IN-DEPTH: Greatness on Trial (w/ Brad Stulberg and Clay Skipper)

In this episode of IN-DEPTH, Cal is joined by the writers Brad Stulberg and Clay Skipper to talk about the topic of “greatness.” They attempt to pick apart the weird moment we are in where, on the one hand, we feel aversion to performative demonstrations of “pseudo-greatness” (think: Elon Musk on-stage with his chainsaw) but on the other, still admire useful skill and seek it in our own lives. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia INTERVIEW: Greatness on Trial (w/ Brad Stulberg and Clay Skipper) Links:https://www.landroverusa.comhttps://www.calnewport.com/slow Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the theme music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport, and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series where I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. Today's episode is presented by Defender, a vehicle designed for those of us seeking adventure in a distracted world. And we're trying something different today. For the first time, I am having two guests at the same time. The first is longtime friend of the show, writer Brad Stulberg. He's a co-founder of The Growth Equation and the author of Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change. I'll also be joined by Clay Skipper, longtime writer for GQ, who has interviewed me actually

• 0:53Cal Newport?

  multiple times for that magazine, but is also the host of the Farewell podcast, which is produced by The Growth Equation. All right, so why are the three of us talking? Well, the other day, Brad texted us on a group chat, a New York Times op-ed, this was from last week, and it was titled, "Elon Musk is the World's Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor?" This is written by Eric Baker. Now, this op-ed was adapted from Baker's book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. And in this piece, Baker takes, you could think of it as a critical stance

• 1:33Cal Newport?

  on the constructed idea of greatness. Core to Baker's book is this notion that, sort of, post-war, we had a notion of industriousness as an ideal for labor in the American context, that you work hard and do your job well, and that this evolved over time to a culture of entrepreneurialism.

• 1:55Cal Newport?

  Where it was much more important that you pursued greatness. You became a sort of self-created mogul, that there is more of this pressure on you to do something really noteworthy with your professional lives. And from a sort of typical, critical standpoint, Baker talks about how there's a constructed nature to entrepreneurialism that helps, for example, paper over certain issues in the economy or certain precariousness about the way that a post-industrial economy has evolved and that as long as we have this myth of entrepreneurialism, we'll all put up with this difficulty because we say, yeah, that might be true, but I'm going to be the next Bill Gates, I'm going to be the next Elon Musk, so I don't worry about it. So the article had a bit of a critical take on greatness, and we were debating this in

• 2:38Cal Newport?

  the text thread because we also have issues with some of the way greatness is discussed as a topic. We also, however, think the pursuit of mastery and craft and quality is something that obviously goes through a lot of my writing, a lot of Brad's writing, goes in a lot of Clay's interviews. And we were trying to make sense of this conflicted relationship we had with greatness. And it occurred to me, this topic is perfect for those of us who are thinking about the broader idea of cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So Brad was like, maybe we should just record this. I said, yes, we jumped on to a bunch of microphones and we recorded this conversation. I think it's really interesting. We get at a lot of points and I think that you will enjoy it.

• 3:21Cal Newport?

  But first, I wanted to say a word about today's presenting sponsor, Defender, which is allowing us to present the discussion that follows in its entirety without any interruption. The iconic Defender line of vehicles has been reimagined for a new generation of explorers. The Defender 9110 and 130, which can seat up to eight passengers, all maintained a legendary off-road capability for which Defender is known, but is now combined with new on-road capabilities that gives you a modern, luxurious ride. Aesthetically, they feature compelling proportions and precise detailing, but these are combined with a tough, rigid body design that makes them so famously durable. Funny story, the other day, I was recording here in the studio with Jesse and we did

• 4:06Cal Newport?

  a Defender ad read and then I walked downstairs and parked right outside of the Deep Work HQ was a white Defender. And so I texted a picture and I sent it to Jesse and I wrote something about it, but the picture sent.

• 4:23Cal Newport?

  But not the text I wrote about. So Jesse, just I walked downstairs and texted him a picture of a Defender right outside the studio. And he texted back, basically, oh, I'm surprised they got you, uh, got you your car so quick. After doing the ad read, I wish it's a good looking car, but it was just a coincidence. Anyways, this is a good looking vehicle that performs. It's perfect for finding adventure as you cultivate your own idea of the deep life. Visit Land Rover USA.com to learn more about the Defender, or even just to see what this thing looks like. I keep coming across them. It's a cool car. So go to Land Rover USA.com to learn more about the Defender. And now, onto my conversation with Brad and Clay.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Brad Cowell, great to see you fellas for a little special edition of Deep Questions Meets Farewell. We are gathered here to talk about a New York Times article, that opinion piece that we had been reflecting on in our text thread. And we thought, hey, if we're talking about it here, it might be worth talking about on the podcast. I'm going to briefly summarize that article. The article is from New York Times Opinion section. As I mentioned, it's by Eric Baker. It is titled Elon Musk is the World's Richest Man. Why is he sleeping on the floor? Biggest upshot of this piece, basically, is that Musk and his Department of Government, is it Department of Governmental Efficiency or Government Efficiency?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Okay, I don't even know. It's one of the two.

• 5:42Cal Newport?

  Whatever word's more efficient to say, I guess. Not, not to interrupt, but it was something I did find funny about his, the email that said, what did you do last week? In the text of that email, it said, can you send approx. five bullet points you did last week? They were abbreviating the word approximately, because it would be a profound lack of productivity to write out the whole word productivity. That shows how efficient Doge is. So we can only be thankful for that type of high, hard hitting efficiency. Sorry to interrupt, Clay. Go ahead.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  No, that's incredible. Brief summary of this is that Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, because that's more efficient, have been championing how much they work. They have reported to be working 120-hour weeks. For those doing some quick math, that is a little over 17 hours a day. I know I can speak for myself and say I'm skeptical of that number. I assume you guys are too. But Musk is talking about why that makes them better, more effective than other bureaucracies. He has this quote in there where he says, "It's like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days. Working the weekend is a superpower." Basically, the upshot, Baker, the writer, says that, you know, he turns this into an argument of how we've elevated billionaires to be superheroes in America and we've valorized work. And I

• 6:59Speaker 01

  think we probably agree that billionaires should not be elevated to the role of superheroes in society. Maybe shouldn't also be government employees. But the other part of the question is sort of interesting. I think what we're here to discuss today, like, is it a bad thing to valorize work? And like, is hard work a bad thing? You know, I know this is something that you think a lot about, Cal, and we think a lot about, like, how do we be productive in a way that allows us to be great and excellent, but doesn't get in the way of all the other things we want to do in our life, right? So I think that's the question we're trying to answer. Most simply stated, is hard work a bad thing? So I'll kick it over to you, Braggs, and I feel like you were the one who sent this article and had the strongest reaction to it. But yeah, excited to hear what you think.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Well, I find a couple of things very interesting here, and they're worth pulling apart. The first is the difference between pseudo-greatness and pseudo-hard work and actual greatness and actual hard work. So this article comes out in the context of Elon Musk at the CPAC conference, marching around the stage with a chainsaw to signify how hard he's working, how much he's cutting up the government, and how efficient he is, like a WWE wrestling character. And I think that a lot of people see that, and I'm painting in broad strokes here, but a lot of people on the right see that, and they say, "This is awesome. He's our guy. He's finally working hard." Someone in government that cares about

• 8:22Speaker 02

  efficiency, that is sleeping on the floor, that is willing to grind, that is working hard. And then again, in broad strokes, people on the left see that, and they're like, "This is all kabuki. This is nonsense." And I tend to be more in the Kabuki nonsense camp. However, what gets swept up in that camp so often is that now all hard work is bad. And there, I completely disagree. I think the performance of hard work, when you're not really doing anything meaningful, is bad. But if someone wants to come into government and sleep on the floor and be passionate about making things better, and actually do it, and do it in an ethical way, that might be great. And I'll cap it off before turning it over to Cal with a really interesting observation.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  So around the same time that this article comes out, around the same time that there's this vibe happening where the right is all about, "Yeah, he's our guy with the chainsaw, hard work," and on the left, it's, "Eh, hard work is bad. It's all just capitalist and it's terrible." The actor Timothy Chalamet gives a speech at the SAG Awards that goes absolutely viral around the same time that Elon's work goes viral. And I'm going to quote from his speech, what this young actor says. "I appreciate the award, but it's not about the award. I know this sounds weird, but I'm really into the pursuit of greatness. I'm inspired by the greats." And everyone's like, "That's so cool. He's athlete-coded. He just wants to grind.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  He wants to devote his entire life to the craft." And I think that, to me, is this tension between, on the one hand, we admire greatness and we admire hard work, but on the other hand, we say, "Oh, like, bleh, I don't know about hard work." Or is hard work just a product of a capitalist system that is supposed to grind us all down to the bone and essentially appropriate our time, energy, and attention? So I think those are the table stakes. Those are the things to pull apart. There's performative hard work versus actual hard work, and I think what all too often happens is people get swept up in performative hard work, but then they throw out the baby with the bathwater.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And especially on the elite left, again, broad strokes, I sound like a broken record, and then it just becomes, "Oh, hard work is bad. It's bad. We shouldn't be for it." Yet we love these athletes and actors that are essentially obsessed with their craft.

