Ep. 373: The Internet’s Best Advice for Reinventing Your Life

In 2023, I published an episode about resetting your life that became one of my most popular. In the years since, multiple major podcasters and YouTubers have done their own videos on the same theme. In today’s episode, I extract the best ideas from five such recent videos to create an all-star reset strategy. I connect this to my work on technology and its impacts, by noting that taking control of your life can be the most important first step toward taking control of your devices. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: The Internet’s Best Advice for Reinventing Your Life (0:02) How do I extract ideas for living deeply from books? [55:44] How do I avoid being overwhelmed by everything required to seriously change my life? [58:31] How do I visualize my ideal lifestyle in a fast-changing world? [1:02:42] I just quit my teaching job due to burn-out. How do I find what to do next? [1:09:28] CASE STUDY: Crafting a deep life [1:13:21] CALL: How to revise expectations with young kids [1:18:45] CAL REACTS: The Great Lock-In of 2025 [1:28:11] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?youtube.com/watch?v=mSaI8Rluel8youtu.be/wXcEtxlrPMAyoutu.be/PvvS-0mqD4cyoutube.com/watch?v=2ZXJZnAxHHIyoutube.com/watch?v=0G7Wu4DnDawcalnewport.com/the-great-lock-in-of-2025/ Thanks to our Sponsors: cozyearth.com/deepshopify.com/deepvanta.com/deepquestionsexpressvpn.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02Cal Newport?

  A few years ago, I published a podcast episode with a simple idea. The right time to make major changes in your life is not the new year, but instead the fall. This is when your energy is returning after the summer slowdown and when you're really ready to lock in on bigger goals. That episode became really popular and in the year since then, this fall reset concept has caught on within the internet community. Some of the biggest names in podcasting and YouTube have since put out their own reset videos, which I think is great for two reasons. One, as an empathetic human, I like the idea in general to see people improving their lives, but two, as someone who writes and talks specifically about technology and how

• 0:47Cal Newport?

  it impacts us and how we should respond to it. I've come to believe that taking control of your life is a critical first step before you can take control of your devices. The more interesting you find your life outside of screens, the less interesting the screens themselves will become. So here's what I thought would be cool. Today, we are going to go through five of the most popular life reset videos on the internet at the moment. I'm then going to extract the best piece of advice from each, which will leave us with sort of five of the best pieces of reset advice out there. We can think of this as like an all-star reset plan. All right, so that's what we're going to do. So if you feel like you've been in a rut or like your life could be better, you're worrying that you're retreating to your devices because you're unhappy with what's

• 1:32Cal Newport?

  happening beyond them, or maybe you just need a little bit of inspiration this fall, this episode will be perfect for you. As always, I'm Kel Newport and this is Deep Questions.

• 1:55Cal Newport?

  Today's episode, the internet's best advice for resetting your life.

• 2:01Cal Newport?

  Okay, so here's the plan for how we're going to do this, Jesse. I have five videos I watched. What I'm going to do is for each of these videos, I'm going to play a clip of what, in my opinion, was the best idea I heard in that video. And then I will translate that idea into a very concrete piece of advice that you can consider putting into practice. So we'll give a sort of Cal Newport spin to each of these ideas. And then when we're done, we'll have sort of five concrete suggestions for resetting your life if you feel like it's time to inject a little bit of energy into it. All right, so that's the plan. Let's get into it. We're going to start with a video from the incomparable Mel Robbins. Now, if you haven't heard my recent appearance on her show from a couple of months ago, you should check it out. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:46Cal Newport?

  I went up to Boston. We had a good time together. But last winter, she posted an episode online that was titled, let me read this here. "The Seven Day Reset for More Time, Energy, and Happiness," parentheses, "backed by science," parentheses. All right, so this was Mel Robbins' approach at doing a reset video. It has around 800,000 views on YouTube, which makes it the second most popular of the videos we're going to draw from today. You know, it's a video that it's classic Mel. She's in an armchair with like a comfy sweatshirt, just melling out in the microphone. If you like Mel Robbins, you'll, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Anyways, she had a lot of good advice in there. I want to pull out one idea in particular that I thought was particularly good. So Jesse, let's play that clip.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Is you gotta do a brain dump. Now, I know what you're thinking. What is a brain dump? It is as simple as it sounds. You're going to take everything that's up in your brain that's weighing you down, and you are going to get it out of your brain and dump it onto a piece of paper. It is the equivalent of mental vomiting. You're just going to put it all out on paper. I have done this for years. And for years, the way that I have used a brain dump is anytime I feel overwhelmed or I start to feel like I'm starting to ruminate, or if you get a case of the Sunday scaries and you're starting to dread the week ahead, or you feel like you've got a lot to do and you didn't get it done over the weekend, you need a brain.

• 4:11Cal Newport?

  All right, so Mel is getting at a really important idea here, which touches on some key psychology. When you are holding too many tasks or projects or ideas in your head, there's two things that happens. Now, one thing I've talked about before, this is kind of an idea that came out of David Allen, who borrowed it himself from Dean Atchison, which is the idea that if you have too many things just in your head, you'll be anxious because your brain will worry about forgetting things that are important. So there'll be a little bit of energy you're always spending worried that you're about to forget something that's important. But there's another things that happens when you keep too many things in your head, which I think Mel is doing, she ends up doing a good job of homing in on. And that's this idea that because our working memory can only hold a small number of things,

• 4:54Cal Newport?

  most of these things that are kind of on your mind sort of meld together into an amorphous blob of just lots of stuff that needs to be done. It's not specific, it's just this blob of stuff. There's all this stuff I should be doing, but I'm not. And that puts you, and that exists in your brain, that amorphous blob of blah stuff. It puts you in a mindset of, I'm behind, I'm behind on things, I'm not getting things done, I'm a mess. And when you're in that mindset, it's hard to make progress on anything that is like proactive for resetting or reinventing your life. It's hard to make big strides because like, that's not the situation I'm in, I'm just behind on everything.

