Productivity Expert Explains: How to Accomplish Far More While Working Less (ft. Cal Newport)

What if there was a way accomplish meaningful work—without the associated relationship breakdowns or stress? What if “making an impact” didn’t require massive amounts of energy or sacrifice? What if you could get more done by doing less? In this episode, I talk to Cal Newport about how knowledge work has got it all wrong. We discuss the subtle dangers of remote/digital work and the key to avoiding burnout, all while still being able to grind on the things you love. If you’re a stressed out, overworked remote worker, this one is for you. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 The Burnout Epidemic: Why Flexibility Isn't Fixing the Problem 00:01:22 Meet Cal Newport: The Professor Who Sold 20 Million Books Without Social Media 00:02:52 What Is Slow Productivity? 00:04:17 The History of Productivity: From Factories to Knowledge Work 00:05:34 Pseudo-Productivity: The Activity Trap That's Killing Knowledge Workers 00:06:52 The Corporate Meeting Nightmare: Why Everything Takes 90 Minutes 00:08:30 Measuring Success on a Decade Scale: The John McPhee Example 00:10:52 Adapting Traditional Knowledge Work Principles to Modern Jobs 00:12:41 Take Longer: Why Doubling Your Timeline Produces Better Work 00:14:23 The Beatles and Sergeant Pepper: Balancing Ambition With Deadlines 00:18:37 Principle One: Do Fewer Things at Once 00:19:20 The Overhead Tax: Why Every Commitment Generates Hidden Work 00:20:55 Specialization Over Jack-of-All-Trades: A Team Management Lesson 00:22:16 Remote Work and the Invisible Overhead Tax 00:23:58 The Friction Paradox: Why Removing Barriers Makes Things Worse 00:26:49 Context Switching: The Productivity Poison 00:29:36 The Remote Work Paradox: Highest Satisfaction, Highest Burnout 00:31:07 Hybrid Work and the Meeting Explosion 00:33:01 Freedom as Anxiety: The Sartre Problem With Endless Options 00:36:44 Making Your Workload Transparent: The Shared Queue Solution 00:39:47 Pull vs. Push: The Manufacturing Lesson Knowledge Work Ignores 00:43:20 Video Production Bottlenecks: Applying Pull Systems to Content Creation 00:44:09 Principle Two: Work at a Natural Pace 00:46:15 The Beatles, Mark Twain, and Picasso: Variability Within Massive Output 00:47:03 Distinguishing Natural Pace From Procrastination 00:16:50 Lin-Manuel Miranda's Seven-Year Journey: Milestones Without Endless Time 00:49:49 The Anti-Productivity Movement vs. Slow Productivity 00:52:59 Principle Three: Obsess Over Quality 00:52:43 Self-Care vs. Self-Indulgence: Where's the Line? 00:55:25 Is Slow Productivity a Privileged Position? 00:58:36 Entry-Level Knowledge Work: Moving Up Through Rare and Valuable Skills 01:02:32 Gen Z: The Attention Span Crisis and Hidden Advantages 01:06:18 From Self-Destruction to Construction: Gen Z's Cultural Shift 01:07:56 Generational Evolution: From Follow Your Passion to Job Engineering 01:10:19 The MIT Theory Group: Where It All Began 01:09:09 Slow Productivity as an Umbrella Framework ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  In a recent survey of 12,000 people across 15 countries, a shocking 75% of office workers said that they had experienced burnout in the past year. Burnout is defined as chronic workplace stress, or constant feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion. Not only has this become more common in the past decade, but post-pandemic, it has reached, well, epidemic proportions. Yet, this is despite the fact that more people than ever have flexibility both between and within jobs. We are more able to choose our hours, work where we want, and for who we want, on what we want, than any other time in history. On paper, things should be great for workers, yet they're suffering more than ever.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  So what the fuck is going on here? Are people just whiny and weak? Or is there something deeper and more psychological going on? Today's episode is all about productivity burnout, and why, when given more freedom and flexibility in our jobs, our minds appear to burn out faster. It's a complicated and nuanced subject, and a must hear for anyone who struggles with feeling stressed at work. Now, joining me today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, but Cal is best known for his New York Times bestselling books about the intersection of technology, productivity, and work culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into 40 languages. His newest one is called Slow Productivity: Accomplishment Without Burnout.

• 1:31Mark Manson?

  But perhaps most impressively, Cal has made it this far in life without ever starting a social media account. Yes, you heard that correctly. If that blows your mind, well, once you listen to the conversation, you'll understand how he does it.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  20 million books sold, zero fucks given. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 1:57Mark Manson?

  Cal, so good to have you here. Mark's good to be here. I'm excited to do this for a couple of reasons. One is just I've been reading your books for 12 years now. Been a fan of your work for a long time. Also excited because I feel like philosophically, we're very aligned. Like, every time I read your stuff, I'm like, that totally dovetails with what makes sense to me, but... There are so many situations where my intuition seemed diametrically opposed to yours. So I actually feel like this is a new podcast, so you might have the honor of being the first podcast guest that, that we get to disagree about things.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 2:33Mark Manson?

  And have a conversation about it. So I'm very excited about it. The new book is Slow Productivity. It's fantastic. It's clear. It's to the point. It's classic Cal Newport. Why don't we start by just laying some groundwork, defining some terms and start out by just telling us what is slow productivity and what was the inspiration for the concept?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's the answer to a question, which is how can we produce work we care about? That's impactful and successful, right? Supports us, supports our family without burning out and without having work annex more and more of the territory of your life, right? That was the motivating question. I was hearing that from my readers and then I was feeling it myself as well. And you know, for me, the, the personal motivation was my three boys all became elementary school age, which I discovered as a dad is a real switch. Suddenly, when you have three boys that are elementary school age, they want essentially every single minute you can give them, which is different than when they're younger and it's more like survival mode. Let's, let's keep these things fed, right? So it's really different. So I was feeling that at the same time that in my career, I was hitting on all

• 3:37Speaker 02

  cylinders, you know, as an academic, as a writer, you know, 10 year to Georgetown, writing for The New Yorker. Books were coming well, so I, I had endless opportunities. And so I was feeling that personally. Then the pandemic hits and all my readers write and said, I'm tired of the word productivity and I'm tired of work and this whole thing is nonsense. I just spent eight hours in Zoom and I'm going to quit and move to the countryside. We'll figure out later how I'm going to survive myself. All this was going on at the same time. And so I said, okay, we have to solve this problem. Like, how can we work and do interesting work and meaningful work and not burn out or just want to leave it all behind, move to the country? So slow productivity, that's the answer. It's, it's what I came up with as an answer to that question.

• 4:15Mark Manson?

  And how would you define slow productivity?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Well, so we have to define it in contrast to what we do instead. So I mean, I went deep in sort of Cal Newport fashion. I went deep on the, the history of productivity and knowledge work, right? And I think the story is important to understand. What slow productivity means is that you go all the way back to mid 20th century. Knowledge work emerges as a major sector, right? The term is coined in 1959. There's a problem. It's a new type of work. We're using our brain. We're not building things with our hands. It's growing really big. We see this in the US economy. The problem is we didn't know how to define productivity. Like, because we were coming out of the industrial age in which we had very clear understanding of productivity. It was a ratio. We produced this many Model Ts for this many input labor hours.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  That's a number. We changed the way we build the Model Ts. That number goes up. This is better. And so you had a very straightforward notion of productivity. That actually came from agriculture. We got this many bushels of wheat from this many acres of land. We switched the way we rotate our crops. That number went up. This is more productive. None of that worked in knowledge work, right? Because I'm going to do five or six different things. That's going to be different than what you're doing. That's going to shift unpredictably. The method by which I actually complete my work is entirely obfuscated. No one has any idea how I'm doing it. There's no central system to even evaluate. So we were left with a quandary. How do we define productivity? We need something, right? We have to manage these people. And what the industry came up with was we'll use activity as like a crude proxy for useful effort.

• 5:47Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Activity is better than less activity. More is better than less. I call it pseudo-productivity, and it was an activity-based notion. This kind of worked because we had offices we went to. And you would go there and you would do the show and, you know, you'd put the magazine down when the boss walked by and whatever. And then we get to the 20th century and we get the front office IT revolution. Now we have computers. We have networks. We have emails. We have smartphones. We have laptops. Suddenly, the opportunities to demonstrate activity are endless because I can send an email anywhere at any time. The threshold on what active means really went up because I can constantly be on Slack. Like, I can constantly be leaving a digital trail. And the amount of work that was possible to do also became basically limitless. That's when the wheels really spun off the car.

• 6:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And that's when pseudo-productivity became increasingly unbearable until we get to the pandemic and that's it.

• 6:38Mark Manson?