• 10:47Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think there's a, I agree with you, there's a language thing going on. I think it's, it's easy to jump from what you're saying, which is there's a certain type of performative hard work that I don't know how to put my finger on the terminology. But this rubs me the wrong way and it's easier just to say hard work is wrong. So here's a comment, I want to read a comment from the New York Times op ed. A commenter left this comment, which I think gets at the core of what's really going on here. So a commenter on that Eric Barker op ed said, "I come from a position of being able to observe more than a few of these masters of the universe," in scare quotes, "day in and day out. Much of this so-called work ethic is performative and on closer scrutiny, dissembles into a

• 11:29Cal Newport?

  scramble of unfocused, disorganized and half-baked decision-making. They waste untold hours in the gaire of aimless meetings while consuming the time of their acolytes and employees. It's not an advantage, it's slogging through cement." I did a lot of research for that New Yorker piece we mentioned about Elon Musk's, for example, his first weeks being in charge of Twitter. And like what we see is exactly that because we have a good TikTok of, not the social platform, but T I C K, the journalist term, a time, point by point timeline of what happened. There was great reporting in The Verge. And the story about what happened is that he, he comes in like a whirlwind to Twitter, 2022, after he takes it over.

• 12:10Cal Newport?

  And he just starts doing random things and abandoning those things and moving on to something else. Right? So he comes in, he, he fires the CEO, that's where he first uses this phrase, "What did you do last week?" He texted that to the then CEO, Agarwal, and then fired him soon after. Then he comes in and says, "I want every engineer to print out the last 50 lines of code that you programmed and bring it to me." And then they're like, "Ah, actually, wait, don't do that. Shred it if you've already done it. I'm not going to review that. No, here's what we're going to do. We're going to enforce these deadlines now from our OKRs. And if you don't do the deadlines, we're going to fire you." No, forget that. What I really want you to do is managers will rank order your employees so that I can see like who the lower ranking employees are. It's like, no, actually, forget that. He just fired half the staff, basically without explanation.

• 12:55Cal Newport?

  It was just random. Right? That, I think, is what people are picking up. Hard work means for some of the people coming out of Silicon Valley right now, for the iconoclastic founder types coming out of Silicon Valley. And we're picking up, this doesn't feel right. And one way we know that's not right is that you can derive the opposite conclusion from Elon Musk to what he's saying right now, which is, wait a second, he has, what, seven different major concerns he's running right now? So he's added Doge on top of Tesla, on top of SpaceX, on top of Neuralink, on top of what's happening with the Starlink product, on top of what's happening with the Boring Company.

• 13:38Cal Newport?

  So the fact that he has that many things going on, he could be working 120 hours a week, but you have to divide that now by, what, six or seven different companies? So actually, you could take away the opposite, which is, you know, somehow SpaceX is successfully launching rockets when at most it could be getting 10 hours of time from Elon Musk a week. So you could almost take the opposite conclusion from this, which is, effective hard work doesn't necessarily mean I'm sleeping on the floor of that office. So anyways, I think this is what's really going on here, is the real intuitive complaint is what is being called hard work by a small group of people is not that, and it's annoying, and I wish they would stop valorizing it. But it's a mistake, as you said, Brad.

• 14:23Cal Newport?

  They say, well, maybe just this means that hard work itself is somehow broken, and then we go down the typical sort of left-wing social conflict lane of like, okay, so all of hard work is a construct, it was invented by capitalists to try to blind us from the misery of our precarious economic situations. Like, we don't have to go down the conflict theory, sort of academic left theorizing, in order to actually say, Musk with the chainsaw, that feels like nonsense.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I think that's right, but then how do you explain this very real vibe that everyone feels? Like, listeners of the show, I bet all of you feel this vibe, which is... Generally speaking, on the right, hard work, whether it's performative or real, and it's often performative, is extremely valorized. It's how we grow our character. It's how we contribute to society. It's productive, and it's what you should do. You should work hard. And on the left, there is this like kind of anti-work, or don't strive for greatness, or, you know, don't, don't give something your all. Don't become obsessed with a craft. I mean, how many people have called you out on your

• 15:30Speaker 02

  productivity books, which are the opposite of performative or pseudo-greatness? You literally use the term pseudo-productivity in contrast to the real thing, yet people are, "Oh, productivity's bad. You know, it's just a capitalist construct, or we shouldn't be working hard." And I think that in my world, when I talk to people who are actually excellent at what they do, whether they're professional athletes, whether they're award-winning artists, or chefs, or musicians, or transplant surgeons, they all say, "All of this is nonsense. These are a bunch of clowns yelling at each other. Real hard work is, comes with sacrifice and trade-offs, but it is a source of deep fulfillment and satisfaction, and it makes the world go round." And that's why we admire the transplant surgeon that sleeps on the floor of the OR.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  That's why the Timothy Chalamet speech, where you see an actor that's not just about, like, being famous, but seems to genuinely be about greatness. That's why we love LeBron James. Like, we do love hard work, and we ought to love hard work, yet it feels like genuine hard work gets crowded out by the polarized vibes.

• 16:34Cal Newport?

  Well, go ahead, Clay. Go ahead.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna say, or it gets crowded out by performative hard work, right? Like, I think people working hard in busyness, Cal, you've written about this wonderfully, like, the idea of being busy has replaced actually doing good work. And I think, I think that's sort of an interesting thing to unpack here, too, which is like...

• 16:59Speaker 01

  People want to look at LeBron James and say, you know, I want to work like that. But instead of actually working like that, they just perform busy work in place of actually doing excellent work. And I think that's interesting, too. Like, how did busyness become a metric for productivity as opposed to doing good work being the metric for productivity? Does that make sense? Quality instead of, instead of busyness?

• 17:20Cal Newport?

  Well, I'll jump in on that because you're right. This is what I wrote about in the last book. I think there's two things going on here. Yeah, I think, one, you're right. People who have just standard office jobs have to face this dynamic all the time. It's not just Elon Musk on the stage talking about it. This is the, the central productivity crisis I've written about, which is the fact that knowledge work has largely embraced the notion of pseudo productivity as its main measure of useful effort. That is, visible activity will be my proxy for your doing something useful, which has created this culture of performative busyness, just in knowledge work in general. So I think this vibe is, is out there more commonly than just like the Silicon Valley types talking about. I mean, so many people's jobs now. You say, why do I have to answer all these

• 18:04Cal Newport?

  emails and jump on all these calls? And this whole thing feels like performance. I'm not actually producing something. So there's a skepticism of productivity that it comes out of the fact that the way we're defining productivity in so many organizations is flawed. So I think it's coming from a good place. But I think the, the conclusion is often wrong. Right? So this is often where I try to go. That's what I was trying to say before, is we have these real reasons to be suspicious about what's happening now. Like, we have a real reason to be suspicious about, like, what Musk is saying. We have a real reason, if you just work for like a large office, in a large office building, you have a real reason to be suspicious of what is being treated as productive. But

• 18:45Cal Newport?

  the, the instinct to say, what's happening here is that all of these notions of hard work or productivity are constructed by like a, a small cabal, like, to our disadvantage. That is where I think we get stuck. Because like, what do we really need to do? Is we really need this? Because if that's the answer, what are we going to do? Overtow capitalism, like, what are we gonna do? Right? But if the answer is like, no, Musk is a moron, so we could ignore him. Right? And, oh, what's going on in these offices over here? Well, we have a terrible definition of productivity because it's complicated and we're being lazy about it. We have to demand that we get smarter about what matters, what doesn't, how we want to reinvent work, what work should be be.

