Ep. Ep 381: Life Advice From Legendary Writers  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. Ep 381: Life Advice From Legendary Writers - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/830993f5-424d-40ef-af49-4553fd08d2b4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Value Emerges In The Edit** - Revising produces the real value because first drafts consume disproportionate cognitive resources. - Start with a draft then iteratively edit to discover richer possibilities in your life and work. Transcript: Cal Newport For those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'll put this up on the screen as well. All right, so here's Saunders. What makes you as a writer is what you do to any old text by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn't need to be good. It just needs to be so you can revise it. All right, so what's he talking about here? Well, the idea that he's picking up on is an idea for which we have some neuroscience backing, which is writing something from scratch that is filling in the blank page with words. It's cognitively demanding in a unique way. There's a lot of mental horsepower that gets summoned to accomplish this goal. You have to fire up a lot of your brain just to create the syntactically correct words that you're putting out there. Like the sentence itself has to make sense. You're also describing something from scratch. You have a lot of other horsepower trying to build from scratch in your mind, whether it's an abstract thing or like a vivid sort of realistic scene that you're writing about. You have to create this thing you're writing about from scratch. You have to hold it completely in your mind's eye. Then you have to put in a lot of work to build sentences around it that actually make sense as good English sentences. That uses a lot of your brain to do that. Now compare that to editing a sentence you already wrote. You have a lot more brain resources now to play with what you're doing. First of all, the words are already there in reasonable English. You don't have to have so much of your brain fired up just trying to make sure that words are matching properly with grammar and spelling, etc. Those brain resources are filled up. Also, when you read what you're writing, that's going to recreate in your mind the image to think about. You're not building it ex nihilo, but it's being captured in those words. Now you can play with it more freely, play with the idea, look at different aspects of it instead of trying to build it and hold it from scratch. So now you can think much more deeply about the ideas, and you can think much more deeply and carefully about the actual craft of your sentences. Which is to say it is in revising your words that the really good writing begins to emerge. And that's why Saunders is saying, look, my iterative method, and if you get into the details of the method, it's about editing passes. It says just get something down. It's going to be the worst version of whatever you do because you don't have enough brain resources to make the first thing good anyways. You need something down to edit because editing is where the actual interesting writing happens. That's a great piece of advice for writers. Now, how do we generalize this to our lives if we're not writers? Well, in life, it can be hard to figure out the right way to do things, pursue goals, to make progress, to express your values or find meaning. It can be hard to figure that out all in advance before you get started. To sit down and say, okay, I'm going to come up with a perfect plan of exactly what I should be doing with all my time for all my weeks for the next few years. It's just really hard to do from scratch. But if you make some preliminary decisions and start actually living, what happens is you begin to get feedback and knowledge. The thing that you were thinking about is happening and you're experiencing it. And now you can play with it. Well, what's working? What's not? What's the reality of this path once I'm actually on it? I don't have to conjure up and try to imagine the whole thing. I'm in it right now. And I can play with it. And I can see variations that would not have been obvious when I was starting, before I had started, before I knew about these nuances. I'm learning new information I might not have had before. I'm not playing with so much abstraction. I'm actually looking at options that are actually there in front of me. So your life is improved in the edit, often with much more nuance and impact than when you're trying to plan it in advance, just like it is trying to produce words. You make the best decision you can, you go for it, you reflect, you edit. You repeat that process you get a really good manuscript of your life. If you try to wait ([Time 0:02:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8c6aa240-6d39-4d0a-839d-c9a4ee0326f5)) - **Write And Edit A Living Lifestyle Vision** - Write a lifestyle vision describing your ideal life across major buckets and update it regularly. - Keep an insight journal recording what resonates and edit your vision from those notes. Transcript: Cal Newport So what should you do to cultivate a deep life based off of this Saunders advice? There's two things I want you to think about. One, I want you to have a lifestyle vision. And what I mean by that is that you have written down somewhere a description of the ideal lifestyle that you want to move towards. At least your best understanding of what this ideal lifestyle would be like at the moment. You can revise this as time goes down. Be careful not to get captured in the myopia here and just focus on one aspect of your life. All I'm thinking about is my job. All I'm thinking about is like some athletic accomplishment I want to do. Make sure you have it divided up in the buckets like I often talk about for different areas of your life and your vision touches on each of these buckets. You want to be describing in the first person sort of what this part of your life is like if you're in your ideal life. So now you have an ideal lifestyle vision to be working towards. You should check in on this vision weekly. You should give it a significant update at least once a year. I suggest doing that around your birthday. All right. The second part is how you edit this. So this is the sentence. The original sentence is the life you're trying to lead based off this lifestyle vision. You came up with the best you could. I think this is what I want in my life. As you go along and live this life, keep a journal, a very specific type of journal. I'm not talking about the, let me talk about my hopes and dreams or get into my psychopathy and what's going on in my life. That's all fine. But the type of journal I'm talking about here is one where you record what's resonating with you and what's not, both abstractly and concretely. So if you come across something that maybe you're not doing in your life, but you come across an example of it and you're like whoa that's really attractive to me i don't know why but something About the way like she's living or something that's really uh i i've seen her in a documentary this person that's really resonating write that down you come across something else my Friend's house and man the way they the way he lives uh it seems really hectic and the house is like huge but kind of empty and depressing. And I don't know, something about that doesn't resonate. Write that down. The same thing with what you're actually doing in your life. Like, hey, this project I'm working on is really stressing me out. Or I really liked, I did this little volunteer thing. I really liked having a place to go each week and meeting with people. So you're keeping track of what resonates and what doesn't resonate, both in terms of outside world stuff you encounter and in your own life. This then can become the grist to edit that lifestyle vision. Now, when you do these more serious