  I love this term pseudo-productivity because, you know, occasionally I will interface with very large corporations. And it's funny because I'll go into a meeting and in my head, there's like five minutes of things to talk about. But for people who are working at a large company, you know, a 90 minute meeting with Mark Manson sounds productive. It sounds like they're doing something really important, right? And so you end up in this meeting and it's, it's like eight or nine people, half of which probably don't need to be there in the first place, going one by one, giving like a 10 or 12 minute spiel about something that's completely inconsequential, but sounds important and sounds useful. And it finally takes 80 minutes to actually get to the, the five minute thing that is of any productive

• 7:23Mark Manson?

  value whatsoever. And it, it kills me inside, you know, as a self-employed person, an entrepreneur, it, it just, it drives me absolutely insane. But I love that you point at the, the ambiguity of measurement within knowledge work, right? Like it's easy. If you're a plumber, you can measure your productivity by how many sinks you fix per day. But if you are a writer, for instance, do you measure by how many words you write per day? Do you measure by how many hours you put in per day? Do you measure by how many chapter outlines? Like I ran into this myself with my books where it's like, I would set word counts, goals. And quickly what you discover is that you'll just write bullshit to fill up your word count goal and then call, call yourself, call it a good day, you know, pat yourself on the back.

• 8:05Mark Manson?

  And then I was like, okay, that's not working. Maybe I'll switch to just put in three good hours a day. And then I would just sit at my desk for three hours and not write any words. Yeah. And then call, pat myself on the back and call it a good day. And so there's this ambiguity that pervades so many jobs. And I think so much of this problem is just accurately defining what is the metric that we're optimizing for?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think the, your example about writing is perfect for getting to the core of the issue. So this idea that what's my daily metric? That's industrial thinking.

• 8:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Right? So you're thinking, okay, so what am I supposed, I have to measure something like how do, what am I doing today? Is it, is it word count? Is it pages? Is it, yeah, time? Where I think the right metric for a writer is measured, and this is going to be quite different, on the scale of a decade.

• 8:54Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  What books that I've published in the last 10 years, how proud am I of those books? I mean, it's why I opened Slow Productivity with a writer. I opened it with John McPhee. John McPhee is laying on his back on a picnic table in his backyard in Princeton, New Jersey, for five days. Like, the book opens with five days of John McPhee laying on his back, doing nothing, except trying to figure out, how am I going to make this massive two-part New Yorker piece I'm supposed to write about the Pine Barrens? How am I going to write an article about this? And he sat there for five days. And my point is, if we zoomed into one of those five days with the pseudo-productivity industrial mindset, we'd say, this person's lazy. Like, he's doing nothing. What can he point to? But then you zoom out, he's written 29 books.

• 9:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  You know, Pulitzer Prize, two different books that were finalists for the National Book Award, his writing for The New Yorker is incomparable, right? I mean, he's productive by any reasonable sort of self-evident definition of productivity. So as a writer, like, yeah, what did I do? I mean, my decade began with this. Like, this is my productivity metric. Like, this was the first book, this was the start of me wanting to write serious idea nonfiction books. This is about 12, 12 years, right?

• 10:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  So like, now I can evaluate this, and I am. Like, okay, what comes next? So that's the scale at which I'm thinking about it. That's a very slow productivity mindset. I know it's hard, and there's a whole, we get into, how do you approach work if ultimately you're going to measure some things on a scale of a decade? But that's slow productivity.

• 10:19Mark Manson?

  This is a classic situation where my heart loves that. I'm like, yeah, that sounds great.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And your brain is not so happy.

• 10:25Mark Manson?

  And my brain is like, wait a second, timeout. That can work for us as authors. Like, that's a little bit of a luxury position, right?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:31Mark Manson?

  And, and John McPhee as well. You know, what if you are a data analyst at a bank?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:38Mark Manson?

  You know, which is also knowledge work, also ambiguous metrics, KPIs that you're supposed to meet. Maybe they're good, maybe they're not, maybe they're driving you crazy, burning you out. But they don't have that luxury to necessarily measure their productivity in a decade.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  So this, this is the, the kind of the key of the approach in the book, is let's start by looking at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So the people, well before we had cubicles and computer screens, used their brain to create stuff with value. Now, the thing about traditional knowledge workers, so writers, philosophers, like scientists, artists, right? The thing about them is, they had huge flexibility, right? I mean, if you are supported by the meta cheese to do statue carving, right? You have a lot of flexibility in how you work. And so my thought is, well, this is an interesting natural experiment. What happens when you give a knowledge worker, a cognitive worker, complete flexibility? How are you going to figure out you can do anything you want through trial and error? Where do you end up?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  What principles do you end up embodying to produce the best stuff, to have the most sustainable, interesting career? And then my idea is we isolate those principles and then we adapt them to the data analyst. Right? So we look at me writing books over a decade, or we look at Newton taking 30 years to get the Principia together, or Lin-Manuel Miranda spending seven years to do In the Heights. And we don't try to replicate their daily work habits. We don't say, great, as a data analyst, you should go be like Lin-Manuel Miranda.

• 12:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  And you should kind of come back to it every few months and then be in a freestyle rap touring group for the rest of your time. We're not replicating the specifics, but let's isolate the principles they discovered and then adapt them. So like, let's take this principle, which I would call take longer.

• 12:19Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Right? Take longer on your work. Take longer the scales in which you measure productivity, you know? Make that a longer scale. You have a standard knowledge work job. What that then mean is, okay, when it comes time for me to agree to a project, let me take whatever timeline I initially think of as reasonable. Like, all right, boss, I'll get you this report in a month and just automatically double it. Right? Because you're probably really bad at estimating how much time. We see this principle of great creators is that like they take their time. If you give yourself more time, actually, it's not only going to be more realistic, it's probably going to be a better report or a better marketing strategy, whatever it is you're putting together. So you can take longer. Now, it doesn't mean sit on your back at a picnic table for five days, but it might be, this is going to take two months instead of one.

• 13:04Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  And now you're able to produce something that really turns heads and this gets the flywheel going, the momentum going. It's all about adapting these examples to modern jobs.

• 13:14Mark Manson?

  Are you familiar with the Hofstadter's Law? A project will take 50% longer than expected, even when you account for Hofstadter's Law.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 13:22Mark Manson?

  I'm a big fan of that. So this is a classic example. Philosophically, absolutely. And I have absolutely found in my own career, slowing down, doing fewer things, which is the first principle of slow productivity. Do fewer things, say no to more things. It's been a huge help in my own career. But then I try to like, start actually like, You know, carving out where the boundary between that and just straight up procrastination. You know, where does that end and procrastination begin? If I go to my boss and I say, hey, I think you said to have in a month, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it in two. Like, do I actually need those two months? Am I bullshitting myself? I don't know. It's very murky for me. Do you, is there any way to like clarify that?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, well, hey, this is the challenge of doing interesting stuff with your brain.

• 14:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Right? So like, let's, let's emphasize all this is hard, but like, let's talk about the procrastination issue. The story in the book that was relevant here is The Beatles, right? So I mean, I tell the story of Sergeant Pepper. Cause what's interesting about that album is The Beatles had had this terrible tour. Right before that, everything went wrong. Right? And at the very final stop of that tour, they said, this is it. We're not touring again, which is a, a big thing when it comes to thinking about recording an album. Because if you're gonna tour, your songs have to be reproducible on stage, like in an arena where everyone's gonna recognize the song. If you're not gonna tour again, you can do anything you want with the music. So now they're in this situation of we could stay in the studio as long as we want. Like, we can endlessly mess with tape loops and effects and Indian instruments and all the things they did.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So now you're in this interesting tension of we wanna do more interesting things than our first album, which they recorded in a single day.

• 15:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Which is crazy. They just went in the studio, boom, boom, boom. They had a completely practiced, they'd been playing those songs and hammer, boom, boom, boom, they're right out the door. So we wanna do better than that, but we also don't wanna be stuck in here, you know, endlessly. Which, by the way, a lot of bands ended up doing, right? They kicked off the progressive rock movement. A lot of bands, especially in the seventies, just got lost in the studio. So how did they walk the balance between it? Well, they, they did spend more time, but they also set milestones that made them actually ship things, right? So like, they, they released a single, as soon as they had a single ready to release, this started the clock ticking of, okay, this album has to follow. Like, you have a single out. So, so they felt, okay, we have some pressure to actually keep moving, but we're moving at a slower pace. So you should take two months instead of one, cause I could, I know one month is not enough time.

• 15:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  I've never met a knowledge worker who has ever accurately estimated how long something was gonna take. I mean, what people do is they, they create a fairy tale about wouldn't it be great if? I could finish this book chapter in a month and then your mind falls in love with how everything in your life would make sense. If you could just, but it's not what's actually going to happen. So make it two months, but not three. I'm taking more time, but not endless time. And what's my equivalent as a knowledge worker of releasing a single? Hold me to it, boss. This is, I'm going to send you updates along the way. This is going to be good. You're going to like it. Hold me to it. There's a cost now.

• 16:23Mark Manson?

