Ep. 376: The Lincoln Protocol  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 376: The Lincoln Protocol - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d4a50eb6-55bf-4a85-bc48-cd17af17a0f9 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Frontier Problems Mirror Digital Traps** - Lincoln faced frontier versions of distraction, danger, and darkness that mirrored modern digital traps. - Studying how he escaped these shows we can apply similar strategies today. Transcript: Cal Newport In the years since I wrote that post back in 2008, I've read a lot about Lincoln. I was doing a count on my bookshelf as I was preparing this episode. I've read at least a half dozen full-length biographies of Lincoln, and that number continues to count. And in doing so, in learning so much about our 16th president, I've come to see this issue differently. It's true that Lincoln, of course, did not have digital technology trying to distract him like smartphones and video games, but the world he grew up in was defined by many of the same General issues that we worry about today in online culture, issues like distraction and danger and darkness. And yet he was able to cut through all of that and make one of the most improbable rises in the history of America. So I now believe that not only would Lincoln have still been president in a world with digital distractions, but that we today can actually learn important lessons for thriving in our Own time by looking back and studying how Lincoln escaped the trials and traps of his. ([Time 0:02:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6366108-aa6f-47ad-832b-67b47fe03e6f)) - **Pigeon Creek's Vices** - Pigeon Creek was awash in alcohol, tobacco, and gambling that diverted people from hard work. - Lincoln resisted these pervasive vices while others indulged. Transcript: Cal Newport This is the town in southeastern Indiana where Lincoln spent most of his formative years. He was there roughly from the age of seven to 21 before he sort of went off as an independent adult. Like many frontier towns of that time in the first half of the 19th century, the biggest sort of life-diverting distraction that people faced wasn't their phones, but was alcohol. Now, I'm going to bring up on the screen here a quote. This comes from William Lee Miller's magisterial book, Lincoln's Virtues, but this is a quote that's actually contemporaneous. So this is someone who remembered Pigeon Creek from the time of Lincoln talking about it. I'm going to read this here. This is someone from Lincoln's time talking about Pigeon Creek. Incredible quantities of whiskey were consumed. The custom was for every man to drink it on all occasions that offered, and the women would take it sweetened and reduced to toddy. So there's a lot of drinking going on. So almost everyone drank back then. That's sort of how you escape the hardness of life on the frontier. Almost everyone also smoked and chewed tobacco, men and women. Gambling on almost everything was also endemic. Miller in his book dregs up a historical record from a town that was not Pigeon Creek, but right next to it, a town that was right near where Lincoln grew up. And Miller says, if you look at the archives of that town, it shows that in 1819 alone, there were three separate retail liquor licenses granted, right? These are what you would grant for basically a saloon. And that was in a town that had a population of less than 100. So this was everywhere. ([Time 0:05:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/726f31e3-d048-4649-ad4a-f6810a192159)) - **Violence Shaped Social Life** - Frontier towns featured real mobs and brutal physical fights that threatened livelihoods. - Lincoln often confronted such violence, even fighting a local gang leader to earn his place. Transcript: Cal Newport But here's the thing. In Lincoln's world, back in Indiana in the first half of the 1800s, there were mobs there as well. But these weren't digital cancel mobs. They were actual mobs. And the threat that they posed was not you're going to have your reputation solely, but physical violence. Men fought all the time in these frontier towns. If you read Lincoln biographies, nothing comes through clear from this period than the amount of violence that was going on. You would fight each other for social standing. You would fight each other out of boredom. You would fight each other out of revenge. And these fights could be brutal. People would lose their eyes in this fight. Lincoln knew people who lost their eyes. You would break bones. People would lose their ears because someone would bite them off. These were brutal fights. When Lincoln moved to New Salem in 1831, as soon as he was old enough to be free, no longer basically the property of his father, Tom, he arrived to become a clerk at one of the local stores. He had to fight the local gang leader, Jack Armstrong of the Clary Grove Boys, just to see if he would be allowed to participate in economic life. Fortunately, Lincoln was 6'4", 185 pounds and strong. And so he won that fight. ([Time 0:07:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7e9ddf98-e12c-4f63-9577-6913fc3beabb)) - **Darkness In Lincoln's Family History** - Hatred toward Native Americans and family tragedies marked Lincoln's upbringing. - His father lost land and family members suffered, embedding darkness in their lives. Transcript: Cal Newport As William Lee Miller points out, for example, hatred for Native Americans in particular was, and I'm going to quote him here, ubiquitous. At that point, because many of the violent encounters between white settlers and the indigenous populations remained within like the recent memory of the people who still live there. Lincoln himself had experienced just such a history. Father had a good plot of land in Kentucky, was killed in his farm fields by a traveling band of the local Native Americans. Thomas himself barely escaped being killed. This threw the Lincoln family into the poverty that afflicted Abe Lincoln himself as he grew up because with Thomas's father dead, they couldn't maintain the land. They lost the property. There was no inheritance to go to Tom. There was no