• 5:37Cal Newport?

  So what happens when you do what Mel suggests and you write it all down? That blob comes into focus as a list of very specific things. Now, if we're going to be really technical about it, it's as if when you write down all those things, you're taking your working memory, which can normally only hold five to seven things, and you're expanding it basically unboundedly. You can now read through this list and see all the individual things. You can't remember 100 different tasks in your head and go through them, but you can look at a list of 100 tasks really easily. That breaks down the blob of just stuff, and it changes from, I'm just behind and not doing things, to, here's all the things I might do. These are all different things I might want to get to at some point. And now your brain could be super rational about it.

• 6:21Cal Newport?

  And say, well, clearly I can't do 100 things this week, but you know what? Looking at the actual things and not the amorphous stress-producing ball, I don't need to be doing all these things this week. So what I'm going to do is like some of these things this week. And of course, that's the way what's going on here is that I have this like very precise list of things and I'm doing some things each week. And I'll be careful about how I choose it. And that's just sort of what life is. And you're no longer stressed out and you're no longer down on yourself as being behind. You instead to say, this is how I operate is that I have like a menu of things I could be doing. I have somewhat limited time and I make choices. In that type of mindset, you're not stressed out, you're not anxious and you can make

• 7:01Cal Newport?

  progress on important optional sort of life improvement projects. Because instead of it being, oh, once I don't feel behind, I'll do this, which will never happen. You could just say, yeah, that's one of the things I'll select to do this week. I'll work in with some of these more mundane or logistical things, some things that are like self-improvement oriented. So it really changes the way your mind proceeds perceives how you're doing and what's possible. All right, so let me transform this into a concrete piece of advice to give you. Here's what I want you to consider doing. Keep track of everything you need to do in some sort of task tracking system. I don't particularly care about details. It probably should be digital because you have a lot of stuff you need to be doing. This list is going to be long.

• 7:46Cal Newport?

  It's going to be hard to handwrite and to update. So you can use a text file, you can use a word processing document, you can use Trello. I've been fond recently of an app called Things 3. Just a beautiful interface for just keeping track of tasks and assigning dates to them. We'll talk more about it later, but whatever you want to use, have it in a system. Here's where I'm going to differ a little bit from Mel and my concrete advice. The idea that you brain dump from scratch into the system every week, I don't buy that. That doesn't make sense to me. You can't make this list from scratch each week because most of the stuff is the same from week to week. So that's incredibly inefficient. And those of us who do this professionally know that that can take a really long time.

• 8:31Cal Newport?

  This is, you know, the famous David Allen estimate from his book, Getting Things Done, is that I can take them like two days sometimes, working with executives, just to get everything out of their mind that they might have to do. So I don't buy this, let's do this from scratch every week. What you should be doing every week instead of my concrete advice is updating your list. All right. What is new that has entered my life that I think I should do or think about doing? Let me add the new stuff to your list. So you're updating the list every week, but you're not just adding, you're also subtracting. So, once a week, when you update this week, you do your brain dump of new stuff, you go through and start crossing things out. Like, you know what? Enough. I'm not going to do that. I had that idea, but this is not a priority

• 9:15Cal Newport?

  for me right now. I was excited because I listened to that podcast about yoga, but I'm not, I'm not going to the yoga studio. So you can also cross things off. Actually, there's a later clip in Mel's video where she talks about her favorite tool as part of this reset. It's just a big, black Sharpie that she uses to cross things off, taking things off of the list. So I think that's useful as well. All right. So you do that once a week. If you're organized, it's great if you can do it at the end of the day Friday, because that'll help you get through the weekend with an open head. If you can do it Sunday, maybe Sunday afternoon, that could help with the Sunday scaries. Otherwise, you could do it Monday morning. All right. Then, once a week, I want you to consult this list as you think about the week ahead. Have some sort of rough plan about maybe

• 10:00Cal Newport?

  what you want to do that week. Maybe you want to circle a few things, right? So your mind trust, when you dump things in this list, I'm looking at it, and I'm highlighting some things I want to do each week. So that's, I'm trying to make Mel's idea there and make it more concrete. But if you do this, keep your brain dump up to date and review it every week. It really will change your sort of relationship to how busy you feel, how you feel about yourself, how stressed you are, and your perception about the amount of cool stuff you can do in your life. So, great idea. Good work, Mel. All right. So Mel is someone who's a little older than me. Now, for the second video, it's popular

• 10:44Cal Newport?

  on this topic, I'm going to jump to someone who is much younger than me. This is Dan Ko, K O E. He's a popular YouTuber, definitely a younger guy, more of like a Gen Z type guy. I think he's very popular. Have you heard of this person? Uh, no. You're not, we're so old, like, we're not up to date. But, you know, Nate definitely knows who he is, Newsletter Nate. Jesse and I, one of the other person, members of our team is a little bit younger. Anyways, his videos are, he's YouTube native, his video is very popular. And he had one that was called, "How to Reset Your Life in Seven Days." So both him and Mel were going for the seven days thing. I went for four months. So I don't know, they're pretty, I guess the YouTube generation is a little bit faster. This is a popular video, it was published in 2024, it

• 11:28Cal Newport?

  has close to 300,000 views. Alright, so there's one idea that I particularly like from this video. So Jesse, let's load up that clip next.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Now, let's think of your mind as the digestive system for reality itself. If you eat too much information, then you get anxious. And if you don't eat enough information with your mind, then you get bored. So to maximize the enjoyment in our lives, we want to maximize the time that we spend at our edge. We're not bored, we're not anxious, we're in the middle, we're between the two, everything becomes meaningful, we're using what we're learning by building. You win the game of life by finding enjoyment, not pleasure, big difference, in as much.

