Ep. 378: The Lost Art of Long Thinking  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Long Thinking Defined** - Long thinking is persistent, intentional thought aimed at creating substantial new insights. - It recombines ideas, extracts principles, and builds novel mental structures over time. Transcript: Cal Newport We often talk about the ways that digital devices undermine our ability to consume complicated and meaningful information. If you spend too much time scrolling TikTok, you'll eventually start struggling to read Tolstoy. But what about our ability to produce complicated and meaningful information? I'm talking about original and creative thoughts or deep insight into yourself or a new understanding of the wondrous complexity of the world or exciting new visions for what's possible. This is what I want to get into today. I'm going to go in three parts here. In the first part of our discussion, I'm going to introduce an idea that I call long thinking. I'm going to explain why I think long thinking is critical to creating a flourishing life. In part two, I'll explore why specifically our modern technological environment is undermining our ability to perform long thinking. And then in part three, I'm going to present a simple but effective training plan for regaining this ability. Believe it or not, it's going to be based on an idea that I first wrote about in 2009 and have been practicing ever since. All right. So if you found yourself struggling to hold a line of thought or to make sense of complex ideas or material, if your world seems to have collapsed into shorter digital takes and cruder Primal emotions, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, the lost art of long thinking. All right, so I want to start here with an example from my own life. I'm going to load on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. An essay that I published on my blog and newsletter back in the fall of 2012. This was right at the start of my second year as a young professor. The title of this article was Solutions Beyond the Screen, the Adventure Work Method for Producing Creative Insights. Now, I've this up because I have some original photos I actually took here actually this is not my photo Jesse but someone else took this photo I did take photos uh there's this was not One of them so this is a foggy it's a foggy street uh with trees and it's sort of desolate and romantic this was taken in Berkeley. All right, let me read a little bit what I wrote here below that picture. A couple weeks ago, I made a brief visit to Berkeley, California for a wedding. My wife, Julie, had to take a conference call the first morning after we arrived. So I decided to get some work done myself. I didn't bring a computer. So work couldn't mean email replying. The standard in this situation just as an aside jesse there was no smartphones back then so like if you didn't bring your computer you weren't doing work instead i decided to log some Hard focus hours on what i like to call the beast a particularly vexing theory problem that my collaborators and i have been battling for many months another aside notice my use of the Term hard focus. It was actually a year or two before I actually started using the phrase deep work. I got some coffee and headed toward the Berkeley campus on foot. It was early and the fog was just starting to march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into a eucalyptus grove. I'll show that on the screen. Not my photo, but that's the same grove I wandered into. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought our existing strategy for the beast included a complicated algorithm which none of us looked forward to analyzing deploying a trick i learned While a grad student i avoided needing to understand why the complicated algorithm work by instead turning my attention to understanding why simpler simpler strategies failed after Only an hour which included a strategic fill-up at the free speech cafe i had an idea for a more concise and easier to analyze algorithm that seemed to work i realized however there's A limit to depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind looking to get the most out of my new insights and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method i trekked Over to a nearby cvs and bought a six by nine stenographer's notebook and then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally and there i i here's a picture of my notes from that day Jesse that i did take that photo i'm trying to remember from those diagrams i can't really read the text but i'm trying to remember from the diagrams exactly what problem this was i was Working on it looks like it was in like the local model of distributed communication. But anyways, the combination of pen and paper notes with exotic content in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding, our battle with the beast continues. But in the latest draft of the solution in progress, those Berkeley simplifications play a useful role. All right. That's a real case study from earlier in my professional career. And it's a type of activity that for me had become second nature and continues to be second nature for me, but I think is more rare for other people. What I was trying to do in that story was extract from my mind an original new thought, something that had actual value to me and others. Not like a eureka moment, just like an idea out of the blue, oh, now what if we put ham on shoes or some sort of like a great brainstorm like that, but a persistent focus application of my Brain to slowly but systematically move towards something useful and new and then captured in a form that I could share with others. There's a term for this type of cognitive activity that I was doing there in the hills of Berkeley, long thinking. Now, I think the first place I actually heard this term was from a TEDx talk. It was given by the Italian professor Giovanni Corrazza, who works at the Marconi Institute for Creativity at the University of Bologna, where I've been, I think ironically the same Year that I wrote that essay, I gave a talk at the University of Bologna. It's a super old university. Very cool. I want to play a clip from Carazza's talk where he introduces this term long thinking. We need to value long thinking. Normally, we talk about brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking, but here we're talking about something different. Long thinking. What does that mean? It's some thought that takes us far. It's as if you were reading poetry or listening to music. You don't judge the single notes. You don't judge the single words. It's the ensemble that gives you a feeling and takes you far. We must do the same thing with our concepts. We need to go far. And so we can use association of ideas, combination of ideas, extraction of principles and application of those principles to areas where they were ([Time 0:00:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/236b7cfa-43da-4b43-a46a-3c371086d6b5)) - **Berkeley 'Beast' Breakthrough** - In 2012 Cal went to Berkeley without a computer, wandered to a eucalyptus grove, and solved part of a theory problem. - He bought a stenographer's notebook, formalized the idea on paper, and later used it in a published draft. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so I want to start here with an example from my own life. I'm going to load on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. An essay that I published on my blog and newsletter back in the fall of 2012. This was right at the start of my second year as a young professor. The title of this article was Solutions Beyond the Screen, the Adventure Work Method for Producing Creative Insights. Now, I've this up because I have some original photos I actually took here actually this is not my photo Jesse but someone else took this photo I did take photos uh there's this was not One of them so this is a foggy it's a foggy street uh with trees and it's sort of desolate and romantic this was taken in Berkeley. All right, let me read a little bit what I wrote here below that picture. A couple weeks ago, I made a brief visit to Berkeley, California for a wedding. My wife, Julie, had to take a conference call the first morning after we arrived. So I decided to get some work done myself. I didn't bring a computer. So work couldn't mean email replying. The standard in this situation just as an aside jesse there was no smartphones back then so like if you didn't bring your computer you weren't doing work instead i decided to log some Hard focus hours on what i like to call the beast a particularly vexing theory problem that my collaborators and i have been battling for many months another aside notice my use of the Term hard focus. It was actually a year or two before I actually started using the phrase deep work. I got some coffee and headed toward the Berkeley campus on foot. It was early and the fog was just starting to march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into a eucalyptus grove. I'll show that on the screen. Not my photo, but that's the same grove I wandered into. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought our existing strategy for the beast included a complicated algorithm which none of us looked forward to analyzing deploying a trick i learned While a grad student i avoided needing to understand why the complicated algorithm work by instead turning my attention to understanding why simpler simpler strategies failed after Only an hour which included a strategic fill-up at the free speech cafe i had an idea for a more concise and easier to analyze algorithm that seemed to work i realized however there's A limit to depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind looking to get the most out of my new insights and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method i trekked Over to a nearby cvs and bought a six by nine stenographer's notebook and then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally and there i i here's a picture of my notes from that day Jesse that i did take that photo i'm trying to remember from those diagrams i can't really read the text but i'm trying to remember from the diagrams exactly what problem this was i was Working on it looks like it was in like the local model of distributed communication. But anyways, the combination of pen and paper notes with exotic content in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding, our battle with the beast continues. But in the latest draft of the solution in progress, those Berkeley simplifications play a useful role. All right. That's a real case study from earlier in my professional career. ([Time 0:01:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/14d4b9ed-8db1-4ff3-84bc-caebe7eea037)) - **Long Thinking vs Deep Work** - Long thinking is distinct from deep work: it focuses on creating new ideas while deep work also includes deliberate practice. - The intersection exists, but long thinking applies beyond professional tasks to personal understanding and visioning. Transcript: Cal Newport Long thinking. We need to value long thinking. Normally, we talk about brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking, but here we're talking about something different. Long thinking. What does that mean? It's some thought that takes us far. It's as if you were reading poetry or listening to music. You don't judge the single notes. You don't judge the single words. It's the ensemble that gives you a feeling and takes you far. We must do the same thing with our concepts. We need to go far. And so we can use association of ideas, combination of ideas, extraction of principles and application of those principles to areas where they were never applied. All right. So notice what he's talking about there. Again, long thinking is not about a sudden insight, right? It is not about practicing something again and again. It is about the persistent intentional application of your brain where you're trying to create something new. So you're taking existing ideas and information, you're pulling them out of the original context, you're reordering them, you're recombining them, you're finding new associations. These are all terms that Coroza used, trying to come up with new principles or new structures of knowledge. ([Time 0:06:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/728c801f-d46c-45b3-b66d-3f9cf13042f5)) - **Three Personal Benefits** - Long thinking strengthens self-understanding, enables the creation of valuable work, and prevents easy tribalism. - These capacities together make life richer and more meaningful. Transcript: Cal Newport In the big picture, we can make big grandiose claims about it, right? It's what built the world as we know it, the world that emerged out of prehistory and everything about it that we think made life better than it was 100,000 years ago, came out of long thinking. We're talking technology, science, philosophy, theology. That all required long thinking, the ability to put internally persistent thought on information you had to try to rebuild it into other structures that could be useful to you and others. We would still be in small bands of hunters and foragers fighting other bands to the death when our territories became too crowded, if not for humans developing the ability to do long Thinking. But that's a sort of like cultural, historical, societal argument in favor for this particular ability. What we care about more today is how long thinking is going to help you as an individual flourish in your own life. And long thinking has three big advantages. All right, God help me, Jesse, I'm going to draw a picture for each. I'm going to put my arrows here. I'll put my arrows here first. I'm going to have three things that I'm going to, I will draw a completely self-explanatory and fantastically rendered photo for each. Okay. There's three advantages that long thinking gives you as the individual. All right. So for the first, let me draw the pictures I like to do. I like to draw the picture first and let's see if Jesse can guess what it is Jesse is that clear what that picture is somebody thinking he's looking to a mirror okay right so we got someone Looking into a mirror all right the first benefit of long thinking is that it helps you build over time a more nuanced and grounded understanding of yourself. Now, without such an understanding, you're going to be buffeted by the world, a conflicting ball of emotions and reactions, like you're outraged. No, you're nihilistic. No, you're radical. No, you just want to numb yourself and escape. Your journey through life, by contrast, is so much richer if you can regularly take time to just be alone with your thoughts and then try to make sense of them. Move them around, recombine, find associations, extract principles. Thinking lets you do that all right second advantage which i will now also perfectly draw all right let's see here it's like a desk i'm giving some subtly giving some oh god oh god oh god Jesse i don't know what i All right. Now, that's the person at a desk. Yeah. That working? Yeah. All right. That is working. Again, brilliant artwork. It helps you create useful things that impact the world and can provide