770 The Power of Digital Detox with Cal Newport

IT'S TIME TO DIGITALLY DECULTTER. Very few of us have the courage to be alone. When we are quiet and don’t distract ourselves, we have to face hard questions. It can be scary. Instead, we reach for our phones. We might be trying to fill a void, or we might just be addicted. Technology is a lot like processed food. We want more and more, but we’ll never be satisfied. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about focus with someone who has famously never owned a social media account: Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to academic research, he writes about the intersection of technology and society. He’s particularly interested in the impact of new technologies on our ability to perform productive work or lead satisfying lives. Cal recommends building “fences” around our phones so that we’re not using them mindlessly all day. So get ready to learn more tools to be more focused, present and creative on Episode 770. Some Questions I Ask: What do you recommend for people who are always connected to technology? (10:30) How can we build stronger connections? (18:00) What’s the void that we are trying to fill with social media? (24:00) What’s more addictive: social media or smoking? (32:00) How can you train your children to work at things (54:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: How to train your focus (2:00) The three benefits from being alone (8:00) Why you need “analog” hobbies (30:00) Why anxiety has risen in younger generations (32:00) The reason Cal recommends 30 days away from technology (43:00) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 770 with New York Times bestselling author Cal Newport.

• 0:08Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Socrates said, "The secret of happiness you see is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." Welcome to this interview. I'm super excited because we have Cal Newport in the house, who is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and writes the Study Hacks blog focused on academic and career success. His work has been published in over 20 languages and he's been featured in many publications, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist. And he's never had a social media account. That's right. He's a New York Times bestseller. He's a

• 1:14Lewis Howes?

  thriving author and never had a social media account to promote his work. And in this interview, we talk about the three powerful benefits of getting out in nature to explore our thoughts, the healing powers of this. Also, how to build stronger connections in person rather than only online. We discuss how our phones and social media can be a big escape from life in a mentally unhealthy way. The power of social media detoxing and what you can do for 30 days to get started. And we discuss the true definition of minimalism and some myths people have about the lifestyle. Now, this is going to be an interesting one because if you're an entrepreneur who uses social media all the time,

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  you may think this might go against the grain of you growing your business. But Cal gives some practical and strategic advice on how to be on social media less and make more, very powerful, and be happier.

• 2:14Lewis Howes?

  Make sure to share this with your friends, LewisHowes.com/770 and tag myself @lewishowes while you're listening. You can't tag Cal because he doesn't have an Instagram account, but make sure to let me know and I'll pass the information over to Cal. All right, guys, I'm excited about this one. It's all about how do we use social media responsibly? How do we take a digital detox and a digital minimalism approach to life? So we can do deeper, more meaningful, more valuable work that resonates with the world with the one and only Cal Newport.

• 2:51Lewis Howes?

  All right, welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about this. We've got Cal Newport in the house. Good to see you, man.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Lewis, my pleasure.

• 2:58Lewis Howes?

  Excited, you had a book come out a few years ago. When did that come out?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  2016.

• 3:03Lewis Howes?

  2016 called Deep Work. And it argues that focus is the new IQ in the modern workplace because we have so much social media distracting us and focus is something that is kind of like a lost commodity, I guess. It's something that is a lost art. No one knows how to focus for more than two seconds.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there was two forces going on. So focus is becoming more valuable, sort of unrelated to this other tech, just because our economy is increasingly shifting towards high level knowledge work. Right? We sort of outsource or automate the low level knowledge work, but the stuff that really requires some creativity or some thinking or original thought, that's getting more important in our economy. Right? So if you can focus, it really helps you produce this type of value. But at the same time, sort of unrelated to that trend, we're getting worse at concentrating because we have this going on all the time. Right? We're looking at the screens and then also email culture within work. So it was this sort of supply and demand. Focus is becoming more valuable at the exact same time that it's becoming more rare. And so the book was about, hey, if you're one of the few people that cultivates this

• 4:08Speaker 01

  thing, you're going to have a huge advantage, sort of a disproportionate advantage.

• 4:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're going to be like the wealthy of value. Because there's only so many few people that are actually able to focus and write a book that's got deep work in it and make a movie or do something that takes a year, two years, three years.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:28Lewis Howes?

  The time and energy to go into something, one piece of work. To make it magical is so much harder to do.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's very valuable.

• 4:36Lewis Howes?

  Very valuable.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  But it's practiced as well. And so the book was sort of about we've forgotten how valuable focus is, and we've forgotten what it takes to be good at it.

• 4:46Lewis Howes?

  What's it take to be good at focus?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, people think about it like a habit, right? Like flossing their teeth. Everyone thinks like, I know how to focus. The problem is I'm just not doing it enough. It's like I should try to make more time to do it. But it's really more like a skill. Like if you practice, it's like playing a guitar, right? You practice it, you can be better at. If you don't practice it, you're not going to be very good at it. Even if you put aside the time and you lock away all your devices and you're, here I am, I'm in the cave, I'm going to write my book. If you haven't been practicing it, it's not going to go very well.

• 5:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And so they're sort of essentially like cognitive athletics. You can actually go in there and train this capability. And you kind of have to. And there's a lot of different elements to how you do it.

• 5:21Lewis Howes?

  But training focus.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Training focus.

• 5:23Lewis Howes?

  How do you, what's for someone who's obsessed with social media?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:26Lewis Howes?

  Who checks email 20 times a day? Who always feels like they're behind?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:31Lewis Howes?

  And they're working till eight, nine, 10 o'clock at night because they haven't done focused work during the day.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Lewis Howes?

  What are some steps that they could start with?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's sort of like with athletics. There's general fitness and then the actual training that you do.

• 5:44Lewis Howes?

  Skill.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Skill, yeah. So cognitive fitness means, among other things, your brain needs to be comfortable with being bored. I mean, if it's been trained that every time you get a little bit bored, you get a shiny treat, like the stimuli, you get this Pavlovian connection where it's bored means stimuli, boredom means stimuli. So then when it comes time to actually focus, which is boring in the technical sense, right? Because there's not a lot of different stimuli.

• 6:07Lewis Howes?

  It's not exciting.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's not exciting. Your brain's going to say, no way. Like I've learned it, right? When I'm bored, I get the treat. So I'm not going to sit here and stare at the blank page for a couple hours. So in that sense, if you're constantly doing this, it's like junk food eating. If you're an athlete, right? It's your fitness is going to be bad.

• 6:24Lewis Howes?

  It tastes good in the moment.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Tastes good in the moment, but then you get on the field, right?

• 6:28Lewis Howes?

  You feel like crap.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You feel like crap, right?

• 6:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then there's the training, right? There's specific things you can do, this sort of acute training. And it's like one of the things I write about is something called productive meditation, which is essentially cognitive pull-ups. Like it's really hard, but it gives you big results. And the idea there is you go for a walk. And you try to hold one professional thought in your head. And you try to make progress on that thought while you're walking. And just like in mindfulness meditation, when you notice that your concentration drifts, which it will do.

• 6:59Lewis Howes?

  You come back to the.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Come back to it, right? You bring it back, bring it back. It's really hard at first, but if you keep practicing this, like I want to just think about one thought, try to make progress on something in my head as I walk. You get better and better at it and the results can actually be pretty radical. You do this for a month and you find your ability to sit down and go laser really improves.

• 7:19Lewis Howes?

  Do you do this a lot for yourself? You'll take walks?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:21Lewis Howes?

  And you'll start thinking about, I did give an example of like the last few days. What was?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so I write in my head. So like when I'm trying to figure out a chapter or an essay or something like this, I really, I work out the structure and then I actually work out a lot of the wording and that's mainly practiced. And in my day job, I'm a theoretical computer scientist. I do proofs, so I do a lot of that in my head. So you roam and that's literally moving the sort of variables of the equations. In my hometown, I'm considered an eccentric because I'm always walking the loops. Yeah. And people, people will talk to my wife, like, where was your husband going? Like, I saw him twice. He looped back, he looped back around, but you know, I like wandering. And something about walking, it shuts off some non cerebral parts of your mind. It makes it easier to take the thinking aspect and really focus it.