• 12:07Cal Newport?

  Alright, so that's a cool idea that Dan had there. I'm going to summarize it here for you. Generally speaking, as saying, information consumption matters for how you feel and how you do in life. Like, it's not a harmless thing, or a thing that's off to the side of your mood or your ability to execute. It's actually a core thing that determines what your day is actually like. Now, he has this really clear idea about quantity of information. If you're not consuming enough information, you're bored, and that's not good. But if you're consuming too much information, you're just internet firehosing all day long, you get overloaded, and then you're not able to focus any attention that's left on things that are important to you,

• 12:51Cal Newport?

  like self-improvement. So you've got to find that edge, as he calls it, between too little information and too much information.

• 13:00Cal Newport?

  Now, I think that that quantity idea is very important. And I think the more general idea that that underscores is even more important still. So again, the more general idea here is care about your information consumption. Without you, without me even telling you what that should be, you should care about that as much as you care about like what you consume for food. We're very familiar with that, like this notion of like what you eat matters. If you eat too much stuff, like you're gonna, you're gonna gain weight in an unhealthy way. But if you don't eat enough, you're gonna lose weight and be unhealthy in different ways. You gotta find the right amount of food. And then maybe you find certain types of food or, you know, you react better than to other types of food. That's the bigger point I'm taking away from CO is like, well, we've got to think about

• 13:42Cal Newport?

  there's so much information out there, such quantities and such variety. We have to start caring about our information consumption if we want to sort of reset our lives, get out of a feeling of being stuck and actually make progress going forward. So I want to transform this into a piece of concrete advice. So here's what I want you to consider doing. Creating an information consumption log. Let me walk you through this. This is like a very specific way to act on Dan's general idea. I'm gonna suggest you create a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is going to have one row per day. And so maybe we're gonna do like 30 rows or so, like 30 days should be enough for this experiment.

• 14:24Cal Newport?

  Each column is going to correspond to a sort of major type of media you might consume. So you might have like a social media column, a YouTube column, like a streaming column, a reading column, a podcast listening column, and so on, right? And what you're going to do is at the end of each day, and this is only going to take two minutes, you don't have to do it for 30 days. At the end of each day, you're going to fill in those columns with quantities. So the screen time app on your phone will give you most of that information. Oh, how long was I on social apps? You know, how long did I listen to podcasts? And then when it comes to things like streaming, you know, how many episodes of stuff did you watch on a streaming service? When it comes to reading, maybe how many pages you read?

• 15:07Cal Newport?

  So you're just, you're, you're, they don't have to be unified units. So you're just making a record of all this. The final column that I'm going to have you add, let's call it score. Now, this is an idea that comes from Jim Collins. We've talked about this on the podcast before, this general idea of a Collins score. That's going to be a number from negative two to positive two. And it's going to measure at the end of your day, your perceived happiness with that day, the quality of that day, however you want to define that. You're going to do this for, let's say, 30 days. Then what you can do is go back and look for patterns. Now, if you're a little bit good with spreadsheets, you can actually sort the columns on the score. So you can see like all the plus two days at the top and all the low scored days at the bottom.

• 15:50Cal Newport?

  But there's 30 rows, you could probably just eyeball this. And what you want to look for is patterns between what type of media consumption was more associated with like the positive days versus the days where you felt more sort of like stressed or anxious or less positive. And what you're looking for here is what mix and quantity of information seems to work well for you. This is just like doing like the whole 30 diet and food where you're trying to understand how you react to different types and quantities of food. You should do the same thing for your information. And once you figure out what patterns actually make you feel better, you can build an information consumption plan that's based in you, how your mind works and how it interacts with the various things you interact with. And then you do your best to follow that plan.

• 16:35Cal Newport?

  Like, actually, I should have very limited social media. That was not good, but when I read more pages, I'm happier. So I'm going to put aside more time for reading. The podcast listening doesn't seem to matter. So I'll just have that as like a default activity when I'm bored or however it shakes out. But the key idea that this concrete suggestion pulls out of Dan Coe's video is that it matters what you're consuming. It matters how much of these things you're consuming. Information is not neutral. There's a major force that dictates how you experience your day. So start caring about that the same way you also care about like what you, you know, put in your body physically. But that's a really good idea. And again, for resetting, it's going to help you get out of if you're stuck in a bad information consumption pattern.

• 17:20Cal Newport?

  That's probably something that's really holding you down and freeing yourself from that by itself can have a really big reset style effect.

• 17:28Cal Newport?