• 19:27Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think if we just, when we just demonize the concept, I think it's very good. If you're writing about the concept, that could be useful for you, but it's not useful for anyone else. So I think something like that's going on here.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I love that. I think it's essentially you've got pseudo greatness versus real greatness, pseudo productivity versus real productivity, pseudo excellence versus real excellence. And the work, or at least our work, needs to be to tease those things apart and say that they're very different. And that the pseudo version is not something to aspire towards, or is not something to valorize. But the real version, which gets crowded out by the pseudo version, is actually a huge part of what makes the world go round and what makes life worth living. Recently, on an Ezra Klein podcast, he talked about how the right is all about excellence. And how the right has kind of like become the party of excellence. I'm like, no, that, like, that's absurd. Like, anyone can be excellent.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Excellence ought not to be politically coded. Excellence is trying to be the best that you can possibly be at something and getting intimate and close in overcoming alienation to find something that you love and to give it your all. Like, how did excellence become a vibe thing? And I think like it's about reclaiming these words that really are true to who we are. But to your point, they can't be the fake performative version.

• 20:54Cal Newport?

  Can I throw out two quick factors that might be involved? I'm interested in both your takes on this, too. All right, two, like auxiliary factors that could be happening in this tension going back and forth. One, I wonder if there's something going on here with like an uncanny valley effect. So if I see LeBron James crushing it on the court, right? Shot 50 recently and he's like my age, which is crazy.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 21:19Cal Newport?

  I don't, there's no threat to me and what I've done in my life. Like, there was never, there was never a possibility that I also could be like an NBA basketball star. So, we can kind of admire that from afar. I can watch an Olympic skier. There's no threat to like where I am in my own accomplishments. It's a completely different other world. But if it's in the realm of like roughly speaking, knowledge work. You're like, well, I'm in that world as well. And they are doing, they're claiming they're doing better. They're very rich. It's they're, they're like, they're famous for what they're doing. That somehow seems like, hey, we're, we're started at the same starting line and I'm lapping you on the track. Like, there's more of a threat there. And this threat might be particularly acute. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pathologize, you know, my own class right now.

• 22:00Cal Newport?

  But for well-educated academic and journalists like my gra, my class, you're often coming from the exact same cohort as the Silicon Valley masters of the universe. And you're probably smarter than them and know that. Like, I went to Harvard with this guy and he's not that smart. And yet, they have the billion-dollar net worth and, you know, so what, I don't feel like they're better. I know they're not better than me. And I know they don't have some sort of superpower I don't have. So, maybe, you know, you, you're looking for a pathology there. So, I wonder if that's part of it. And then the other thing I'm wondering if might be involved here is just language, being a little more careful with language. Like, athletes are very good at this.

• 22:40Cal Newport?

  You will never see an athlete at the post-game interview be like, yeah, I crushed it because I work so hard. Right? Like, Jalen Hurt is not like, you, you know, you know how long I'm in the gym? And like, how much I, how, how much I had to study these playbooks and how hard I worked? No, it's always like, my team is great. Like, I'm so happy to be there, whatever. And maybe the, the, the left picks up this sophistication a little bit more. Like, this is unseemly to post a picture, the equivalent of posting a picture of your bicep on Instagram. Like, it's kind of unseemly that try to brag about your work. So, there's like this other sort of unseemliness that goes around. I'm just, these are secondary factors at best, but I'm curious about them.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  I have thoughts on that. The first one is... I think part of the problem with the comparison game is just like everyone's success is way more available to us now, right? Like, it's very easy to see who, you know, obviously, the top of the top has always been available to us. But now we can see all of our peers on Instagram, on social media, how they're doing, and it's just an endless comparison game. And I think that is probably exacerbating this problem. As to your second point, I wonder if part of the problem there, specifically with athletes, is like, they have an objective, sports is super objective, right? You win or you lose, you have more points, you have less points. And Jalen Hurts can point to like, I won the Super Bowl, so, you know, I'm clearly great at my job, whereas a lot of people in knowledge work don't have that sort of objective metric.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So, the most, the closest thing they have is, I worked 17 hours a day and I worked, you know, 120 hours a week. And I think that sort of blends into another thing that at play here that a friend of both of our pods, Derek Thompson, wrote a great story on last year in The Atlantic, on workism, and like, how work has essentially become not so much about, to quote him, I believe he said this, not so much about material production as identity production. Like, now that we have less places of belonging in our lives, we've turned to work as sort of our religion, our cathedral. And again, if that's where you're getting all your self-worth from, like, I think Elon Musk probably gets all of his self-worth from working, then you're, then it behooves you to be like, yeah, I'm working 17 hours a day and sleeping three and, you know, I

• 24:48Speaker 01

  don't know, I'm doing the other four, playing video games, because then it makes you look like, you know, that's where all your self-worth is tied to.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  I think that ultimately what we're circling around here is like, security versus insecurity in many ways. So if you're secure about your process, then you don't have to tell people that you were in the gym for six hours a day studying the playbook, because you have confidence, you don't need to showcase it. If you're secure about your life, you don't have to compare yourself to other people, whether it's real or performative, because you're secure about what you've done. If you're secure about your values, you can admire greatness, even if you are not obsessed with what you do, and you can say, you know, Timothy Chalamet is a great actor, or LeBron James is a great athlete, or Cal Newport is a great writer. But I'm not willing to make the trade offs that they're willing to make and that's okay.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  And I can still admire their greatness because I bet that they wish that they had more time with their kids, or I bet that they wish they could just turn off their minds and have more hobbies. But all of that comes from a place of being secure with like who you are and your values. And I think that maybe that's the secondary problem here. So again, to retread where we've been, the first problem is when performative elaborate kabuki steps in for the real thing and people see that and they get disgusted by that. I agree with that. But then the second problem is when there's the real thing, when there's genuine greatness, if people are insecure about themselves or their choices, then it's very inconvenient for them to acknowledge genuine greatness. And instead of admiring it as a thing of beauty, they say, well, that person must just

• 26:25Speaker 02

  have, um, you know, a miserable life, or that that's just capitalism. And actually, like by going to medical school and becoming a transplant surgeon, they're just part of a system, even though that system might very well save your grandma's life the next week. Uh, but if you're securing your values and you're secure in your own life, then if you choose to pursue your own version of greatness, you'll do so from a place of security and you won't have to parade around with a chainsaw. And that might mean posting pictures of yourself on Instagram, like we all, we all have our own personal version of parading around with a chainsaw. And if you don't choose to pursue greatness because you don't want to accept the trade offs and the sacrifices that come with it, then you can still admire it in other people. And to me, that's what this comes down to.

• 27:08Cal Newport?

  So this, this goes back to Eric's article. Would this explain part of what you're talking about? This was a very smart part from his article, which comes from the book he's writing. He said, part of what's different about that, like we're, we're worried about this, we're having this conversation now, we wouldn't have had this conversation in 1955. And his argument was, we shifted our understanding of work from industrial industriousness to entrepreneurialism. So in the age of industriousness, what mattered was I did, I'm a good worker. Like, I did my, I do my job well, right? Like, I have my, my, my job, I'm a GM. This, I think this was in Anna Weiner's review of his book from The New Yorker. And I do it really well, and I'm proud of that. But there's no notion of, there's a notion of greatness,

• 27:52Cal Newport?

  but it wasn't something that most people pursued. And then, yeah, some athletes did or some such. And then, the shift that he argues in his book is that, as we shifted to an entrepreneurial culture, part of the shift was culturally now, this, the idea of, you are in charge of your own career. There is no limit to you. You can and probably should try to get after it and make a name for yourself. This became on the plate of almost everyone. A lot more people did it. But more importantly, it put a lot more people into a context where you could have done it, or at least that became the cultural change. So now, I'm thinking back, I'm thinking, Eric, actually, your book is pretty smart, because this, this idea is starting to help me make sense of what we're talking about, is that maybe we have whiplash from a culture that suddenly says,

• 28:37Cal Newport?