• 8:09Lewis Howes?

  Do you take your phone with you when you're walking?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 8:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. But you just don't have social media. What about, what about texting and email?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Lewis Howes?

  Do you, because you don't have social media. You've never had an account.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Never had an account.

• 8:20Lewis Howes?

  And you and I were born around the same time. You were a year older than me and we were in college, you know, I guess your last year of college, my junior year was when Facebook came out.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:30Lewis Howes?

  I think.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:31Lewis Howes?

  2004, 2003, something around.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I went back and looked up the timeline.

• 8:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, 2004. And it was like a big deal when it came out in my college.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Lewis Howes?

  And we were some of the first people to have it. I'm sure you were as well, a year of college, but you never signed up for an account and you've never had social media.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Never had it. I mean, I, I think what happened was sort of accidental, but Facebook was the first. Well, Friendster had been around, but.

• 8:51Lewis Howes?

  MySpace.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. MySpace was kind of new then. Friendster was sort of outdating, I think, more. So Facebook came around, people were excited about it and I wasn't interested in signing up and I don't quite know why. I think in part because, you know, I had had a failed tech company in the first boom and you know, Zuckerberg's a contemporary of ours. And so it's just like, yeah. Like who's this, who's this other kid whose website is so popular? And also, my memory is, see, I've always hated listing things, right? If you tell me, what's your, what's your three favorite books or something like that? I just can't do it. I'm really bad at like listing favorites. And that's what Facebook was in 2004.

• 9:28Lewis Howes?

  What's your favorite movie?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Favorite movie, favorite books, favorite songs. I was like, I don't want to think about that. And so it's sort of accidental, I didn't sign up for that. But then, once you didn't enter that path, I had this sort of objective distance. Where then I could kind of observe as it changed. You know, how its role in people's lives changed over time.

• 9:46Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Lewis Howes?

  And the stress that people have, I think that stat is like almost 50 minutes a day? People are on Facebook or social media or?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  50 minutes is, yeah, Facebook products.

• 9:56Lewis Howes?

  Facebook products.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So Instagram and Facebook mainly, yeah.

• 10:00Lewis Howes?

  Messenger.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:01Lewis Howes?

  Do they own WhatsApp now?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I guess they own WhatsApp, yeah.

• 10:04Lewis Howes?

  Crazy, isn't it?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Lewis Howes?

  Almost an hour a day of your life.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, just for those services.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  Crazy, okay. So you wander around, do you do this every day? You take a walk?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends on the day.

• 10:15Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, because when I was, what, 11, 10, 11 years ago, I had a mentor. Every day, he would take a walk for lunch.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  And just brainstorm. He was, he was an inventor.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:25Lewis Howes?

  And he always had creative ideas. And he said, my best ideas come from walking.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:30Lewis Howes?

  And I think we lose the art of getting out in nature and having space to be bored.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:36Lewis Howes?

  And when we are bored, that's when some of our best ideas come to us.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  It's crucial.

• 10:40Lewis Howes?

  Crucial, but very few of us have the courage to be alone.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's scary for a lot of people.

• 10:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, so being alone with your own thoughts, right? It's scary, but it does three things. One, it's self-insight. So if you want to develop as a human, figure out what you're about, grow into a new phase of life, become an adult, any of these type of questions, you have to grapple with your own thoughts. You have to process your experiences. You have to try to make sense of it, right? That requires time.

• 11:07Lewis Howes?

  Ask the tough questions.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Ask the tough questions, you know, what are you upset about that you've done? What are you happy about? And that involves, you can't do this while you're in input processing mode. So if there's something in your ear, something in your hand, you can't be doing this type of reflection. And so, so you don't, you don't develop. Professional insight requires it, right? Creativity requires you to actually take in all this input that you've been receiving. You gotta think about it.

• 11:30Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  So like someone listening to this podcast right now is in input processing mode. So their brain is in a very particular mode, which is, I am now receiving input. That comes from another human mind, which is a very special mode. Our brain takes that seriously, all hands on deck, right? If you don't then take some time to just think about what you've heard, you're gonna get a fraction of the value out of it, because it's two different things. And then finally, there's like a maintenance aspect to it. So, you know, it's a big deal to be processing input from another brain, because again, we take that very seriously. If you're doing it all the time, so every time you have a down moment, you're looking at social media, for example, which is, you know, all input from other brains. You don't get the downtime that your brain needs just to do all the things it expects to have time to do, and this causes issues.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And so I think this sort of low-grade hum of anxiety that so many people feel today, a lot of that is actually lack of solitude.

• 12:23Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Lewis Howes?

  So if more people were actually alone, they'd be more happy?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, not all the time, right? So I give this quote from the book, I found it in Ben Franklin's journals, when he did his first transatlantic crossing, when he went to London for the first time. And so he was really thinking about

• 12:37Lewis Howes?

  A lot of alone time.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Solitude, yes. So I found it in his journals. And he was talking about how like, well, the great sages talk about the value of solitude, but I suspect that if you made the great sages be alone long enough, they would start to regret it, right? Like, you can't be, you can't have too much solitude, that's just as bad. I think he kind of hit that on the nose. And so if you're alone all the time, it's terrible. The worst thing you can do to someone is put them in solitary confinement. But if you get rid of every moment of solitude, it can be sort of just as bad in some sense.

• 13:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So what do you recommend for someone who's on social media all day, email, text all day? They never have any downtime, because right when they get home, they turn the TV on, they're stimulating constantly. Do you recommend, hey, take a 30-minute walk?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:21Lewis Howes?

  Just start with that?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Do something without your phone once a day.

• 13:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  That's the easiest way just to get comfortable. When you walk the dog, or you're whatever, going to the drugstore, just leave the phone at home.

• 13:31Lewis Howes?

  You see so many people walking, looking down at their phone.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  Everywhere you go.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Lewis Howes?

  At the grocery store, at the gym.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:37Lewis Howes?

  It's funny, because two years ago, maybe it was two and a half years ago, I had a realization that for 15 years, I'd had my phone on me every single day for 15 years.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:47Lewis Howes?

  Since I was 19, uh, no, 19, the year 2000, I got my first cellphone.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Lewis Howes?

  I was a junior in high school. And I realized there was not a day that had gone by that I didn't have my phone on me.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Lewis Howes?

  At some point in the day.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:01Lewis Howes?

  And I thought to myself that was wrong. I was like, this is horrible.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  What a radical change, too, in terms of all of human history, right?

• 14:08Lewis Howes?

  Before that, never had a device on me. Maybe a Game Boy every once in a while or something, or whatever it may be. But now, fifteen years of my life, I had this on me. And so, two years ago, I made the commitment. I said, I'm going to Hawaii alone and leaving my phone at home. So I went to Hawaii for, I think it was four or five days.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:26Lewis Howes?

  And the first day, it was terrifying because I rented a car and I forgot like my confirmation number and I forgot which car rental service I got it from.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:35Lewis Howes?

  So I'm going to each rental service. They do have my confirmation, right? And I finally get the car and now I need directions. I'm like, how do I get to my hotel?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:43Lewis Howes?

  I started asking people, where's this at? I stop at a gas station like we used to do in nineteen ninety-five or whatever. And I was like, wow, this is actually really scary. But I remember on day two, I was at the beach and I was thinking to myself, I was laying in the ocean, just like looking up at the sky and hearing like the birds and nature. And I had zero anxiety because I wasn't worried about where my phone was.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:07Lewis Howes?

  Which was like, it's safe in my home.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:09Lewis Howes?