  So, okay, that, that helps me conceptualize this because one thought that I, that I had it recurred throughout me reading this was this idea of like limitations and constraints can actually improve productivity. And it sounds like what you're saying is don't just kick the can down the road. Like still have a deadline, still put a constraint on, just allow for an, an extra amount of leeway than you might do naturally or normally.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I mean, this is what Lin-Manuel Miranda did in that example. Right? So he has this play. He writes it as a sophomore because he's a brilliant guy. So he writes in the heights as a sophomore at Swaffmore. They perform it. It's not very good. Because also he's a sophomore. But he's like, there's something here. Right? I mean, I think there's something here. I need to mature creatively, but I think there's something here. So he didn't just sit on it and say, let me wait till I'm inspired. But he also didn't say, what I'm going to do is like disappear for three months and like finish this thing because it would not have debuted on Broadway and won eight Tonys if he had done that. He did the middle. So he got connected with two alums from Swaffmore who saw the play and said, I think you're on to something. Like your book is kind of trash, but the music is really interesting. Like, so there's something here.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  And they said, here's what we're going to do. They had a theater company in Manhattan. They said, we're going to every couple of months, stage a new reading. We're going to bring in actors and actresses. We'll pay for it. And we're going to do a reading and you're going to really get a sense about what's working and not working from actually hearing people read the script. And then you better update it before the next reading comes along, right? You need to actually act on it. Right? So he had these milestones that pulled him forward, but he was also touring with his freestyle group. He was doing some substitute teaching. He was writing a restaurant review column. Like, he wasn't just doing that. So he was taking time to let that really mature. But at the same time, he wasn't

• 18:14Speaker 02

  He wasn't sitting there and saying, I'll get to this when I feel inspired.

• 18:17Mark Manson?

  So it sounds like this principle of do fewer things isn't necessarily do less work. It's work really hard on fewer things over a longer period of time.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So do fewer things. There's, there's another bit of the logic to it as well, which, which I think is clear. When I add two words to it and say, do fewer things at once.

• 18:37Mark Manson?

  Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Fewer things at once actually means that your rate of completing things is probably going to go up.

• 18:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Right. So like this one gives palpitations to people with bosses because they interpret it as like, I'm going to do less stuff. They, they see it typically through a standard sort of zero sum employer manager relation, like you would have in the, the labor politics of the industrial sector. You know, I, I as the, the employee in the factory, what makes my life better is going to make your life as the factory owner worse. And what, what makes the factory owner's life better is going to make my life as the employee worse. We're in a fight, right? And we're going to have to just go back and forth. It's not that situation, actually, in this case, doing fewer things at once is actually going to produce more things. And, and the, the reason for that, actually, it's like really insidious and subtle.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  It is the administrative overhead that comes along with saying yes to something.

• 19:30Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Right. So, so once you say yes to something, there's an administrative overhead in an office. That's going to be emails. That's going to be, I get shudders thinking about it, but standing meetings. Like, I don't know. I'm also an academic, so you don't have to deal with this as much, but like, great. Well, meet every Wednesday to talk about this. Everything generates that.

• 19:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Right. Which is fine. Like you have to, there's overhead with commitments. You gotta talk to people about it. The issue is that's generated whether you're working on that at the moment or not. So if you say yes to too many things, they're each generating this overhead tax. That begins to pile up, right? And then once that begins piling up, the time left in your day to actually execute the work gets smaller and smaller and more fragmented. Because these meetings aren't going to all fall one after another. They're going to fall sprinkled throughout your day. So now the, the pace at which you're actually completing things goes down. So how long does it take in between things you finish? That actually begins to get longer. So if you keep fewer things on your plate at once, it's not that fewer things get done. Actually, it goes faster. So I always tell people, if you start there, it's okay.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Because once you bootstrap doing fewer things, your boss is going to say, why are you so productive?

• 20:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Like, it's actually going to be the opposite thing. Like, hey, what's going on here?

• 20:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Like, you're shipping at a pretty fast rate.

• 20:39Mark Manson?

  I believe it. I've actually, I've found that with my own team. I actually had a sit down with one of my employees, maybe six months ago. And I, I told her, I'm like, you're doing too much. Like, you, you, you're good at five things. I need you to be excellent at one.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 20:54Mark Manson?

  And it's, it was really effective. It's been really helpful. I think it's, I've definitely seen, as my team has grown, I have seen the importance of specialization. You know, because when you're small and it's just two or three people, everybody wears a lot of hats.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:06Mark Manson?

  And the stakes are a little bit lower. But now that we're growing quite a bit, I'm finding that I'm having to have these conversations of like, you are going to be the team expert at this one thing.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:17Mark Manson?

  And you are in charge of this domain. And it's, it's been great.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:20Mark Manson?

  It's been really effective.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  You do that well. I mean, it's like, software developers figured this out a long time ago. Like, we want you to write this type of code that you write really well, right? That's why software developers figured out a while ago, we're not just going to push tasks on people. We're not just going to say, here's like 20 features we need.

• 21:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  You know, just, hey, take care of these. No, we're going to use some sort of agile system. Where if there's a feature that needs to be done, we'll write it down on a board. And it's not on your plate, and it's not on my plate, it's on the team's plate.

• 21:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  It's generating no overhead tax.

• 21:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Because no one is assigned to this yet. And then we're going to give you one thing at a time.

• 21:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And just like sprint, do that thing, you know, all the 10x code this. And when you're done, we're going to give you another thing, right? They, they discovered, programs get built faster and better that way than just dropping everything on everyone at once. And like, just hey, figure this all out and, you know, add all these features and keep up with them.

• 22:10Mark Manson?

  So one of the recurring subjects that happens throughout the book is remote work. It kind of, you never, I don't think you ever completely address it directly, but it's, it continually shows up as examples, particularly over the last few years since the pandemic. And I was thinking that this concept of the overhead tax, which I love, and it's a completely accurate way of thinking about it. I think there's something about digital work that

• 22:40Mark Manson?

  Deludes us, it makes the the overhead tax less apparent.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:45Mark Manson?

  Like if you come to me in person and you're like, hey, Mark, I'm doing this event. It'd be really cool if you showed up. If for some reason, you know, we can talk about it, I can ask like, okay, what are your expectations? How many days is it? How long is the talk?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:57Mark Manson?

  All these things. And I can get a really good sense of like, okay, how much time in my schedule is that going to take up? Whereas if I get an email from a random company or organization saying, hey, come out to Indiana and come speak to a thousand people and we're going to pay you a shitload of money. For some reason, that email just looks like easy money. And like, just on paper, I'm like, oh, man, this is, this is the best deal ever. And what, for some reason, my brain is not processing that this is, we're going to have multiple Zoom meetings. I'm going to have to fly out like two days early. There's going to be a meeting with, with the organizers. There's going to be a meeting with the VIPs. There's going to be a sound check.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  There's going to be a lunch.

• 23:38Mark Manson?

  There's going to be a lunch.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  VIP launch, there's going to be a reception.

• 23:40Mark Manson?

  There's going to be a book signing. My flight's going to get delayed coming back. It's actually, it's like a four day commitment. And, and it's actually not worth it. And it took me a long time to start saying no to those things. Part of me wonders like, what is it about digital work in particular that, that obfuscates the overhead tax?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it matters you're not seeing someone.

• 24:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, the, the friction, little reductions in friction can make a big difference. Right? I mean, there, there's a, a study that Gloria Mark did where they went to a company and they took 12 people and they turned off their email. It's like one of these cool Gloria Mark studies of like, let's unplug this wire and

• 24:20Mark Manson?

  Do what happens.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  See what breaks, right? Yeah. But then she told me a backstory about the study, which I think gets to this, is that one of the subjects in the study told her, like, it's not in the paper, but told her that he was really annoyed at his boss in general. Because he had this job where he had to set up a laboratory for experiments every day. It was an R and D lab. And the boss would just keep emailing him with like, do this, can you just do this? Like, get me this, not just give me, why, did you get the email? Did you get the email? And he was really annoyed because it would keep distracting him from what he was doing. And it was kind of intricate what he was doing. Then they selected that guy to be one of the no email people in the subject. In the study, the boss essentially stopped bothering him. And then what Gloria would say, the reason why this is interesting is the boss's office was like three doors down from the laboratory that this guy was setting up.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  So like, the boss could just walk down the hallway and ask this guy, hey, could you do this? What about this? That extra little friction? That was the difference.

• 25:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Right? It like substantially cut down. So there's something about, you know, like if I pitched you right now, come to Indiana. Yeah. It's just like you're saying, I want you to come give a time. I've done exactly this in Indiana. So we've probably done it for the same company.

• 25:25Mark Manson?

  Been there, done that.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've probably done it for the same company. You're in person, A, I'd be much more reluctant to ask you because I can watch. I mean, I know it sounds small, but like asking someone to do something, you have to watch their face and the consternation. And there's like a social capital.

• 25:40Mark Manson?

  There's a risk of feeling the rejection. It's easy. Like if you don't get an email back, it doesn't really bother you. But when you stand face to face with somebody and ask them something and they're like, no, like, it sucks.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  It does suck. And yeah, and I think that that is true. Right?