check-ins on like the annual basis or maybe twice a year, you can look through those journals and begin adjusting this vision. You know, that wasn't so important. This is important. I was missing this. I want to put that in there. That is where you're editing the sentences of your life. ([Time 0:06:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4095a84f-9b19-4bd0-836a-603a9f77dea8)) - **Deep Work Comes From Turning Every Page** - Deep achievement requires turning every page: exhaustive, diligent work uncovers the real story. - Long-term focus plus deliberate practice produces exceptional results and new opportunities. Transcript: Cal Newport I can't remember how many times with that Johnson book and that incredible massive stuff at the Johnson Library, I felt like giving up. Not giving up the book, just saying, I've done enough. But then I would hear Alan saying to me, turn every page. I hear him saying, never assume a damn thing. I have that in my mind all the time. All right. So the Alan that Robert Caro is referring to here is Alan Hathaway, who was his editor at Newsday. So Caro's sort of first serious journalistic job was at Newsday. And Alan Hathaway taught him, hey, when you're trying to do research on something, don't just do enough research that you have a story that you like. Turn every page in that archive. It's when you turn every page, you read everything that's available, that you actually get at the truth of the matter. And in the end, the truth is going to be much more interesting and much more powerful than just that initial story you came across that you like. This is a classic piece of advice for research-based nonfiction writers. Now, this generalizes to our lives as well. One way to think about this is pursuits don't really get interesting, both in terms of their subjective experience and the opportunities they open to you, until you've really followed Them through to an impressive level of accomplishment. It's once you've symbolically turned every page that you really get to something that's special, something that is award caliber. And I think this applies to your life as well. Now, this requires two things. Once you get going, it requires diligence. You have to stick with something over a long period of time, which in turn requires you to say no to other things. I have the ability to stick with whatever this project is that I think is important to my life, whether it's professional or not for a long amount of time. It also requires deliberateness. It's not just enough to stick with something year after year after year. You have to keep thinking, what are the activities here that are going to help me make the most progress? What are the activities that actually matter, right? So for Caro as a writer, it was turning every page in that archive, whether you wanted to or not. That's the thing that actually matters, even though it's a huge pain. The same holds for almost any pursuit that you might go after in your professional or life. You might want to just tell yourself a story like, oh, I'm just going to do a little bit of work and it'll be fine. But the things that matter are the things that matter. If you want to become, you know, better at a sport, there's types of practicing you have to do to get better. If you want to get better at an instrument, it's the hard stuff, not just jamming on the songs you know, it's trying to push yourself on the songs that are a little bit too hard that make You better. So you've got to be deliberate. What really matters for the thing I'm doing? So I can't just stick with it. I have to be doing the right things. I think this is a great piece of life advice. The things that are going to define your life, the stuff that's going to be, you know, your equivalent of winning the National Book Award is going to require that you turn every page. You stick with it for a long amount of time. You do the work that actually matters. Now, I can translate this into some practical advice. So if you want to practice these type of efforts, and I think it's worth practicing before you're setting off on like a 10-year journey. If you want to practice these type of efforts, a good way to do that is with what I call a seasonal project. You come up with one project per season. I'm talking about the seasons, the weather seasons of the year. If it goes well, it can span multiple seasons. You set aside regular time each week to work on that project, and you have a training plan that's actually written down that says, here's what I'm going to do on this project this week, And here is why I think this is the right thing to do. Like, I talked to this person. This is what they said actually made a difference, or here is my experience trying this over the last few weeks. So you have to justify your actions. So what you get here is practice sticking with something over a longer amount of time. So at least a season. Putting regular time on it because you're going to put aside regular time for your single seasonal project. Regular time is on your calendar. You just these days, these times, that's just how I do it. I go to work late on Thursdays and Saturday morning, whatever it is. And you're deliberate because you have to have a training plan where you say, no, this is what I did this week on this project and why I did these particular things. You can't just do what feels good or you can't just, in carot terms, pursue the story you want to be true. You can actually find the story that actually is happening. Do this for a little while, a year, maybe two, you will begin to understand what it feels like to be both diligent and deliberate in the rewards that returns. You'll realize what it feels like to actually be doing the right thing time over time and not just doing something that's fun in the moment, how to stick with something past moments of Enthusiasm and have a deeper, longer-term motivation. Now you're ready to get involved in whether it's in your personal, professional life, those bigger projects, it's going to make a difference. So if you turn every page on something, that's eventually where the deep story actually emerges. ([Time 0:10:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a946731-915c-4a56-b644-7e154e58db5e)) - **Train Diligence With Seasonal Projects** - Practice diligence deliberately with seasonal projects that reserve weekly time and a written training plan. - Use these projects to learn how to stick with hard, important work over months. Transcript: Cal Newport So if you want to practice these type of efforts, and I think it's worth practicing before you're setting off on like a 10-year journey. If you want to practice these type of efforts, a good way to do that is with what I call a seasonal project. You come up with one project per season. I'm talking about the seasons, the weather seasons of the year. If it goes well, it can span multiple seasons. You set aside regular time each week to work on that project, and you have a training plan that's actually written down that says, here's what I'm going to do on this project this week, And here is why I think this is the right thing to do. Like, I talked to this person. This is what they said actually made a difference, or here is my experience trying this over the last few weeks. So you have to justify your actions. So what you get here is practice sticking with something over a longer amount of time. So at least a season. Putting regular time on it because you're going to put aside regular time for your single seasonal project. Regular time is on your calendar. You just these days, these times, that's just how I do it. I go to work late on Thursdays and Saturday morning, whatever it is. And you're deliberate because you have to have a training plan where you say, no, this is what I did this week on this project and why I did these particular things. You can't just do what feels good or you can't just, in carot terms, pursue the story