  It's not on the beach, like no one's gonna, I don't need to check anything. I don't need to post anything. And I remember at the end of this four or five days, I felt so much peace and calm and zero anxiety. It was almost like I didn't want to go back home to the phone.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  And that, that's just getting back to our baseline.

• 15:25Lewis Howes?

  Baseline.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That's the baseline. We underestimate how artificial it is to have a constant companion, a digital constant companion. I mean, it's incredibly artificial. Nowhere in our evolutionary past were we in a context where we had sort of this sort of constant connection to other people and ideas and thoughts. And so you faced all the worst case scenarios, right? The stuff that makes people worried about not, not having their phone with them. What if I need to look something up? What if I, what if I get lost?

• 15:51Lewis Howes?

  I get hurt or I call someone, yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, except for this is the way we all lived our lives.

• 15:56Lewis Howes?

  This is how we used to live.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  And I was fine.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so in the book, I talk about, I find these stories. It's a, it's a subgenre online of people who like lose their phones or have their phones stolen and then decide. I'm not going to replace it right away.

• 16:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And then they write about the experience. You can find all these stories online and they often have a very similar.

• 16:14Lewis Howes?

  It transforms their life.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And there's these inconveniences, but they're not as many as they thought. And maybe it'll be like one really bad thing that happens in a month, like they're late for a meeting with their boss and.

• 16:23Lewis Howes?

  They couldn't check in.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  She was talking, one young one was talking about she had her laptop out in the cab and was hoping that as it passed the Starbucks. She could get enough wifi.

• 16:30Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's stressful, but but that's one of the things I push back on. So, I mean, you had your phone on you for for 15 years. But actually, more recently is when we shifted towards not just having a phone on us, but looking at it all the time. That's like six or seven years old.

• 16:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, because the first, I don't know, eight years, there was no smartphones.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:49Lewis Howes?

  Right. It was just like you're texting and you're calling.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:52Lewis Howes?

  And then there was social media, then there was, you know, wifi, there was everything else.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Social media is what changed it.

• 16:57Lewis Howes?

  Social media.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  And not just social media, it was the Facebook IPO. So if you go back to the the beginning of the consumer facing smartphone era, so like the iPhone in 2007. I went back and talked to the original development lead for the first iPhone. And what he confirmed is there was nothing about this tech that meant for you to look at it all the time. Right. Steve Jobs was a minimalist.

• 17:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  His whole thing was, I want to take something that's really important to you and I want to make the experience beautiful. And so for him, it was playing music. Music was incredibly important.

• 17:29Lewis Howes?

  Huge. It was big.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everyone was listening to iPods, right? And so the iPhone had a touchscreen. And he was like, look, I can make the experience of playing music even more beautiful. And he was offended by the interfaces on cell phones at that time.

• 17:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Phone calls are important. I want to make that a beautiful experience. I want to put them in one device. So you don't have to have an iPod and a phone both in your pocket. And that was from like 2007 to 2012. That was smartphones. It was this beautiful tool that you brought out occasionally to do specific things. Like I want to listen to a song. I want to call my mom. I want to look up directions, right? Around 2011, 2012, the social media companies were now past the stage of just we're trying to grow and saying we actually have to get a revenue up. Because it was the Facebook IPO in particular, right? How are we going to get people to engage much more on our services? Because the Facebook.com is pretty static, right? I mean, you would go check your friend's relationship status, but if you checked it in the morning, it was probably not going to change that day.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  It's not something you would spend all day looking at, right? And so they completely re-engineered the experience to be not about posting and reading other people's posts, but instead about social approval indicators.

• 18:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  And then we got the likes and the retweets and the favorites and the photo auto-tag. So now every time you hit this app, you could see some indications. Are people approving of me? Were people thinking of me? And that's what changed our relationship with the phones. From this Jobsian vision of this is a beautiful object that does a few things really well, into I have to look at this when I'm walking the dog. I have to look at this, you know, when I'm in the bathroom. I have to look at this when I'm in the line. There was nothing fundamental about the tech that said we need to be looking at this all the time.

• 19:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  That was essentially a business model that was proved very effective.

• 19:16Lewis Howes?

  Very effective, very addictive.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:18Lewis Howes?

  And this, you know, as that expands and grows, the more likes you get, it's almost like you feel less worthy of yourself. It's like you have less self-worth because you constantly need to be reminded that you're liked or what you posted was cool or interesting. Or, oh, you have cute kids or a cute dog. And so we have to constantly remind ourselves like, yes, I am worthy. I am enough. Look, it keeps growing.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:41Lewis Howes?

  Let me post more to remind myself that I have.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I need the.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  I need it.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  The likes, except for when you're hunting the likes, then what you're not doing is actually sacrificing your time and energy to be with a close friend or family or community.

• 19:54Lewis Howes?

  Or create something meaningful.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Or create something meaningful, like the things that actually we've evolved to crave, to feel sort of accepted and connected and impactful. And so it's this irony that you're doing this because you're like, I want to feel accepted and connected to people. But by doing this all the time, you're actually feeling less connected and less accepted because our social brain, it doesn't really know what to make of like a number next to a thumbs up icon. It knows about this. It knows like I'm sitting across from someone and I'm looking at someone. I'm seeing facial expressions and I've made time to be here and we're interacting. It knows about that. That's connection. But without some sort of sacrifice, like I had to go and be and spend my time with someone. If you take all the friction out, you just hit happy birthday or like or something like that,

• 20:39Speaker 01

  it's not a strong connection.

• 20:41Lewis Howes?

  So how do we build stronger connections?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, when it comes to social life, we kind of know, we've known for a long time, what makes people feel connected. It's strong relationships with sacrificing time and attention for taking on responsibility on behalf of family, close friends and community. I mean, there's no shortcut. I mean, if a friend has a baby, you could send them like, "Congrats", three exclamation points. What you really should do is go over there and say, "Here, I'm bringing you, I'm bringing you a box full of like, this is, you know, it's snacks and food and towels. It turns out towels are really useful when you have babies. Yeah, this is something I've discovered, right? But, and that, and that's hard. And it just took an hour of your time, right? But that leaves you feeling connected. That leaves that other person feeling like you're connected. The "Congrats" with the three exclamation points,

• 21:27Speaker 01

  it's not bad, but it's not giving you what you need.

• 21:30Lewis Howes?

  And it's not like a deep work of building relationship.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33Lewis Howes?

  It's the small attention that's not as meaningful, showing up. Even a phone call is better than...

• 21:39Speaker 01

  It's a lot better.

• 21:39Lewis Howes?

  Than just a "like" or "congrats", it's taking the time. I try to go even a step further with people that I'm really connected to and send them just a video message.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Lewis Howes?

  And they're always in shock because they're like, so used to someone just saying a quick text.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:52Lewis Howes?

  I'll send even a minute video message of just acknowledging them for what I appreciate about them or congratulating. They're just always like, "Wow, I'm so thankful", a video.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And it probably hits you instinctually, something about it when you do it. It probably feels, something about it feels more real.