economic value, right? All great innovation strategies and ideas come from long thinking. If you're adept at this, you will find a much clearer and more rewarding sense of purpose. So clearly this is what I was using long thinking for in the example from the beginning of the episode. It was helping me figure out how to make progress on a really complicated theory problem that me and my collaborators called the beast. I published a lot of papers in 2012. So I don't know what that was at the height of my theory career earlier when I was, you know, a new professor, I was publishing a lot of papers back then. So I don't know which of the papers that was, but I was doing a lot of long thinking back then. So that was the advantage I was getting, but there's a third as well. I have like a, not an abstract artwork to do here, but it's, I'm doing artwork here that's going to represent something. All right. So I'm drawing for people who are listening, not watching. I'm drawing what can only be described as like expertly rendered humans and they're each holding signs. That's clear, right, Jesse? Yeah. All right. So it's like a lot of people like holding up signs and then, oh, this is going to get profound. Jesse's going to wipe a tear away from his face when i'm done drawing this there's somewhere someone over on the side this is this is not looking like a hope it looks kind of bad jesse he's Helping up someone you get that that's yeah yeah yeah yeah he's doing something to someone yeah so it's like uh there's a whole group of people like waving signs, but someone else is off To the side, actually like literally helping someone. So what is that supposed to represent? Uh, it helps you avoid fall into the trap of an easy tribalism with the, out the ability to apply long thinking to important issues, issues you care about issues that are important to The world. You will fall back on a more easy tribalism where you just choose a tribe to be yours. And you're like, all I care about is making sure that we keep calling all the other tribes blackhearted and scoundrels. And I just want to focus on hating them. Instead of having original thoughts or extracting my own principles for understanding the world, I will just consume short summaries of what the leaders of my tribe espouse as being True, and then I'll just like parrot those. I have no real understanding of the world. I just want my tribe to succeed. I kind of pretend like I'm helping the world, but really I'm just liking being part of a crowd. The result of that sort of easy tribalism is often a mixture of anger and despair. It might help you feel sort of alive in the moment, like it gives you some chemicals. But long thinkers instead find real fascination and beauty and challenge in confronting the issues of the day. They have clarity that comes not just from a desire to win over another tribe, but from putting in the time required to grapple with something difficult and find their way to its roots And really believe to their core. This is important to me, and I'm willing to go and act on it. All of the great prophets and activists of history from Jeremiah through MLK all depended on long thinking, not an easy tribalism. So for those three reasons, self-reflection, production of things that really are valuable, and the ability to escape tribalism and like really know what you believe in and really Try to make a difference. All of that depends on long thinking. ([Time 0:11:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a85f16db-0362-4b65-b7b6-8eba06c9e64b)) - **Technology Fragments Attention** - Digital distractions fragment sustained attention, making long thinking uncomfortable and difficult. - Hyperpalatable content and hyperactive collaboration both erode the ability to hold a sustained line of thought. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, obviously the general cause, right? This is me. This is my show. This is a show about understanding and responding to technology in a way that helps human flourishing. Clearly the problems come back to our modern technological environment. They almost always do in this show, but I want to drill a little bit deeper. I think there are two particular reasons that come out of our modern technological environment that are more specifically making long thinking something that's becoming more and More difficult for the average person to do. The first thing is the way that digital distractions undermine our comfort with sustained attention, right? Long thinking requires sustained attention because you have to keep your thoughts intentionally and persistently on trying to work with the information you have and try out different Structures. Your mind's eye has to be focused and unwavering. That requires sustained attention. The digital distractions that are readily abundant in the modern digital environment, as we know, makes us worse at sustaining attention. That's because we have hyperpalatable content. We have algorithmically curated content that's selected for our own particular interest. It gives us a pure reward signal. We've talked about this for the last couple of months on this show that creates a bundle of neurons in your short-term motivation system that are super well tuned to giving a super clear Vote for pick up phone, pick up phone, pick up phone, because it's getting such a clear, consistent reward with the occasional intermittent, very big reward. That vote is powerful. And so you're constantly breaking up your attention and you get less comfortable sustaining it because you can't, politically speaking in this metaphor, you can't win the vote against The pick up the phone neurons that long before you get exhausted. In the professional setting, then we also have the hyperactive hive mind collaboration scourge where too much work is happening with back and forth unsynchronized messaging, which Means you constantly have to check email. You constantly have to check Slack. And that makes it impossible for you to let your attention actually do the slow focusing on a single topic. So we got hyper palatable content, hyperactive hive mind. You put those two things together. We really lose our ability to sustain attention. One of the many casualties of that common problem that we talk about a lot is long thinking is something is uncomfortable because you can't keep that mind's eye focused when it's phone, Email, phone, email. ([Time 0:18:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1de2ab5c-bef1-4215-9e74-f26b4a5175c9)) - **Necessity For Long Thinking Faded** - Technology reduced the necessity to practice long thinking by providing ready-made, refined takes and endless distraction. - Because raw, unrefined information is less required, people rarely integrate ideas into personal understanding structures. Transcript: Cal Newport So for example, we used to do self-reflection style long thinking much more often because we had a lot of time alone with our thoughts and those were often the thoughts we were having. Hey, something happened. I'm upset about it. I'm excited about it. I'm down on myself for like this day went really poorly at this like work off site, like what's going on in my life, what's going on professionally. And then when we're alone with those thoughts, we have nothing else to do but to start moving them around. And let me file them away and take this out. Let me try recombinations of new associations. Here's the structures I use for myself, meaning now maybe I need to do some renovations over here. We got used to that out of necessity because we had a lot of time with our thoughts and those were a lot of