you want to be true. You can actually find the story that actually is happening. Do this for a little while, a year, maybe two, you will begin to understand what it feels like to be both diligent and deliberate in the rewards that returns. You'll realize what it feels like to actually be doing the right thing time over time and not just doing something that's fun in the moment, how to stick with something past moments of Enthusiasm and have a deeper, longer-term motivation. ([Time 0:13:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/02a127e5-2b77-4c94-953e-75ac4b8ba4d8)) - **Vet Big Moves With Evidence-Based Planning** - Run major life decisions like a journalist: investigate, interview, and gather evidence before committing. - Use evidence-based planning to discard appealing but fragile ideas and find durable opportunities. Transcript: Cal Newport This is from an interview with the Neiman storyboard. Coming up with the right idea is the hardest part. I spend a preliminary period ruthlessly interrogating ideas as I come across them, even though it's time consuming and a bit frustrating. I don't want to wake up two years into a book project saying this isn't going anywhere. So I like this idea. He's saying, spend longer thinking about what you're going to write your book about, like find the perfect idea. Because you're going to be working on this for so many years. And if the idea is not quite right, you're not going to end up with a Leonardo DiCaprio starring Martin Scorsese movie. Like having the difference in impact between a great idea and a good one is exponential. It's worth taking the time to find the right idea. I didn't put this on the screen, but he actually, I thought it was interesting because I have the notes here. He went on in that interview to talk about three things he looks for when David Grant is evaluating an idea as a potential long-form article or book concept. So I want to go through these briefly. All right, so he says the first thing he looks for, you try to find a story that grips you and has subjects that are fascinating. Then you ask, are there underlying materials to tell that story? Once in a while, I come across a rich story, but the records are classified or nobody's alive and nobody left any records behind. The third level of interrogation is, does this story have another dimension, richer themes or trapdoors that lead you places? It should tell us something larger about the human condition, the mystery of existence, systems of injustice or power, the nature of truth. That's actually a pretty cool, I mean, just if we're going to geek out on writing stuff here that's a pretty cool checklist for evaluating an idea like the the idea grips you you're like Oh my god this is fascinating but don't stop there there's actual resources to pull from pages to turn so you can write a good story like for the his most recent book the wager which is about A shipwreck i don't know if it's 18th century where there's two sets of survivors who's who's finally and had two completely different stories. There was a ton of – because they had the survivors' tales, there was like a ton of records on what had happened, two different accounts of what had happened. Then they had all of the testimony from the Admiralty Court, so like all of the testimony and depositions after they got back. And then there's endless information about the, just the maritime trade and these ships and who these people were. And, and so he had a huge, he knew for that book, like, oh, it'd take me a few years, but I can learn about all of this. There's like a lot to pull from. And then his third idea was, yes, it should be a fascinating story. It should be fine information, but for it to really, you know, get the Martin Scorsese film option, it has to have that deeper layer. You're like, oh, there's a deeper layer here about – the wager I think was about the construction of truth and story and narrative. And then there was the – obviously the flower moon was about structures of power and injustice and justice and those notions of that and what that meant in our country. And that's what brings it to the next level. It's hard to find an idea that has all three. Probably the time block planner movie fell down on that third piece. There wasn't it was probably missing like the deeper observations about structures of power. That's why we were we were ached out. I thought that was really cool just to geek out. It's really hard to find an idea that satisfies all three of those things. But that's what David's looking for. If it takes some years to takes some years. All right. Let us now generalize this. In your own life, use what I'm going to call evidence-based planning. I'm kind of combining the generalization of the advice here, but let me tell you what I mean. We often jump at an idea for something to do, a project to pursue, a job to switch to, a move to make. We jump at these ideas because there's on the surface like that's exciting. And I like that feeling of excitement. Let's roll. An idea that can sustain multiple years of working on that project. So you really want to run an idea through the ringer before you actually use it as the foundation of making major changes in your life. And that's where this thing I call evidence-based planning comes in. This is a concept that comes out of lifestyle-centric planning. Evidence-based planning, so this is kind of my concrete advice here, but evidence-based planning is where you get to the bottom about how whatever world or decision you want to make, How it actually works. You talk to people, you read things. Why do some people succeed with this or some people fail? What's the reality of this place I want to move to? What's the reality of this job? What would the economics be of this? What type of people are they hiring for this? If I move there, how much do the houses actually cost? What are the schools like? Does this job, is it likely to have like a remote element? Is it nice to work remotely? Can I talk to someone who's in that situation? You gather evidence about the thing that you're thinking about doing. Because if you don't, you might just be stuck on a story that caught your attention today, but two years from now, you're going to say, I can't believe I'm still writing this book. I'm stuck on it. So evidence-based planning makes a big deal. So how do we make that concrete? Treat your major life decisions like you're a journalist. You're David Grand trying to do research on this idea. I want to talk to everyone involved, read everything I can, find people who did this, maybe people who tried this and failed at it. Like what is really going on here? And if after all of that, you're even more excited, like, wow, this is even better than I thought, but now I know exactly how to navigate and what to expect. And I'm excited about it. Then you're going to be much more likely to stick with that decision and get good rewards. And if you have to throw out the idea, that's okay. You just saved yourself a problem. That's not a bad thing. You've just saved yourself from something, an obstacle. You saved yourself from wasted time. And it can be frustrating because evidence-based planning might lead you to throw out a bunch of things that are exciting in the moment. You might feel like, man, I'm such a killjoy. I'm always sort of like, is that really going to work? What about this? What about that? I should take more risks. But it gets you to those eventually to the ideas that become the blockbuster. And it's the blockbusters in your life that really in the end make the difference. So I'm a big fan of deploying something like, you got to deploy something like evidence-based planning. ([Time 0:17:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/690801bc-a2bf-4c2e-8a76-032e96afa1ef)) - **Autopilot Your Calendar For Big Work** - Put important work on repeat: same time, same place, same ritual to protect it from