• 22:06Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. It's more attention, it's more time, it's a more piece of quality, I guess, communication, right? But showing up is really the key in person if you can. But if someone's not in your city, then it might be harder. So, do you feel like our, our quality of our life is diminishing because of social media? Or because of the lack of our attention to deeper work in our work and our relationships?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  This is what I've been hearing, right? So, I wrote Deep Work, which was really about tech and its impact on the professional world. And what I kept hearing when I was on the road was readers saying, "Yeah, but what about..." Tech in our personal lives, right? There's something going on here. So tech in the work life, meaning? Like the distractions like email and Slack and how that's keeping people away from doing highly concentrated work and how this is probably a mistake. Yeah, just doing meetings all day and communicating, but not actually creating work. Yeah, we're really bad at knowledge work. Right. So that was deep work, right? So a lot of the readers say, "Yeah, but something is going on in our personal lives with tech that is arguably more important." And so you look into this and you see there is this unease. Maybe around two years ago, people really started the shift from this self-deprecating mode

• 23:15Speaker 01

  to like, "Wait a second, there is a problem." But if you talk to people, it's not utility, right? So it's not that they say, "This is useless. I hate what I'm doing when I'm on my phone." It's not like cigarettes or something, where like most people who smoke would just say, "I just wish I wasn't smoking. There's something good that comes around." There is, right? I mean, there's good things happening. Yeah. The issue is autonomy. So people were feeling like, "I am losing control over my life and that's why I'm upset." Not that this is always bad, but it's that I'm doing this more than I should. I'm doing this more than it's useful. I'm doing this more than it's healthy. I'm doing this to the exclusion of things that I know are much more meaningful. I feel manipulated, like how I feel, my emotions, that somehow these algorithms are changing how I feel.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And so the argument is, "I'm losing my autonomy as a human being." That's what was making people concerned. Now, the social media companies, for a long time, because I've been a long public critic of some of social media, they would always push back with the utility argument. They would say, "Wait a second. Here is something useful that someone is doing on Facebook. Stop criticizing." Right. Checkmate, right? Like, we've won. And what I was finding is that's not really the grounds on which this argument is occurring. It's not, "Is this useless or useful?" It is, "Am I in control of this and using it for good means or is it in control of me?" I think more people feel like, okay, it's shifted and now it's in control of me.

• 24:39Lewis Howes?

  Especially when you now on the iPhone, you can track to see how many hours you've spent on an app or social media account. You're like, wow, I just spent 20 hours this week on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. It's just like, what could you have done with all that time? I'm guilty for this too.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  But you split that, take 20 hours, right? Split that between some like strong interaction with people, self-reflection, and let's say some like skill building or creation.

• 25:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, or working out or nature.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  And multiply that by, what, like five or six weeks even? And it's a vastly different outcome. And then think about, now think about the compounding return, right? Now you take those 20 hours and you repurpose it week after week, and now you're growing off a bigger and bigger base. And you go three or four years down the line, it's a completely different life.

• 25:24Lewis Howes?

  Completely different. And people who complain about wanting to write a book but never have the time, or wanting to learn a new language or a new skill.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:31Lewis Howes?

  Just look at the amount of time you spend on social media.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:35Lewis Howes?

  Or your email, or on nonsense.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  But this is why people are getting upset about social media. Again, it's not that they think it's what they're actually doing is evil, or like what they do when they're on these screens is, you know, you're looking at baby pictures of your niece or something. It's not bad. What they're upset about is that it's keeping them from getting after it in these other aspects. So like, this isn't bad, but not learning the language, not learning the skill, not getting healthy, not taking on responsibility, right? Like becoming a figure in my community, right? That people respect, like these things that we actually crave, that's what people are picking up on. There's all of this stuff over here that instinctually I know, like if I'm doing this is key to flourishing as a human, and I'm just distracting myself with this so much, that there's nothing left over for me

• 26:20Speaker 01

  to do that. And the fact that, why am I so distracted on this is because they tweaked it so that I would do this a lot. It's so that the real estate prices in Northern California can be really expensive.

• 26:28Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  It's not like I'm curing cancer over here and I'm making sacrifices over there. It's, they tweaked this so that I would use it 20 hours a week.

• 26:37Lewis Howes?

  And you said before we jumped on here about, you know, the deeper conversation of what's the void we're trying to fill?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:44Lewis Howes?

  What's the thing that people aren't willing to look at within themselves that makes them so distracted? Have you been having those conversations a lot lately?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  This is a lot of what surprised me, right? When I was working on the book, is that I did this experiment where I put out a call to my readers and said, I'm experimenting with this idea of a digital declutter where you 30 days you step away. Wow. 30 days you step away and this is kind of the core sort of suggestion in the book like 30 days you step away. From all social media. All social media. Email too or no? No, all optional technologies in your personal life. So I can't get you out of answering your boss's email, but online news, social media, games, streaming media, YouTube, right? Almost everything you do in your personal life with tech for one month. TV as well? It's a. Movies and TV. Well, yeah, so different, different people had different rules for that. Like one of the rules I liked is people said, no streaming media by yourself.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So like, yeah, I can watch a movie with, with like a friend or my wife or something. Not just in bed streaming a movie. But I can't just, you know, watching The Office or whatever, yeah. Which is what everyone does. And that's the idea was that you do this 30 days, then when it's over, you rebuild your digital life from scratch, right? So it's like Merry Kondo, you clear out the whole closet. Yes. Right? And what brings you joy and. Yeah, you figure it out and then you, and then you rebuild it from scratch, right? But I kept getting these reports from people, especially younger people, who did not have an adult life before social media. Wow. That it was terrifying. That taking this away that first day was really terrifying for them. And I had underestimated the degree to which for a lot of people that this is a serious escape. It's not just like this is dumb, I spend too much time on nonsense.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Like it's actually an escape from hard things they don't want to deal with. Like what? Well, it can be a lot of things, right? I mean, for some people, there's actually hard questions about their life. Like what am I, what am I supposed to be doing? In my purpose. Am I really living up to my potential? Am I really happy with like the type of person, you know, I am? Am I just going out partying too much or this or that? And this stops them from having to confront that. And it's incredibly, you know, it's incredibly uncomfortable to confront. And for other people, just they don't have high quality analog leisure options in their life, which is another thing I learned about. It seems sort of superficial, like your leisure activities, but it's actually really important to have things you do.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Like things you do in your time outside of work that is requires skill, something you can get better at, something that maybe connects you to other people as you do it. It could be like athletics for a lot of people, like even, even like their pickup basketball game or something like this, but also skilled hobbies, community or church group engagement. Like these type of things that we always used to fill our time with outside of work. Are really important, but it takes some practice and it's harder, right? And so getting back into that, if you've never been there before.

• 29:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Is difficult.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  I think you said in your TED TED video that you like read a book every night and you relax like on a rocking chair and you're like.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  I'm such an old man.

• 29:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And I read a newspaper at the table with my kids in the morning. Like that's how that's how.

• 29:42Lewis Howes?

  That was like my dad. My dad would read the newspaper after either in the morning, but after work you'd come home and just read the newspaper, just sitting in the room with us while we were watching TV or playing video games. He was reading the newspaper.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:55Lewis Howes?

  And then I would, almost every night, he would just like fall asleep in his like chair, reading the newspaper or a book and just like pass out. And I'm like, man, he just looks so restful.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I'd be a good farmer a hundred years ago.

• 30:06Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  If I could just sit on a porch and whittle or something. But again, it sounds superficial, but but I get into it. Like we go all the way back to Aristotle, right? In the Nicotinoian Ethics. And you see that it's crucial to have activities you do just for the intrinsic quality. That's crucial for making it through the inevitable ups and downs in life, right? That you have activities that you do that you do just because you appreciate.

• 30:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Quality, right? If you have that, it's kind of a buffer against various ups and downs, right? If you're if you're really good at cooking or playing music, if you're a musician, even amateur, you can really just appreciate a good piece of music, or if you're a knitter or something like that, and just constructing something good. It all seems superficial, but it's actually a really important buffer.

• 30:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And we.

• 30:49Lewis Howes?

  The in-between times.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  The in-between times. And so maybe you're having a hard time in life at the moment. Having this sort of anchor, but there's things I do that I just appreciate them for the their intrinsic quality is like deeply human. We take it for granted, but having the screen, I mean, you can avoid all of this. Because it's easier in the moment.

• 31:08Lewis Howes?

  And more more rewarding.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  More rewarding. It's this algorithmically optimized content. You've been reduced to a data tuple of 19,000 data points. Statistical algorithms are processing and they're feeding you. Like, look at this nugget, look at that nugget. It's reduced you to a statistical gadget. It feeds you these these isolated nuggets that and and it's just optimized so that you'll want to keep. It's the same as processed food.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Same idea.