land to be passed down to him. And so Lincoln came up in much more poverty. This is why, for example, that Abraham's uncle, his dad's brother Mordecai, was like fearsomely known as a sort of rabid Indian hater, they called him. Thomas, for his part, suffered through like a very grim life, marked by repeated bad luck. You know, he scraped together all these resources to buy a few hundred acres of land in Kentucky because he didn't inherit any, and he lost it all. And he lost it all, the like legal disputes about, you know, the land claims about who owned what land, what settler had what was a little bit hazy. So basically in his mind, he was sort of tricked out of his land by elites. Then he lost his wife, Nancy, to milk sickness when Abraham was only nine. That's like a comically absurd, tragic way to die. It has to do with like the animals you eat themselves have been eaten a certain poison plant. So she dies when Abraham's only nine. Tom goes blind in one eye. He has to sort of do work where he can feel with his hands because he can't even really see that well. ([Time 0:09:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84a35bcb-ca25-4882-a260-a04952a3041d)) - **Moral Resistance Enabled Ascent** - Lincoln resisted common vices and social norms that surrounded him, choosing restraint and empathy. - That moral differentiation helped him rise above his station. Transcript: Cal Newport I'm going to read this here from Lincoln's Virtue. In a world in which men smoked and chewed, Lincoln never used tobacco. In a rough and profane world, Lincoln did not swear. In a social world in which fighting was a regular male activity, Lincoln became a peacemaker. In a hard-drinking society, Lincoln did not drink. In an environment soaked with hostility to Indians, Lincoln resisted it. In a southern-flavored setting soft on slavery, Lincoln always opposed it. In a white world with strong racial antipathies, Lincoln was generous to blacks. ([Time 0:12:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c670cdc8-5eb3-4ccb-970e-a0d82e0f81e1)) - **Stepwise Rise From Clerk To President** - Lincoln progressed rapidly from clerk to national figure through a sequence of increasing goals. - Each step built capability and reputation that led to higher ambitions. Transcript: Cal Newport Let's look at this timeline real quick of what happened. We can put this on the screen here. Okay, here we go. 1831, he moves to New Salem. He turns 21. He's able legally now to leave the employee of his dad, and as soon as he could, he left to make his own way. He moves to Salem. He becomes a clerk in a store just because he impresses people so much when he talks, they just give him a job. He has to, of course, fight to earn that job. He begins to teach himself the law. 1832, they're already electing him captain of the local militia. This was during the Blackhawk War. He makes his first run for state legislature. As a 23-year he loses, but does surprisingly well. 1833, now he's starting to get prestigious positions in town. He's appointed the postmaster. Now he can read all the newspapers. He's appointed the county surveyor. 1834 runs again, all of what, 2425, elected to the state legislator successfully. 1836, he's passed as the bar, completely self-taught, is now a lawyer. 1836 to the 1840s, he's a very successful legislature in the Illinois state legislature, becomes a four leader for his party. He's a member of the Whig party back then, becomes very successful. 1846, elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Then we have this sort of period where he's basically, he steps down. He's doing a lot of lawyering. 1858, this is where the famous run begins. He runs in Senate against, for the Illinois Senate seat against Stephen Douglas. This is where the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates occur on slavery. Douglas in favor of expanding slavery. Lincoln offering an eloquent and super research defense and moral defense of why that was wrong. He does not beat Douglas for the Senate seat, but that makes him a national figure. 1860, because of that, he's nominated for president by the new Republican Party which he helped start and of course we know what happens from there. ([Time 0:13:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3cb1961b-7dd6-49ef-99b2-333f9898fdc2)) - **Reading Was Lincoln's Core Strategy** - The short answer for Lincoln's escape from traps: he read. - Reading became his chief tool for self-transformation and policy mastery. Transcript: Cal Newport That brings us to the second part of our talk. There's a short answer and a long answer to the question of how Lincoln both avoided those traps and had that astonishing ride. Let's start with the short answer he read. ([Time 0:15:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e871d23c-0395-46fa-829e-ddbfd3e17025)) - **Self-Taught Through Books And Newspapers** - Lincoln borrowed books, used community libraries, and read every newspaper he could as postmaster. - He taught himself geometry and law to qualify for roles like surveyor and lawyer. Transcript: Cal Newport Here was his stepmom, Sarah Bush Lincoln, said the following, Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on. Later she gave this quote, I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home as well as at school. We took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him. We would let him read on till he quit of his own accord. Here's John Hanks, who lived with the Lincolns during this period. He described young Abe as a constant and voracious reader. Here's another description of Lincoln. This is from when him and his mom were essentially like rented out as free labor. The money came back to Tom Lincoln, to a local family that was better off, the Crawfords. And here's how they described Lincoln at that time. While other boys were out hooking watermelons and trifling away their time, he was studying his books, thinking and reflecting. What these quotes tell us is Lincoln never stopped reading. When he was with the Crawfords, he negotiated access to their library. They had money. They had a library. When he moved to New Salem, he basically found the most