• 25:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  So, so you get that with the digital.

• 25:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  So you're like, okay, I don't care if I send this out, you know, because what happens? They're going to say no. You also have to see the context, right? So, you know, when I see you in your office, I see you're doing things. So I'm thinking like, oh, Mark's kind of busy. Like, okay, maybe I'm not going to bother him about this. On email, for whatever reason, or Slack, the, the way we imagine other people is basically like empty vessels to do our work. It's like, we imagine like you're just sitting there.

• 26:25Mark Manson?

  My entire team is nodding along right now.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  And especially like the killer is not necessarily the trip in the ads can take four days. It's the thing that's going to take like 45 minutes at a time. Cause they imagine like, come on, why not? What are you doing right now? Like I do things that take 45 minutes all the time and they don't understand you're busy or the scale of how many people are asking this.

• 26:45Mark Manson?

  Even five minutes. Like it's dozens of five minute things.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:49Mark Manson?

  And there's, there's something to, there's like a, there's a cognitive load that comes with task switching.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:56Mark Manson?

  And so when you are always available and when everything seems minor and easy and you just get inundated constantly with a five minute thing here and a five minute thing there. It wears you out in a way that, I mean, this is, this is a lot of what deep work is about. It wears you out in a way that, you know, working four hours on one thing does not.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  And this is, I think is like the productivity poison.

• 27:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Is like the fact that the human brain. Is not a microprocessor, right? Like a microprocessor, every op that it executes, every op code is the same as far as it's concerned. It just, here it goes. It goes to the circuits. It takes exactly one cycle. Give me the next thing. So all that matters for a processor is you want to make sure that it's never idle. So if you design a processor, like all of us computer scientists had to do in school, you want to keep a pipeline as full as possible of instruction so that like it's never idle. Human brain can't do that. Like if I want to switch from what we're doing now to talk about or think about something unrelated, I have to do a lot of cognitive work. I mean, and it goes down to the neuronal level. I have to inhibit certain networks that are relevant to this conversation. I have to excite different neuronal networks that are relevant to the new conversation. This can take 10 to 20 minutes.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  It's why when you sit down to do something hard, it's this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. Ooh, I'm in flow now, right? Like 15 minutes in. Like, why is that? Because it takes about 15 minutes for your brain to reconfigure to what you're doing. And then it goes easy. So yeah, so what happens when you have to switch every five minutes? You always feel like in the first 10 minutes of trying to write, like everything is just frustrating. Your cognitive capacity is reduced. It's deranging. Like it completely exhausts people. It's like working in an environment with weird flashing lights and it's like too cold. Like it's not conducive to how humans actually function. Like I really do think constant context switching is like the number one mental health affliction of knowledge work, right? Like it's a massive issue.

• 28:43Mark Manson?

  And it's something that technology, to the point of digital minimalism, it's something that technology enables further. There are a couple of themes here that keep coming up on the pod with multiple people. So like when Oliver Berkman was on, we spent a lot of time talking about how removing friction actually can in some cases make things worse. And with him, it was more in kind of like a philosophical existential sense. Like it's without friction, things don't feel as meaningful. They don't feel as important. When David Brooks was on, we talked about how the loss of social friction is actually makes relationships more superficial and more, you know, more tenuous. And here we're seeing it with with productivity, like that that lack of friction is actually in some ways kind of overloading our brains.

• 29:28Mark Manson?

  So when I was doing research for this episode, I came across something really fascinating. I looked up Job satisfaction surveys. And I was surprised, really surprised. According to the Conference Board Job Satisfaction Survey, 2023 marks the highest job satisfaction since the survey began, almost 40 years ago. It measured job satisfaction across 26 categories, and it found that the gain in job satisfaction was most marked in people who had hybrid or remote work. Let's put a pin in that. Next thing I looked up, burnout. Burnout is also at an all time high. 61% of workers say that they find it difficult to unplug and stop working at home. 77% of remote workers say that they feel isolated,

• 30:11Mark Manson?

  and 41% say that they do not feel supported by their bosses or coworkers. One study found that, on average, remote workers spend two and a half hours more per day working, which is, that's staggering. That's like a 52 hour work week. So we have this weird contradiction going on here of, if you ask people how satisfied they are with their jobs, they're more satisfied than ever. And the people who are working from home, or have the option to work from home, say that, report that they are the most satisfied than ever. But they're also the most burnt out of all the remote work, of all the workers, period. So what the fuck is going on here?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  I know these data. Partially what's going on here is people like flexibility.

• 30:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Right. So many different surveys ask people, and this is not surprising. Would you rather have flexibility in your schedule? Or a schedule that you have no flexibility? Nine out of 10, I'm thinking of recent Gallup data, will say, I want flexibility. It's like asking, do you want sunshine?

• 31:09Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So when you ask a newly hybrid or remote worker, are you satisfied with your job? I honestly think a lot of that answer is, I don't want you to take this flexibility back away.

• 31:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna say this, like, they see the question as a quorum. You know, they're asking you, do you like? Having this flexibility like, no, it's good. It's good. Don't take it back.

• 31:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Right. And that's a lot of the dynamic right now is people who gained hybrid or remote work schedules don't want it to go back. Actually, right now, what's ended up dominating is hybrid. You know, I was just looking over these numbers. We had fully remote, of course, in remote capable jobs like jumped and dominated in March of 2020. Onsite fell all the way down to 12%. Onsite came up a little bit, like it never got back above 20. It's been there ever since, right? It's like, we basically got rid of onsite jobs for jobs that didn't have to be onsite and knowledge work. The real shift is remote and hybrid. Remote just fell, fell, fell. Hybrid rose, rose, rose. Hybrid is now two times more prevalent than fully remote. Like, we're in a hybrid world now and no one wants to not have the option.

• 32:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. But they're also really burning out.

• 32:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Right. So hybrid work, remote work, whatever combination you have, it brings with it these friction issues we're talking about. It also brings with it the issue of we get more meetings.

• 32:27Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  And they're virtual meetings because if I can grab you in the hallway, then we don't have to set up a Zoom.

• 32:32Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  If you set up a Zoom because we're both at home or one of us is at home and one of us isn't, that's going to eat up 30 minutes on my schedule because I don't have the dexterity to drag like a smaller thing on Google Calendar than 30 minutes. So now you're taking what might've been 15 total minutes of ad hoc conversation. And now it's going to be two and a half hours of Zoom meeting. And this is really deranging for people as well.

• 32:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Again, it is a concept that keeps showing up over and over is people like a lack of friction. It, on some level, makes them happy, but it produces worse results in terms of just overall well-being, mental well-being. It's really interesting to, not to get too philosophical, but you know, when I was thinking about this, I've been thinking a lot about Jean-Paul Sartre. He had this idea.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  As one does.

• 33:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah, of course. Like, what else do you do on a Tuesday morning?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Good existential.

• 33:22Mark Manson?

  But Sartre, you know, he described that as a good Frenchman, he said, freedom was anxiety and terror. And, you know, at the time, that was just very, I don't know, edgy of him to say, but the older I get and the more all of this technology develops, the more I see the wisdom of that, of how giving people endless optionality is actually, in some sense, emotionally overwhelming and cognitively taxing, to use your word, like, it is a tax. And it's a subtle tax. I don't think we recognize it when it's happening, when we're scrolling on Instagram or browsing through Netflix or opening our email and like scanning through the 200 emails that just came in.

• 34:05Mark Manson?

  Like, our conscious perception is, wow, look at all this amazing stuff that's available to me. What's actually happening behind the scenes is very taxing and draining.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's like the Netflix effect, right? I mean, you go on Netflix today, like, I can't find something to watch. Because when the options are endless, you're like, there's gotta be some sort of perfect movie that's like gonna match my emotional state slash interest of the day slash I heard about this thing, also has this actor in it. If I can't find that, I'm not happy. Whereas 15 years ago, you could basically take a random thing that you select on Netflix. And if it was on TBS and you were home that night, you're like, this is great. This is kind of interesting. Look, like Vince Vaughn's in it. Okay, I don't know. Like, it's gonna be funny. I don't. And we were happier.

• 34:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or like when I was a kid, probably the same, right? Remember the 90s? It was like, we're gonna go to the movies every weekend. And it's like, okay, you know, there'll be something that seems like kind of okay. And it was fun. Like, some things were like fine, some weren't. It'd probably be a movie with like Harrison Ford jumping off something. And it was like, fine. And we really loved it. And we were happy. And now we're on Max, like, oh, there's only like 20 Oscar winners here. And I don't know.

• 35:10Mark Manson?

  This is bullshit. That's, this is two and a half hours. I don't have enough time for that.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So imagine, like, in the workplace, one of the ultimate flexibilities we gave people in knowledge work is we said, okay, productivity itself. Figure that out. How do you organize your work? Figure that out. You can do anything you want, you know, it's a, we'll just throw stuff at you. And you have to figure out, like, how are you going to make sense of everything? Like, why leave that completely up to every worker? And you would say like, well, options are better, but I think exactly it's the, the start right over again. Right. It completely paralyzes people.