• 31:30Lewis Howes?

  You want more and more, but you're never satisfied.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Never satisfied. But if you move away from a real food culture to eat McDonald's, like you're not going to be happy in the long term.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Lewis Howes?

  So this void that we're trying to fill, you're saying that when we have hobbies or other things that we can do that add value to us, the buffer times, as opposed to going on the phone.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Lewis Howes?

  To try to fill the void. That, what will that do for us emotionally, mentally? You also talked about how a lot of professors, or maybe, what is it? The therapists on college campuses or professors in mental health are saying that mental health is rising.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  It's off the charts.

• 32:07Lewis Howes?

  Because of social media anxiety.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:10Lewis Howes?

  So do you think if we were able to eliminate some of that to do more arts and crafts, music, other buffer type experiences? Then anxiety would go down?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:19Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would definitely go down. So for young people, so Generation Z, which is the first generation to have sort of ubiquitous access to smartphones, social media. As they entered their young adolescence, this generation, that's where anxiety, anxiety related disorders were literally off the charts. So the demographers that measure different traits of generations and see how traits change from generation to generation. Had never seen something change that severely. So it was off their charts. And looking at anxiety and anxiety related disorders and the turning point from this was. If you were born just late enough to have social media and smartphones, like when you entered junior high.

• 32:58Lewis Howes?

  When you were like 10.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so this is off the charts. I had been hearing this informally from mental health experts on college campuses where they would tell me like it was crazy. It was overnight. They used to have the standard array of mental health issues, sort of a cross section of what you would expect, like country as a whole. And then it just shifted overnight. It was all anxiety, anxiety related disorders. And it was like 5X more students coming in than they ever used to got before. And they would say it was the students who started arriving on campus with smartphones. It was like that year. Because we're not wired for it, right? So what do we need to flourish as human beings? You take on responsibility for friends, close, family, close friends, community, take on responsibility, commit to them. You know, I'm going to sacrifice for you, you'll sacrifice for me, I'm going to be involved. You do activity that has intrinsic quality, right?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  So you go out there to, I want to do things with my time that itself is high quality and there's value in just doing that. And then, and then in your professional life, you look to make impact. Like you do these things, it's, it's not a secret formula. This is what we've always needed is the nutriments of human flourish.

• 33:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  And so this is the issue with the phone is and again, like the, the, the social media companies wanted all to be about utility. It's not useless to be on Facebook, but it's not the issue. It's that this has become so compulsive that it's taken us away from these things that we absolutely need to flourish. So you take those all away and you just do this instead, you're going to be anxious.

• 34:22Lewis Howes?

  You're going to get dumber.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  You're going to get dumber. You're going to, it's going to impede professional progress and, and then life gets really hard. And then you need this more and more to escape. I mean, when things become dangerous in our life is when you start using them to escape harder things that you don't want to confront. And so then it becomes a cycle. So then you know, like, I'm not, I'm probably not doing what I should be doing with my life.

• 34:43Lewis Howes?

  And you feel guilty.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  You feel guilty and so you escape the guilt by.

• 34:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  By going back to this and it's a cycle.

• 34:50Lewis Howes?

  What's more addictive, social media or smoking?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. I talked to psychologists about this. It's a different type of addiction. Smoking is a substance addiction. So there's actually chemicals that can, that can nicotine can get through the blood brain barrier and it can mess around directly with your neurons. So that's really strong. And when you have a substance addiction, you can feel strong physical withdrawal symptoms, for example, if you stop using it. Phone addiction psychologists tend to categorize as a moderate behavioral addiction. Which means, okay, if I take away your phone, like it might be difficult, but you're not going to have the same type of withdrawal you would have if you were like an alcoholic and you were being taken away from alcohol. But moderate behavioral addictions lead you to using something much more than you know is healthy if you have access to it.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  So it's just like if I put the bowl of potato chips in front of you every day, you're going to eat probably way too many potato chips, right? But if I don't, you're not going to sneak out in the middle of the night to go buy it. So that's where we are with probably with the phones is that if we have it with us, we're going to use it more than we think is healthy.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  On the phone. Okay, so let's, let's make this an air. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen, a lot of people that have products and services and companies and trying to build their brands and get exposure and build a following. What would you say to the people that their business is mostly online?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:12Lewis Howes?

  And is evolved around building communities on social networking platforms? How would you suggest they manage their time on social media? Can they eliminate social media all in all? Or let someone else run it for them?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:24Lewis Howes?

  What's your recommendation?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  And all those are possible, right? So I definitely recognize in the professional context, there's certain things that social media enables that's really powerful. I mean, there's a reason, for example, why Facebook is worth $500 billion. Because let's say you're trying to advertise. It's crazy. This thing can pinpoint exact human beings that you want to try to sell to. I mean, I see why they're making lots of money. And I understand why people would use it to advertise. I also understand having some sort of presence in social media is useful in certain industries. And so what I typically advise is if you think social media is very important for your business, treat it as something important. Like actually get after it and understand where am I really getting value? What activities really matter? Do they really matter?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Make sure you're not telling yourself a story, right? Treat it like any other tool. Then, once you've really figured out, okay, these are the ways that social media is helping me professionally, then use it like a professional. So there's no reason for it to be on your phone.

• 37:22Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Doesn't don't.

• 37:23Lewis Howes?

  Emails on your phone, right?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  I don't use email on my phone.

• 37:26Lewis Howes?

  Really? Wow.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I deleted the app.

• 37:28Lewis Howes?

  You just only open the computer to do the work on email?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:32Lewis Howes?

  And on your phone, you're not checking or being notified?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  So do the same. So once you've identified X, Y, and Z on social media is a big ROI, do it like the pros. So I interviewed some sort of social media brand managers for major companies in the book. Like, okay, how do the professionals use it? It's on their desktop. They've got tools. They've got schedules. They've got systems. They often have staff that helps them. And it's a completely different interaction than I'm in line at CVS.

• 37:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And I'm looking at it. I'm on the toilet. Yeah.

• 38:02Lewis Howes?

  20 extra minutes, which I do all the time.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Right. So like a lot of people, a lot of people sort of tell themselves the story. They allow the sort of professional use to completely change what's happening in life outside of work. And so those are the two things that happen. So sometimes people just generically see professional social media as like, I don't want to think about it more than just in general, being on here and using a lot is beneficial. I think we got to think about it sharper than that. And then two, they let it. Infect over, but like if a friend of mine was running a business and we were out to dinner and he's doing QuickBooks. Whatever. I was like, well, why are you, why are you making QuickBooks invoices? Like, I don't doubt that maybe QuickBooks is useful for your business, but this is weird that you're using it on your phone all the time.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  At dinner.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not just enough to, if he came back and said, but my business needs QuickBooks, that's how I invoice my clients or whatever. I say that's true, but like, do you need to be writing up invoices on the toilet?

• 38:54Lewis Howes?

  And at dinner and at the movies.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  At the movies, yeah. So when I talk to professionals, I'm like, if you need social media, use it like, if you're using it professionally, use it like a professional and it should have very little to do with your personal life.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  What are the non-negotiables for you every day with, in terms of screen time and your phone?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Well, I don't really need that many non-negotiables because it's.

• 39:18Lewis Howes?

  It's never there.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I don't have social media accounts, so I'm, I'm free from that re-engineering. So when you don't have that re-engineering towards the compulsive use model, the phone just goes back to the way it was in 2007. So I was like, great, I need to look up, you know, I'm looking up like whatever the address of where I'm going or something like this.

• 39:35Lewis Howes?

  Use Maps.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Maps, I'm gonna call my wife and see how the kids are doing or something like that. But because I've never been exposed to the constant companion model, it's just, it's never something that, that I worry about. And then online, I've, I had trained myself not to web surf.