  you know, you could think about trying to be quote unquote, "great", in a way that I don't think my grandparents would have thought about. It just was like, no, I do my job well, and I'm a deacon at the church. And my kids are raised right, and I'm respected in my town. Like, what else, I'm killing it. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, the generation that went through the Great Depression, that's killing it. Our generation is like, well, how many Substack subscribers do I have? Like, you know, Heather Cox has a million. Like, what am I doing here? So, I mean, I'm wondering, I'm wondering how much of that's actually going on here.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I think that's right. It seems to me like, just like, an obsession with winning. Because, like, you think about your, the way you're characterizing your grandparents. Like, I just, yeah, I don't think they would have been, it just feels to me like that switch from industriousness to entrepreneurialism, it all of a sudden becomes about who's on top. Who, am I winning? And I think that is a big shift from just being like, I go to work, I find meaning in work, I find meaning in coming home and being a, being a dad, and being a father, and being the coach of my, you know, local, my son's sixth grade basketball team. There was no concept of like, I'm going to win. But now, we, we, I think a lot of people probably look at Elon Musk or Donald Trump, and they think like, that guy won. He, he won. Even we do this to some extent, right, Brad? Like, we're always talking about, like, why are we not, you know?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Andrew Huberman, like, we, you know, we almost, there's, there's a sense of, like, wanting to get to the top. And then I think there probably used to be more tolerance for, like, I'm in the middle, and I'm, I'm feeling pretty good about finding meaning in the middle here as opposed to being on the top of the mountain.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a long list of reasons for why we're not Andrew Huberman, but best I don't go into those right now. I, I think that's right. I think that in the, the 1940s and 50s, there was no LinkedIn.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Cal, I know you're a, a fan of the Google Engram. I bet you could look this up while I talk, but my guess is personal brand wasn't a word that appeared in anything that was published. I don't think anybody thought about having their own personal brand. You weren't measured in the number of followers you have. Because there's no internet, you're not comparing yourself to everyone in the world and their GPA and their degree. You're comparing yourself to the eight people that live in your neighborhood. And, um, maybe when you saw greatness, it wasn't a threat to your own ego or your own sense of self in the way that it is now, because now you see greatness and a part of you is like, oh, if I'm not doing that, what does that say about me? And what I would say is all that that says about you is that you're at a stage of your

• 31:05Speaker 02

  life where you've chosen not to make the sacrifices required to pursue that level of greatness. And there's all kinds of different greatness, too. There's greatness as the deacon at your church, there's greatness as a parent, there's greatness as a kindergarten teacher. We just happen to valorize very specific examples of that, and the examples that we valorize are entrepreneur billionaires, professional athletes and musicians. I'm gonna bring up, this is from our latest farewell episode, so listeners, regular listeners of farewell, you heard this last week, perhaps my favorite quote ever, and I think the greatest line in all of literature is the last line of the novel Middlemarch, describing Dorothea Brooke, the main character of the book, and it is, "For the growing good of the world

• 31:49Speaker 02

  is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." And what that essentially means is like, a big part of the reason that the world goes around is because people are just living their life and being good, decent people. And I think that maybe that gets swept out a lot with this, with this current obsession with winning in, in public greatness.

• 32:19Cal Newport?

  How broad is this interest, I wonder, as well? Okay, so we're thinking demographically. Are we in a bubble? I mean, it's, it's a bubble where whatever, we're well-educated, sort of media-adjacent figures with like, audiences. How representative are we? And the writers, Eric at the New York Times, the, the Anawina Review from the New Yorker, it's all, we're all in this like, similar bubble. We write for elite publications, we write books, we have podcasts. How broad, I wonder, does this, this increased interest in greatness, or this increased insecurity about, am I doing enough? How broad does that go? I really don't know.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  I think that the interest in greatness goes very broad.

• 32:59Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  I don't know about the insecurity. And the reason I think the great, the interest in greatness goes very broad, is I think, and I'm putting on my armchair political scientist hat, I think Obama represented greatness. And Obama was a very popular president, because people voted for someone that wanted to build things and be great, and was aspirational for individuals in a country. And then I think, for a million different reasons, the left lost that. And the left is all about, here, all the things is wrong. There's very little talk about building, or being excellent, or about being great. And whether it's the real or the performative version, that depends on your politics, but the right picked that up, at least the perception of that up. And now people love that. I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor in Ohio, I don't know if he lives there, and his whole campaign is like, excellence.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Now, my definition of excellence is very different than his, but I'm sure he spent a good chunk of change doing market research and shows that the thing to run on is excellence. Why? Because people see the left as somehow opposed to excellence. So, I, I think that it, it's very big in the culture.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  But don't you think it's more- Make America great again. He literally chose the word great. And I think that, that you could argue that that does two things. I think that one is it codes and says that America has become something that it wasn't. And I want to go back to the 50s. And I think a lot of people get value in that, but I think other people see it as we should be great. We should be proud of our hard work. We should be proud of our industriousness. I think that it's also like, you know, we should be great and we should work hard and we should be leaders. Uh, and we should strive to build things. And people are inherently attracted to that. And I think that there's a vibe that like elites like, eh, you know, we don't like that unless it's on our terms. Uh, and I think that's a real thing.

• 34:47Cal Newport?

  So what do you think about this prescription? Cause I'm, I'm thinking through what we're talking about. Okay. So, so what are some prescriptions? Um, one, I think it's, it's useful to say, we, we got to understand the, the thing that we're talking about, like the real issue is performative versus real. We got to talk about pseudo productivity is a problem. It is really annoying, but there is such thing as, as actual meaningful productivity. That performative greatness is annoying, but there's such thing as real greatness that should be lauded. Uh, we recognize that. The right response, here's, here's a proposed prescription. The right response then is to try to, to push back on, define and reject the pseudo.

• 35:28Cal Newport?

  As opposed to try to, uh, build a sort of theoretical framework that just makes productivity or greatness writ large, something that's a problem. Right? That's easier. Also, it's like a flex if you're really smart, because you have about 150 years worth of post-Marxian theory to draw from and talk about. Uh, so like, you know, Eric kind of goes there in his book to some degree, the degree to which, well, entrepreneurialism is somehow a construct of the capitalist class to try to paper over the sort of economic pecarity that we're in. But if we think that we, but I, I think that, that is getting in the way.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. None of, none, none of these people, none of these people deadlift. None of these people run eight hundreds. None of these people make beautiful music. None of these people do woodwork.

• 36:15Cal Newport?

  Well, if they ran eight hundreds-

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Like it's true.

• 36:17Cal Newport?

  They would be so, they would be so upset at life that they want to do anything because that's just-

• 36:21Speaker 02

  No, but my point is like, if you, if you touch grass and you do real things in the world. You don't even have to be world-class, but if you give something your all, which is your own personal version of greatness, you realize how frickin' awesome it is. And you don't need to draw on Marxist theory to shut it down. You say, "Wow, training for that marathon was so much harder than I thought, and it felt so good." And that's very different than performative greatness, but the real thing, like, that's worth fighting for. And like, that, that to me, I think, is the ultimate prescription. The only, I guess, the only addition to your prescription is, yeah, when, when there's the pseudo-version of any of these things, we should call it out and we should name it, and we should say, "This is elaborate kabuki." And we should laugh at it, and we should make fun of it.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  But instead of trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater or come up with this intellectual, snarky reason for why all hard work or all greatness or all productivity is bad, we should say, "And the real thing is frickin' awesome."

• 37:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, this is, I always say, "You don't need a complicated theory when plain stupidity will suffice." Right? Like, in my writing, the famous case study is like email and distraction. I, I probably know more about the rise of email and knowledge work and its impact than any living human, right? Wrote a book about it, endless articles about it. And from my point of view, if you really study it, it's an unforced error. You introduce this tool for one purpose, replace fax machines and voicemails, and you have, almost immediately, due to the way that we deal with personal productivity and knowledge work, you have this unexpected consequence of communication volume metastasizing, and suddenly we're distracted all the time. You don't need a nefarious villain to understand why that happened.

• 38:01Cal Newport?