• 35:41Mark Manson?

  Absolutely.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I have to figure out how I say yes, how I say no, how I keep track of what I'm doing, how I decide what to do next, how I, you know, every time I do a video that's even remotely, you know, hey, here's a, a productivity related thing you could do. Those numbers fly through the roof because there's so many people out there like, oh my God, I don't know what, what to do. It's Netflix all over again.

• 36:03Mark Manson?

  It is fascinating how much this topic has blown up since the pandemic. And it's, I, it's funny because at first I thought it was that everybody was at home and had nothing to do. And so they were, they suddenly became all very aware of all of their bad habits and all of their worst tendencies. That might be part of it, but as it keeps going, I have to believe that this is part of it too. That it's, it's the remote work and the weird kind of paradox of increased flexibility versus feeling like you're running in place all the time, feeling like nothing's actually getting done. And the burnout that comes along with that. I think some of the best practical tips in the book

• 36:44Mark Manson?

  come from this section of like, even if you have a boss, even if you're working in a huge company, even if you've got like 20 people who, under you who are relying on you, like here are some practical tidbits that you can do to slow things down.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:00Mark Manson?

  To take things off your plate. Can you run through a couple of those really quick?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and most of them come back to the practical tips in that section. Making your workload more transparent. It's almost like psychology hacking in some sense, like one of the, the, the issues that keeps too much work coming on your plate and you saying yes too much is other people don't know what you're doing. Again, so they see you as a vessel to do their work and they're offended. Why would you say no? They're like, an idea in there that was actually meant as a thought experiment, but people that I've talked to about this on the podcast are actually doing it. So it's fascinating. Like it's maybe not a thought experiment is have a shared document. Right. And at the top of it is here's like the three things I'm working on right now. And like a divider line. All right. Here's the queue of things I'm going to work on next, like that I've, that I've agreed to. Now, when someone comes along and is like, hey, can you do this? And it's, you know, it's not like an obvious no.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Right. It's from your boss or whatever. Like, yeah, of course. Just add it. Throw it on the queue.

• 37:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  And like, you know, if there is information, I need to know to execute it. You can put it there or you can just put a reminder to say like, you know, the call you when it gets closer or whatever. Throw it on the queue. Oh, and by the way, you can check in anytime you want to see where that thing is as it works its way up. Oh, and you want it to be done fast? That's great. You're like, you're the boss, you know, just tell me which of the things. So what are we moving? Yeah, you know better than I like, which one are we moving down? I'll let them know, you know?

• 38:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  And it forces a confrontation with the reality of workload. And you would think something like this would be kind of preposterous or, you know, a boss like, what are you talking about? But if you do this nicely, it's actually really effective. Like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing. You're working on these things. You know what? Don't worry about this, right? Because it's going to take you too long to get to this anyways. I'll give it to someone else or we just won't do it. Or now that I see what you're doing, can we take these three things back off your plate? I don't want you doing those. It's like your employee. I don't want you doing those three things. Like, these type of things are more important. Oh, I see what's getting in the way of you doing this, which you're really good at. So you know what? Tell these people you're not doing that. I want you just to be working on this. Transparency unlocks a lot of good things and obfuscation unlocks a lot of frustration.

• 39:02Mark Manson?

  Hearing you say that, it makes me wonder how much of this issue is that if you're in person? Or let's say you're in a blue collar job, you're on a construction site or something. You can physically see what everybody's doing. You can talk to someone, you can see if they seem like flustered or overloaded. There's an emotional intangible communication that happens in person.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:20Mark Manson?

  Where as a group, you can kind of prioritize and sort tasks by what's most valuable in each given moment. And there's not an argument about it. There's no, there's no ambiguity about it. Whereas when you go digital, you don't have that extra nonverbal communication. You don't actually see that John's like working his ass off or busy with eight other things. So it makes sense that building systems with, with that explicit purpose would solve a lot of these issues. I was a big fan. Of the push versus pull processes? That's actually, that's the section that I hit. I was like, oh my God, I'm totally going to use this.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  That's the way all work should be done, by the way. Pull, not push.

• 39:56Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, pull, not push is like how all knowledge work should be assigned. And almost none is.

• 40:00Mark Manson?

  Can you describe each one of those and what it looks like?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this comes out of manufacturing. Right, so you know, in manufacturing, a push system would be as soon as I'm done with this step of the manufacturing process, I push it on to the next person. Right, this doesn't work out very well because I can't control the speed at which things are being pushed on me and then you get pileups.

• 40:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  So what works better is a pull based system. When I'm ready to do the next thing, I'll pull it from you. No one gets piled up. So basically, the slowest step of the chain in this particular setup dictates the speed. But then what really happens in these systems is then you can pretty clearly identify, oh, great, this is the slowest one. We can put more resources there and the whole system speeds up. No pileups, though. This is how knowledge work should be assigned, but it's not. We push. Something comes into my world. It's now a source of stress for me. Like a client called me, it was like, we gotta, you know, whatever. We gotta get this feature, whatever added to the software. I want to get this off my plate as soon as possible because you know, productivity is personal and I'm not very organized. And it's just in my head and it stresses me out. So I'm just going to push it on to someone else's plate.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  So I can just be like, Mark, take care of the feature, exclamation point emoji, send, boom, it's off my plate, right? It took me like seven seconds and it's just on, now I've pushed it on to your plate. Now you have to deal with it. So now you're pushing other things on the other people's plates. So all the work that comes into the system gets pushed on someone's plate. It's all unevenly distributed and we get the whole overtax issue, right? A pull based system in knowledge work would be, okay, things that need to be done exist by default, not on an individual person's plate. Like we have a place to keep track of as a team. These are things that need to be done. So the client calls me, hey, we gotta have this feature, whatever. I put it to our list of, these are things we need to do. It's not on my plate, it's not on your plate. And what individuals do is as they finish something.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  They pull something more from that list and you can do this intelligently like let's, let's have a quick meeting or whatever to figure out. We have a stand up meeting is how they do it in software development. Okay, you're done with this. What's the best thing for you to do next? Well, now that we're really looking at this, like we should really give this priority. Okay. Well, you take that on next. And it gives you an opportunity to say, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this from you and this from you and this from you. And you can kind of figure it out right then.

• 42:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Okay. Not a lot of emails. Okay. Make sure I get that by Tuesday. Let's write this down. You're doing that. All right. This draft will be ready for you to check by Wednesday. I'll put it in this Dropbox and you do that and I'll come back to it and you figure out the whole plan. And then you go and do that thing and it gets executed. Like that is the right way to leverage cognitive resources, not just, oh my God, like let's just email this thing with them off. You know, it's just obligation hot potato. I gotta get this stuff off my plate right now because I'm stressed.

• 42:36Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And I temporarily feel better. I just made 20 people feel worse. They're going to retaliate. They're going to retaliate. It's like, no, you get this. And you know, you get this sometimes where people will send you an email and you know that there's not enough information that for you to do it. You know, it's not, you know, it's going to get bounced back. They know it's going to get bounced back, but in the moment they were just trying to get that off.

• 42:57Mark Manson?

  They're trying to get it out of their inbox.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:59Mark Manson?

  Because they feel like, oh, if I can just clear my inbox, I'm done for the day.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I'm done for the day. Yeah.

• 43:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  So you said nonsense.

• 43:04Mark Manson?

  Hey, I love this because a pain point in my business right now is, you know, we've completely pivoted the video and everything relies on the video production. So.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Are you filming this? Oh, man.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Cut to me in a suit.

• 43:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right. I should have.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  With an elaborate wig on.

• 43:28Mark Manson?

  But yeah, everything in the business now relies on the video content being produced. So the social content that we put out, the, the way we promote things, the promotions that go into the newsletters. And so if, and video production is very hard and complex and very labor intensive. So when things get stuck in the video pipeline, everything gets like backed up in the rest of the business. And I've been talking to my, my lead people like, how do we solve this? How do we get over? And so as soon as I saw the push pull thing, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. All right. So let's get to where I think we might disagree. Principle number two is work at a natural pace. What the fuck is a natural pace?

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Not, not like you're in the Ford factory.

• 44:12Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Not, okay, full intensity, nine to five.

• 44:15Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Five days a week, 50 weeks, 50 weeks a year. No variation in intensity. Work is, turn it on, you should be working really hard till it's over. That was not how humans worked through all of our history until we invented mills and factories. And then when we tried to put people into that type of work, it was so unnatural and so terrible that we had to invent labor unions and giant regulatory frameworks just to try to make this type of artificial work somewhat tolerable. And then knowledge work comes along and what do we do? Like, how do we organize this? Like, oh, let's do what the factory does.

• 44:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, show up nine to five, let's go.

• 44:48Mark Manson?

  So a natural pace is inherently variable.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Variable.