scheduling creep. - Use autopilot scheduling so the work happens without decision friction or constant negotiation. Transcript: Cal Newport I up, I eat breakfast. I walk about three and a half miles. I come back. I go out to my little office where I've got a manuscript and the last page that I was happy with is on top. I read that and it's like getting on a taxiway. I don't spend the day writing. I'll write, I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what i like and then turn it off it's a cool article jesse because it gets into his Hq because a reporter shows up and like the cool thing about it is king has like security concerns and he's just so famous and um whatever like he has to not have an easily identifiable Place he lives or works so it's a really nondescript office building he like owns an office building a nondescript office building in like a nondescript part of bing or main that you Go into this building which they say looks like dunder mifflin and it's like all this king memorabilia and things from his movies and his Gothic Victoria. Like he's like, there's really cool space for him and his staff are, but he couldn't put it in a cool place because otherwise people just start showing up. That's why, that's why we're above a restaurant because otherwise people knew where we were, Jesse. The problem that me and granny both have, people are always trying to chase us down. Leo is always like, I want to know about your latest book. Maybe we'll do a movie about it. I'm like, Leo, man, chill. Chill, okay? You got to do a podcast about schedule productivity. I don't have time to talk about your movie ideas. But I thought that was cool. So I liked that piece. All right. So what was King talking about here? The question that he was answering is like what's your schedule as a writer writing is hard waiting for the muse or be like hey i'm going to get some writing at some point today when i feel Up for it like that's amateur hour the real the writers who write a lot like king and king he writes a lot he's definitely a high volume writer they do the same thing every day some days are Better than others but that's what adds up over a lifetime to a lot of books. Have your schedule, put aside the time for things to matter, do that time, have a ritual around it. You can have a taxiway as he talks about it for your mind to get into the mode and then do the work. Well, you can imagine this is something I'm happy to generalize. Make regular time for the things that matter most in your life. Whatever your equivalent is of working on book manuscripts. Don't wait for having a lot of free time or feeling inspired for it. Put it on your calendar. Have a ritual surrounding it and just do it on a regular basis, even if inconvenient, even if it doesn't always go well, and even if sometimes nothing of interest is produced. That is how you make progress on hard things that require a lot of time. If we're going to make this concrete, the particular tactic I want to talk about is autopilot scheduling. This is where you actually have the same time, same place, same day for certain activities, and they're on your calendar in repeat for weeks, weeks, weeks into the future. So that time is protected. Nothing gets scheduled there. If you went into the day and say, I really want to prioritize my big project, that day might already be fractured too much for you to make progress. But if 10 to 12 for the next six months on Tuesday is put aside for like I work from home and then I go to this library and that's where I work on whatever the thing is, the new skill you're learning Or whatever, it doesn't get taken up because you protected that when you're making meetings or appointments. That time hasn't been available and you have a routine. You do it week after week. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to burn mental energy or convince yourself that actually gets done. You got to autopilot to schedule the stuff that you know you have to do or the stuff you know you really want to do on a regular basis. That is the absolute best way to make progress on it. ([Time 0:25:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29cc4216-1841-44f1-94b7-f94ffa776e65)) - **Protect Deep Blocks From Context Shifts** - Avoid context shifts during cognitively demanding work; treat deep blocks like dentist appointments. - Use a timer and keep your phone out of reach to prevent the attention-costly shifts. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, let me load this up here. Here's what I said. The critical mindset shift is understanding that even minor context shifts are productivity poison. When you looked at an email inbox for 15 seconds, you initiated a cascade of cognitive changes. So if you have to work on something that's cognitively demanding, the rules has to be zero context shifts during that period. Treat it like a dentist appointment. You can't check your email when you're having a cavity filled. You have to see it that way. All right, so that's kind of about writing. It's kind of about life outside of writing all at the same time, but here's the generalized point I'm making when doing something important to you, professional or personal. It's like having a conversation with someone on the phone, watching something meaningful, or you're like doing something professional. I'm coming up with a business strategy. I'm writing like a really important memo. You have to remember that the absolute poison that you need to avoid is context shifts. This is what we get wrong about productivity in the digital age. It's what we get wrong about efficiency in the digital age. We're used to productivity being about producing things faster. What's going to make me move faster? Because when I was building Model Ts, the way I got the productivity ratio, cars produced per input put in, the way I increased that ratio was moving faster. I had a faster, more efficient way of putting things together. So we think that's what productivity means. But in the digital age, that is not our problem. Our problem is not that we move too slow and that we need to find ways to move faster. The problem is, is then the digital age, the things we're creating, we're creating with our brain. And our brain is a really fickle thing to work with. If you change the context, even briefly, you show it a brief distraction, you look at an email inbox for 15 seconds to check for a message, you just go to see what's going on on social media Real quick. The brain goes haywire. It initiates a context shift. This is an expensive cognitive operation. And before this shift is complete, you try to come back to the thing you're doing. So it tries to abort that shift. But before you can fully lock into what you're doing, you check something else. It's a cognitive disaster. Your cognitive capacity is reduced. You're exhausted. The stuff you produce isn't, you actually end up producing is not very good. It would be like if in a factory, we discovered like the way the human body worked was like, let's say you're like moving a wrench. Like let's say the way our human body happened to work is that if you turned your head too far, your arm strength disappeared for 10 minutes. Like you have a hard time holding a wrench. Let's just say that was true. We would keep that in mind when designing factories. Like, okay, let's be careful. Let's not build our factory in such a way that the workers keep having to turn their head because they're going to lose their arm strength and they're going to have to wait for a while until They can really speed up again and get the steering wheels back on. Well, this is what's happening cognitively speaking in knowledge work in a digital age context shifting takes all the proverbial arm strength out our ability to concentrate really Dies down but instead of protecting ourselves from this we make it even worse we've added even faster more ready forms of context shifting and