• 39:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So I don't have a cycle of sites that, to go through. Now, in part, I can do this because I have a lot of autonomy in my job. So as a professor and a writer, it's not like, I, I never have to just be at an office to be there. I can decide what I'm gonna work on. And so because I have kids, I tend to tightly schedule my workday. And so I don't want time, the web surf during my workday. It's like, I'm doing this for two hours and this, like, I wanna be trying to work every single minute.

• 40:14Lewis Howes?

  Get done.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  So I can be done and then I can be home. And then when I'm home, you know, I have three kids running around.

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  So you're just a present dad.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  That's what I wanna do.

• 40:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  You're just hanging out, throwing a baseball in the backyard, you're whatever, getting dirty, whatever it might be.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we literally do that, yeah.

• 40:28Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Just like the old days. I remember after work, my dad would come home, he'd be in his suit, he'd roll his sleeves up, he'd get to two mitts and we'd go play catch in the backyard.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:38Lewis Howes?

  For twenty, thirty minutes. It was so powerful in the summer in Ohio, just like the smell, the grass, just like throw and catch, you know?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:46Lewis Howes?

  Simple little things that build connection and is a memory.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  It's a memory and it's physical and it's tangible and you're taking responsibility for a relationship. My oldest is only six, but we're working on swings.

• 40:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And he's getting better.

• 40:59Lewis Howes?

  All right. He'll be doing T-ball soon.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  He did T-ball last summer.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  Really? Are you coaching?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I'm not the coach. I'm not the coach, maybe I should be.

• 41:06Lewis Howes?

  But you go. Now, it's interesting, when you go as a parent to see, I guess, T-ball, and I'm sure you'll be doing more activities with your kids as they get older.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  Do you see all other parents just on their phone the whole time?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of that.

• 41:17Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And playgrounds too.

• 41:20Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  This is one of the sources, I think, of the pushback that I've been picking up on the last couple of years on our digital lives is that our generation, like so, so people like us who were exposed, the social media generation, right? We got it when we were like in college.

• 41:36Lewis Howes?

  Twenties.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  The first adopters, basically, right? Is we're starting to have families. And so it's interesting, a lot of the unease is coming from like new moms and dads.

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Right? Because now suddenly you have to confront, like it's pretty clear that this thing in front of me here is very important and something that I want to dedicate to and take responsibility. And then like, then why am I looking at this?

• 41:57Lewis Howes?

  Right. Well, my kids are the most important.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's, it's one of the source of the growing unease is that the social media generation, the first adopters is now getting old enough that it's not just, you know, we're in our twenties and we're, we're going out and hanging out with friends and who cares, you know? And so I think that's, that's part of the pushback.

• 42:15Lewis Howes?

  So for people who are entrepreneurs that use social media to, to build their business, what do you recommend? Do you recommend them deleting for thirty days? Do you recommend them saying, okay, you're only going to be scheduled online for these hours a day like a working professional would?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Put, put fences around it.

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So take it off your phone and put fences around how and when.

• 42:35Lewis Howes?

  That's scary.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Take it off your phone.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  And then have how and when.

• 42:40Lewis Howes?

  How and when.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is a lot. So a lot of the digital minimalists, right? Like, a lot of the people who go through this process, like, of that sixteen hundred, probably fifty percent added some social media back into their life after the thirty days.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

  So you had sixteen hundred people go through this process?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:56Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And they would send in reports. Of the reports I got, about fifty percent were saying, "Okay, I can't think of any huge wins I'm getting out of social media." Because the whole minimalism game is just about focus on the big wins and ignore the rest. And so the whole idea is you go through all this tech after the thirty days and say, "If it's a big win, I'll bring it back in, and if it's not, I'm happy to miss out." So about fifty percent, when they did this calculus for social media, were like, "I'm not getting a big win, and I'm a minimalist. I'm gonna focus my attention on the things that really matter, so that's okay." Fifty percent had big wins, right?

• 43:25Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean they had big wins?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  There is a value, something they really valued for which, let's say, a particular social media tool was a big boost, right?

• 43:32Lewis Howes?

  For what? Their business or their career?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Either, right? So there might be, it might be a personal thing, right? Like, "This is the way, the only way I connect with these people who are very important in my life." A lot of, like, soldiers deployed overseas have a very different relationship with some of these social media platforms because of the time changes and the difficulty of the synchronous communication.

• 43:51Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  That's really important for them. A lot of visual artists told me that Instagram is crucial.

• 43:56Lewis Howes?

  For their business, for their awareness.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  For their creativity. They have to be, if you're a visual artist, you have to see other people's work. That's why they all used to live in Greenwich Village, because that's where the galleries were, right?

• 44:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And now...

• 44:08Lewis Howes?

  It's an online gallery.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Instagram has been fantastic for visual artists, because you don't have to live in one of three cities anymore. So about fifty percent had some value that social media really helped, but of that fifty percent, probably ninety-five took it off their phone and transformed it into, "I use it, like, Sundays on my desktop to do X." Right? The visual artists were like, "I took my Instagram followers. I went down to ten artists I really admire. Sunday night, I go on my desktop. The password's not saved, you know, it's in a post-it note or whatever." It takes about twenty minutes. I look at the things they posted that week. I'm getting all the value I need out of this tool without letting it turn me into a widget.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  So the how and when is sort of the secret sauce to minimalism. So it's not just the what. So they really cut down, right? It's like taking the junk out of your house. But then they have this extra element, which is unique to the digital world, which is, how and when am I going to use the things that I kept in the closet?

• 45:03Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So in the book, Digital Minimalism, do you have a guideline for how people can do this for 30 days? Is there a process?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. The process is you figure out, okay, what am I going to step away from? And for the things that I do need to keep, you actually write down the rules, right? So you see it. Here's my tech rules. And you have 30 days. So what are you supposed to do during those 30 days? Like, why is this not just like a Marie Kondo weekend type thing, right? Yeah, like what?

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Five-hour declutter.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, well, there's two reasons. So one, it takes about seven to 10 days just to sort of detox from the need to compulsively use the phone. Until you get rid of that feeling of compulsive use, it's very hard to make decisions about what's important or not. So the first week or two is you're just kind of getting away from it. But more importantly is 30 days is enough time to actually do the hard self-reflection on these key questions, like what am I all about? What do I care about? What do I want to do with my time? You can experiment and try things out. You can talk to mentors. You can go for walks. You read inspiring books. I mean, it takes quite a bit of self-work to figure out, what do I really care about? And then, once you know that, when you get to the end of 30 days, now you have a foundation to make your decisions.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  So now, when you're like, should I come back? Maybe should I put Instagram back into my life? You can now run that against, here's the things identified I really cared about. If it really helps one of these things, yes, I'm using it for a huge win. If it doesn't, I'm really secure missing out on it because this is what I really care about. I really care about these five things. This is what I want to do with my time. This is what's important to my life. I want my energy to go to that. And now you can just make these tools back into tools and not this sort of constant companion escape.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  Addiction.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:43Lewis Howes?

  Wow, man. This is powerful, powerful stuff. How many people do you think actually, after reading this book, will take on the 30 day challenge?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  They seem to be doing it.

• 46:54Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a 30 day challenge is a little bit more self-helpy than I normally am. I mean, right? I was a little bit uncomfortable. My books tend to be more, a little bit more like idea books. It has practical things, but like, I'm an academic, right?

• 47:08Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  We don't do 30 days.

• 47:10Lewis Howes?

  You're a researcher, yeah, yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  We don't do 30 days, but it's what works. And, and you know, people want there to be, I get asked the question a lot, like, but can you give me instead, like, some tips? Like, five things I can do or whatever? And I was like, I can, but...

• 47:22Lewis Howes?