educated man in town, the first person he had ever met who had any time of a college education from a local small college was the only College-educated man he ever met. He began borrowing books and participating in a discussion salon with him. It was actually in this gentleman's collection that he first studied and read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. When he clerked in that store and especially when he became the next year the postmaster, he could read all the newspapers that came through Illinois. He would read every one before he would distribute them. ([Time 0:16:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4758b560-3eef-4699-8b04-70b6a062085f)) - **Purposive Reading Reconfigures The Mind** - Lincoln's reading was purposive: focused on specific moral, political, or personal aims rather than general erudition. - That deep, targeted study reconfigured his mind for concrete projects. Transcript: Cal Newport As Miller points out, Lincoln wasn't a brilliant person. Here's quoting, I'm quoting Miller here. He does not appear to have been a precocious child or any kind of natural genius. Lincoln also wasn't reading mainly for entertainment. He wasn't reading just for some abstract notion of mental exercise. He was almost always with a purpose. Here's Miller again making this point in his book. He did not aim to be and never became a learned man. The prime quality of his mind was not speed, which in the different world a century or more later would be thought to be almost the defining feature of intelligence. It was also not breadth. The embrace of the best that had been thought and said in the world of learned persons, which Thomas Jefferson aspired to, or the instant knowledge of the inner details of public affairs Of the 20th century policy wonk. Lincoln's mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly or at least with effort and concentrated attention into a relatively few subjects. It was purposive, personally, politically, morally. That word there, purposive, is important. If you look that up, it's a $10 word for a 10-cent concept, which is having, serving, or done with a purpose. Again, Miller is saying his learning was purposive. It was done with a purpose. ([Time 0:18:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93687710-6324-4ad6-859e-2d89068dc55d)) - **Follow The Three-Step Lincoln Protocol** - Pick an ambitious but tractable useful project, then learn the hard stuff needed to succeed. - Reflect on outcomes and repeat with progressively bigger projects. Transcript: Cal Newport I call this the Lincoln Protocol. There are three steps in the general protocol that Lincoln is revealing. All right, step number one, pick a useful project that's ambitious but also tractable. So it's stretching you, but it's still something that with a stretch is reasonable for you to accomplish. Step two, do the hard work necessary to learn what's needed to succeed with that project. Now, it's probably going to be primarily reading. This was the main tool that Lincoln used to prepare to succeed with his various projects that he thought about as he made his rise. Three, reflect on the outcome, whether it was successful or not, then loop back to step one. You pick a new project that's even more ambitious. You do even more hard work to become even more capable. You reflect on that and you loop and you loop and you loop. ([Time 0:24:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/08d4ada5-5b21-47dc-ae42-a5dbba0d26de)) - **Long-Term Motivation Beats Proximate Temptations** - Working on meaningful long-term projects recruits a long-term motivation system that suppresses short-term temptations. - Repeated success strengthens resistance to distractions through a virtuous cycle. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, one of the things that's going on here is neurological. When you're working towards an accomplishment that seems useful, like this is useful to the world or to myself because I need to establish myself. I'm on my own or now after I've established myself, I want to do something that's useful for my state or for my county or for my country, you are going to recruit in your brain what we can Call the long-term motivation system. The long-term motivation system can suppress the impulses of the short-term motivation system, which looks at the possibilities that are right around you. So it's your short-term motivation system that pushes you towards the traps. In Lincoln's time, like, why don't you just grab a drink or gamble or, you know, like, or really worry about the violence and try to, like, hide or retreat. The long-term motivation system can come in and suppress that. Same thing is true today with the digital distractions, dangers, and darkness. The phone beckons, the video games beckon, the streaming content beckons. But if you're working on something that you really deem to be useful, that long-term system says, I'm in charge here. It's going to suppress that and allow you to resist and keep moving on the bigger term thing. Once you've chosen one of those more ambitious accomplishments, the best way to succeed is going to be to reconfigure your brain in the way required to actually understand that problem And what the solutions work like and take the right efforts forward. And reading is a great way to reconfigure it. So Lincoln then making reading his primary purposive reading, purposeful reading as primary way of moving towards his goals was very smart because for these type of goals, if they're Non-physical, reconfiguring your brain is what's going to give you a chance of succeeding. And then as he would succeed with one project, your long-term motivational system takes in that experience. It gets encoded in the hippocampus and therefore accessible again when it comes time to work on the next project. And now your motivation is stronger. Now your ability to suppress the sort of short-term proximate distractions is much more powerful. So it's this virtuous cycle that builds. ([Time 0:27:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b50e9b05-62c9-4d37-b1cc-4a21a5126c92)) - **Avoid Three Pitfalls When Applying The Protocol** - Avoid projects that are too ambitious, useless, or that dodge the hard work required. - Choose tractable, meaningful goals and do the deep learning needed to progress. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, there's three pitfalls you have to be careful about if you're implementing the Lincoln Protocol. Number one, don't make your projects too ambitious. It needs to be tractable, meaning it has to be something maybe you can't do it tomorrow, but that it's reasonable. You can see a reasonable path and a reasonable timeline for you to learn what you need to learn to make progress, right? It was reasonable for Lincoln in the 1820s to say, I can learn geometry. It's hard, but I can learn enough geometry to be the county surveyor. But it would not have been reasonable in the 1820s for him to say, I'm going to run for president next year. So that's to be ambitious, but not too ambitious. If it's just, I want to be a millionaire in six months, your mind is, we don't know how to do this. The second pitfall, your project needs to be useful, right? So it has to connect to things you really care about, which, you know, for Lincoln at first was really self-improvement in the sense of like he was on his own and came from a hard situation. So he was really motivated to, I need to get established politically, socially, and economically. So I don't feel like I have to go back to splitting rails and being rented out to other families to do manual labor. But then as that got more solidified, he began to redefine useful to mean useful to other people. At first, useful to his town, then useful to his county when he was in the state legislature. And then as he moved up in the state legislature, useful to the whole state of Illinois. He was a Whig, which means he was really big on internal improvement projects. We need to fund canals and toll roads so that everyone has more economic opportunity. And then as he moved to the national scale, of course, he turned to the national goods of trying to hold the union together and ending slavery. So it needs to be a useful project. If it's just something you think is like cool or fun or I want to crush it on TikTok, that is not going to necessarily generate enough positive feedback from your long-term motivational System for you to suppress the short-term system and to get out of those traps. The final pitfall is avoiding doing the actual hard work required. For most of the things that Lincoln went after, it was reading hard books that mattered. Those books were hard, and he would just do the work to learn them. If you don't do the equivalent hard work for the useful projects that you choose, you're not going to make progress. If you want to tell yourself the story that I have this ambitious, useful project and what really matters is looking up these like easy to watch tutorials on YouTube that have these like Checklist productivity ideas about, hey, make your profile great and people will come to it or whatever. You don't actually want to do the hard work of reconfiguring your mind to understand something new and then apply that knowledge to actually produce new things there out the world. If you're there trying to configure, you know, maniacally and manically trying to configure AI to systematize and automate everything so you can avoid any sort of beyond minimal effort, That's not the Lincoln protocol and you're not going to succeed. And, you know, hard things require that hard effort. So that has to be part of it. ([Time 0:30:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e4782609-211e-4083-9f73-16f054cc251b)) - **Count Articles As A Virtual Book** - Treat a set of long-form articles as a 'virtual book' to fit them into reading goals. - Count several long articles as one book to diversify contemporary reading. Transcript: Cal Newport So let's say your goal has been to read three books a month. You can say, I count five long form articles or six long form articles as a book. So I'm going to read two books and six long form articles. And then that same motivation that you're putting towards like getting through your book chapters, you can turn that towards like keeping up with your New Yorker issues or whatever Atlantic or whatever long form articles you read. I mean, I think that's just as fine. And then, so it just depends on like what mood you're in or what's going on. Like often if we're in a time of like political turmoil or geopolitical turmoil, I'll say, I don't want to be contemporaneous and I'm going to, let's, let's, let's read some books that Are a hundred years old. And other times I'll be like, you know what? I want to know what's going on in the world. Or if I'm, if I'm deep in a book that I'm writing, I'm like, I don't really want to know what's going on in the world. Cause I can get ideas. I can't deal with ideas right now. I'm working on this thing. But if I'm in between books or in between big New Yorker pieces I'm writing, I'm like, Ooh, I want to be more exposed to ideas. So it's okay if you read long form or not. If you want to do more long form, just make a virtual book, you know, five to eight, depending on how long these articles are. Let that count as like one short book. ([Time 0:42:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7065a48-775c-48f7-85c6-0ea1f53e0329)) - **Fix Repeated Rereading By Shorter Sessions** - If rereading sentences, shorten sessions or ladder up material difficulty slowly. - Stretch session length incrementally to rebuild focus without overwhelming yourself. Transcript: Cal Newport Good for you for doing a digital declutter. Good for you for trying a bunch of reading. This is one of the things you want to do with any digital clutter. As I always say, it's the reflection and experiments. You figure out what really makes you tick so you want to try things that are new you do this temporarily step away from your typical optional digital technologies you want to be aggressively Trying new things to feel out like what matters to me or not so you might be reading more now than it's going to be sustainable but it's a great way of sort of feeling that out like congratulations On that you're doing the right