distraction so that's that's what productivity In the digital age. Avoiding context shifts, not trying to go faster. Avoiding context shifts. In fact, I've talked about this in multiple books of mine. I will take on significantly more cumbersome processes, slower, more structured processes that are a pain the moment. I'll take on a huge amount of hardship if it saves me from context shifts. That's the productivity poison. So that's the advice I want to give here at a high level is you need to think about context shifting as the thing you want to avoid to be productive, not getting faster. Now, if we want to get more concrete, you know, read deep work, read a world without email, read slow productivity. These books of mine get into it. But I'll give you two. I will give you two concrete ideas you can do just to sort of get more used to thinking about that. In the world of work, if you're working on something deeply, you should have a set rule for what happens in deep work blocks. How long do I want to go? And my rule is no context shifting. Start a timer. Put the timer on your phone. Let me tell you why. Because now your phone is, yeah, it's in front of you, but it's full screen timer. That's the purpose is it has a timer on it. And the way you're going to run this process is that if you context shift, that means looking at anything that's not the work you're doing. So email, Slack, your text message on your phone, social media, YouTube. You have to start and restart that. Stop the timer. Okay, here's how far I got. And then you have to restart it again. I only got seven minutes. I only got 15 minutes. So now your phone, which will be one of the biggest sources of context shifting, is pre-mocking you. You see that number on your – that's what's on your phone is seven minutes. Like the timer's going. And so that to look at something else on your phone, you have to swipe that time to the side. Like, you know, exactly. Oh my God, I'm, I only made it seven minutes. Like you have to confront what you're doing. So I think have your phone with a timer full screen. That's what you're timing. And be like, I want to get an hour, I want to do a half hour, whatever it is. And like, Hey, if I contact shift, I'm going to restart. At home, the answer is really simple. You got to plug your phone in the kitchen. Just plug it in the charge. If you need it, go to the kitchen. It's not with you while you do other things. It's not with you while you're watching TV. It's not with you at the dinner table. It's not with you when you're reading, when you're doing other things, you actually have to do those things. There is no easy distraction to turn towards. You'll lose a lot of your taste for the context shifting. This really has to do with your short-term motivation systems, what's happening in your brain. Don't worry about the neurological details. Keep your phone plugged in the kitchen when you're at home. ([Time 0:34:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5cadd193-44dc-405a-828b-43d3e6913bee)) - **Manage Energy Alongside Time** - Manage energy as well as time: schedule demanding tasks when energy is high and restore energy with sleep, exercise, and diet. - Match task importance to your energy level to produce better cognitive work. Transcript: Cal Newport Like that book a lot. I remember that book from the 90s, The Power of Full Engagement. And that was the idea. We talk about time management, but not energy management. But if you're careful about increasing your energy and then matching your energy to the things you want to produce, you're going to get a lot more out of your business. So it's a really smart idea. These are the type of books I came up on in like the 90s when I was reading all these business books as a teenage entrepreneur. They really influenced the way I write today. I think it was probably for the good. It's a style of book that's not as, maybe it's not as popular as it once was. It really was big in the eighties or nineties books that are just like, Hey, here's an idea. You, I mean, you see this so much in my writing. Here is an idea for like organizing a part of your life or doing this type of work or organizing your tasks or trying to maximize like what you get out of your day. I'm just going to walk through it. It's like a concrete idea. We get this wrong and we talk about it. There's, we, we have like steps to it and matrices. It was just like this sort of business pragmatic nonfiction was like a really big thing because people are like, yeah, I want to, it's hard to be in business and I want to know how to do better. These books are a little bit less common now, but it's definitely like my writing is basically a mixture of like Jim Lerner and Tony Schwartz style writing with like New Yorker writing. And I just put those two things together. So they were both very influential. So I liked the power pole engagement. I met Tony Schwartz actually back in, I got it. Would have been like 2015. I did an event at Lincoln Center. 99 new conference. And I was speaking at one of the stages at Lincoln Center about so good. They can't ignore you. And I remember it because like I was backstage was me and Brene Brown and so we were like yeah that was that event well it was a cool event and I might be mixing events up I think that was an Event I met Gretchen Rubin was there and we were hanging out and I met Tony Schwartz there interesting guy I think he co-wrote one of like Donald Trump's books, like the art of the deal Type books or whatever. And then he like during the first Donald Trump election, like came out against him and it was like a big controversy at the time or something. So I don't know. Tony Schwartz, interesting guy. I like powerful engagement. I'm a big believer in energy management. This is an idea. Maybe we should do a deep dive on this book at some point. It's an idea that really should come back. It's a really smart one. Low energy, you can't do much work, so it matters. So do important stuff when you have high energy, less important stuff when you have low energy, but also manage your energy itself with diet and exercise and sleep. ([Time 0:45:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf51c347-793d-47e1-997f-7e7a643554c2)) - **Channel Antsy Energy Into Autonomous Projects** - If you feel antsy when idle, fill time with autonomous, intrinsically motivated, flexible projects. - Prioritize self-chosen action to avoid burnout from externally imposed, deadline-driven activity. Transcript: Cal Newport Action. I think it's absolutely fine. And if anything helps off anxiety for a lot of people. The sort of sit still, like let me just like have an empty evening, go for a slow walk or take a bath. Like some people, it makes them really anxious and activity makes them feel better. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think this is really a personality type. I know people that have to constantly be working on projects and other people who really would like to minimize work altogether. Like they're like, I want to just sit and enjoy the sun in the afternoon and listen to a ball game. And like, I don't want to do things. And there's people that are in between. So there's nothing wrong with the bias towards action. As long as here's the caveat. If all of that action is imposed from outside, it's extrinsic, it's inflexible, and it's deadline-driven, then you're going to burn out and be stressed. Like that's just the people who have like the really hard jobs that have to work 100 hours a week. They have a lot of action. They're also burnt out. What you need if you have an action bias is a lot of action that is autonomous and flexible. You're choosing to work on it because intrinsically it's interesting to you, but it's also flexible. Like if you don't do it today or you're feeling sick and you're like, I'm just going to cut this short, nothing happens. It's just you choosing to work on these projects and you make progress as you can. And you're not stressed out if something you can't make progress on for a while. That works really well for action oriented people. Intrinsic, autonomous, flexible action. Then fill your time with as much action as you want. That's not going to stress you out because you don't have deadlines. You're not falling behind. You don't have a sense of being forced to do something you don't want to do. So I like it. I do have an action bias, but I don't have an extreme one. ([Time 0:48:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a37c1f72-442f-4c39-86df-3e7b0ca7ef6f)) - **Use Dual-Use Platforms Intentionally** - Use Reddit and YouTube as reference libraries, not as TV: search with intention rather than follow recommendations aimlessly. - Reserve those platforms for targeted queries or appointment viewing to avoid attention traps. Transcript: Cal Newport I think reddit it falls into a category of multiple other online information sources in today's day-to where on the one hand it is true that the information source has a lot of good information In it it's there's a lot of people who are contributing information or if it's a maybe has really good creative uh output like reddit will be an example of a place like there's a lot of really Good information like people talking about stuff they know about and on youtube is other example there's like a lot really good creative you know output right there's there on there, But you can also see really interesting, cool stuff as well. At the same time, it's also true of these services. They have attention traps. They can put you in addictive loops. They can give you that consistent purity signal, reward signal that overwhelms your short-term motivation system. And now you just turn to it for numbing or distraction. It's just if I just get lost in Reddit, there'll be debates and arguments and they're suggesting new things to look at. What about this argument over here? And you go read that and next thing you know, you've been on it for hours. YouTube, of course, is the same way. You go down those auto recommendations and God knows where you show up. For those type of information sources, I always say like you need to use them like you would use a reference library and not like you would use your television. So if you use them as I am bored or uncomfortable or feeling strained and looking for numbing or distraction, let me just go and see what I find. You're exposing yourself to the attention traps. If instead you say, I am looking for this particular thing, let me go see if I can find it on here. You're extracting the valuable information. So like, oh, I want to know more about – I'll give a concrete example where Reddit was useful to me. This was back when I was writing my book, World Without Email. I was looking for a good concrete example about the arrival of email. What was it like when email arrived at companies in the 80s and 90s? I mean, I had done a lot of archival research about the business journalism about email and how it was being written about, but I was like, what was it like in the companies? And I was just searching around Reddit on Google searches. And I found like a great Reddit thread where like an engineer from IBM was like, let me tell you, like someone asked that question. He's like, let me tell you I was involved and let me tell you the story and then i kind of tracked him down it was and it was really useful that's good reddit bad reddit would be if i then was Like let me just stick around and now see people just like fighting about you know um email blame wars and usenet and people getting like whatever like nonsense that's like not really Relevant to what i was trying to do. YouTube is the same way. If you want to look something up, it's like a great resource library. Also, if there's like a particular show you like, they say, yeah, I know that show comes out on Mondays and I, I'm going to watch the video on YouTube of it. That's actually, that's fine as well. You're like, look, I'm a big fan of like Mark Rober science videos, or I'm a maker and I like the wicked makers channel or something like this. And they have a new video out. I'll go and set it up and watch it on my TV. Like that's fine as well. But if you're just sitting there on your iPad, following the recommendation, uh, you're following the recommendations and you end up in some sort of like weird corner or something Like completely unusual or weird or mean is happening. That's a bad use. So that's the way I think about those type of dual-use platforms. For appointment viewing or looking things up, they're great. For distraction or numbing, danger will Robinson. So don't use them for your distraction or numbing. Have higher quality things that you use for distraction or numbing and use those that have the attention traps just for looking things up or appointment viewing. ([Time 0:51:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06ea2aa7-d2d2-4a5d-8277-450bb5f5b489)) - **Mix Purposeful And Joyful Reading** - Combine Lincoln-style purpose-driven reading with joyful, escapist reading across seasons. - Let the ratio shift depending on energy and life stage to keep reading both sharpening and renewing you. Transcript: Cal Newport These are two related but not completely the same type of purposes. The Lincoln Protocol is to seek out books that are going to make your life better and that you maybe have to stretch to to understand or build up to being able to consume and that's like An important uh way to self-improve and it also makes your mind very sharp not all your reading should be you know trying to pour over euclid like lincoln did to try to learn geometry you Should also have reading you do for fun, and you do both. I just like this. It's elegiac. It's fun. It's an escape, or it's just really interesting. And also, I'm working on something over here that is hard and pointed towards a particular purpose. Do both those things. And you know what? That ratio can change depending on the season of life and your energy. ([Time 0:55:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5bf46e0-2710-4d1e-b750-fac36e6ba306)) - **Podcasts Are Targeted Entertainment, Not Deliberate Practice** - Active, focused podcast listening is high-quality entertainment but not a substitute for deliberate skill practice. - Treat podcasts as targeted learning-adjacent media, not primary means to master a professional skill. Transcript: Cal Newport I don't think it's a pure distraction i don't think it's productivity i think it's entertainment you know what i mean by that is it's like any other source of entertainment watching A tv show or listening to a radio show uh it's something that's interesting to you and some of the stuff might be kind of dumb and some of it might be kind of smart but it's not it's not i'm Not being productive i'm not trying to like master if i really want to like learn a new skill that's important for my job, I should actually learn that skill and get direct to practice And do deliberate practice. So think of it as an entertainment, but it's a good source of entertainment because you can focus it and target it, right? Unlike TV or radio, you could find shows about exactly what you are interested in. Like my kids and I were getting excited about going to a, one of our local theme parks. There's, I do what podcasts where all they do is review theme parks. Oh, there's a great one. Jesse, I hadn't heard this format before. Um, and I feel bad because I forgot what it was called, but it was a travel log format. So he would go to an amusement park and take audio and then he would edit it and narrate it. And it would be like, he would hear the audio in the background. It's like, and then I went to like the such and such ride line was not that bad. I talked to someone in the, then when I clicked in it to the, the turns let it out. He's just kind of like narrating. And then I got this food and it