physical fitness and we're impressed by it. We should be equally impressed by these examples. I get up early and read 100 pages every day. I just don't use social media at all. These are the type of things that are leading to really positive impacts in people's lives. I think that's a good collection of messages to talk about here because this revolution is going to happen, and I would like you to be a part of it. ([Time 0:33:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c28473a4-c1ea-4189-a4b1-67f63f3ce6df)) - **Reading Collapse Is A Cognitive Health Canary** - College students' inability to finish a 20-page article signals a measurable generational collapse in sustained reading. - Newport compares this to early warnings in physical health and urges cognitive endurance testing tied to admissions and schooling. Transcript: Cal Newport We have a message here from Rob who's sharing a disturbing new article by a college professor. All right. So I haven't read this article yet that Rob sent us. So we're going to do this in real time together. Let me pull it up here. The title is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The title of the article, uh-oh, My Students Can't Read. The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse. Let's just read the intro to this, Jesse. I'm sure this is going to get worse before it gets better. Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. It's not positive. When I asked why, a student answered, honestly, it was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class. These are students who had cleared the admissions process and written good essays good enough to get them here, yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them. Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I'm seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul It requires. All right, well, Rob, I'm glad you sent that along. I mean, this is alarming. We saw something similar in physical health when we saw a real canary in the coal mine, a real warning sign, a real sort of point of break for a lot of medical professionals where the crisis Alarms went off was seeing a sudden rise in type 2 diabetes among kids. Kids didn't get type 2 diabetes. It used to take a long time through bad eating habits, et cetera, to sort of get the type 2 diabetes. But we got so bad in our diet and we cut out so much physical activity that we began to see kids with it. This is a trend that really picked up in the 21st century. This is when the alarm sirens went off for a lot of physical health practitioners. This is the equivalent, I think, for cognitive health. College students, high school graduates, wrote essays to get into college, had the test scores, are looking at a 20-page article and say, I can't read that. That is the cognitive equivalent of having type 2 diabetes. Your brain is not working. It is not anywhere near where it needs to be to be a functioning, thriving member of our sort of civic democracy and a knowledge work economy. This is a big deal. It's the type of thing that makes us say cognitive fitness matters. And it goes back to that cognitive endurance testing. That's what I want if I'm a college, maybe. I want to see where you are. Take one of these tests in a testing center. I don't care about your AI-generated college essay. Take one of these tests. How much can you focus? That's what I'm looking for. Do that one change. Let me tell you what you could do right now. I'm thinking about this on the fly. You want to change the trajectory of this country. You want to give new opportunities and the ability for our current young generation to have the best chance of thriving in their lives. Add alongside mandatory SAT testing for college admissions, add cognitive endurance testing. You get all these kids knowing, oh, my ability to focus and sustain concentration is going to play a role in whether I can go to whatever school I want to go to, be it Georgetown or Dartmouth. Now suddenly they're going to look at their phone like a liability. They're going to look at TikTok like the thing that's going to keep them out of the Ivy League. They're going to look at a book like the activity that's going to help set up my future. And as a side effect, and this might be sort of leveraging a sort of crass instrumentality, but a side effect is these brains are going to be stronger and these are going to be more capable, More thriving, more successful citizens and individuals. ([Time 0:37:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1229a1cf-8b9a-4bd7-92b4-0a4f0c735814)) - **Block Specific Deep Work Objectives** - For deep work, start with hyper-specific time blocks that define exact deliverables rather than vaguely protecting large swaths of time. - Newport recommends scheduling 90 minutes for a concrete task and iterating to learn how much uninterrupted time each task needs. Transcript: Cal Newport If you're not used to depth, if you're not used to deep work and you just clear out a schedule, then yeah, you might find that you have over-romanticized it and you don't really know what To do with all this time and it doesn't necessarily make your professional life better. What I recommend people do is they start with specificity. When it comes to deep work, schedule, like a meeting or appointment, deep work on your calendar for specific deep objectives, not just I've protected all day. But you say, here's two and a half hours I'm going to spend trying to get a draft of this report done. This afternoon, I've blocked off 90 minutes to specifically work on trying to run down this bug in this computer program I'm working on. So schedule specific deep work at first. Now, what's going to happen is you're going to learn a lot about depth and how much time and concentration it requires and what schedule is best for it as you do this exercise. Sometimes learn for a certain task that the amount of time you put aside was too much, and for a lot of times you'll be butting up against the boundaries of the time you put aside, like, Man, I could have used a lot more. This is where you learn. This type of hyper-specific time blocking is where you learn about the reality of your brain and the type of things you do. This knowledge can then be deployed going forward into simpler heuristics. Like you might realize, okay, the best way for me to get this, this, and this done is to keep my whole morning clear of meetings. Like I need to get started with writing and then do my debugging. And I need to have that done by 11 while I'm still caffeinated, or I'm just not going to get it done at all. So you learn what type of maker schedule works for you and what you do in that maker schedule. So you're right. You can't just jump in and switch to a maker schedule. You might waste a lot of time. But maker schedules are really valuable if you have a lot of self awareness about what your brain is capable of, what this work looks like, what are the most important things for you to Do. So start with hyper-specific time blocking, schedule time for deep work blocks, but be specific about what you're doing, and then allow that to evolve into a maker schedule that makes Sense for whatever type and intensity and volume of making that you actually do in your job. 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