thing keep doing lots of experiments keep doing lots of reflection and thinking walks in terms of your specific issues with reading there's two things That you're going to have to keep an eye on that could be an issue here either your problem is coming because you're reading too much at a time like your focus is just not ready to sit down For three hours and read a book and so you're just losing focus or you're reading things that are too hard for your current state of preparation. So the solution to the, you're losing your focus. So if you find like, I understand things for a while, but in the same book, I begin to lose understanding as I go on, you need to make your sessions shorter. And then you stretch incrementally how long those sessions are over relative, you know three weeks at one length before you sort of stretch them. You got to give your mind time to actually get stronger. If the problem is not how long you're reading, but just the material is too hard, well, then you need to work on sort of laddering up complexity. ([Time 0:44:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/83d49878-35bb-4df2-a338-8741d3a31a39)) - **Ladder Complexity To Build Deep Reading** - Ladder up reading complexity: start with accessible texts, then secondary sources, then primary sources with support. - Build vocabulary and frameworks over months to tackle harder books effectively. Transcript: Cal Newport Like roughly speaking, you start by just reading like whatever is the most interesting. So you just get into the habit of the mechanics of reading. Then you're going to move to like specific topics like Lincoln might be interested in, would have done on topics that are interesting to you about the world or issues that are of. So like useful reading, like I kind of want to understand these things. Maybe it's a political issue. Maybe it's like a spiritual issue. Maybe it's like an issue of health or physical fitness or a psychological or philosophical issue. It's stoicism, whatever it is. You're like, you know, now I'm reading for utility. I want to sort of understand this thing better. So that's sort of like the next level as you move up these ladders. But you start with very accessible text. You don't jump into like a textbook on stoicism. You start with like Ryan Holiday's much more accessible series. All right. Then what you want to move up, if there's a topic, you know, useful reading, now that you're locked into useful reading, you can move your way up to what I think about is like more challenging Secondary sources. So it's, you know, you're not reading like the original philosopher, the academic, but you're reading people talking about their ideas. And now they're talking about a little bit more sophisticated way. Now you're laddering up your understanding from there. You can then go to accessible primary sources if they exist. Like again, they used a stoicism example. You know, I think Marcus Aurelius, it's approachable, right? The text is approachable. It's not like in a good translation. It's not like reading Heidegger or something like that, or like Viktor Frankl, man's search for meaning. It's an accessible text, right? You don't need like a huge background and specialized terminology to understand. And then you finally move up to, I want to read non-approachable primary sources. And the best way to get at that is you sort of read it in conjunction with secondary sources that tell you about the book that you're reading. You're not coming in blind. So you're working up a ladder. You do this for a year and on the other end, you're going to be tackling like pretty sophisticated books. And in the topic area that you're laddering, you're going to have accrued so much understanding and terminology and structural frameworks of knowledge that you're going to be like, Oh, now I can tackle things that are way more complicated than I could a year ago and get meaningful value out of them. ([Time 0:45:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f71ea747-c3a2-4f80-96a8-d5b23a9a5f65)) - **Build Habit With Regular Times And Rituals** - Create regular reading times and sensory cues (place, tea, music) to cement the habit. - Start with books you find compelling, set goals, and repeat finish cycles to sustain momentum. Transcript: Cal Newport Have regular times when you read always helps. I read over lunch. I read when I go to bed. If I have free time in the evening, I always do a half hour before, you know, TV shows or I alternate. Some days I do TV shows, but other days I sit and I read and have a place I go and a certain type of tea I make and certain type of music I put on. Start with books that you really find interesting. That's different than starting with topics you find interesting than finding books for them because sometimes that can be really narrow. So you want to be more broadly exposing yourself to different types of books. Like, oh, here's a genre fiction I really like and I can read through there. Here's a type of nonfiction book. I didn't realize there was like a lot of books on personal finance, but it's kind of inspiring because I want to get my money. I'm kind of in control and I like getting this information. Or I didn't realize like this type of nonfiction, like business idea books is really interesting or memoirs that are, you know, people moving to Provence and France and Italy and trying To – there's a whole bunch of books like that or whatever. So it's not so much like I am very interested in nuclear waste disposal. So I need to find books on that. I can't find that many interesting books. Find books that are very interesting to you but be really open to what those could be. And then you get some sort of goal, like there's a classic Lincoln protocol that begins to push you to finish books and get more ambitious about it. But you're in the right place. Reading takes time to fill it out. Be more purposeful, start really interesting, have regular habits, and then start getting purposeful. Get those goals. ([Time 0:48:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f2de8d8d-f5e2-486d-8f81-900280099cb3)) - **Compare Choices To A Full Lifestyle Vision** - Create a comprehensive