  All right, let's move on to our third video here. Let's get a little controversial, Jesse. Our third video comes from Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor. So Peterson is good at giving advice. You know, he's a professor, he's a psychologist, and this is sort of what he does. He melds Jungian psychology, best I can tell, he really melds like a Jungian psychology with a lot of sort of early Bible, Hebrew Bible mythology with some like Christian theology themes mixed together with like a sort of a parental father figure, tough love type mix. So anyways, he's very good at giving advice to people, especially

• 18:09Cal Newport?

  young people who feel adrift. He's also controversial because somewhat unrelated to that advice, he also has been like getting these like increasingly heated spats where he's becoming more conservative on things and then the political left is mad at him. But put that aside, his videos online that give advice on these type of ideas are very popular. So it's hard if you're trying to find what are the most popular videos about resetting your life. It's hard to avoid a Jordan Peterson video. So we have one in here. The one in particular, they're rarely him, like it's not, he doesn't put out a lot of videos of himself like this. It's more these compilation videos seem to be the big thing. People flip up different talks and appearances he've done, and they put together things on

• 18:52Cal Newport?

  the same theme. So the video I'm going to pull from here is from a channel called Success Chasers, and the title is "A Complete Guide to Reinvent Your Life in 2025. Listen Every Day for 90 Days." I guess you're supposed to listen to this, it's like a three hour video. I hope I would make it to it every day for 90 days. It came out nine months ago, and it already has around 320,000 views on YouTube. So I want to pull out of it a clip that caught my attention. It's a really interesting idea for resetting. So let's see if we have this clip, Jesse.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  The ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is is something against which you fall far short. And that might be so painful that you can barely stand it. But then what you do is you, you, you, two things, I suppose, is you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your possible, of your potential. And what do I mean by lower the ideal? Well, if you're comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the gap is so painful that it paralyzes you, then you've created a dragon that you don't have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  And you want to scale the dragon down to size until it's a size that you are willing to move toward.

• 20:18Cal Newport?

  One thing I've learned there, Jesse, is that I think if I slow down and we play violin music, like somber violin music behind me, everything will sound profound. I actually really like that background music. It really makes everything sound profound. I mean, I could really be saying- We might have to have violin music for takeaway. I could, I could be saying like the most like ridiculous, uh, like Cal Network references, but if I said it slowly with violin music behind it, people would be like, you know, heard, heard, you got me there, that's, you know, that's right. Cal Network and just like the violin music, um, you know, whatever it is, like Cal Network

• 20:59Cal Newport?

  doesn't pay to ride the metro in Washington DC. The metro in Washington DC pays Cal Network to ride it. And if I said it like that and there's violin music behind it, you'd be like, yeah. It's a, the metro's like a metaphor, like a metaphor for, uh, your father issues. All right, anyways, uh, there is a really good idea in here that caught my attention. So what Jordan is talking about there is how you choose your goals matter.

• 21:30Cal Newport?

  So if you make a really grand goal that you're, you don't really know how to accomplish, it's not, there's too many steps you're missing along the way. It's not positive. Instead, it becomes a force that is mocking you in a self-reflective way. Your inability to make progress on this goal only energizes a sort of the darker voice, the devil on your shoulder to basically say, see, I knew you're nothing. Who do you think you are? Like, yeah, you're not gonna, you just, let's go back to Call of Duty. Let's go back to like being mad on TikTok or something like this. Like, you're no one, right? So it can be counterproductive if the goal is too ambitious.

• 22:13Cal Newport?

  So what Peterson is saying is like, you need the right goal. It's got to be challenging, but not too challenging. It's got to be something that requires a stretch, but that you can actually, you actually accomplish. And that the, the choice of goal matters. The dragon, he pulls, this is, he's pulling again from mythological themes here. I was very young again, but the dragon has to be slayable. If it's not a slayable dragon, then it just becomes a monster that's a source of anxiety and fear. But I think that's a really good point. Like, I'll give you a couple of examples here. Uh, let's say you're, you want to reset your life, you're unhealthy. A dragon that's too large would be if you just said, like, I want to get shredded. If you're healthy, you haven't really unhealthy.

• 22:56Cal Newport?

  You really have no connection to fitness or health. That's, that's admirably ambitious, but it's a very hard goal to achieve if you're starting from scratch. If you're watching like videos of fitness influencers on Instagram and TikTok, and they're just in incredible shape, you're like, well, that's what I want. And, and you're not really making any sort of meaningful progress towards that. You could end up worse off. Whereas if instead you said, okay, here's my goal. It's, you know, I'm gonna run a mile, I want to be able to run a mile in a certain amount of time. That like, you can get there with some cardio training. That I want to bench press like a certain amount of weight, like 200 pounds or something like that. Like, you'll, you'll get there. If you're sort of steadily working on the weight, it's not going to require like a huge amount of technique or growth, or maybe there's like a certain percentage of body fat

• 23:39Cal Newport?

  that you want to reduce by that's reasonable. Not like I want to get the 5% body fat, but maybe I want to take 5% body fat, you know, off. Those goals are tractable. Those are dragons you can slay. And you know what? When you, when you slay one dragon, then you can, you can attack a slightly larger one. And it's more tractable way there. You know, there was a time in my life when I was 5% body fat, when I was rowing crew. I was a skinny, skinny guy because it was, it was just muscle and nothing because weight, I was, I was rowing lightweight crew.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. That like a wrestler.

• 24:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah. It was like the same thing as a wrestler. Because we'd cut weight and all that sort of thing. And I was like a 170 pound guy that would row at 155 and all that type of stuff. But there's a period there where I had very low body fat. That number is larger now. That number is larger now. Okay. Another example, like I want to be, let's say you have no connection to writing, but you get very inspired by, you're watching, I don't know, Brandon Sanderson videos. And you're like, yeah, look at the man, that guy's a bestselling writer. He's built his layer underground. This guy's cool. You're like, I want to be a bestselling writer. That's too big of a dragon to slay. And it's eventually in that inaccessibility is going to begin to mock you. But if instead you're like, no, here's the dragon I want to slay here. I want to take and finish this, this sort of like writing course. It's like pretty rigorous. It's online, but pretty rigorous. It costs some money, but I'm going to go through it.