  And yet, there was always this, this, if you cover this topic, always this drumbeat of, "If I feel bad because I'm being distracted all the time, it has to be because someone else is exploiting me." It has to be, "I'm on email all the time because this somehow is allowing, like, the managerial class to exploit more value from my labor, to alienate me more from my labor, it's some sort of, like, psychic mind games of trying to have control." And you can document, it's like, nah, it's just, "This tool messed up the ecosystem. You threw it in and it messed it up." And as long as we're gonna sit around and be like, "No, there's a bad guy here, and we're hunting for the bad guy with our torches," we're not gonna be actually trying to clear the invasive species out of the ecosystem, try to get back. Like, "We gotta fix what's going on here, we gotta get rid of the kudzu." And so, I, I mean, I think that's, that's part of what's going on here,

• 38:44Cal Newport?

  is, we need to yell louder about the nonsense. Like the Musk performance is just nonsense. Again, I think I mentioned this earlier. He's running like seven companies. So really, the thing he is showing us is that in 10 to 15 hours a week, you can actually be a successful CEO because that's what he's doing. He might be working 120 hours a week, but he's spreading that very, very thin. If he really wanted to make the argument that you need to work 120 hours to do one thing well, he would have dropped everything else and just done one thing well. So that's nonsense. I think pseudo productivity in the workplace, less nefarious in its origins, but it's like just as annoying. We need to yell about it. Like all of these meetings, everyone jumping on calls and no one really pinning down what it is you're trying to do and just making the whole thing activity based. We got to yell

• 39:26Cal Newport?

  about it. That's a problem. But we don't need a complicated theory to understand why it's a problem. I think complicated theories are almost always smokescreens. And I know this even in the world of mathematics, where I do complicated math theories. It's usually the simple theories that win the day. Like you can come up with complicated theories and it looks smart and your math is complicated and you can even get a couple of papers accepted that way. But the real great minds in mathematics, it's typically like, oh, I cut to the core of it. Here's what's really going on. I think that's what's happening here. Call out the nonsense. But there isn't necessarily a complicated theoretically induced nefarious scheme that we all have to write complicated journal papers about.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  All right. I have two follow ups. The first is complexity versus simplicity or complicating things versus making them simple. You see this all the time in any kind of sport performance, where there's this real temptation to have like a super complicated program for what you're going to do at the gym or for your running. And you have to have all these protocols and routines, and you have to track everything. And the reason for that is because you can hide behind complexity. So if something's not going well, well, it must be my complicated routine, or it must be protocol six out of seven, so I'm going to change it up. And when you make something really complicated and complex, you get to talk about it all the time. So you can go to cocktail parties and you can post on social media about all that you're doing and all the studying and methodology behind

• 40:53Speaker 02

  your program. But simplicity, which is you show up and you do the workout, like you can't hide In that you either do the workout or you don't. And every single great coach will tell you that getting better in any sport or developing any physical capacity, it's just simple. Like find the system you want to stress, stress it, recover and rinse and repeat. You don't need fancy protocols, you don't need complexity. It is simple. So I just love how you come to the same conclusion in your own little corner of the universe. And I think that's probably like a fairly universal truth that sometimes things are complex. I mean, this is Oskar's radar, right? Like razor, the simplest thing is generally the the actual thing. My second point that I want to make that I think is important is there are going to be some people listening and I'm curious what you think Cal and Clay before I for my take that are saying a lot of what you guys are saying makes sense, but like Elon Musk

• 41:39Speaker 02

  is pretty great. I mean, he's built all these companies. Starlink is an insane technology. Tesla completely overhauled how we think about vehicular transportation in America. SpaceX is like on some accounts doing better than NASA, or at least has performed better than NASA. And yes, he got all of these government grants and all this government money to do these things, but still like he was the head of these companies. So who are you guys that have written a couple of books that have this podcast to say that Elon Musk isn't great? So let's hear, let's hear what you guys have to say about that. Again, I have my own answer, but let's hit, let's hit this head on.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I think it's a great point and it's one I thought, you know, I was thinking about as we were texting you about this, but I think the thing that people are celebrating him for are not the things that are actually have made him great to the extent that he's great. Right? Like a business success, he's obviously very smart as a businessman, but I don't think people are celebrating him because of business decisions he's made. I think they're celebrating because he shows up on stage wearing a ridiculous outfit and a gold chain and sunglasses and busts out a chainsaw.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  And I think that gets at a larger problem of like, we are maybe judging the winners and losers of this game by the wrong metrics. Right? Like the fact that you can have pseudo productivity over productivity suggests that like there's a way to shadow perform your job versus actually doing your job. And we are often celebrating people for the ways in which they perform rather than the actual work. I don't know if that makes sense, but like as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about someone who's like a teacher, right? Like I can't imagine a teacher has a really a form of pseudo productivity because either you're like educating the kids or you you aren't. But someone like in our world and knowledge work or in jobs where you have a following

• 43:25Speaker 01

  or you're building a fan base, there is an element of like snake oil and selling yourself that gets in the way of actually making anything, if that makes sense, right? The selling of the product mattering more than the actual product. But in something like teaching or surgery where there's the product is how you're evaluated, not based on how you sell it, there isn't as much of an ability to to have a pseudo work. Does that make sense? Is that too convoluted?

• 43:47Cal Newport?

  I get I buy that. I buy that. I mean, and I think it's worth. I think it's worth acknowledging what Brad said that, yeah, Elon. I mean, another way to think about it is he has been very successful with various startups, right? And so the critique is not that he is bad at technology or bad at startups. And what an idea that came to mind is I think, okay, here is the other caveat or factor, secondary factor I wanted to mention is that there is actually certain areas, context, where a sort of like 120 hour a week workload workflow matters. It's typically in startup culture for like a small portion of the lifestyle of a company, a lifeline of a company, right? The timeline of a company, right?

• 44:32Cal Newport?

  Like, so so this is very overrepresented in the experience of Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs. So, you know, I read the Musk biography. I've read both of them, actually. And so when SpaceX is getting off the ground, actually like having a singular leader who is can just it's small enough that he can continually push everyone back to this is what matters and keeping them focusing on this and pushing away other things. That is actually the way how you get a high risk startup up and off the ground. And he did that at Tesla and he did that at SpaceX. So part of the problem is, though, is trying to extrapolate that. Steve Jobs did that early on, like with the Mac Group at Apple. Extrapolating that, though, that this is just how people should work in general. That is where the failure is. Musk kind of moves on when he gets bored.

• 45:16Cal Newport?

  But if you look at all these companies, you yes, when you. I wrote about this in my New Yorker piece. When things are small, you might just have a single visionary leader who can hold the whole thing together. And in fact, that could be necessary for you to actually break out. But once your company is large, and in the long run, you can't run it that way anymore. It's too big. And also, it's just not sustainable or useful anymore. So I think that's part of it. Another part of it is, I want to read this here from Nate Silver has been writing recently about the question, is Elon Musk smart or not? Because he's saying, like what you're pointing out, Brad, it's like, I think it's weird, this pushback from the left, that he's somehow dumb. Right? And just like entirely, it's just a like, it's somehow artificial. And here's what Silver said, which I think

• 45:56Cal Newport?

  is an interesting take. He says, that Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for these to pretend that it's all or part of some master plan. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects, just because he isn't in others. And if he merely had very good SAT scores, I don't care. But he's demonstrated his intelligence through his accomplishment. This is a bit like criticizing Tom Brady, because he had mediocre ratings in the NFL Combine. And he goes on and on. But he argues, you know, Elon is probably neurodivergent, and there are certain things he does very well. And there's other things, like sort of interacting with normal humans, or like reacting like a normal person on stage, and having feelings,

• 46:41Cal Newport?

  having empathy, having any sort of moral compass that he's just really terrible at. So that probably gets at it, right? It's like, yeah, A, tech startups, you do go all out often for the first like year, and that's how these things succeed or fail. But we can't extrapolate that, because if you tried that in many other fields, long term, including athletic endeavors, including almost any other endeavors, you would burn out. And two, yeah, he's like really smart, sort of technical things and visionary things, and is like a pretty terrible person at other things. And so both of those things can be true at the same time.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  And there's probably a lot of luck involved as well. Something else we talk about a lot, right? Like, yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  I have another take, and I'm shocked that you didn't say this, Cal, because this is to me like the the ultimate Newportian take. Is it Newportian or Newportian?

• 47:23Cal Newport?

  This is making me sound like Musk that I have a term named after my name.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  A Newportian take. This is the ultimate Newportian take. It's the simplest take. It's Oskar's razor. What I was gonna say is, I don't know if Elon Musk was great five years ago, and it depends on how you define great. There's a theory that he just put really smart people around him and he's a sociopath, and that's what it takes to win in these kinds of companies. I don't really buy that. I think to have multiple successes, I think he's very good at running a startup, like you said. I just think that he got on Twitter and it turned his brain into sawdust.

• 48:02Cal Newport?

  Yep.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Like, that's the simplest explanation. Like, he didn't build any of this stuff after he became addicted to Twitter. All this was pre his Twitter addiction. And I think he got on Twitter and he tweets 50 times a day. And anyone, if I got on Twitter and tweeted 50 times a day, it would ruin my brain. And I think the real, the real story here is to be wary of social media. Like, I mean, you hear this too, when I talk to professional sports teams, the biggest concern they have is players spending too much time on social media. Why? Because they think it takes away from that player's ability to pursue greatness in their sport. And I think that no one took Elon's phone from him. And you spend that much time on Twitter, it turns your brain to mush.