thoughts we had. I mean, think about the like teenager alone in their room playing the Lisa Loeb songs, right? What are you doing up there? You're writing your diary and like trying to make sense of your thoughts. Today, when you have like smartphones that can deliver alternative programming that will distract you in any situation, we're not forced to do that anymore. We can numb away our thoughts or avoid the thoughts, the teenager who's upset, the business person upset after the bad meeting. We can let Father TikTok take that off our hands. And so we don't get that experience. We don't get that experience with self-reflection. Okay, the other way, the other thing that we've lost, necessity for long thinking that we've lost, has to do with how we just understood ideas. It used to be, if you didn't actually go pursue information about something, you were clearly ignorant about it. Like if you weren't reading the newspaper, you didn't know how to talk about what was happening in a political campaign. If like the day we're recording this is the mayoral election in New York City. If this was like the mayoral elections when I was a kid, this is like the Giuliani, Dinkins, before that Dinkins, like that type of years. If you weren't reading the newspaper, like you would have no idea. Like I have no idea what's going on. Today I can, I can grab almost any kid and they'll have like something to say because like they've seen some Mondani TikToks or you get these little quick summaries of things and you can Kind of feel in the know. You can see what your tribe feels about something without having to like actually just read more raw information. And so you don't need that today but back then for anything you want to know more about you had to kind of take in raw information but not raw but like not takes not like here's how you should Feel how your tribe feels about it it's like it's a 2000 word article in like your local paper it's a it's a news report but dan rather right it's you uh a special at pbs a book. So you had to engage with a lot more information that wasn't yet, I'm not going to say wrong and say unrefined, that you had that didn't refine yourself to pull out of it some understanding And compare it to other things you know. I'm like, okay, so how do I feel about this? Not today. Your phone can do this for you. Social media will just like, okay, I kind of follow people in my tribe. I get the quick takes. I like this guy. I don't like this guy. This guy, it's great. It's like young, sexy mayor. Like, no, no, he's scary. Socialist. Or like, you get the answer right away. But in those old days, you had to like, I'm going to have to read about this. And then on my own, figure out how I feel about that. Right? Because you weren't getting this information in a way that was already partisanized. So you would read kind of boring, unrefined information and then say, how do I fit this into things? Oh, I guess I like this guy. I don't like this guy. I have reservations. We'll see. I want to see this or that. And that, that was a, that act of having to integrate less refined information to your existing understanding. So you didn't seem ignorant or dumb required long thinking. But again, we don't do it today because you don't have to. We can just tell you how you're supposed to feel. Everyone has an opinion on everything. People know very little about it. I know this, Jesse, because I've been doing a lot of AI criticism. Everyone has an opinion about AI. And so few people know anything about it it's it's uh it's crazy i think i'm going to grow a beard like eliezer udowski and then i'm going to seem more profound i'm going to do here's what I'm going to do i'm going to wear a wizard's hat like a harry potter style wizard's hat and i think that'll just make it seem when i'm gonna have a long gray beard um like rick rubin and then I think people that's it and then i'll just whatever i say about ai people that's probably right that wizard knows what he's talking about i'll talk real profoundly um sorry so that's What's going on so that's the second reason why technology undermined our ability to to do long thinking so okay just to summarize issue number one, it fragmented, sustained attention. Now long thinking's hard. Issue number two, technology made information that's already refined that just to tell you exactly what you need to think and know gets rid of the like natural need to have to actually Process less refined information into your own personal understanding structures. People don't have personal understanding structures anymore. They join teams and then they get quick telegraph updates of how that team feels about things. Don't need long thinking in that world either. ([Time 0:20:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/82887d51-b69a-4baf-a2c8-2b63ee19d75b)) - **Practice The Notebook Method Weekly** - Do the notebook method weekly: bring a sturdy notebook and pen to a scenic, non-distracting place for 1–3 hours. - Spend the last 20 minutes summarizing the session with a dated title for future reference. Transcript: Cal Newport And I think it is the best training, the best single thing you can do to train your ability to do long thinking. All right. I'm going to load this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. You'll see here the name of this method is the notebook method. Now, the subtitle says, how can pen and paper transform you into a star student? Because, again, I was writing just for students back then. But stay with me because this advice is relevant to anyone. That's what I learned as I advanced in my career and kept using it. All right, so I'm going to scroll down here a little bit and I'm going to start at the paragraph that says the idea is simple. There's four steps here. I'm going to read each of them. Number one, buy a sturdy college ruled notebook dedicated to the relevant class, right? So that was for school, but we can just generalize that to say to the relevant problem that you want to make progress on. Number two, buy a good pen. Nothing beats a black uniball micro 0.5 millimeter. I keep talking. I've been talking about those. Jesse is literally holding one. Show us, Jesse. Jesse I adopted it because I was a fan. Cal Newport I've been. So this is proof. I've been using those for a long time. Number three, take your notebook and pen and go to the most relaxing, meditative, non-distracting place possible. The deep stacks of the library is okay. Hiking 30 minutes into the woods or onto the dunes overlooking a windswept springtime beach is even better. Number four, spend one to three hours working out your thinking on the task at hand in your notebook. Spend the last 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page that you mark with the date and a title. For example, here is a snapshot from a page of my PhD thesis notebook. There we go, Jesse. Look at that. All right. So I recognize this. This was from my doctoral dissertation, I defended later that year. The composition algorithm, you probably right now, I know, Jesse, you're seeing multiple mistakes probably as you're looking at this. Two randomized algorithms, one of which was simulating a channel and one of which is simulating an algorithm that uses that channel, treating them formally as as as formal IO automata. And then it's a it's a systematic algorithm. So it's a conceptual algorithm, not something you actually run that just shows the existence of a combined composed algorithm in which the channel, the algorithm on this channel simulator Behaves like the algorithm on the channel. It was a pain to work out these details. But