• 24:59Cal Newport?

  I can come out of there knowing a lot more about writing than I did before. That's an achievable goal. Or maybe you write a little bit, you're like, I want to get something published in some sort of online venue that pays some sort of money, even if it's $20. That technically makes me a professional writer. That's a goal you can go towards. And that's a goal that you'll probably, you know, have a much better chance of accomplishing. All right. So let me turn this into a concrete piece of advice that you can follow. Here's how I want you to think about goals when you're resetting your life. In each of the major areas of your life, so this is what on the show we sometimes for reasons I don't even remember, we call these buckets. I don't know why, but okay, you have these major buckets, these major areas of your life. What you want to start with for each of

• 25:40Cal Newport?

  these areas of your life is not a goal, but a vision. And it can be narrative, like, you know, I, I want to be in really good shape, like something that, that it's something people know about me. Like friends are like, oh yeah, like he's, uh, yeah, you're in good shape or something like that. And like my doctor is happy with, you know, when I go there for my annual checkup and they look at those numbers on the blood test like, hey, you know, good work. Like she kind of have like a vision, like a narrative. It's not like super specific, but just like a narrative about that part of your life. So you have this sort of vision that is aspirational of where you one day want to end up, but it's not super specific. Then under that vision, you can pick a next goal, a single next goal, something that moves

• 26:24Cal Newport?

  you closer to the vision, not all the way there necessarily, but moves you closer. And it's chosen with the Peterson advice of it's got to be a dragon that you're kind of scared of, but also one you can probably beat in battle if you put your mind to it. All right. So you don't list out every step, every goal you have to accomplish to get from here to like something like your vision, just what the next one is. And then you can narrow even more by selecting just one or two of those next goals. Cause maybe you have five or six areas of your life, five or six buckets that you have a vision for, just choose one or two of those next goals and say, those are the ones I'm working on right now. So now you've reduced the field of action to maybe like one goal that's pretty tractable.

• 27:09Cal Newport?

  And now you're starting to make progress. You finish that, you choose another one. And maybe, you know, this, this season of your life or this literal season of the year, you're kind of just working on one thing. And then that gets you to a new stable place. And now you're going to work on this other type of thing. And you go back and forth and a couple of years pass and you look back, you're like, wow. In all these areas of my life, I'm much better than I was before. The vision aimed me in the right direction. So I wouldn't wander, but the tractable goals move me down those various paths. So that's how I want you to think about goal setting, not big ambitious goals that you're just like, I'm going to get there or bust. That doesn't do anything for you. Not, let me figure out the 15 steps I have to do. That's going to get me to like, whatever. It's, these are my visions and I

• 27:51Cal Newport?

  can take my time and work on one at a time and sort of like tractable steps. This may feel like it's unbearably slow, but there is no faster way to do it. You only have so much time. You only have so much bandwidth. So just telling yourself you're going to do six of these at the same time doesn't mean you're going to get six times more done. You still only have time to really make progress on one or two at a time anyways. And actually, it could be worse if you try to do six because you get the logjam effect I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity, where just the overhead of each of these things adds up and then most of your time is now being eaten up by the overhead and nothing really gets done. So it's more you being realistic instead of you sort of lowering your ambition or lowering the effort you're going to put out. Alright, so there's my concrete advice that comes out of

• 28:32Cal Newport?

  the very inspirational piece of video. If we played that violin music between our ad reads, we would probably sell so many things. They'd be like, wow. I think Cozy Earth is the answer to my crippling depression or whatever like the problem is, you know, my crippling back pain, whatever it is like, but the way he said it because there's such violin music behind it. I really need Vanta. Okay, let's move on here. Our next sort of popular reset video we're going to draw from is someone we couldn't miss. We couldn't miss this person, Jesse. My friend, friend of the show, Ryan Holiday, he talks a lot about this stuff. I mean, often through

• 29:11Cal Newport?

  the lens of Stoic philosophy, but he has lots of books and videos and podcast episodes about how do you improve your life? How do you, if you're stuck, how do you get unstuck? How do you make things better? And so it was actually pretty hard to try to find just one Ryan Holiday video to pull from, but I found one that's very popular and it's sort of right down the line of what we're talking about. It was published late last year and it's titled, "How to Reinvent Your Life: Eight Stoic Practices You'll Actually Use." This also has around 800,000 views. So I'm going to pull one idea out of this Ryan Holiday video. So let's play that clip, Jesse.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Seneca said that too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge. Seneca thought it was super important to read, but he said, we gotta linger on the works of the master thinker. So as you're thinking about reading this year, as you're thinking about getting better, don't just resolve to just consume a lot of raw information. Think about what books you need to reread. Think about really big, important books that you're gonna actually struggle with and stay with, that you're gonna get something out of. It's not just about impressing people on how much you put on your good reads. It's about actually getting better. It's filtering what gets in your brain. It's asking yourself, can I use this? How am I gonna use this? What am I learning from it? Never everyone's gonna have different personalities, different

• 30:33Speaker 05

  interests, different obstacles, different areas they're trying to improve in. Look, I own a whole bookstore. I got lots of books for you to recommend. I have a million other videos.

• 30:41Cal Newport?

  All right, that's Ryan Holiday. Also, good music.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  The key is that music in the background.

• 30:46Cal Newport?

  It doesn't even sound so much more profound.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was thinking about Holly, one, how they always have music, like cinematic music.