lifestyle vision across buckets (health, community, craft, contemplation). - Compare options by which better advances that multi-bucket vision, not single features like autonomy. Transcript: Cal Newport Clearly, the thing you want to do here is classic lifestyle-centric planning. And that requires you to look ahead a little bit farther into the future. And when you look ahead, you want to be describing what your ideal lifestyle is going to look like, let's say like a couple of years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, like You're looking into the future. The key for a good lifestyle vision is that it needs to be comprehensive. So you cannot just focus on one thing. This is what really catches people up. They'll focus on one thing like in your case autonomy or something like i think this is uh definitely like a big gen z thing right now is like autonomy is a really big deal like i need uh i Can't be in a situation look i'm i built my whole life around this instinct but i can't be in a situation where like i have to keep doing work i need the ability to like control my work and Chill i need to chill don't have one. You need to have a lifestyle vision that covers a comprehensive description of your life. I suggest breaking it up into what we call buckets, but like different areas of your life. It's, you know, constitution, which is like your health and community, which like your connection to other people and craft, which can capture things like work and other sort of like Useful things you build with your hands or mind. Contemplation, which can capture like the spiritual philosophical context, like what it's like physically where you are, like where you live and commutes and like the physical surroundings That you're in every day. You really want to have a vision that spans many of these buckets so it's comprehensive. And then the game is just how do I get closer to this broad vision? And that's how you should be comparing these two things. Don't fix it on one thing you don't like about the current training portion of this job. Don't fix it on just one thing you really like about the other thing. I'd have more autonomy in the short term. Which of these is going to give me the better route to covering more of this vision? And that's the way. Just do that analysis honestly, and that's the way to think about it. ([Time 0:56:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ded6092-f668-47ba-a88b-a993a70c8a8b)) - **Put On Your Dad Hat: Be Active And Phone-Free** - When toddlers bore you, be active: invent adventures, take them outside, and avoid using your phone. - Use phone-free rules during solo parent time and model reading instead of scrolling. Transcript: Speaker 2 Time playing with him without much stimuli. While a bit of boredom is appreciated, these large spans of time is too much, leading me to excessive phone usage. What should I do? Cal Newport Well, Ben, toddlers are boring. Men talk about this. I don't think they're as boring to women, I guess. My wife would point this out about me, that when we had our first kid, we just had one, and he was young. My wife would be very happy. Like, we're just, this is great. We're like sitting in our living room and we like have our two year old and we're just kind of here. And I would be like, this is boring. Like, what are we doing here? We're just, he's on the blanket. Like this isn't, this is boring. I need to go hunt the mastodon or something like that. So I want to, what I want to do there is validate that, that feeling, um, and tell you that, uh, if you can't find a Macedon and you instead try to spear neighborhood dogs, as I did, you're Going to get the police are going to come over. So don't follow, don't follow that path. So they are boring. So what do you do as a dad? Well, you got to put on your dad hat. Moms have their own way to deal with toddlers. They're happy to gaze lovingly at them. Dads, you gotta, take that kid and go do stuff. You got to be active. We are going to go on adventures. I'll push you in the thing until you can walk and then I'll walk with you. And you invent the adventures. I mean, the old house I lived in, there's a park down the street and there's like a little bit of woods at the end of the park. Well, that became the wizard woods. We went to the woods. We had the different logs we would go to. We named the different things. We had to build traps for goblins like we had to go do things we're going to go to the library we're going to look at certain books that's fine like go be active put on your dad hat have more Things to do but do have the rule when you are it's just you and the kid right don't use your phone don't have that be an option. If it's like a boring thing, like you're waiting and they're just like doing their, you know, boring toddler thing. Sorry, toddlers, but you are kind of boring. Read a book. That's fine. Let them see. Oh, like dad's kind of reading the book. We're just sort of hanging out here in the yard on the first sunny day or whatever. ([Time 1:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56ea3996-d37c-4295-926b-4bc762ade5bc)) - **Block Planning Reignited Creative Career** - Lisa used block planning and digital awareness to reclaim creative momentum and finish major projects. - She launched an art education platform, completed a degree, and published a children's book. Transcript: Cal Newport I was married to a senior officer, but I got stuck creatively in my own career and also motherhood. This past year, I did more block planning, short and long-term planning, and though not perfect, I'm more aware of digital consumption and I am still working to get better at having Less distractions. Either way, this year I was able to one, successfully finish my last year teaching at the high school level. I am opening my own online art education platform that I didn't see possible or even dream of a year ago. Two, I will graduate with a master's this December. Three, I will illustrate and publish a children's book that has been sitting stalled for over a year or two for my artistic work is starting to flourish again. It's also giving me the confidence to determine