that was a big part of this thesis. This was actually, interestingly, the work I presented in Bologna. And there we go, full circle. All right. This should look familiar because that's exactly what I was talking about in the article from the beginning of this podcast from 2012 when I was at Berkeley working on a problem as a professor. That was three years later. So clearly this notebook method of I'm going to take a notebook, I'm going to go somewhere scenic, and I'm going to sit there and just work in the scenic environment on this problem. And then in the last 20 minutes, summarizing the best I can with a title and date to kind of make it all official. That's exactly 2012. I was still doing that. I still do it today. This method has stuck with me. Why does it work? Well, I'm going to scroll down farther in this article because here is my best explanation for why the notebook method is so successful. I said it's power sources from the following truths. Number one, writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you're thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies. It's hard work. You'll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere. Eventually, you gain familiarity with a novel sensation of deep thinking. Number two, you can't check email using a spiral bound notebook. You also can't update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel. That's somewhat timely. That's from a while ago, 15 years ago, but those technologies still exist. If you're high up in the library stacks or better yet in the woods or at the beach, it's just you and your notebook. Eventually your urge towards distraction will give away. And three, paper facilitates creative thinking. You can draw arrows and circle concepts and sketch structure. Something about a good ballpoint scraping across a thick-grained paper stock unlocks areas of your mind that tend to hibernate when you're slumped over your laptop in a crowded study Lounge. I think those explanations are exactly right. Writing down your thoughts as opposed to just keeping your head makes you be more organized. That's exactly right. Your thinking is clearer. That makes your long thinking better. Being without technology in a very scenic place reduces distracting poles, helps you focus more. I kept pushing for inspiring places in this article. So yeah, library stacks, sure, beach better. So if you're in an inspiring place, that gives you an extra bit of energy. It's so different. You feel chemicals, but they're not the standard chemicals. It really unlocks new things. And finally, you're in a paper form. You can draw pictures and squares and boxes and mathematical formulas and connect things together with arrows. And so it unlocks as sort of like a freer type of thinking than if you're just trying to hold something in your head or just typing. I think those reasons do a very good job. Whatever identified back then in 2009, does a very good job of explaining why this method works. And so this is what I want you to do. If you want to become a better long thinker, implement the notebook method at least once a week, preferably in the most scenic places possible. It could be a work problem. You can, you could, it could be something about yourself, like a self-reflection thing you're working on. It could be visioning or planning for your future, like what your deeper life is missing. It could be about making sense of something in the world that's catching your attention. It could be about clarifying your personal principles, values, or beliefs, whatever the target, take that good notebook, take that good pen, go somewhere scenic, one to three hours, Last 20 minutes, write it down. This is calisthenics for your ability to produce thoughts. So if reading hard things like we talked about a couple episodes ago is like calisthenics for being able to understand hard things, for a mind that has new connections and can take in Complicated thoughts. The notebook method is calisthenics for then how do you produce original complex thoughts of yourself? So it's a, you read, combine that with the notebook method, and now you have a brain that's internet proof. Now you have a brain that's algorithm proof. There's other things you can do to become a better long thinker. But I'm just saying, notebook method once a week. Simple. But that really does make a big difference. I still do that to this day. ([Time 0:31:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75ddb14c-7513-42ff-9b4c-ad2196728eb7)) - **Write To Clarify Thought** - Write down thoughts to force clarity and confront ambiguities; persevere through initial resistance. - Use paper to block digital checks and to sketch connections that unlock creative thinking. Transcript: Cal Newport I said it's power sources from the following truths. Number one, writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you're thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies. It's hard work. You'll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere. Eventually, you gain familiarity with a novel sensation of deep thinking. Number two, you can't check email using a spiral bound notebook. You also can't update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel. That's somewhat timely. That's from a while ago, 15 years ago, but those technologies still exist. If you're high up in the library stacks or better yet in the woods or at the beach, it's just you and your notebook. Eventually your urge towards distraction will give away. And three, paper facilitates creative thinking. You can draw arrows and circle concepts and sketch structure. Something about a good ballpoint scraping across a thick-grained paper stock unlocks areas of your mind that tend to hibernate when you're slumped over your laptop in a crowded study Lounge. I think those explanations are exactly right. Writing down your thoughts as opposed to just keeping your head makes you be more organized. That's exactly right. Your thinking is clearer. That makes your long thinking better. Being without technology in a very scenic place reduces distracting poles, helps you focus more. I kept pushing for inspiring places in this article. So yeah, library stacks, sure, beach better. So if you're in an inspiring place, that gives you an extra bit of energy. It's so different. You feel chemicals, but they're not the standard chemicals. It really unlocks new things. And finally, you're in a paper form. You can draw pictures and squares and boxes and mathematical formulas and connect things together with arrows. And so it unlocks as sort of like a freer type of thinking than if you're just trying to hold something in your head or just typing. I think those reasons do a very good job. Whatever identified back then in 2009, does a very good job of explaining why this method works. And so this is what I want you to do. ([Time 0:34:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/140a0c96-2a8a-4751-9917-160cda432050)) - **Make It A Regular Habit** - Implement the notebook method at least once a week for calisthenics of producing original thoughts. - Combine hard reading with notebook sessions to become 'internet-proof' in thinking and producing ideas. Transcript: Cal Newport If you want to become a better long thinker, implement the notebook method at least once a week, preferably in the most scenic places possible. It could be a work problem. You can, you could, it could be something about yourself, like a self-reflection thing you're working on. It could be visioning or planning for your future, like what your deeper life is missing. It could be about making sense of