  Just delete your accounts.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  But you gotta do the 30, like, it, something about this 30 days, this declutter, it does work. And coming up short of that, trying to kind of do it piecemeal, it doesn't seem to be as effective. And so I was like, alright, I'm putting it in. I'm gonna marry conduit, I'm gonna have a process, you know?

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  I love it.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  But that's the feedback I'm getting. So that's why I tell people, it's like, you can do things to get in shape, the prepare for the 30 days, but rip the band-.

• 47:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I really feel like when you do this 30 day challenge, I had another friend, Baratunde Thurston, Thurston who did this a couple of years ago, and he wrote a whole article, I think in like Fast Company, about like, what he learned about himself in 30 days.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I wrote about him in Deep Work.

• 48:01Lewis Howes?

  He did?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he, he stepped away from Twitter.

• 48:04Lewis Howes?

  I think he stepped away from like every, was it just Twitter?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yes, maybe everything, but then, uh, he went back to it all.

• 48:10Lewis Howes?

  And now is he back like this?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know, I just remember at the time I wrote the article, I went and, and looked at how much he was using afterwards.

• 48:17Lewis Howes?

  He stepped away for 30 days, or maybe a month or something, yeah. And then he did like a whole article about what he learned about himself, or what he, I think he was able to do the deep work finally.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  On certain projects, or...

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:28Lewis Howes?

  Connect with friends more.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  You, you have to have the time, right? It can't be a weekend closet clean, that's the interesting thing about it. If it's just like, okay, this weekend, I'm gonna just step back and figure out, you know, what do I want on my phone? Like, I'm gonna delete apps and stuff like that. It doesn't get it done, like, you, you have to have that space.

• 48:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's the same. Honestly, I think what's going on here, we've seen in health and fitness. Right? We got highly palatable processed foods.

• 48:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, get it out of your system.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everyone got, you know.

• 48:57Lewis Howes?

  Take the grains out.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we tried tips, just, you know, the banal stuff, right? Like eat less, move more.

• 49:05Lewis Howes?

  You gotta get rid of it, though.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  The food pyramid, yeah, and what works is the people who have like a whole philosophy. Right? They're vegan, they're paleo, they're whatever. But they've got a whole philosophy based in something they care about. And so that's why this book is not about tips. It was like, what's veganism for digital life, right? Like, what's the philosophy? What's the philosophy that can be based in values? That allows you to make like consistent decisions about what you do.

• 49:29Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, my COO, who manages my business, he doesn't have social media. He has a Facebook account, because he got on in 2004 when we were at college. But he never uses it. I don't even know if he knows his password. He's not on Instagram, Twitter, nothing. And he's probably the most productive person I know.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:46Lewis Howes?

  He's got a daughter, you know, a year and a half daughter. And he's not anxious a lot.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:51Lewis Howes?

  He's calm, and he can think clearly.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:54Lewis Howes?

  And it just kind of, he's my inspiration, because I'm probably on it too much promoting, you know, my show, or whatever it may be.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Lewis Howes?

  And, but I realized after this conversation, like, I could just be on the desktop for an hour a day.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:06Lewis Howes?

  Doing what I need to do on social media.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  With some professional help, probably, too.

• 50:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, with some systems, some software, some team, you know, around that. And I've been doing that more and more, but I still feel like there's a couple of things I hold on to.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:19Lewis Howes?

  For whatever reason. And maybe I get to reflect more of like, what's the void I'm trying to fill?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's.

• 50:25Lewis Howes?

  Or is it just an addiction now, that it's just like, maybe there's no void, but it's just like, you're just so used to it?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  That's the complicated thing, right? But you can't figure out the void unless you do the whole Nietzsche thing, right? You have to confront it, right? Okay, I feel really uneasy because I don't have the thing I normally look at. That uneasiness is good, because now you have to figure out, why do I feel uneasy? And how do I make this go away? And that's where actual development comes out of.

• 50:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  You gotta be uncomfortable sometimes.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

  I love this. You know, my mom, who lives a few blocks away, she has been knitting her whole life. And she still knits, I don't know, two, three hours a day.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:02Lewis Howes?

  There's a blanket, a huge blanket, a scarf, a sweatshirt every week.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:07Lewis Howes?

  That she finishes. And she always shows me like her masterpiece.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:11Lewis Howes?

  Like, that's so cool, that she focuses so much on her craft. And she has that as her buffer time. She's always knitting in the car when someone else is driving. She's knitting in the car. When there's a movie, she's knitting. She's always knitting.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:26Lewis Howes?

  And it brings her a lot of peace.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:28Lewis Howes?

  It helps like her mind. I'm sure she's probably thinking a lot during those times. It's just like reflection time. And I just continue to think about, what are all the things that we can be mastering with this buffer time?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And it's primal, right? There's something primal, let's say about knitting or

• 51:44Lewis Howes?

  Using your hands.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  woodworking.

• 51:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Because what differentiates, there's maybe three species. It's like chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans. Like what, one of the things that differentiates us is that we can plan. So we can have an intention, and we can manifest it in the world.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Right? So I can think about, you know, a spear, and I can take the rocks, and I can do the different things and create it, right? And that really helps us succeed. So we're wired to be very fulfilled when we can take an idea and manifest it in the physical, concrete world. Which is why there's a type of fulfillment we get when you knit something, or you carve something, or whatever it is, that you don't get on a screen. Because seeing our intention manifested in the concrete world is something that's primal. It's something that we're wired to crave, because that's what allowed us to stop being tiger food.

• 52:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Because once we could start, once we could start doing that. And so like someone I really admire is, I don't know if you've, if you've, if you've met Nick Offerman. He plays Ron Swanson. Yeah, but he's got this somewhere around here in LA.

• 52:39Lewis Howes?

  Woodworker, right? Does he have a chef?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  He's got the shop around here, yeah. And he spins, it's gotta be the most healthy way probably to be in Hollywood.

• 52:46Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Screen star, but he's there all the time. And it's a serious shop, like a live industrial warehouse type things. And he's a really serious.

• 52:53Lewis Howes?

  I also look at like Jim Carrey. I don't know if you've seen his work. He had a video last year that was like the most viewed video on Vimeo.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:01Lewis Howes?

  He's a master artist. He has this huge warehouse in, I think, New York City and in LA. Where he just goes and paints something new every single day. And he's unbelievable painter.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:12Lewis Howes?

  And he just has all these colors and just painting whatever he wants. And I actually have one of his paintings because I was so inspired by it. But here's a guy who's probably, he's been wrapped up in the Hollywood scene for a long time. But to have like a craft that you can keep focusing on.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  Probably gives him a sense of peace as well.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we're wired for that.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to do that more in my own life.

• 53:32Lewis Howes?

  Really, like what?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Well, so I'm getting back into my guitar playing.

• 53:35Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Same thing, right? You have inflexible metal strings and a piece of wood. And you're sort of trying to manipulate this real world thing to make it some outcome.

• 53:43Lewis Howes?

  Sound good, yeah. That's good, man. A big thing I like to do is salsa dance.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:48Lewis Howes?

  I love salsa dancing. I play a little guitar as well. I just started singing lessons a couple of months ago.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great, yeah.

• 53:55Lewis Howes?

  So I'm trying to just use more of my body.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:58Lewis Howes?

  To manifest like my skills.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:00Lewis Howes?

  And things that I'm not that good at, you know?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:03Lewis Howes?

  Things that I'm trying to get better at.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  But you can get better at, and this seems to be, it's skilled and you can get better at it. And it's demonstrable that you're getting better.

• 54:11Lewis Howes?

  It's rewarding.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  You know, like I'm better at this now than I was.

• 54:14Lewis Howes?