was actually pretty good. He's narrating his day with audio clips in it. And it's like super interesting, relaxing aspiration. Speaker 2 Like, man i just kind of want to be at the park with this guy uh new yorker does similar stuff with their podcast i just listened to that one darkness in the darkness with a um she did the research Cal Newport Of that crime yeah my wife was talking about this yeah i like that that's a cool but so here's what i thought was cool about that format is it's a great format but in like true crime you have To do a lot of work because you have to like actually have a crime that you're investigating this guy was just like traveling and but it ran into the travel channel like yeah it's like any Show that's popular travel channel but like on this very particular thing i happen to care about that moment and there's shows like that for like anything that you're interested in And there's probably like good shows on it as well. So it's like hyper-targeted cable TV. That's the way I think about podcasts. And you're like, oh, this is good. I have a good source of, there's not a TV, I'm not watching a lot of TV shows, but I have podcasts. Like it's a higher quality source of entertainment. So it's not about productivity, but it's not like mindless distraction either. So I'm a fan of it. ([Time 0:57:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/985e3ca2-2968-4dff-acb3-ccc937c65a62)) - **Project Manager Reclaimed Focus By Cutting Screens** - Owen reduced screen time from nine hours to 1.5 and regained focus through disciplined habits and planning. - Managers noticed improved work quality even when colleagues pushed back on delayed email responses. Transcript: Cal Newport Today's case study comes from Owen. Owen writes the following. In 2024, I received some hard-hitting feedback where I almost lost my job as a project manager. I could barely focus for 15 minutes at a time, and I wasn't making progress on my projects. I was behind schedule and way over budget. My problem was that I stayed up late every night scrolling social media. I came across your YouTube video, How to Reinvent Your Life in Four Months. I started with discipline in the fall of 2024. I prayed, set my bedtime alarm, and connected with friends and family every day that I tracked those core habits. I wrote out my lifestyle-centric career plan. I implemented multi-scale planning. I started a values document. These adjustments helped decrease my daily screen time from 9 hours to 1.5 hours per day. This past March, I decided to let these new systems run for a bit. I really like Cal's advice. Run the systems for a while, take note, and then start from the beginning again. So it's November 2025, and it's time for me to start back at discipline. I read Slow Productivity over the summer, and I started implementing the ideas. I got pushback on not opening emails immediately. I got pushback on muting my team's notifications. However, all this pushback came from colleagues at the same level. My bosses and managers didn't notice. In fact, they just commented on the improvement in my work. My systems and habits provide rigor and efficient structure to my professional endeavors. These systems allow me to use my time efficiently and lift the cognitive load. But most importantly, my systems continue work, confined work to designated times and locations. My work shutdown routine ensures that I can confidently put work aside. I have many pursuits outside of work that energize me on a weekly basis. Oh, and I love that case study. It both shows the problem of living a fully distracted life. It will just keep pulling more and more from you until like, oh, and you're up all night long scrolling social media. Like you're literally toiling for free in the attention factories of Mark Zuckerberg, right? So he can buy the other half of Kauai while your main job is suffering. Like, look, you can barely focus. So the danger of living with uncontrolled distractions there in the story, but also we see some realities about fixing in that video reinvent your life one of the things i talked about Is like let's go in order like discipline and organization uh i had a few things i said start with some simple habits in each just to signal to yourself that you take those seriously and Then rotate through and keep working on those parts of your life there's sort of a rotation to that well look at the difference it made in Owen. It slowly, if you focus on the right areas, start small but are continuously going through them and improving slowly over time, real change can happen. The other thing that happened here is you put into place the type of ideas I talked about in slow productivity. And his boss is like, wow, your work's better. Because ultimately that's what matters to the people who are in charge of your job is how good is the work you're doing. To your colleagues, it might be, make my life easier by answering my email, make my life easier by being on teams all the time. But for your bosses, for your customers, for your clients, the value of what you do matters. And taking your time, doing things well, obsessing over quality, spending more time on each thing you do, not doing too much things at once, those principles of slow productivity, It produces better work over time. It produces more work over time because you have less of the overhead tax eaten away at your schedule. It's a great example of the type of things I talk about. The motivation for my work is the digital age is eating us alive, and we don't even realize why. We weren't ready for it. But there are ways, if we're systematic and careful, that we can push back against that erosion and still build successful lives that are meaningful and not overwhelmed. Again, I hate to harp on this, but it's why I hate this straw man that any talk about systems and organization or improvement is somehow like hustle culture or productivity culture, Or it's coded as like online bros or something like that. Not about hustling. Not about how do I produce more and crush it or whatever. It's about surviving our current digital moment that's eroding all the things that makes life meaningful and we didn't even realize it's happening until it's too late. It's about thriving as a human. It's incredibly humanistic what I talk about in an age that's increasingly anti-human and digital. So there we go. Oh, great case study. ([Time 1:02:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93f22e7f-2b27-4a9e-a6be-197ee9b08a28)) - **Pretraining Teaches; Tuning Narrows Behavior** - Most learning in LLMs happens in large-scale pre-training; RL tuning mainly sculpts output behavior. - Tuning constrains and focuses pre-trained capacities rather than enabling the model to actively experiment or learn online. Transcript: Cal Newport Let me tell you the way I think about reinforcement learning. That's what he means by RL. Let me tell you the way I think about reinforcement-based tuning. And it's a bit of a simplification, but to me it kind of gets at the core of what's going on here. During pre-training, which is that really long period of time where you use real text and you knock out the words and the model tries to guess the word and then you do gradient descent To adjust its weights that make its output be a little bit closer so this is where you keep doing this until the average loss on the token guessing game testing set is uh practical this Is where you run this for days and days and these giant data centers with 50,000 or 100,000 GPUs, that's where you're optimizing it to produce guest tokens. If I give you real text with a word knocked out, you do a pretty good job of guessing what that word is, right? That's this massive pre-training. This was, by the way, the thing that was making these, this is my New Yorker piece from August. The thing that was making language models more capable over the last few years until more recently was they made them