something in the world that's catching your attention. It could be about clarifying your personal principles, values, or beliefs, whatever the target, take that good notebook, take that good pen, go somewhere scenic, one to three hours, Last 20 minutes, write it down. This is calisthenics for your ability to produce thoughts. So if reading hard things like we talked about a couple episodes ago is like calisthenics for being able to understand hard things, for a mind that has new connections and can take in Complicated thoughts. The notebook method is calisthenics for then how do you produce original complex thoughts of yourself? So it's a, you read, combine that with the notebook method, and now you have a brain that's internet proof. Now you have a brain that's algorithm proof. There's other things you can do to become a better long thinker. But I'm just saying, notebook method once a week. Simple. But that really does make a big difference. ([Time 0:36:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/516c5b5b-b30a-4df9-941a-f213d43b4f07)) - **Lincoln's Retreat For Decisions** - Abraham Lincoln retreated to a cabin to wander, think, and write ideas that influenced the Emancipation Proclamation. - He famously stored drafts in his hat lining and used solitude to wrestle with crucial decisions. Transcript: Cal Newport Up now in Petworth in D.C., but sort of in the hills above where the White House is in DC and Abraham Lincoln, I wrote about this, how Abraham Lincoln would go there. That was his like his weekend retreat up into the hills to this house they had up there. And he would go there to basically apply the notebook method. He would wander the grounds and think and try to make sense of whatever the issue is of the day. And he would write his ideas, not always in a notebook, but famously on scraps of paper, some of which he would hide in the lining or store in the lining of his sort of famous stovetop style Hat. It was up there wandering, trying to make sense of his thoughts, that he reached like his decisions about the Emancipation Proclamation and some of his biggest military decisions. ([Time 0:37:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc447e2d-eb91-4772-8457-67a3e7865931)) - **Cultivate Mental Structures Deliberately** - Your experience is shaped by the mental structures you build; long thinking lets you design those structures intentionally. - Without it, algorithms and fleeting content implant impoverished structures that skew perception and values. Transcript: Cal Newport We like to imagine that our brain is a neutral observer of an objective world that surrounds us. And that our daily experience is therefore determined by whatever we happen to encounter in the world that day. But this model isn't right. Our experience is determined by a combination of what we encounter and all of the relevant mental structures that we have built in our minds. The structures that help us explain ourselves and our beliefs and our understanding about how other people and the world functions. If you're comfortable with long thinking, you can create these structures in ways that are meaningful and important to you. This allows you in a literal sense to help shape the world you live in to be more rich. If you allow instead the modern technological environment to degrade your long thinking ability, you'll end up encountering the world through impoverished mental structures that Were implanted haphazardly in your mind through distracting content and random things you happen to come across. You are in that case, letting a bunch of random algorithms essentially shape your world into something that's most likely to be nihilistic, angry, random, or boring. So if you don't want your phone to determine your world, then you need to re-embrace the joys and power of long thinking. Not that hard to do. You buy a notebook, you hike somewhere scenic, you work out a complicated thought on paper, you end with a clear summary, and you repeat. It's a simple habit, but over time, it will help you re-engage with long thinking, and as long thinking becomes more common and comfortable for you, you will be able to transform your World into something that is much more meaningful and satisfying. ([Time 0:39:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b387398d-fe7f-463c-a0bb-be026a965638)) - **Rebuild Reading With Minutes On Page** - Read more minutes of eyes-on-page; prioritize material that excites you to rebuild reading circuits. - Reduce phone and social media presence to restore sustained attention needed for reading. Transcript: Cal Newport Yes. And right. Yes. You need to read more. For now, just whatever you're most excited to read. Great. The key is actually minutes of eyes on page because you're reactivating those reading circuits. You're re sort of myelinating them you're trying to get uh you're trying to get that the friction reduced for the active reading so if you can get involved in like a reading fandom i'm Going to read uh whatever like dark academia books which as far as i can tell or tend to be it's always like young women and these like always like some sort of weird secret society cult And then at some point like a ghost is beating them up. Like, so whatever, if that's your thing or fairy romance or whatever it is, um, whatever, I don't care what it is. Minutes, eyes and minutes on page. But I said, yes. And because the other thing you need to do is make attention, sustained attention, be less foreign and scary. You're an 18 year old student. So I'm going to assume that the very best way to do that is you have to stop using your phone so much. You got to stop having your phone as a constant companion is not normal or healthy. And I don't care if everyone does it. You're noticing the beginning of those side effects. Now reading is like the basic of advanced symbolic thinking. If you're struggling reading, your whole brain is struggling because of that stupid piece of glass. So take social media off of it. They're not going to miss you. Take social media off of it. Keep it in one room when you're at home, not with you. Just be used to having long periods of your day where the phone is not there. You cannot be interrupted. Your mind has nothing to check. You have to drastically reduce the footprint of your phone in your life. I don't know how else to tell you this. If you want your brain to get re-comfortable again with sustained attention, which you'll need to do reading, the reading will build the circuits. ([Time 0:45:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b04c8676-99f0-4485-9120-4a538e744d8b)) - **Draft Offline To Protect Creativity** - If you prefer not to write on a computer, use paper, a FreeWrite device, or a laptop with no Wi-Fi to draft without distractions. - Export and edit later on a connected machine after capturing the creative draft offline. Transcript: Cal Newport It's interesting. I mean, speaking of professors, like I always thought this was an interesting observation. So my dad was a professor for a while. My grandfather was a professor and my grandfather was a very prolific professor. So I'm from a line of scholars. My grandfather wrote a lot of books. I don't remember how many, but like at least a dozen, you know, academic books. He was a Baptist Christian apologist, was at Rice for a long time as an endowed chair and then the provost of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary right before the fundamentalist Takeover. So he was like in that world of religious scholarship, wrote a ton of books, never had a computer, bought his first computer after he retired. He would hand