deeper level work and if I want to get a PhD and go on creatively to more art history or writing projects. Either way, my talents are being used significantly better. I'm more aware digitally of where my rabbit holes are and life is much more fulfilling. ([Time 1:04:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f749b357-1093-4ea2-a782-f883e67db1fd)) - **Checks Cause More Harm Than Total Minutes** - Frequent brief phone checks produce many costly context shifts that sum to large lost time. - Reducing the number of checks yields far bigger productivity gains than trimming total minutes. Transcript: Cal Newport It's the raw number of times you do. Because every time I glance at my phone, and even if it's just quickly doing a few TikTok scrolls or looking at my Instagram, I do a context shift in my brain and it's going to take me 10 to 15 minutes to get back. Right? So if I'm just, look, I only looked at this thing four times in the last hour. It was like four total minutes. That's 56 minutes. I was working not so fast because if those four quick checks were spread out over that hour, no, no, you lost an hour of being able to do actual good work. ([Time 1:06:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f1faa603-e007-41cd-9b2c-14d1ab369b41)) - **Avoid Smartwatches As Constant Context-Shifters** - Avoid Apple Watches as always-on context-shifters that trigger frequent attention shifts. - Rework communication protocols so important messages get through without constant device checking. Transcript: Cal Newport Not a fan of Apple watches. It's why I somewhat ironically have my Zen 105 here without the UTC complication. This is an entirely mechanical watch. It's an automatic, so it harvests the motion of my hand. I put it on purposely an apple watch style black silicon strap but there's no electricity in this beast like that is my sort of little subtle watch nerd commentary on the apple watches Here's the problem what you know one of the big things you want to avoid from a sort of digital distraction perspective it's like we just talked about with lisa contact shifts when i shift My attention from what i'm doing it can take me up to 20 minutes to get it back. But now the watch that says, we'll make sure there is no escaping context shifts because if that thing buzzes, my brain says there's a person who needs us and it could be urgent. You can't ignore that. Now you got to look at that. Then you read it. You say, go ahead, spare the hand having a phone. I watch people read and dictate the longest messages on these things. You have just like strapped a context shifter onto your arm. I understand people like some of the health and fitness benefits, though I think that people work backwards. They just wanted the Apple Watch because they felt compelled to buy an Apple product. And now they're trying to figure out, like, why do I have this? I don't think it's that compelling. So I know some people like it for various things. You can sync music on it but it's a pain it doesn't really work and I'm not a big Apple Watch fan it's just a distraction machine listen to some of my prior podcast episodes about how to reform Your relationship and expectations with other people about communication and communication protocols in a way that you don't have to be on call all the time for text messages, but The important stuff can still get through. Those are the right solutions. So no, I'm not a big Apple watch fan. Just get like one of these ends and you don't have to worry about it. ([Time 1:08:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7647d782-0096-4526-accb-4ac9ea86dfad)) - **Reading 2008 Comments Feels Like A Time Capsule** - Cal read the 2008 comments on his 'Would Lincoln Still Be President If He Had Email?' post and reflected on past worries. - Early concerns included email overload, IM, RSS, and parenting worries that prefigured later social-media-era debates. Transcript: Cal Newport This is always fun. What I've done here is I've gone back to that Lincoln article. Would Lincoln be president if he had email that I wrote in February 2008? One of the very first articles I wrote about the dangers of digital distraction, especially in a professional context. This laid the seeds that grew eventually into what became deep work. This topic was kind of new back then. It wasn't, you smartphones were new, email, people were getting a little bit wary about their email inboxes, but it was still a little bit like, oh my God, my email. But, you know, it wasn't so bad. AOL was still a thing. At the beginning of us really worried about digital distractions. But what I wanted to do, and I haven't looked at these, Jesse will attest, I'm going to go back, let's read some of these comments from 2008 to see what did people care or think about distractions Back then. I thought it would be interesting. We should have like a read the comments theme music. Yeah. Could that be an excuse to get the bass fishing music back? Where it was like, hell yeah. We'll get that back one day. All right. What do we have here? All right. Here's a comment from February 20th, 2008. Amy, she said, in the electronic age, we're on such an instant schedule that someone like Lincoln may not have been able to cut it. Imagine the luxury of having an entire day between a newspaper printing and the next newspaper printing to accuse or respond to a comment. I think the concept of GTD would be completely lost in those days. What do you mean that you can have an inbox for everything that you need to do? All right, that's an interesting argument from Amy. I would have agreed with that back then. I think today, no, I wouldn't agree with it. Like, for example, you know what figure who predates Lincoln in American history that was completely overwhelmed with correspondence and messages and everything he had to do? George Washington. This is why he had to do whatever he could to get Hamilton. Some might say get Hamilton on his side. Hamilton reference from the play. I just read a book about it. He was overwhelmed. He was constant correspondence. His inbox was overflowing, and it was like the curse of his life. He talks about this. If you read enough, like