  And I think when we do these things, like guitar, whatever it may be, and we get better, that's when we build true confidence. We don't build confidence by getting more likes on social media. It might be a false sense of confidence for a moment, but we haven't really built a skill that's valuable.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  And I think that's the thing. There's like fake confidence when we're like growing online. But when we actually do something that we know is hard, deep work, and we see the growth, that's when we have that intrinsic confidence.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  That supports us for a longer time.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  My Uber driver yesterday. Was telling me that he used to do music lessons, professional musician. And he said this was one of the shifts he saw that kind of got him out of, out of that industry. Was that sort of younger people now aren't willing to practice. And he'd been doing this for a long time, right? I mean, it's, it's not a random sample. It's people who are coming to get lessons and just a, a discomfort with the discomfort of practicing. But when you're doing something like this, like learning how to play guitar, you probably remember when you first learned. The guitar is like completely unyielding.

• 55:12Lewis Howes?

  Oh, it's so hard, man. It's like a year and a half to figure out like three songs.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Just for like your fingers to get comfortable.

• 55:18Lewis Howes?

  Painful.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  But we used to be more comfortable doing these things because what else were you gonna do?

• 55:22Lewis Howes?

  There was no other time. Yeah, we had all this free time.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  There was free time. What are you gonna do? Like, I want to play in a rock band, right? Girls like guys in rock bands is what I was told, right? So I'm gonna learn.

• 55:29Lewis Howes?

  Practice all afternoon.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna practice all afternoon. I'm gonna put on the Hendrix and, and do, you know, pentatonic scales or whatever. But, you know, we, if you're used to that, it's confidence. You know what skill is. You don't have to be world class at something, but you know about, I was bad at this and then I did this deliberate effort. And now I'm not bad.

• 55:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  And now you know what that is. The competent person, this was Matthew Crawford said something like the, the competent person who has a skill is sort of quiet and easy with themselves. The non-competent person is out there yelling into the void online, desperate to get, will someone validate?

• 56:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Will someone validate me? But when you know how to do something really well, you're quiet and easy.

• 56:08Lewis Howes?

  What do you recommend as a parent to other parents on how they can train or teach or educate their kids to do the hard work growing up?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:18Lewis Howes?

  On certain skills or activities as opposed to take your iPad and iPhone and watch a movie and play games?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, modeling is important. So they see, they gotta see what you're doing.

• 56:29Lewis Howes?

  See you reading a book.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  See you reading a book. See you doing.

• 56:32Lewis Howes?

  Playing guitar.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  See you doing hard things, yeah. See you doing hard things, seeing you respecting other people who do hard things. That was important to me growing up for sure. Just being exposed to that and seeing that. It's just having that message. And then when I was growing up, the other rule was you always have to be doing an instrument. You always have to be doing a sport.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, that's pretty good, actually. Because those are both things that are, what's more, two things are very unyielding. Like trying to get a guitar to do something, or trying to get a bat to hit.

• 56:59Lewis Howes?

  Fastball.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:01Lewis Howes?

  So hard.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  So hard.

• 57:02Lewis Howes?

  That's right.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  My dad tried to get me to do piano when I was a kid. And I went to one lesson and I just like screamed and cried about it. And he, he was like, okay, you don't have to go anymore. But I was in every sport.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:15Lewis Howes?

  So I was like obsessed with sports and all in.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  I mean, this is part of why it's so great is because, I mean, it's hard. And you want to get better. It's demonstrable when you get better. Like it's clear that you're better and you're connected to other people.

• 57:29Lewis Howes?

  But you're, you're learning with a group, you're getting coached.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You're helping the team as, as you get better. It's, I mean, that's having that, that modeled. Like skills matter. We respect people who do something well. It's worthwhile learning how to do something hard. Hard things is what moves life forward. Hard things is the foundation of, of fulfillment. The more I think that that is sort of modeled and talked about, the better.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. This is great, man. I love this. Uh, make sure you guys get the book, Digital Minimalism. I've got a couple of questions left for you, but uh, Digital Minimalism is out now. Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. You can't find them on social media, but you can go to your website, calnewport.com.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 58:09Lewis Howes?

  You can subscribe to your newsletter there. You can learn more about you, uh, not on social media, but on, on there. And then you're, do you have a newsletter once a week?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I blog.

• 58:19Lewis Howes?

  Blog.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  And it goes out to the newsletter. Yeah, I'm a blog nerd.

• 58:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Blog nerd, love it. Okay. This question is called the three truths. So I want you to imagine it's your final day on earth, whenever you want it to be. Could be hundreds of years from now, it could be whenever, but at some point you gotta go.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:34Lewis Howes?

  And uh, you've gotta take all of your work with you. So all of your writing, your material, the content you've created has got to go with you when you die.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43Lewis Howes?

  But you get to write down on a piece of paper, three things you know to be true about all of your experiences. And leave that with the world. Your three lessons that you've learned that you would want to share back with the world. What would you say are your three truths?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  So this won't be worded elegantly because I'm just, I'm thinking about this on the fly. Probably something about responsibility. So taking on responsibility, like for other people to do things of value is in the end going to be more important than worrying about happiness in the moment. Doing hard things. Is sort of the foundation for a good life.

• 59:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Hard things are good. Like push yourself, push yourself to do hard things. Serve other people. Family, close friends, community, I talk about these things.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, serve other people. I mean, I guess all of these, if I'm thinking about it, all three of these things is, and this is probably common to a lot of wisdom traditions, so I'm not coming up with anything new, but all three of these things, I guess, are really about taking the focus away from yourself, what's happening to yourself, what do people think about you? How do you feel? Sort of shifting the focus away from that.

• 59:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Take on responsibility, take on hard things, try to rise to it. Do hard things, produce things that are valuable. Serve other people as opposed to worrying too much about are other people properly serving you?

• 1:00:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Are they liking the right things or saying the right things to you?

• 1:00:10Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Lewis Howes?

  Those are great, man. I love those. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Cal, for, man, you set the example for what is really hard for a lot of people right now. People are so focused on likes and being on social media and doing the easy things. And you constantly do the hard things and set that example. So I want to acknowledge you for going against the grain.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Lewis Howes?

  Because it's not easy to do that. And a lot of people are seduced with the easy out and filling the void by getting likes and all these things. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for creating this type of work because it is the most rewarding things when we do the hard work. And when we eliminate distractions and really connect to other people and other human beings. So I acknowledge you for that, my man. My final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Rising to your potential. You know, we all have a potential, like what we could be doing. And so fighting the rise for that, like that's greatness. Versus throwing in the towel early.

• 1:01:12Lewis Howes?

  All right. There you go. I love it, man.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 1:01:15Lewis Howes?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:01:16Lewis Howes?

  Appreciate it, brother.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Lewis Howes?

  There you have my friends. Big thank you to Cal Newport. All about doing the deep intimate work that creates more value in the world with that more focused attention as opposed to being scatterbrained all over the place, never really building true relationships and true value in the world. Again, if you enjoyed this, make sure to share with your friends. If you know someone who's always on social media and is struggling and overwhelmed and stressed, or feels like they never get anything done, or they don't have any time, make sure you send this to them. Be a friend. Send this to them right now so they can get the inspiration to start detoxing some of these things from their life. Again, send them the link. LewisHowes.com/770. I want to remind you how much you matter in the world.

• 1:02:08Lewis Howes?

  No matter how much stress you are facing right now, how uncertain you are about your career, your finances, your health, or that relationship in, or the uncertainty of finding the right person in your life, you matter. I want you to know how much you matter. I've been to too many dark places in my life where I didn't think I mattered. And it's not worth it. It's not feeling that way worth it. It's not supportive to a greater purpose for your life. So I want you to remember right now how much you do matter and how important you are to this world. I hope you continue to push through the challenges you face, to lean on support in

• 1:02:50Lewis Howes?

  your life, to find friends, mentors, lean on family members, find people who think like you, who can support you as well. And put yourself out there. Start giving back in other ways because whenever you feel like you don't matter, all you need to do is start helping someone else. And remember how much of an impact you truly can make. You matter, my friends. I love you so very much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.