larger and they pre-trained them longer. And so for a while, we had this sort of scaling effect that as you made language models bigger and you trained them longer and on more data, they seem more generally capable on all sorts Of different things. And what that article was about in August is that those scaling benefits actually really started to die off about a year ago. And now just purely making it bigger and pre-training longer is not making the models better. There's actually like a big figure from OpenAI's past, Ilya S., because I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't have his last name handy. He actually came out recently, Jesse, and said, yeah, the age of scaling is over. He had this kind of nice quote where he's like, we had this long period of research and then a five-year period, 2020, 2025, which is about scaling. Now we're back to a period of research because scaling is not giving us any more rewards. So what did they do once just making the networks bigger and training them longer didn't make them more capable? They turned to tuning, which happened after all the pre-training is over. Without getting too much in the details because there's different ways to do this, the one way to think about the more common types of tuning is that you have prompts and correct answers To that prompt here's a question and here's a correct answer that's very different than how pre-training works where you're just it's unsupervised you're just guessing a missing Word and you know what that word is so i guess that word is the correct answer but in tuning you might have a math problem and you might have like a detailed proof as like, the correct answer. Or you might have a question about building a bomb, and the correct answer you paired with that is I'm not allowed to talk about that. You load that prompt into the language model and it's activating all of the relevant sort of circuits and attention and pattern recognizers that are sort of parsing and figuring out What is this question and what are the types of things we could say next and then you use the correct answer at that point in a reinforcement learning based algorithms to sort of zap those Final logics and please don't yell at me ai people this is just simplifying but to kind of zap those final logics that help you select among the right words to come next once you've identified Like what type of answer that should be given here to uh really so let's reinforce the logics that are closer to this particular right answer now if you do that uh it's like so you're not Teaching it how to understand you're not teaching it in tuning you're not making it smarter in some sense right you're not it's not in this phase it's not the type of training where it's Like learning whole new concepts or it's learning to recognize things i couldn't recognize before what you're doing in tuning is saying like okay you have all this pre-training that Was very expensive to recognize and understand you know what you're doing you know this is like a joke and that you're at the punchline and that the punch line has to refer back to this Thing that was a cat like all the pre-training has all these circuits like lined up and then if you come back in and you're reinforcement learning with like i don't do cat joke answers You're then going to have like these final wires at the end of all these layers when all these other things are activated really push it towards whatever token is next and saying like I don't do cat jokes and if you do that reinforcement learning on enough examples you're kind of like brute force training it. Hey, whenever you find yourself with a cat joke again, just say, I don't find, I don't like cat jokes. Right. Um, so it's, it's like a final layer of tuning. Uh, so you're, you're, you're being more precise about how it should use the smarts that it learned in pre-training. That's roughly how I think about the different forms of reinforcement learning and the impacts they have. No, so this is not, I really don't think about this here as a language model experimenting to figure out more about the world. I think about this more like a trainer coming in, like in a dog training example and shocking the dog to prevent them from doing certain things. Or like, you better always go and chase after the lure when it's thrown, because when you don't, like I, like I hit you with a training crop, it's like more of that type of thing. So it's not a language model. Like it's out there like learning and trying to understand how different things do. It is having its behavior curtailed, pushed down particular avenues and shutting off other avenues. We don't want you going this way, go this type of way. This is what a lot of the reasoning reinforcement learning was about. It was give answers that have lots of steps in it as opposed to just giving an answer. So it shuts down the circuits that one of its opportunities and all the different ways that might answer a question. There's ways where it might answer briefly with like yeah the answer is seven like don't let's turn down the weights on those types of circuits and turn up the weights on the circuits You already had that like you're going to show your work and so it's all about aiming the way these things behave towards the end and that's that's really simplification but to me that Again i don't see this as um running experiments to learn more about the world. The learning really happens in pre-training. The reinforcement learning is more about now constraining and focusing what you want to do with those smarts it already has. ([Time 1:13:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76aa175a-6817-4eaa-9bfb-ad9ec522de32)) - **Architecture Limits Claims Of LLM Consciousness** - Cal argues LLMs lack the dynamic, interconnected architecture thought necessary for emergent consciousness. - Static, feed-forward deployment with no continuous drives, world model, or online learning makes consciousness unlikely architecturally. Transcript: Cal Newport My argument about language models is it doesn't have nearly enough of those things. I mean, nothing in the language model is dynamic. It is static. It is statically deployed. It's not even deployed on a single machine. How can you talk about interconnection? They're too big to fit in the memory model of a particular GPU. So now you have precast weights for different layers spread out over all sorts of different GPUs, which are just running through multiplications for multiple different queries on Those layers for multiple different queries at the same time, and then eventually passing those numbers back around. They're integrated different. There is no even, there is no even like hole. You can't even point to like, this is where the computation is happening for this word that was just generated. But more importantly, it's static. There's no state that upstates. There's no world model. There's no drives. There's no actuation or reaction. There's no online learning. So my argument about LLMs not being conscious is a purely architectural argument that's engaging specifically with the architecture of LLMs, which are static feed forward on changing. You've got to have a lot more things that are dynamic and deeply interconnected before you have a chance of the subjective experience of consciousness arising. We don't know where that happens, but almost no one would say a static table of numbers that are divided among a couple hundred GPUs are dealing with a lot of things at the same time, that This somehow has any sort of notion of emergent consciousness. If that does, like everything does, every data center does, Google does, every distributed system does, my phone does, right? Like that's too loose of a definition. So I have a very particular functionalist, architecture-based argument for consciousness here. ([Time 1:22:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/be5f6eca-a109-49e7-b04b-f9824fdcd89d))