• 48:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah. No, fair enough. And so maybe we're just talking too much about Elon Musk. Like, it's only relevant in that he sparked a conversation. But yeah, you're right. He's a hard figure to knock down. He was like sociopathic, but also fantastic at startups, and then also his brain broke. Which is Sam, this is Sam Harris's argument. He said this on the air. He has told us to me like individually as well, is because he knows Elon, but now they feud. Twitter broke his brain. And so, yeah, you're right. It's a cautionary tale, right?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  But Twitter would make, but Twitter would break my brain, too. I think that I just have like just enough self-awareness or just enough people in my lives to be like, Brad, you're spending too much time on social media. And then I get off. Because if I spent as much time on social media as Elon spent, I'd probably be a raging leftist instead of a Trumper. But like, it would break my brain because that's the natural endpoint of social media.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  But isn't he also important, not just for sparking this conversation, but because he is still the avatar for a lot of people of greatness? Like, and that goes back to our conversation of pseudo-greatness versus actual greatness. I think a lot of people look at him and want to emulate him as he, I think some people would say he's as great as he's ever been at this moment, right now. And I think that's part of the problem, right, is we're oriented towards the wrong horizon in some ways, right? And I think that's also a larger conversation. I mean, we talk a lot about, you know, I think people think they want one thing, but they actually want another, right? Like, you talk about who emulates greatness in basketball, right? I think most people are going to say Michael Jordan. Now, if you took the qualities that Michael Jordan felt on the inside when he

• 50:20Speaker 01

  was at his greatest, this probably wouldn't make you feel good in terms of living that subjective experience in your life. You might be happier as like Nikola Jokic, who seems to have a healthier relationship with being a champion. But I think we think we want one type of greatness, but what we actually want is a different type. And I think that disconnect causes a lot of the turmoil.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Well, I'm gonna try to tease that out a little bit more. I think that there's still two things at play here. The first is performative greatness versus real greatness, performative productivity versus real productivity, or pseudo, pick your adjective. I still think that's the most important battle for all of us to fight, for Cal to fight, for us to continue fighting, for us to fight together. Because I think the first misstep that people make is they think they want masculinity, but then they go for performative masculinity. They think they want greatness, but then they go for performative greatness. They think they want an exercise program and they want to be fit, but then they go for performative fitness. They think they want a certain family life, but then they go for the performative version. It's the, to quote Steve, who's not here, it's the Instagrammification of everything.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  And I think that's the first problem. Then you overcome that problem, you've already done 90% of the work. So now you've got, you're, you're, you're able to in your mind tease out examples and role models of the real thing versus the performative version. Now, when you get to the real thing, things get interesting. And then you get to say, is it worth the trade offs to be Michael Jordan in my pursuit? Or can I do this more like Giannis Antetokounmpo or Nikola Jokic or Steph Curry than Michael Jordan? Can I get to greatness while having fun and playfulness? Or am I the kind of person that needs to have a chip on my shoulder? Clay, you want to say something?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Or just even can have you like Mikhail Bridges or like Kentavious Caldwell Pope, right? Like, I don't even necessarily need to be an all star. Like, can I just be the sixth man and be happy with that? You know what I mean? This, this is already getting at the thing that I think we're talking about, which is like, winning. Like, maybe you don't need to be an NBA all star. You can make a pretty good life coming off the bench as the seventh man in the NBA. And like, that's the equivalent of like, being a middle manager and being the deacon at your church. And like, that's a type of success, too.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And I think all of this, though, comes after separating the bullshit from the real. And then, once you get to the real, we could have a 40 series, episodes, or 40 podcast series, because it's such a fascinating question, we're all obsessed with it, which is how do you navigate these natural tensions and trade offs that come with trying to get the best out of yourself?

• 52:45Cal Newport?

  Well, so then, how will we deal with the other critique that comes from greatness? Which is, it's not fair. Right? That, you know, different people are in different positions that go for different definitions of greatness. Michael Jordan was 6'6", which was, you know, table stakes for considering basketball to be serious. This is, I think this is the second critique from the left. The first being, any valoration of greatness is somehow like a capitalist construction to et cetera, et cetera. The second critique is, look, not every, it's, it's, people start from different places, so it's best if we just don't talk about it. Because, you know, some people, it's, I'm a, I'm a single mom and I can, you know, it's taking every hour with my two shifts just to try to keep food on the table for my kids.

• 53:29Cal Newport?

  And I can't go and work on whatever scheme to become great in X, Y, and Z. So maybe we should, in the interest of niceness and inclusivity, not talk about it. So how do we navigate that critique? Because that's- That's probably the critique. I would say the elites, anti-greatness elites, talk more about the theories. The critique I would hear most often, sort of in my inbox, would be of that second type. So I take it a little bit more seriously because it's coming from real people. And I'm, so you gotta help me here. I should ask for help. Like, what's the right way to think about that?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  I think that's the right critique. The right critique being like the much more interesting and I think more, more valid one. Someone who makes this point often is Ezra Klein, and I think he makes it really well. And he'll say just that. He's like, you know, my genetics are such that I love reading, that I have an obsessive personality, that I can read really fast, and I wasn't born in Syria. And if I was born in Syria, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. If I didn't have these genetics, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. So am I great, or am I just lucky? And my answer to that is yes. Like, the answer is both. So like, I think that we have to acknowledge the role of circumstance

• 54:42Speaker 02

  and luck in greatness. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't celebrate it. I think that we can celebrate it while acknowledging the role of circumstance and luck. I think I made a post on Instagram a few weeks ago that essentially says, anyone who says, "Look how hard I work. Look how much I've done. Don't tell me I got lucky." Well, they clearly got lucky because they're too doofus-headed to realize how important luck is. But anyone who says, "You don't work hard, and you're not that great. You just got lucky," clearly has never worked hard or cared about greatness a day in their life. Because anyone who has skin in the game that's actually doing it knows it's both. It is being born in the

• 55:24Speaker 02

  right zip code. It is having certain genetics. But a lot of people are born in the same zip code as you, and a lot of people have pretty good genetics, and they just chose not to work hard. And that's, that could be for a million different reasons. I'm not here to make a values judgment about it, but I don't think you should feel bad for making the most out of your situation and the most out of your gifts. And what's fascinating too, and the last thing I'll say here, is it's an argument that you hear out of very real people. And that's why I take it seriously, and I appreciate it. However, when I've gone and I've given talks on my books in underserved areas, people who are born in like truly crappy situations.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  They're the ones that are the most inspired by this message of pursue greatness.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  They don't want to hear about how the structure is against them, or how they're in an unlucky situation. They know that because they live that. They want to know, how can they get better so they can work themselves out of it?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think there's absolute greatness, evaluating it across everybody. And then there's relative greatness, and how great can you be, given the circumstances you have? And I think our job as a society is to try to raise everyone, give everyone the same opportunity to achieve absolute greatness on that scale. But while the reality is still that everything's not going to be equal, you can still be great relative to your own circumstances, I think.

• 56:47Cal Newport?

  So here's what becomes more complicated. Because I mean, I like the way this is set up. I mean, there's also like a religion, I think it's a Jewish notion of you have to make the most of what you have. It's not yours to complain, you know, if you have a particular gift, you have an obligation to do something that's going to help the world with it. Given like whatever latitudes you have to do that, that'll look very different, depending on, you know, what that would look like in war-torn Syria would be different than, you know, like Ezra, growing up in Irvine, California, or something like this. But that you have an obligation to do something with whatever gifts you happen to have, and opportunities you happen to have, do something with it. So that's like a notion that's out there. And then there's a notion that striving to get better is something important,

• 57:30Cal Newport?

  regardless of scale or endpoint, is it self fulfilling? Right? And so like, do that. And if your endpoints and your opportunities happen to put you on like a very notable scale, I'm doing something at a big scale, don't be like Elon Musk about it. Don't, don't, you know, have some self-awareness. But here's a complicated question I always get back to, it's like, Okay, so how far should you go? I don't want to psychologize this too much, but the pursuit of greatness is complicated, right? I have a very complicated relationship with it. It's not simple. It's not, oh, all of the, it's not, it's all invented and it's all artificial and you'll just feel better if you're just happy doing nothing.

• 58:12Cal Newport?