write those books on yellow legal pads and then a typist would type it up and he would look at the type drafts and he would mark up those type drafts and then someone that would Type it up again and he would look at those. To modernize, we have this efficiency thinking. We've taken the idea that comes out of like industrial manufacturing in which like all that matters, right? Because it's a set process. So all that matters is the speed at which things happen. We look at that and we say, oh, that's so slow. Writing on a tablet is slow. Having it typed and you have to hand mark it and hand it back, that's slow. But he wrote way more books than most professors. He wrote more books than I've written. Because with cognitive activities, it's interesting, efficiency and slowness isn't the same thing as in industrial manufacturing. In fact, going slower probably made the books better. And also like the raw hours that you're actually writing when you write a book is like a fraction of the time involved in like creating that book. So I always thought that was interesting. So you have a lot more flexibility than you think when it comes to writing. I have a friend who does a short story writing on typewriters. He really likes it. So if you're looking for an alternative, there's several things you can do. There's a product I'm interested in called the FreeWrite, W- R I T E. It's an e-ink product. It's like the same type of screen as a Kindle. It's a keyboard with like an e-ink screen. They have a couple of different models. And basically it's a drafting tool. So you can see what you're typing in the little screen as you're writing. All you can do is like write and you can have different folders with different files in it and you can select one through a pretty slow interface. And then just start writing. You do basic editing. There's like a backspace key. Or you can move to your recent text. But you can't do. You don't have a mouse. You're not cutting and pasting and spell checking and doing this. The whole idea is you're supposed to. It's for creative writers. Like I just want to get a draft of this done. And I have a really good mechanical keyboard. And I see the words there. And I can fix my typos in the moment, but I'm just writing until I'm done. Then you can export them off of the free write into like Google docs or word or something and, and, uh, do like a better editing pass and work from there. But it's like mint as a drafting tool that you could just carry and it's portable. I think that's really interesting. Another thing that some people do, I believe I first heard about this from, I think it was, I think it was dave eggers it might have been michael i don't think it's michael shabon i think This was dave eggers um he had an old laptop where it had no he had disabled the internet so it had it had no workable wi-fi and it's old there's nothing else on it but like word and he would Use that laptop to write. So now like you can edit like a little bet, right? You can do all your editing on the copy and paste and move things around. And like, it's not just like I'm writing a draft, but you can't do anything else on this computer. There's no, there's no internet. And then when he's done, you, a USB key. All right, I'll move the file over there and I can move it to like my other computer. And then I can, if I want to email it to someone or do something like that, that to me is a cool idea. So you just get like a simple computer and just never activate, um, never activate the internet. I would go so far as like break that wireless chip and have someone do that for you. Like I really can't use this on the internet. So this is just like a nice writing machine. I spent $300 on it. So you have options from paper to something like free, right? The remarkable has a keyboard. I bought a remarkable with a keyboard. I don't, I'm not going to recommend that. Um, it's too clunky when you try and type with the keyboard, the keyboard's fine, but it's, um, you have no control. I feel like I don't have enough control of where that text goes. It's too hard to edit. It's not really, it's meant for like adding some annotations to notes. So I wouldn't use a remarkable for it, but I think the free write might be an interesting tool. And then really the best solution is cheap laptop, no wifi, nothing else on it. ([Time 0:48:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3f438b9c-6cb5-4bca-9531-e6f145b89f3b)) - **Let Each Book Set The Pace** - Read at a pace that extracts value; heavy books deserve slow annotation and reflection. - Mix heavy books with lighter reads to avoid burnout and preserve learning quality. Transcript: Jesse When I read, I don't get the most out of the book unless I write reflections or spend time thinking about the concepts presented. And reading one book per day would not allow me to maximize benefit from each book. Cal Newport I'm still not completely sure how Roosevelt did that while in the White House, mind you. While in the White House, he supposedly read a book a day. I think he was a very good skimmer. I think he was very good at getting to exactly the points that were in because he had read so many books. He'd be like, interesting, interesting, skip, skip, skip, interesting, skip, interesting, got it. Like, I think that's what was happening. When it comes to your own reading practice, read at the pace that allows you to get the most value. And for a book where you're really trying to extract new ideas, like so a book that's going to trigger a lot of long thinking could take a long time to read, and that's fine. Annotate it. I often do that with those books with my pencil marking method do summary notes so for big idea books i really want to understand i'll start a document where i write summaries of each chapter That really helps me like long think through like what the ideas are go for long walks to try to integrate ideas in your life that's all great the only thing i would add to that is having Some diversity of books you don't want every book that you're reading to be such a heavy lift. You're going to burn out. So mix those in with other types of books that you can read fast, maybe even in a day and go back and forth between these. But let each book get the time that it needs for you to get the most out of it. ([Time 0:57:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c54e4230-e7dd-4438-88ce-7d9a2fadbe13)) - **Use Single-Purpose Notebooks On Walks** - Use single-purpose notebooks on reflection walks to act as working memory and a long-term record. - Capture scratch ideas and finish each session with a starred summary to resume next time quickly. Transcript: Cal Newport So now we have terminology for this. That's basically the notebook method, what we just talked about in our deep dive. So going for a walk somewhere scenic with a single purpose notebook that can do nothing but hold notes on this one topic. It forces you to do exactly long thinking, persistent thought towards one problem that you're trying to make useful progress on. You have to reorganize, build new association, extract principles, write it down, think about that's not quite right. But the single purpose notebook in the short term acts as like an extension of your working memory. It's a way, OK, let me write this down. Let me think about that. Let me reorder it. OK, now this is what I really mean. It allows you to hold more pieces together and rearrange them. Over time, it also becomes a repository for how you're thinking as evolved. So you might have like a few pages of kind of scratch pages as you're working through thoughts on your walk. And