• 44:51Mark Manson?

  Okay, so there's like sprints.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:53Mark Manson?

  Periodic bursts.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  At different timescales too.

• 44:56Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Within the day, within the week, within the month, within the year. Like, the summer is slower than the fall. This day is more intense than that day. The morning's more intense, early in the afternoon.

• 45:05Mark Manson?

  Or within a career, I assume.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could go that wide as well.

• 45:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, because as I was reading through this section, I kept thinking of counterexamples. Like, you mentioned the Beatles earlier. They did 12 albums in nine years.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:16Mark Manson?

  Which is an insane amount of output.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  They never stopped working.

• 45:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  They never stopped.

• 45:21Mark Manson?

  Like, never, which is completely atypical. And, you know, there are, there are other musicians that, like, you talk about Jewel in the book, you know, took, slowed down, canceled opportunities, took her time with albums, you know, like, really honed her craft and, and also was massively successful.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Turned down a million dollars. Didn't just slow down.

• 45:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Without, homeless at the time.

• 45:39Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Turned down the million dollars so that she could take more time and make $200 million a couple of years down the line.

• 45:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Jewel, if you're out there, come on the pod. So that, the variability of it makes more sense to me. I couldn't help but feel, and I guess this goes without saying, but a certain amount of this is probably personality driven as well. I imagine some people's natural setting is a little bit higher or lower than other people's. And I say that just because I, maybe, maybe I'm a workaholic in denial and, and this is like.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Is this therapy now?

• 46:11Mark Manson?

  This is like triggering to me.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  You'll be okay, Mark. Be okay.

• 46:15Mark Manson?

  But I know I really thought about this and because I came across some examples and I'm curious what your response would be. So we've got the Beatles. Mark Twain did 94 books in 55 years. Picasso, if you average out Picasso's output, he averaged almost a painting a day in his adult life.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  These guys had huge variation in their day to day intensity.

• 46:38Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Mark Twain was not writing nine to five every week. I mean, he would go on these trips. Like I'm gonna go, like, I'm gonna go to California to like, write an article about California. That's like five days on the train.

• 46:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  You know, and then like, he's there for three weeks and then he comes back. This is like John McPhee. He wrote 29 books.

• 46:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  But also he spent five days laying on his back, like just thinking about when you compress a career, you imagine, this is what happens is you think about like, kind of working on all those things at the same time.

• 47:06Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Picasso had huge diversions, you know, where he was like, let me try this or that. This movies happens all the time, too. Like your directors, right? Like, wow, they have this great filmography. There's often like some exceptions, just like years where like, nah, nothing was really getting made. I was going back to the creative well. I'm glad you bring this up and I kind of interrupted, but I just.

• 47:25Mark Manson?

  No, no, no. I want to hear your, because this, I was thinking about this during the book.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because like in variations in intensity is completely compatible with like killing it. Like I'm just like producing great stuff, right? Like I write a lot of books, but I'm not writing every day. I'm not writing every month. Years will go by, you know, a year will go by where I don't touch a book at all. And then you kind of recharge and come back. It just kind of gets to a third principle out of obsessing over quality, but like slow productivity. A lot of the exemplars of this, these traditional knowledge workers are really productive.

• 47:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Right? Like they're, you look at what they've done and they're like, okay, I'm just gonna like, give you a round of applause.

• 48:02Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  But they're not trying to do full intensity every day because that's impossible. You can do that with pseudo work.

• 48:07Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Right. I can do email and Zoom eight hours a day, you know, five days a week, because it's busyness, right? But it's not, I'm actually not being taxed that much.

• 48:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  I can't write at that intensity. I can't do a movie. I can't do painting at that intensity. So they're all over the place.

• 48:24Mark Manson?

  I may be placated here.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  I'm trying.

• 48:28Mark Manson?

  No, but that makes sense to me that at a macro level, somebody can be intensely productive.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:33Mark Manson?

  There's peaks and troughs and variation. And again, as a self-confessed workaholic, that maps pretty well to myself. It's funny, I go to my, my wife, my team, I'm like, you know, this year, this year is a sprint. Like, I'm gonna go hard this year. It's gonna be six day weeks, you know, whatever. There are other years where I'm like, I'm gonna take three months off.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:53Mark Manson?

  Like, I'm feeling exhausted. I need time away. So.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  You're a slow productivity aficionado. That's working at a natural pace.

• 48:59Mark Manson?

  So, okay, so this kind of gets back to the point where it's like philosophically, like, I think we're on the same page. It's, maybe it's interpretation of the philosophical precepts.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  So can I propose, maybe, tell me if this rings true. Like, maybe part of the, the instinctual friction, because I get this a lot, so I think this is worth talking about, is the notion of slowness in our culture is so connected to sort of anti-productivity, self-care.

• 49:27Mark Manson?

  Laziness.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, or we'll positive spin it, but it's like, yeah, you're doing, be less productive.

• 49:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Because there's more to life than productivity.

• 49:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  It's not what I think about with slow productivity. Actually, I think about, I wanna really produce awesome stuff. Like, I'm fiercely ambitious, you know, like, I wanna produce really good stuff and keep getting better. This is what allows you to keep doing it.

• 49:47Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  It's what allows you, like Picasso, to do it.

• 49:49Mark Manson?

  A hundred percent.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  But I think this is the, there's another dominant discourse right now that came out of the same place, which is pseudo-productivity is terrible and people are exhausted and we're done with being on Zoom eight hours a day. The other dominant discourse that came out of this is the anti-productivity movement. And that's much more coming at it from a perspective of work as a pejorative. And it's more of a antagonistic relationship.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Between you and work and you zero sum are claiming more for life outside of work. There's more to life than than work.

• 50:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  These type of arguments have never been as compelling to me because I think that people who need them ignore them. Let's just be less hustly. I mean, like, yes, but also like, that's a hard sell for a lot of people.

• 50:33Mark Manson?

  So when it's framed that way, it resonates a little bit more, you know, the the anti hustle culture thing. Like it's, I I agree with you that it's, there's often, especially when you're in one of these sprint periods. You get outsized gains from taking your foot off gas for a little while. Like, go take that four day weekend and relax by a lake or something and you'll come back and you're you're actually twice as productive as you would have been otherwise. And you make you make up for the lost, quote unquote, lost time. Totally get that. With this, I run into the fear too of like, and maybe it's part of his, I just don't trust myself enough. But like, how do we recognize what the natural pace for us is?

• 51:13Mark Manson?

  Because I know for myself and a lot of people I know as well, if I try to allow myself to take breaks, I will sometimes wonder if I'm being lazy, if I'm just avoiding responsibilities, if I'm actually nervous to try to do something and this is my way of like trying to avoid it.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:34Mark Manson?

  And then on the converse side, like on the flip side, I'm also, sometimes when I push myself super hard, I'm like, this is unhealthy, I'm probably avoiding something. Like, I'm very skeptical of my own ability to accurately gauge what is natural for myself. And so, yeah, maybe this is just, this is my therapy session.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I would, I would rather have you have more variation in your intensity for the wrong reasons.

• 51:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Than have you work all out for the wrong reasons, right? Because working all out is just not sustainable. It's just not sustainable. Like, it just doesn't work, right? So that there isn't really an argument for, I could do this, like work all out and have no variation in my pacing. And there's some things I'm losing and some things I'm gaining. No, net net, you're gonna just lose.

• 52:13Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Right. It's just gonna, it is gonna burn you out in the end because it's it's unnatural, right? I mean, same thing if you had, you know, a relationship with, you know, food or drugs or something. They're like, this is just not sustainable for like a human body. Like, okay, I'm gonna drink heavily.

• 52:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Uh, and that has its advantages and its disadvantages. Like, no, net net, it's gonna end up being just all disadvantages. Like, right now, yeah, you're getting advantages out of it, like sociality. But give that 20 years, like, this is not gonna go someplace good. That's what I feel about the all out working.

• 52:43Mark Manson?

  One thing that I've talked about before on this podcast is, is that there's a very fine and blurry line between hashtag self-care and hashtag self-indulgence. You know, where is that line where taking the time off, backing off, just turns into, you know, quiet quitting or whatever?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is why the third principle, obsess over quality. I call that the glue for everything else. This is what makes all that work, right? So when you begin to also reorient your work around doing things really well, like this is the thing I want to do really well, and I'm going to keep getting better at it. Like, I'm going to prioritize craft and get better about something. This makes all of the other things I talked about not become degenerate and go into a weird direction. So if you don't have the obsess over quality and all you're working on is I want to do fewer things and I want more variation, these are all real issues.

• 53:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, it's like, I don't know where this is going. And you could become sort of pathological about that.

• 53:37Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  I do nothing. Yeah, I work two days a week. I win the do fewer things and natural pace or whatever. The obsess over quality is the moderator. So I mean, I say in the book, without that, you're just going to be engendering a sort of weird antagonistic relationship with your work and it's going to go weird places. If you're obsessing over quality, a lot of these issues go away, right? Because now what's driving you is I want to produce the next thing I do. I want it to be great. So I am going to keep working on this. And like, why am I having variations? Because it feels as natural to me as anything else that my quality is slumping here.