• 30:52Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it kind of tells you how to feel. Yeah. I mean, because I'm, this is the way my mind worked. I couldn't help thinking about like, what would be the worst music?

• 30:58Speaker 04

  We had some complaints on some of the.

• 31:01Cal Newport?

  Some of our music, people said was the worst? Okay. I was thinking like.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  Would you refer to some sort of help, help music that we had before the.

• 31:12Cal Newport?

  Was it not, not good?

• 31:14Speaker 04

  You made a reference. I'll think of it while you.

• 31:17Cal Newport?

  Well, we need to get that music and not whatever it is that people dislike that we do. Like, bad music would be, I think circus music would be.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a fishing music that you said that.

• 31:27Cal Newport?

  Oh, that'd be, I like that. The bass fishing music? Where it's just like guys holding up basses and high fiving with like Oakley sunglasses on and, oh yeah, I like that music. That's a different type of vibe, though. So for those who don't know, there was a, some, we like to play with theme music because we get bored. And it was theme music that I thought sounded like the intro music to a show about competitive bass fishing. That music was cool. It was like da na na na na na, just like a lot of like high fives and waving American flags. We got some complaints. Yeah, what from Bass Fisherman? He thought I was making fun of him? It's like people want piano music. I know. All right. We'll get some more profound music, but Ryan had, uh, he had a point there that

• 32:09Cal Newport?

  uh, I want to, I want to highlight, right? So Ryan is one of the more prolific readers I know. I mean, I'm convinced that he bought that bookstore basically because his wife was like, you can't have any more books in the house. And so it was like a workaround that he could have even more books if they were like in his store that he was selling to people. But he doesn't just read to read. As long as I've known him, he reads for insight. He reads for wisdom. So he really knows what he's talking about here when he quotes Seneca. This doesn't mean everything you read needs to be Tolstoy, but you do need serious books that challenge you and provide new like ideas and insights that are complicated, that stretch you. Those need to be a regular part of your reading diet. These are the books that can reconfigure how your brain actually understands

• 32:50Cal Newport?

  the world and therefore literally opens up a new world to you, new possibilities, new understandings. So this idea of not just reading, but getting serious reading into that rotation, I think is really critical for resetting your life. I think he's absolutely right there because it will change the way you understand yourself in the world if you're doing that on a regular basis. So let me give you some concrete advice. Let me transform that into some concrete advice because here's the problem. It is difficult to just say, hey, go read something really hard and complicated. Go read some like Jungian philosophy or something like this. You're going to pick it up and say, this might as well be French, right? I, I don't know what any of this

• 33:33Cal Newport?

  means. And am I just forcing my way through this book? So I can be like, I got through it. And I don't think those of us who talk about reading hard things, talk enough about how to learn how to read hard things. So here's what I want you to consider doing. Climbing what I call the book complexity ladder. There's a sort of a well-known ladder of complexity you can move up in books. That's just like a sort of workout progression that over time makes you stronger and stronger at like what you can do physically. There's a similar progression that you can make your way up for increasing the complexity of what you're able to read and understand. So I'm going to go through the rungs of this ladder. And the idea here is you start on the bottom rung. And then, once you're comfortable there, that should be a bit of a stretch. And once that's no longer a stretch, you move to the next rung, then the next rung, and the next rung.

• 34:18Cal Newport?

  So you're going to work your way up. So the first rung of this ladder is working with secondary sources that make hard ideas more accessible. So by secondary source, this means you're not reading the original sort of famous or hard idea. You're reading someone else writing about the original famous thinker or ideas. So this would be books like Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe, which you can learn all about existentialist philosophy without having to first confront the existentialist philosophers themselves, which can be a little bit harder going. A book I talked a lot in, I think in Deep Work, I talked about All Things Shining by Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, which like, again, it draws from a lot of

• 34:59Cal Newport?

  primary sources to talk about, you know, about sort of wonder and mysticism in life. And it's like, but it's a secondary source, so it's more accessible. So you read secondary sources about smart people and ideas. Next rung up the ladder, non-complicated but profound primary sources. So now you want to go straight to profound books, where you're reading the actual book itself, not a book about it. But you want to start with the sort of tranche of these books that themselves are not super complicated. So they're not pulling upon a very sort of either complicated language style or a very complicated set of references that they're building upon. For example, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

• 35:44Cal Newport?

  A profound book, but very accessible. You can understand it when he talks about his experience in the concentration camps, when he talks about the development of logotherapy and the necessity of meaning, having something that you are doing that is meaningful as like the key to sort of mental health and thriving. It's profound, but it's accessible. I think you could read like Matt Crawford's Shop Class of Soulcraft. Again, it's like it's it's smart and there's some profound ideas, but you can come into it without a huge background in a particular type of discipline and still understand it. At this point, you already, by the way, tons of insights, right? You're going to be just doing these two rungs of the ladder. Like, once you're there, you're like, okay, my world is already much richer,

• 36:29Cal Newport?

  but let's go up another rung. Approachable, but more complicated, primary sources. So what I mean by that is now you're now, again, smart books written by famous people, where they're more complicated than the other ones. What I mean by that is you're not going to necessarily understand everything in it, but you will understand enough things in it that you can get great insight out of it. This is the way, for example, I think about Walden. That's a very inspirational book to me. I now know a lot about it. I've read a lot of secondary sources about Thoreau. But if you read Walden, and a lot of people have had this experience, you are going to have profound, there's going to be moments of profoundness in it. There's going to be profundity, I guess would be the word. There's

• 37:11Cal Newport?

  going to be sort of ideas about work and economy and meaning that are going to hit home. The the nature writing is beautiful, and the effect that the nature writing has in Thoreau is not that like nature writing was what's good, but he's actually trying to capture like the value of a sort of non-economic slower existence, that that he's trying to make this point that I'm living deliberately by this pond, and the economic output I need to sort of live is like pretty low, but look at the wonders of like watching the ice change. He needed the language to be poetic. For that point, the land poetically, and that anyone who reads that has that. But then there's other references he had. The language is weird. He's referring to things you might not quite get it.