  It really does feel good to do things, to get rewarded for it and to have recognition. And it feels good and it can stay with you. It's also really stressful and anxiety-producing, and there's a lot of pathologies that come with it. And this is maybe going in a different direction, but if the idea is like, yeah, greatness is relative, but the point is the pursuit of trying to do something useful with your gifts is important, it's a duty and it's gonna make you feel better. But how far do you go? What is, for most people, how do you figure out the line between Yanis and Jordan? Or, I mean, most of our audience probably doesn't know, actually, basketball. So to use like an actor, I was thinking of like an actor analogy, right? Paul Rudd versus Daniel Day-Lewis, right?

• 58:54Cal Newport?

  Like, Paul Rudd, he's good, and he got Ant-Man and got paid, and then people like him, but he's not winning Oscars, right? What's the advice there, right? About like how far to go? What a complicated question that becomes.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  It's such a complicated question. To try to give a simple answer to a complicated question, for me, it's like, keep friends and family in your life that know who you are and will tell you when you've let greatness get in the way of who you actually are, and you're turned into an asshole. But I know a lot of people don't have that privilege, but I don't know, you gotta surround yourself with good people.

• 59:27Cal Newport?

  I tell Jesse not to make eye contact. I said, don't make eye contact, eyes down. That's why I always say when we're podcasting.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  So, I think that this is really, really hard. I think that the first thing is just to be aware that as you're pursuing greatness, whatever that looks like to you, that it comes with trade-offs. And then to constantly evaluate are the trade-offs that you're making in alignment with your values. And to have some minimum effective doses for important things in your life. So, let's make this real. I might say, hey, I've got a book coming out in a year, I think it's great, my own personal version of greatness is selling as many books as possible, and part of being a great author isn't just writing the book, you have to sell the book. However, I'm gonna do everything I can to sell that book. And I'm still gonna coach my kids' basketball and baseball team. And I'm not gonna miss that.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna miss those games. I'm only gonna travel twice a month. I am not going to miss family dinners. So on and so forth. Right? I'm not gonna, I'm gonna make sure that I exercise for at least 45 minutes a day. Once I hit those minimum effective doses for the other important areas in my life, then it's all in. So I'm all in, but not all the time. And I think every person has a different temperament in a different situation in their life where how they answer that question will look different. And it will also look different at different points of your life. Someone who has a temperament that is maybe a less inclined towards their family, well, their minimum effective doses are gonna be less than mine. Someone whose temperament is more inclined toward family and community, their minimum

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  effective doses are gonna be higher than mine. It's not good or bad, it just is. And I think that people who achieve greatness on a planetary scale, the LeBron James and really any NBA player or coach, their unique mix of genetics and situation is such that they're just okay putting other parts of their life aside more than I might be. I mean, I think about this often with, and these are people that I admire, like J.J. Reddick, okay? Yeah. Seems like a really good guy. I feel like I know him because I've long listened to his various podcasts. He seems normal. He's very thoughtful. He's very, very smart. Was a hell of an NBA basketball player, had a great career.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Well, after his career, instead of retiring and hanging out and like building tables in his basement and whatever, posting on Instagram once a day, he took a job traveling all over the country, arguably traveling more than when he was a player, so that he could be an analyst talking about basketball. And then he took a job as the head coach of the Lakers. That's not good or bad, that just is. But clearly, JJ Reddick finds more value in that than doing other things. And I just think you should never work against yourself. For JJ Reddick to say, "I'm not gonna do this because I should be spending more time with my family and my friends," that's not core to who he is. But the flip side of that is also true. If you're saying, "I feel like I should be spending more time with my family

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  and friends, but society is pushing me to sell more books, so I'm gonna focus more on shilling my books," that's also not true to who you are. So I really think this comes down to knowing who you are, knowing your values, and then getting as much out of yourself as you can within those constraints, all the while knowing that this changes at different points in time and different points of your life.

• 1:02:48Cal Newport?

  All right, so I've tried to summarize this. All right, I'm gonna, I've summarized our advice. Then you gotta, you gotta tell me if you agree with this. All right. So one thing we're saying is, maybe it's easier to stop using the word greatness. Here's what, here's what you really should think about. Pick a craft, let's use the word craft. Pick a craft that you're, you're well-suited for, both in terms of like your abilities and just opportunities in your life. Strive to get better at that craft. Practice quiet gratitude. So you should have pride and be, have gratitude for, "Hey, I'm getting better and this is important and I feel good about it," but be quiet about it. Don't run around the stage with a proverbial chainsaw. At the same time, have well-defined minimum effective

• 1:03:30Cal Newport?

  doses for other things that matter to you in your life. These will differ between different people, but you gotta be super clear about what they are at the moment and you have to stick to them. And if they're gonna shift, then you gotta shift them, be clear about it. All right? "I'm gonna coach this team for two years," that's shifting, but never take that for granted. Know what that is. That is the, that is the template for greatness. So then what should commentators like us, or people writing other op-eds, New York Times, what then is our role in this? One way to think about it is getting rid of the stuff that gets in the way of that. Pseudo-productivity gets in the way of that. Pseudo-greatness, flexing online gets in the way of that. So those who are public figures, writing or thinking about this, that's what we should be doing, is maybe not trying to find whatever,

• 1:04:14Cal Newport?

  the theoretical substructure that explains the universe, but get, help people identify and sidestep the craft that gets in the way of real greatness, which is picking a craft you're well-suited for, trying to get better at a quiet gratitude, coupled with minimum effective doses.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  I think that's great. And then this sounds a little bit woo woo, but the only thing I'd add is like, really know yourself and then pursue your own personal version of greatness. And don't let society shape that for you in either direction. If you are the person that just wants to be the stay at home parent, and you're going to be the best stay at home parent, and when you're being a stay at home parent, you feel like you're living your life's purpose, that is awesome. That is incredible. That is what you ought to do. If you are the person that can't stand an hour of being the primary parent, but every cell in your body tells you to go to medical school and to try to be the best surgeon that you can be, you should go be the best surgeon that you can be.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  And don't compare yourself to different people because they have different temperaments and values than you. They're wired differently. And in both of those cases, don't be an insufferable asshole about it. Do it with quiet gratitude. Let the work speak for itself.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think to go back to your question, Cal, about what is our role in this? I mean, I think this one's really hard to make actionable, but the way I think about it is, and you wrote about this a lot in your last book, Slow Productivity, but just make sure that like the noise we're making is actually meaningful. And it's really difficult, right? Because you got to make noise to sell what you're making. But I think part of the problem is here is we live in like such a noisy world. And when you live in a cafeteria where everyone's screaming, that's how you get to a guy up on stage brandishing a change saw because he's making more noise than everyone else. But again, that's really hard, right? To make that, to make that, apply that across society, to tell people like, we should all be making less noise and make that noise better and more meaningful

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  and higher quality, to use a word you've used. But I do think that is like part of our responsibility, right? We aren't just going to get on here and talk about bullshit because we want to give you guys, listeners, something to, to listen to. We're going to get on here and we feel like we have something to add to the conversation.

• 1:06:24Cal Newport?

  You know who's like an interesting model for this? I feel like when, whenever I listen to a podcast hosted by or has on a guest, a Navy SEAL, and tell me if you've had the same experience, they don't like, like I think they've just learned, they don't like bluster. And probably because that's a community where you'll get your ass kicked if you're strutting around and you're whatever. I don't know what it is. But I've listened to a few of these podcasts and it's an interesting, because I'm trying to think of an example on the right. Like we're, we're kind of saying to the left, like, okay, will you stop pathologizing greatness? And with theoretical frameworks, like what we need to do is fix the definition and get, get rid of the stuff that gets in the way of the, the useful definition.

• 1:07:07Cal Newport?

  And on the right, we're sort of saying, stop like bicep flex greatness. This sort of like very performative, like, hey, I'm going to talk about like my bench press on Instagram or this or that. So I'm trying to think of an example on the right, like look towards this. And I don't know, maybe it's special forces. Some of those guys, at least like the SEALs, like they also don't tend to be, um, just for practical purposes, super swole when they're still on the teams because it's, it's inefficient to carry around that much muscle weight. And they tend to be, uh, they really don't like to brag. So maybe that's, there's an example there. They get really good at what they do and have a culture of like, uh, we get really upset if someone starts sounding off too much, gets a little bit too proud, but they're great at what they do and they strive and it's useful

• 1:07:50Cal Newport?

  and there's, there's utility to it. So, so maybe that's our, maybe that's our example from the right.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's, there's no pseudo productivity there in the SEALs. You can't pretend to be working, I don't think, when you're a Navy SEAL.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Right. And it's entirely different because I, what I like about the Navy SEAL example is it has like the ultimate foil, which is over the last two years, there's, there's been this movement where people sell like a one week retreat where you train like a SEAL.