then the final page, you maybe have like a star or a box around like, okay, that's kind of the work product of this walk. That's the key observation. And then the next time you do a walk or go somewhere scenic, whatever, you start from that, like, okay, I can get up to speed on where I was. You're doing more so the short term is like a working memory long term is like a record of your thoughts is that notebook fills you're capturing an artifact of the human brain seeing what Only human brains can do so i love the practice of single purpose notebooks on thinking walks aimed at a given problem that is purified long thinking and once you've started doing it It really can be addicting like i really always look forward to my my long thinking. I have a stack. I have like 50 single purpose notebooks just waiting for me and a hundred of my pins. So I love the idea that no matter what comes up, I can grab a clean notebook and a fresh pin and head out the door. I keep like a big stock of those in my library at home. ([Time 0:59:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ffe4e8fd-c243-4e5a-a2f1-61b0cb2abbf9)) - **Turn Hiking Into Long-Thinking Sessions** - On a long hike, schedule brief long-thinking sessions during the day and jot refined notes during water breaks. - Aim for ambitious creative goals and use walking to incubate ideas before sketching at night. Transcript: Cal Newport You have all day long, you're just in scenic environments alone with your own thoughts. It's a perfect environment for long-thinking. The real issue is you're doing too much. You're going to burn out your brain. I would choose sessions throughout the day where, like, for the next hour, I'll be working on the following thing in my brain. Long thinking target, making sense of a new creative idea, making sense of yourself, trying to make sense of the insights that you're gaining on the trail. Now, I know you can't stop that often, but you're going to get really good at working with these things in your head. And then during like a brief water break, adding those notes pretty refined to your page, or if it's a graphic novel thing you're working on, maybe you have a sketch, though really you're Probably working more on ideas and styles and plots and innovations like in your mind because you don't have much time to draw that maybe at night you can do a little bit of drawing but Yeah have long if you do long thinking sessions that have multiple long thinking sessions every day you can figure out a lot of stuff be more ambitious than just i want to think about my Novel think about like your whole creative career the future of graphic novels build a whole intricate universe brandon sanderson level of complexity type of uh you know creative Universe of ideas that all hook together in which you're going to build 20 graphic novels that all intricately and connect you kind of have all these notes in your notebooks that is you Have the raw number of brain cycles you can now deploy towards whatever you want on this continentalinental Divide trip is massive. And you can come out of it with some like really fun, creative output. So fill those notebooks. Do most of your thinking while you're walking. It's the best way to think anyways. And raise your ambitions about the type of things that you think about. ([Time 1:10:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a9994d35-f3d4-4443-bb50-50b9c04b8932)) - **Spectacle Prefigures Social Media** - Guy Debord's 'society of the spectacle' anticipates social media: relations mediated by images replace direct human relations. - This mediated spectacle helps commodify social life and aligns with harms of digital culture. Transcript: Cal Newport And this is like right before the postmoderns came in and were like, you guys are all nerds. Right. So this is kind of like the end of it. I'm not a Marxist expert, but like roughly the way I think about Marxist critical theory is it's when Marxists begin saying, we want to study not just like the economic stuff that Marx Wrote about, but the ways of these subtle things in society that are constructed implicitly to help reinforce or support or protect the economic stuff that Marx originally wrote about. So this is where it's just like, hey, these cultural artifacts, the culture around us is actually like a tool that helps keep the proletariat oppressed and the owners of capital, you Know, rich and whatever. Right. So critical theory was like, we're going to go beyond economic analysis to like cultural analysis. Right. And then the postmodernists came along and they were French and they were cool. And, um, and Foucault had a shaved head and they smoked and they were like, you all are nerds. Is for wimps you know your student you know whatever and they made the whole thing seem like you're all so self-serious and upset these little details and you guys wear berets you're All nerds and that was kind of like the end and that and you know we got reports from the soviet union that like oh actually socialism is not that great necessarily like they're saying Everyone the gulags those two things the post-moderns and social nation basically came together and that was kind of like the end of um the heyday of marxism so this is kind of at the heyday Uh so there's a lot of stuff in this book the part so the person who recommended it to me i think this was the part they had in mind um there's a part of this that i think is relevant to some of Our technological analysis today so i i like getting these type of smart analysis. It says DeBoer's idea of the spectacular society. I think it connects the social media culture. Let me read a quick summary. I'm taking this from Wikipedia of what he means by the spectacle society. The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people in which passive identification with the spectacle Supplants genuine activity the spectacle is not a collection of images the bohr writes rather it is a social relation among people mediated by images all right so that's of course how Like french marxist critical theorist wrote but like the idea here is he's talking about you have this sort of like um this new falsely this society that exists between it's like the Relationships between these over-the like images and commodities to relate to each other it's not actual society if humans interact with humans that's kind of the social media internet Age i mean he argues that that helps uh you know keep the capitalist imperatives in place and hoodwink the bourgeoisie to thinking that they're happy when they're really just allowing The proletariat to be stepped on. We can give other analyses for it, but I think there's something there. I think it's really interesting, right? Like society is mediated between it's like images and memes and ideas that are floating around is not people talking to people anymore. And I don't think now it's because of like some sort of capitalist imperative. I think it's, you know, there's a profit making imperative for these companies, but a lot of the harm it causes, I think like the harm caused by like the modern social media spectacle Society is not harm that's directed directly at it then loops back and helps the owners of those companies make more money. It just has a lot of harm as side effects. So like replacing a society with a special society is good for stockholders in those companies. But a lot of the harms that are created are just also just as like the side effects of doing that, of making life virtual and disembodied and digital. So I don't know, he was probably onto something. 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