• 37:55Cal Newport?

  Well, who is he talking about there? I don't know what these references are, these like references in the first chapter about this sort of like Oriental thinkers. Like, well, what does that word mean from the 1850s? And who is he talking about? He's talking about Hinduism? Like, you know, there's a lot of stuff you won't get as well. But you'll, you will come away from reading it with, okay, there's stuff in there that really changed me. I think Letters from a Stoic is kind of similar. Like, oh, yeah, I don't quite get all the things that are being referenced here, but a lot of people have read that book cold. And like, there's a lot of things that still hit home. That then brings you up to the, the final rung, which takes a while to get to, which is complicated primary sources that require preparation to actually make your way through. But then if you make your way through, there's, there's, there's super deep insight, right?

• 38:39Cal Newport?

  So now you want to read Jung, you want to read Nietzsche, you want to read like a lot of Aristotle. You want a secondary source or two to read first and to help you go along. Like you want to read, you know, Finnegan's Wake, for example, right? Joseph Campbell read a whole book about it. It was like the skeleton key for this book. And like, if you read that book and then you go and read it like, oh, I get what's going on here. So, so that's the final place you get is books that require preparation. I have studied this field. I know the references they're drawing from. I've even read about this particular book and why it's important. Now I'm ready to read it. And Heidegger is like this as well. He's very, very difficult. You can't really cold read them.

• 39:22Cal Newport?

  But it's, you know, I've heard Adam Smith, I haven't read it, but if you read, you know, you want to read, you know, classic Adam Smith. Again, you need some preparation to get in there. You work your way up this ladder. It could take a year or two. It completely changes your perception of the world and your life because your, your, when your brain gets more complicated, your world gets more complicated. And there's more to appreciate and there's more options and it's richer and it's more interesting. So it's good advice, good general idea from Ryan. Working your way steadily up the, the rungs of the book complexity ladder is my concrete advice for actually acting on that.

• 40:00Cal Newport?

  All right. My final video that I want to draw from the most, the most popular of the videos we cite, and I think we could agree, Jesse, the most profound. I agree. Videos. I'm drawing from my own because I figured, okay, I had that popular video that came out in 2023. It was called How to Reinvent Your Life in Four Months, my full step-by-step process. That must have been our YouTube guy who added that part. My full step-by-step process. 1.4 million views. It's like one of the more popular things that I have put out before. If you listen to this podcast, you may have heard we re-aired this episode over the summer, but I thought, here's what I would do. In the spirit of this like all-star advice selection, I would go through and say, if I had to choose just one of the

• 40:40Cal Newport?

  ideas from this four-month process to include in our list here of selected advice, what would be the one idea? If you could only take one from the video, what would it be? So there's a little bit meta here, but I'm about to play a clip of myself on this podcast, talking on this podcast. So this is going to get really circular, Jesse, but let's hear this profound words that I had to say a couple of years ago.

• 41:01Cal Newport?

  When it comes to your professional life, put multi-scale planning into work. Get this executed. This is where you have a quarterly or semester plan that you update every quarter or semester or season, whatever, three to four months. You look at that plan every week and use it to create a weekly plan. Your weekly plan, you're consulting your calendar, you're seeing what's actually on your plate that week, and you're looking then also at your seasonal semester quarterly plan for reminders of the bigger things you're working on, and you write out longhand, here is my plan for the week ahead. Okay. Then you look at that weekly plan every day when you do a daily time block plan for the actual hours of your day. I, of course, recommend my own Time Block Planner 2nd Edition, timeblockplanner.com,

• 41:46Cal Newport?

  but you can use whatever you want, but your time block plan in your actual day in consultation with your weekly plan. It's your time block plan every day is informed by your weekly plan, which is written every week, which is informed by your seasonal plan, which is updated every three to four months. That's multi-scale planning.

• 42:04Cal Newport?

  Again, violin music, twice as profound, or bass fishing music. Okay, so the idea I pulled from my plan video from a couple of years ago is multi-scale planning. I think that's kind of the glue that's going to help you take advantage of all these other ideas. These other ideas that are going to add new insight into your life, they're going to add better, your day-to-day is going to feel better, you're going to have a richer understanding of the world, you're going to be clearing things out of your head so that it's not so stressful. You're careful about your information, you're careful about the goals, so they're realistic. You're clearing your head, you're reading stuff that's profound. How do you actually take consistent action? If part of your reset is actually like changing things,

• 42:50Cal Newport?

  how do you take consistent action on that now that you're in this much better place? And there, I've talked about all the time, but it's worth reiterating, is multi-scale planning. So that clip actually gave my concrete advice, because I always talk in terms of concrete advice. The concrete advice I gave in that clip was multi-scale planning. You have a vision for your quarter, you look at that every week to create a plan for your week. Now, when I talk about weekly planning these days, I'm a little bit more specific about it. I say during your weekly plan, you look at your quarterly plan, you look at your big brain dump of all the tasks you're supposed to do, you look at your calendar ahead, you write out a plan for the week ahead, like what do I actually want to make progress on this week? And when you're doing that, anything that's big, anything that's going to take more than like 20 minutes, actually find time for it and put it on your calendar right there.