• 1:08:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  And it's the, the fakest bullshit ever. It's like you sign up and you pay someone $10,000 to scream at you for a week. And that's not at all what actual, like I've talked to Navy SEALs. That's not what they do in, in their training. Um, What I would say is that unfortunately, I think a lot of Navy SEALs now see performative greatness everywhere and they say like, you know, they're probably more in our camp. Which is just like being an honest person in having some integrity in how you think about these topics and talk about them. But yes, if the right wants manly, honorable, conservative, but the Elon Musk with the chainsaw,

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  there's nothing conservative or honorable about it. That's why this all gets to be like really hard when you actually talk about political. But yes, the traditional conservative, honorable, masculine example of this would 100% be a soldier who we ought to respect because they serve their country, they put their life on the line, and they pursue their own version of greatness with no BS. And that used to be the right, I think, like 15 years ago.

• 1:09:28Cal Newport?

  So we can just blame social media for everything. The SEAL, by the way, I was thinking about, I was listening to a podcast by Andy Stumpf, who is, he's pretty cynical about the Navy and is, just like to a fault, hates to be self praising on anything. And then it turns out more recently, I think not only was he a SEAL, but he was in like SEAL Team Six. Like he was like an elite of an elite. And he's uncomfortable even people just like valorizing Navy SEALs in general. He says, we're not so great. And so that caught my attention. Jaco Willink is kind of the same way. He's a gruff guy and he posts those pictures of his watch, right? Which that's like its own thing. But if you listen to his podcast, really what he cares about is like his men and like

• 1:10:12Cal Newport?

  the stories of what people have gone through. Most of his podcasts is having on veterans and talking through and like the thing that haunts him is the men he lost in Iraq, you know? So it's interesting. And he's big and he's black belt in jujitsu or whatever. Man, that guy does not brag. I feel like he could put me into a stuff sack if he got mad at me, like he would just go like that. But he doesn't go around acting like that's the case. I don't know, I think between our basketball references and our Navy SEAL references, we have now officially, I'm checking the notes here, yeah, we've lost every female listener to this. I think the last one just left.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  When I said Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, I knew that was good. That was gonna be a big drop off in the listener ship.

• 1:10:56Cal Newport?

  I heard a door shut, I think, in the background. The screen door slamming shut as like someone walked off into the field. Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's, I don't know. It's like you wanna, this example is, I think, gender neutral. And maybe we should catch ourselves in the examples that we're using, but like Serena Williams, like there is a, there is a fierceness in her style is very bold. And she was known for like yelling at officials and screaming during points. But she wasn't faking it. She's the greatest tennis player of all time. Katelyn Clark plays with a lot of pizzazz on the basketball court. She's the greatest collegiate basketball player of all time, probably across both sexes. But she wasn't faking it. Like, it wasn't performative. You know, maybe, maybe a place

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  to drive this home is, I, I, I put something up on, on social media, although I'm trying not to ruin my brain, where I essentially say, you know, like LeBron James doesn't have to be prating around with a chainsaw because he's too busy shooting his 2,000 jump shots. And that's real greatness. And someone commented, yeah, but Elon Musk is like so WWE, Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, and it's awesome. And I immediately thought, and I commented back, and I said, like, yeah, like, for pure entertainment value, it is. But if you want to watch real wrestling, you go to the University of Iowa. And I bet you can't name one guy on that wrestling team. But it's arguably the greatest sports program in history. That's

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  real wrestling. And you know what this guy said? He said, touche. Like, I've been owned on the internet today. But it's waking people up to that. And hopefully that guy had a realization, like, whoa, you're right. And then instead of watching Elon on stage, you can go down the YouTube wormhole and watch some, some videos about the Iowa wrestling program. But that gets back to like, just calling out pseudo greatness, without saying greatness is bad. We're saying, hey, you want greatness, look at the real thing. Admire that over there. That's our job.

• 1:12:59Cal Newport?

  But I'm seeing here, this, this commenter said touche, his name is Srad Bulberg? I don't know, man. I think this is. His picture looks a lot like you with a mustache. I don't know. I've seen him show up a lot. He really likes your work.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're too funny, Cal. No, the actual commenter, I'm not gonna name anyone's name that's not appropriate. But it's definitely like one of these like manly dudes. Who has trainer in his name. And who you go to his profile and has like a Roman gladiator aesthetic.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  I feel like if you send that guy to Iowa wrestling videos, given what's already in his algorithm, he's going down. You're gonna get him red pilled. So maybe he shouldn't. He shouldn't be watching Iowa wrestling, but you know.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  But that's my point. It's the WWE version versus the real thing and that cuts across everything. And I think the left is too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say it's all bad. And the right is too quick to actually mistake the WWE version for the real thing. And the people wrestling at Iowa have no time for either. Cause they're too busy trying to be great at what they do.

• 1:14:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah, no, I like that. I like that. Yeah, there's a better way to think about it. So if we solved all the problems?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  If we solved all of them, I don't know if we solved any of them. I hope we were great.

• 1:14:18Cal Newport?

  Well, I am gonna parade around with a chainsaw after this episode. Just to lean into my greatness.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  The new portion chainsaw?

• 1:14:25Cal Newport?

  Hold up my Webby award or whatever.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  It shouldn't be a chainsaw though. If it's Cal, it should be like a time block planning book.

• 1:14:34Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Or it's like the manifestation of time block planning. I'm trying to think.

• 1:14:38Cal Newport?

  My planner?

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Maybe it is a chainsaw. You're just cutting. You're just cutting everything that's not productive out of your day.

• 1:14:45Cal Newport?

  Cut it out of my way. Other losers aren't doing this because they're losers. But I, I deep work for 19 hours a day. Till my rectum bleeds. That's what a man does.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  I forgot my partner's name. My kid only knows me because they see me on TV.

• 1:15:03Cal Newport?

  I know my partner by the nickname Roadblock because that's what I see her as.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:15:08Cal Newport?

  Road to greatness.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's this is this is this is the problem and this is this is the kind of greatness that we need to continue to to call out. And as a listener, hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully this helps you define the role of greatness in your own life. And I think that once you hopefully we've helped you see the difference between the performative Kabuki version and the real version. And it's the kind of thing where once you see it, you can't unsee it. And now that your radar is fine tuned to this, I suspect you'll start seeing it everywhere. And I think it's a really good way to decipher between signal and noise. And I'd encourage all of you as you look for examples in your own life and sources of inspiration to identify the noise and try to minimize it and then to follow good signal.

• 1:15:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you. A pleasure talking and I'm glad we could share this with our audiences as well. I guess we have to get back to crushing it.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Gotta go win.

• 1:16:06Cal Newport?

  Gotta go win.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Let's go win.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Thank you, Cal.

• 1:16:09Cal Newport?

  All I do is win.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Thank you, Cal. Thank you, Clay. Thank you, Jesse, in the background for doing the production. And hopefully we'll make this a more a more regular occurrence.

• 1:16:21Cal Newport?

  All right, talk soon. All right, that was my discussion with Brad and Clay, brought to you by the Land Rover Defender. Visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender. It's funny that they sponsored this particular episode because Brad's neighbor in Asheville just bought a Defender. And he's always sending me photos of it because he likes the look of that car. So go to LandRoverUSA.com. If you want to see what is this car that keeps being a part of Brad and I's life, whether we wanted to or not. All right, I like that discussion. I think we covered a lot of ground. We got practical, we got philosophical. This idea of having people I know and who have been on the show before, join me for an in-depth episode to talk about something timely. This is new. It wasn't the original intention

• 1:17:06Cal Newport?

  for this series. But maybe it's something I'll play around with as time goes on. If there's there's other things that come up in the news, or a new book, or a new sort of cultural trend that I think my existing Group of writer friends might be have an interesting thing to say. Maybe we'll do a few more of these episodes. But in the meantime, I have what I think of as a spring season lined up for more semi regular in-depth episodes. I have a few writers I want to have on. I have at least one repeat guest in mind who I want to try to convince to come back in the show. I'll give you a hint. He's in the woods for a month right now. So I want to hear about how that goes. So anyways, I'm trying to do more of this. I took a little bit of a hiatus during the late fall and winter, but I want to get back to it. So stay tuned on our normal feed. I'll release these as I finish. But otherwise, Monday, you got my normal

• 1:17:51Cal Newport?

  episodes. I hope you enjoy this one. I hope you enjoy the ones to come. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:18:01Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.