• 54:08Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Like, this book is not going to be great. I can't just white knuckle this. Like, I need to, like, this isn't working, you know? Like, I need to go take a week and just think about it and like, walk the beach. Let me come back to it again, because if I don't, this thing's not going to be good. If you don't obsess over quality, and it's just a pseudo-productivity world, and you're like, I don't know, more, I could always do more and more is always abstractly better. So when you obsess over quality, slowness becomes natural. Like, of course I need to slow down because this junk is getting in the way of this. Like, you're not even convincing yourself. And then you get the other advantage was, as you get better, you get more leverage to actually do more of that. So you have this sort of virtuous cycle. So yeah, the quality piece. Is the linchpin, people who obsess over quality don't hashtag self-care.

• 54:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  They hashtag, here's my Tonys. You know what I mean? Like, this is what they're thinking about. But by the way, they're probably doing more self-care than a lot of just pseudo-productivity drenched knowledge workers because, you know, I gotta do what works. Like, Lin-Manuel Miranda needed this play to be great, and he couldn't white-knuckle that yet. So he knew this was gonna take time.

• 55:07Mark Manson?

  And it's, there's an awareness of like, it's not just about taking care of myself. It's also, you're taking care of your own work. Because, yeah, if you white-knuckle it for too long, you start doing bad work. So that, that totally makes sense. So far, you were Neo in the Matrix with my objections. I've got two more.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Here we go. I should've, I should've put more curse words in that title. I thought about it.

• 55:31Mark Manson?

  How much of this is kind of a privileged position? Like, obsessing over quality in particular? Like, if you are somebody who's growing up in poverty, just trying to claw your way out of it, do whatever it takes, you know? Fuck how well the product turns out. Like, I'm gonna work three jobs until I can get, get the fuck out of here. Like, where is the boundary on that dimension? And I use the word privileged, like, not in a pejorative way, but like, just in an honest, like, socioeconomic way of like, is this a middle-class, white-collar, knowledge worker thing, college-educated thing? Or is this more broadly applicable?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  This book is looking specifically at this particular economic sector. Because this is the economic sector that has these odd dynamics of complete autonomy and lack of specificity about how work unfolds, complete dependence on digital tools that allows work to follow you anywhere you're going. These are the things that came together to create the pseudo-productivity burnout crisis. So this is very focused on knowledge work. But one of the things I say about that is, knowledge work, up to this point, hasn't really had this discussion, right? So other sectors of the economy that do other types of work, we're often much more comfortable, maybe not solving the problem, but have a vocabulary for talking about the problem. Like, okay, well, this is the problem with, like, the service sector, for example.

• 56:50Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  There's a lot of issues with the service sector, right? And the service sector jobs can be way worse than anything we're talking about here, right? Like, having three service sector jobs where they're doing algorithmically optimized scheduling, meaning that the Starbucks manager just calls you and is like, never mind, you're working like, one hour this day and like, three hours here. This is way worse. Then I have too many emails, but also in the service sector, at least the people who are talking about this, like this is definitely a problem. Everyone's like, yeah, this is a problem. What is this guy? What are you doing with this? And we're going to unionize now, and at least there's a fight going on. Knowledge work, we don't even have the fight, right? It's like, no, you should just feel like this is white collar work. Like this is, you know, you're, this is, it's creative and you should, you're passionate about this job.

• 57:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  How could you complain?

• 57:33Mark Manson?

  You've got a great, you're great salary and benefits and you're working from home. What are you complaining?

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So you don't want to compare the magnitude of the problems between sectors because I mean, this sector's got a, you work in air conditioner. Let's be honest about this, right? So, you know, these are not strategies for the service sector. It's not strategies for the agriculture sector, for the industrial sector. But one thing this sector could learn from all those other sectors is like, be willing to have people to step back and say, there is a problem here. Let's think about what it is and like, let's talk about solutions and let's fight about the solutions. And, you know, I'm going to propose this and this person, and we just don't have that discussion at all.

• 58:08Mark Manson?

  Well, to clarify, maybe what about like at the bottom of the totem pole of the knowledge worker sector? Like, you know, a secretary who's taking an extra job, you know, doing data entry or something.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  In the knowledge sector, but at the, the lower sectors of it. Yeah. So the, hopefully the idea is not only your job be more sustainable, you're going to move up faster.

• 58:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Right. Like, okay, what's going on here? This job's entry level. Like, it's always my advice to someone, entry level knowledge work. Like find the two or three things or the one or two things that you can start learning how to do really well. That then you're indispensable on that. And then they stop giving you the other things and that's how you begin to move up. I mean, this is the, it's like the fallacy of being an assistant in Hollywood, right? You want to be like super competent and ambitious, but not too good at the small things, right? If you make yourself indispensable at, I can figure out that you're dry cleaning. You could pick it up on the way here and I got the driver going over here. They're never going to let you move up because the agents, if they move you up to be a junior agent, don't need to be good at that. They need to have like some other attribute. And there's this whole thinking of like, okay, so I want to get really good.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  There's that whole game theory there.

• 59:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  It's like you, whatever it is they care about, some shark attitude, but you got to show it, right? So I think. Obsessing over quality more like right away, what can I do better? Thinking about, okay, I need some variation in the book. I talk about how to put variation without telling anybody, without it being notable, like right? I have all that advice about stealth, quiet quitting for just three weeks at a time. Like giving yourself secretly variations. You're not burning out.

• 59:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  And then working with transparency of workload and trying to the subtler advice for doing fewer things. The hope is that will move you up quicker than if you're just like, let's just rock and roll. I'm just going to be on email all day. You're going to burn yourself out. Right? So, so hopefully if you're into knowledge sector, this is implementable, make things better.

• 59:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah. My other question was around young people, particularly because they have the most energy generally. And often they aren't totally aware of what they want to specialize in or what they want to get really good at. And so there is an element of like, test a bunch of different things, maybe even test a few different jobs before you go all in on something.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Mark Manson?

  Like, how does that fit into this?

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, if only there was a book that

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  a lot about that.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Young people spend too much time doing that.

• 1:00:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm not saying you should just throw a dart, but also the, the only leverage or capital you have in your career and knowledge work is your skills.

• 1:00:38Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Like the things you can do well, that are rare and valuable, that's your leverage. And you can alter those over time. You can pick up new ones, but you should be obsessing almost from day one. Where is there some place here in this entry level job and I'm Xeroxing things for whatever, where is there a place here? Where there's something valuable that like most people at this level aren't doing well, that I can with laser focus, get really good at. Right? It doesn't mean like, what, what might that be? If you're at an entry level, knowledge position, Xeroxing, that thing is not going to be your career 25 years from now. That's going to be what starts moving you towards options. It starts exposing more of the world to you. You know, it's, it's like, uh, when you're new in your career, you have these huge blinders on.

• 1:01:19Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  You could survey the world as much as you want, but all you're going to see is like the reality of the entry level jobs. You, you don't know enough to know what comes up next or what it really feels like. So you actually have to start climbing the ladder. And at each level, it's like Donkey Kong.

• 1:01:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Now I can run over this platform and go up another ladder, but I don't know what's up there. So you have to, how do I get those ladders quicker? Rare and valuable skills.

• 1:01:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  If anything, just practice it. Like in your first job, make it a game. I'm going to choose this thing and within six months, I'm going to be awesome at it. Just to do, just to practice, like what does it feel like to get really good at something?

• 1:01:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  What is just the sense memory or the cognitive sensation of doing that? So I'm a big fan that rare and valuable skills, that's the only currency. In the end, knowledge work is the only currency that really matters. And so you want to have a lot of that. So you can kind of make investments of what you want your career to be like.

• 1:02:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you won me over. I have no room to talk because I never had a real job, so.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, have I really? I'm a professor and a writer.

• 1:02:18Mark Manson?

  Speaking of being a professor, I'm curious, you know, it's fashionable to trash Gen Z right now, particularly around things like this, around quiet quitting, self-care, how they're always on social media. Have you noticed any trends, any differences? Like, do you think it's over, overblown? Are you bullish, bearish on Gen Z? What are your thoughts?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  I'm bullish. I mean, look, the students at Georgetown that I teach, they're all brilliant. They're all smarter than I was at that age. So you don't really see that carry over. I think social media trends are easy to extrapolate to a generation, but often no. It's why, what makes a social media trend a trend is it plays well with the algorithm. And then more and more people figure that out. And it's this weird cybernetic content, content production loop. And now everyone's doing quiet quitting videos. And then the algorithm kind of disfavored that and no one talks about quiet quitting anymore. I care less about that. The thing I do worry a little bit about talking to like my Gen Z students, the attention span thing is real. Right? I mean, I have students telling me, I can't believe that anyone watches YouTube anymore. Like those videos could be like 15 minutes long. Like, are you kidding me?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Like in an age of TikTok, who is watching YouTube? It's like a sincere concern that like a lot of my students have. And so I'm always telling them, this could be really good news for you. Right? Like it's the parable of the bear. If, you know, you're with your friend and a bear charges, you don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than your friend, right?