Chernow's biography of Washington gets into this. So that was a problem back then, having too many people needing you, too much stuff going on. Yes, the delivery wasn't as fast, the actual production of responses was much slower. You have to keep it in mind. You had to write these long letters in response. And back then, linguistic communications, epistolary communication required these very long preambles. You try to set the emotional context. It was very flourishing. It took forever to write these things, and you had a quill, and you had to dip it in ink. I don't know, Amy. I think they figures, the equivalent of 18th and 19th century, you know, executives of today had their own overload problems. All right, what did Martin have to say? Martin says, the picture in your post, the dinosaur in the bikini girl, I feel like it's following me around. I subscribe to those different blogs, so I can't wait to see who posted. Oh yeah, there was, I had a whole chain of attributions. That picture went everywhere. I had a chain of attributions with like seven. This went to here, to here, to here, to here with ellipses in the middle, because that thing I was trying to track back then you could track actually, and I missed a pre-social media days. You could track this picture was posted here. They got it from there. They would attribute it. Then that person, that blog would say, oh, I got it from here. And you could follow the chain of a meme. You could trace it back. Today, a meme goes to like 100 million people through an exponential growth and, you know, cybernetic Twitter follower graph. It's such a different time. As for the age of focus, I agree that many of us tend to check things too frequently. It's not just email. It could be TV news, RSS feeds, text messages, web forums, instant messaging. The list goes on. Man, is that anachronistic a little bit? Remember when those were the things that were distracting us? Cable news. Speaker 2 RSS feeds. Cal Newport RSS feeds, which the social media companies killed because it was a competitor to their closed gardens. Google killed it because they wanted to make their own social media platforms. Web forums. Man, it's a different time. So interesting. What did Johanka have to say? I think the answer is obvious. Make the high focus activities far more attractive than those that add to the continuous partial attention problem. I mean, I think that's right. I think that's right in the sense that this is like the Lincoln protocol that we landed on more recently, right? Is that if what you're doing is really useful in a way that's meaningful to you, your mind will suppress the short-term attention motivational system. Chris is being a little snarky here. Didn't Lincoln also have a nervous breakdown of some sort after a family member died? If we had the internet back then, that would be all over the web, but I don't think anyone would have voted for him. I think you could argue that people lived much more privately back in those days. Not politicians. No, his – yes, he had an oppressive episode after his fiancée died, but he had embarrassments, political embarrassments. In particular, look up the spot speech that he gave about the Mexican-American War. I think this was Zachary Taylor who was the president at the time. It was an embarrassment and it like really hurt. It followed him everywhere. People, you don't understand, people wrote, newspapers were, you know, three editions a day. People had nothing else to do. People would write about all these things. They're all text filled, full of text or whatever. Everyone knew about the embarrassments that Lincoln had. It was like a huge issue for him. Like his, his, the problems he had in the house of representatives in the 1840s really followed him for a long time. And he had to sort of earn his way out of it by coming back into the, the Stephen Douglas debates with something even better to do. So I don't think that was true back then. They had, they had all of those problems. If you were a public figure, just like we do today. Here's someone. Oh, wait a second. Coren says sigh if everyone learned to cite their sources like good little boys and girls everyone would know that that awesome comic comes from asher sarlan at elephantitis of the Mind kareen i am going to scroll to the top of my article here all right jesse what do we see here hat. Academic productivity via why that's delightful, via omnibrain, via dot dot dot, via elephantitis of the mind. I clearly attributed that this started at that particular blog. I know it's been almost 20 years, but I do expect an apology from Corrine. All right. Let's just look at a couple more. This is kind of fun. What did people care about back then? All right, here we go. White bread, white beard. Thinking about focus back in 2008. Focus and dedication to mastering hard ideas. I've been thinking about those lately as I try to understand the behavior of my teenage daughters. Uh-oh. Which seems to be far removed from the realm of reason. I'm learning that they do not have focus on ideas their mother and I offer or what is available in many of the fine books to which they have access. They have only to go to their bedrooms and text their friends for instant confirmation that what they want, do, think, believe is not only utterly rational, but absolutely right or An internal truth. Even email is too slow for the young. If not texting, then at least instant messaging on the computer. ([Time 1:12:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/828a683c-e24d-4c8e-870c-5f8b7c9456df)) - **Use Separate Spaces For Deep And Shallow Work** - Create separate physical spaces for deep reading and routine tasks when possible. - Use a laptop to make one space dual-use if you can't have two dedicated rooms. Transcript: Cal Newport You do that up there. If you want to like read a Lincoln biography and highlight things with a pencil, you do it in the study. So I think having different spaces works. If you only have one, a laptop can be used to sort of transition the same space into both. ([Time 1:21:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9b6cdb15-db8d-4136-b7eb-bf9afb3bb9bd))