• 1:03:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's the same thing with attention right now. I was like, if you opt out. Like 50% of this, like if you don't use TikTok, just let's just do that. Like if you read as a college student, just compared to the fragmentation of the attention of the people around you, you're gonna be like Einstein, people like, I cannot believe that you wrote this whole thing, this whole memo in like three hours. Or how did you get so much stuff done? How do you also have these hobbies that are fulfilling you? And so that's the thing I do care about is the deep work effect, right?

• 1:04:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Is I do think digital media, especially in non-professional media, where Gen Z has this very particular frenetic relationship, that could have some ramifications.

• 1:04:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  But it's a very smart generation.

• 1:04:25Mark Manson?

  I agree. I interact, you know, a significant percentage of my audience is Gen Z and I play a lot of video games. So I inevitably end up watching, you know, these 20 year olds on Twitch who are just incredible at games and.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a hungry generation.

• 1:04:39Mark Manson?

  It is. I'm, I'm actually consistently impressed by how thoughtful and aware they are of everything going on. And I agree, like they, I have seen 20 year olds on Twitch and Discord say and think about things that I was nowhere near that level of maturity when I was their age. So.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I think this is the, the plus side of like YouTube influencer culture, right? If you think back to Gen X.

• 1:05:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  For example, like before us, you know, the sort of slacker culture in part because there was no like obvious place to let out what might be a natural ambition. Now, like every kid is like, I'm going to be like a very successful YouTuber. All right, they're not going to be.

• 1:05:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  But at least they're thinking in terms of like an ambition, like, okay, I could do this. I could focus on this. I'd have to buy a camera. And then if I got really good, we could grow the audience. Like a lot of people don't think that way.

• 1:05:30Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  When they're 15, 16 years old.

• 1:05:31Mark Manson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Now the key is how do you take that ambition and then translate it away from, I'm going to be a Twitch streamer.

• 1:05:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Like, you know what, like that same mindset, you could push over here to like the sport you're training for. Or like you're getting into theater as like a high school student. Like you could put that same ambition over here and realizing, oh, this is, this is something I can do for like whatever I'm interested in.

• 1:05:54Mark Manson?

  One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is that our generation, Gen X. And before, starting with the boomers, really, self-destructiveness kind of became cool, became a status symbol. I think it started in the 60s with the free love and rock and roll and everything, and it continued up through the 90s. And I feel like Gen Z is the first generation since maybe the 40s and 50s that status is awarded towards constructive behavior.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:06:22Mark Manson?

  Which it's actually kind of blowing my mind. Like, it's one of those when you're, it's like a fish doesn't recognize the water that it's been swimming in its whole life. I've become a lot more aware of a lot of the destructive tendencies that existed when I was a teenager and in my 20s, and a lot of the dumb destructive shit I did because I thought it was cool and it got, it got like won me cool points with my friends. It's something that's just really been sitting on my mind quite a bit lately. And I, I don't totally know how to explain it or what to make of it.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a good question. Like, what, to what degree, for example, this whole phenomenon of interaction is more digital for the, for Gen Z, right? There's some real harms about that. It also is reducing self-destructive behavior.

• 1:07:05Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Because now you, like, I have other ways that I can at least simulate sociality. When it's, when I'm just with my buddies, yeah, when we were in our teens, right? You like do stupid stuff. Like, I don't know, this is the group I'm stuck with.

• 1:07:15Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Like, how are we gonna, what's gonna impress them? Like, okay, I think I can, you know, you take the car to the parking lot, we're gonna do the donuts and whatever.

• 1:07:23Mark Manson?

  Do donuts, yes.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  We literally would do this, right?

• 1:07:24Mark Manson?

  Steal, steal your mom's beer, yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, where now kids are like, let's, you know, let's, let's, uh, let's record a let's play of this like new video game. So, but then there's also costs. So it's interesting. It's, it's evolution. Our generation also had, I wrote this New Yorker piece about this last year. My take on our generation, like at least from our relationship to work, is that we were the first generation raised on follow your passion.

• 1:07:46Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Right. So that, that is an idea that rose in the 1990s, right?

• 1:07:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  We can just look at it enologically, enthemologically. That got big in the 90s. So Gen X didn't have that as much. Then we're also a generation that got nine 11 and the financial crisis. So like, we learned, we're like, wait a second. This doesn't work. This idea, and so like, follow your passion was the baby boomers trying to rationalize these two sides of their experience. The sixties and seventies, in which it was like, you need to like, be true to yourself. And then the eighties and early nineties were like, oh, you need money to pay mortgages. And there's a lot of, you know, so how do we, and they're like, what if we just put these two things together? We'll, we'll like, take all the good and get rid of all the bad from our life and like, make money. But be passionate about working at the law firm or whatever. And then we figured out that doesn't work.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Like, it's not how you, job satisfaction doesn't come from matching the content of your job to a pre-existing passion. So our generation invented job engineering. Like, we, you know, we, we get like, the minimalism movement. We get lifestyle design. We get all these Instagram influencers, they're showing alternative, like, that's what our generation came away with. Is like, okay, you gotta shape your life. Like, that really influences us. It's a lot in my book. How do you craft your life to be what you want? And it's very pragmatic. We get like, the FIRE movement. Like, this is all Gen Y, millennial, like, oh, follow your passion didn't work. So we gotta just sort of re-engineer work to be what we need out of it. So by now, Gen Z is doing its own thing.

• 1:09:09Mark Manson?

  So this is the last question I want to ask you. The three principles of slow productivity. It occurred to me that this is actually kind of a, an umbrella framework for all of your books. So if you look at do fewer things is digital minimalism, work at your own pace, deep work. And then obsessive equality is so good, they can't ignore you. Did you think of it in those terms? Or did that just kind of naturally emerge?

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  It's somewhat purposeful.

• 1:09:33Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Right, right. So, so it's trying to draw all these ideas I've been exploring, deconstruct them, understand them, and then rebuild like a coherent philosophy for work. Yeah, so it is, I think it's why people who like my prior books who have read this are like, oh yeah, no, I really like this. If they were, if they liked the prior books. They're going to really like it. I'm actually writing an article right now. Maybe it'll be out when this podcast airs, a New Yorker piece. It's a personal essay. Right? So I've been writing a lot about this book, but they're like, why don't we write something different? Let's do something different. Let's do something personal. And so I excavated my past. Right? And in this essay, I go back to my time in the theory group at MIT. And it was like this preposterous place like this is because I had put a lot of this down, but I came back.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  I redredged this up, like what it was like showing up at the theory group at MIT, which is the number one theory group in the world. Right? And it was preposterous. I come to orientation and one of the first people I meet, 16, starting the doctoral program, graduated college two years earlier. So he graduated college at 14, had spent two years, all right, show up. The professor across from me, like in their office, is my age. And he won a MacArthur the year before, was hired as a professor when he was 20. He got tenure at the end of my first year. And he was the least accomplished person on that wall of offices. Three offices had Turing Award winners.

• 1:10:53Mark Manson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  And he was the, there was a fourth and fifth. So I went back and like, redredged this like preposterous experience. And basically the point of this essay is like, oh, my God, everything I've chased in all these books that culminate in slow productivity, all of it goes back to my time at the theory group. They were obsessed over focus. They had a real sort of humanistic, because they were theoreticians, computer science theoreticians in a world of engineers. The human mind is what matters, be very wary of technology and like how it affects the mind. There was no rushing. Theoreticians can't rush. So they were very productive, but like they didn't, you couldn't be busy because you can't force proofs. So I realized all these things like work at a natural pace on not too many things. Care a lot about focus, be obsessed about quality.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Everything I've done, I realized it's like this five year experience of this like preposterous place that had no business being there. I've just been chasing it ever since. So that's, that's my new self therapy is like, that experience is something I've been trying to like grapple with in my writing for 20 years later.

• 1:11:53Mark Manson?

  One of my favorite quotes, I don't remember who said it. We spend our entire lives trying to either prove or disprove who we were at 18.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was so overwhelming, this experience that I've never, I was like, okay, I just have to grapple with this for the rest of my life. Like, I think. I think there's something happening here in a weird, extreme purified form.

• 1:12:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  That isn't somehow right.

• 1:12:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  And it's been lost in this like really weird, preposterous place that no one sees. But I think they've like accidentally purified and made radical like these ideas. Like, why have they stuck with, I think they were on to something. And then I just keep rediscovering them again and again.

• 1:12:28Mark Manson?

  Nice. All right, that's all for the show. Be sure to follow the show if you haven't. Leave a review, make sure you're subscribed and tell me how handsome I am. And we'll be back next week with an all new episode of the Subtle Art of Not Getting a Fuck Podcast. See you all then.