• 43:34Cal Newport?

  That's one of the additions I've had to this thinking right now, is if it's going to take time, figure out that time right then when you're doing the weekly plan. When is that going to happen? And that might lead you to actually change some things on your calendar, cancel some plans or consolidate some things, and then highlight the other sort of things you want to get done. And then, as you go through each day of your week, you should make a daily plan, where you start by copying onto a daily plan where you have a block for every hour of the day, the stuff that's already on your calendar, and then you make decisions about what to do for the rest of the plan during your workday. You don't just sort of stumble from moment to moment and say, what do I want to do next? You figure that out in the morning, you execute the blocks, and then when you're done, you do a big shutdown. That's multi-scale planning. It is the best way I know to actually orient your energy in the moment during the workday

• 44:17Cal Newport?

  as intentionally as possible, all the way back up to your biggest dreams, ambitions, all of your obligations. It's like the, if you wanted to make sure your energy at any moment is like the best thing you should be doing that moment. This is the best tool I know. It's draining. Only do it during the workday. You're gonna be getting a lot more done if you do this. So like, choose workdays to end earlier or start later because you'll be getting 2X more done and you don't want to burn out your brain. But yeah, that's the sort of really tactical glue that helps you take advantage of all these other sort of, all the other sort of upgrades you'll get to your life. So you put those five ideas together, I think you have yourself a pretty good plan. Alright, so we heard five ideas, so I think it's time for me to get to my takeaways.

• 45:08Cal Newport?

  This does make me sound more profound. I appreciate it.

• 45:14Cal Newport?

  Alright, what are my takeaways? We took five popular videos about resetting your life, and we pulled out my favorite piece of advice from each. We get a sort of all-star reset strategy. Let me quickly list all five pieces of concrete advice that I identified during this process. Number one, update and review your brain dump every week. Number two, have a plan for the information you consume. I'll kind of put in parentheses, do a call and score experiment to figure out what that plan should be. Number three, choose goals that are hard, but not too hard. Again, in parentheses, separate vision from next goals and only

• 45:56Cal Newport?

  work on a few next goals at a time. Number four, read increasingly smarter and complicated books. And number five, control your time at multiple scales. That's a pretty good collection of advice. If you do those things, if you were feeling... Stuck right now, like I want my life to be some, this just feels like I'm in neutral, or it's not where I want to be, or I want that spark back that I had before. Or again, because as a technology podcast, I'm on my screens all the time, not because I lack willpower, but because there's nothing on the other side that's like worth it. This distracts me from it. I want to, I want to feel something. These five pieces of advice will go a long way to helping you have a sense of reset.

• 46:37Cal Newport?

  Like to do this, uh, the revisit this advice every fall will, will probably have a pretty big impact. So more than anything else, though, when it comes to reset in your life, the most important thing to do is, is you know, taking intentional action. This idea of, uh, if I don't get involved and say like, wait a second, where have I veered off to? And maybe I want to course correct. Maybe I want to lever myself out of the mud. Maybe there's something I need to change. It's that this idea of like a course, I have to like intentionally intervene on a semi regular basis in the journey of life to keep that journey heading in interesting directions. That's the biggest thing I want to get across is that matters. That's never been more important than it is right now in a time when again, I'm telling you, the digital world is happy to just sort of consume all of your attention and redirect

• 47:22Cal Newport?

  your life into its metaphorical attention minds. You can just basically be like generating attention and data for a small number of billionaires to make money off of. There's never been more pressure to take you off an interesting journey for life and make you into sort of this, this, you know, unpaid attention factory worker. So it matters that you keep coming back and saying, how do I make this better? What do I need to change? So whether you use this advice or the advice from my original video, or the other advice from those videos, or the advice from any number of podcasts and videos that are out there about resetting, I love the idea of thinking this mindset that you have to regularly re, uh, re-energize what you're doing in your life. If you want to keep it moving in directions that you choose, not other people, not other circumstances, and certainly not technology.

• 48:07Cal Newport?

  All right. So we have a lot more on this topic coming up, including reactions from Jesse, some listener questions that are all about resetting or reinventing your life, including from a consultant who took eight months off to live in nature, but ended up right back where he was before. So we got some really good scenarios here. We have a great case study, good call. And then also I have some, a recent article I wrote about this. I want to tell you about a reaction I got to that article from a reader that I think was very profound. So we got a whole lot of show on this topic still to come. But first, we need to take a quick break to hear from a sponsor. So stick around and we will be right back. All right, Jesse, we have to talk about Cozy Earth. As listeners know, I'm a huge fan of their bamboo sheets, which are the

• 48:52Cal Newport?

  most comfortable sheets we own. We have something like three different sets that we rotate through because we never want to be without a set of these sheets on our bed. But we just last week got our hands on a new Cozy Earth product that has created a bit of a war within my family. This is their Bubble Cuddle Blanket. I was tempted to wear this thing like a shawl in our podcast recording today. It is the most comfortable. It's hard to explain how comfortable this is. I'll do my best. Okay, so it's called a Bubble Blanket because it's textured in this like bubble design. So like there's bubbles kind of on it, like bumps all over the mattress. It's covered

• 49:34Cal Newport?

  in ultra soft fibers and it has weight to it. They added weight to it, not as heavy as a full weighted blanket. But when you put this thing on, it's you are getting, you know, comfort out of it. Anyways, it was just a war with different family members trying to steal it and steal time from it. So eventually my wife and I had to make a rule. It lives on the chair and a half that's in our bedroom. If you want to use it, you have to come in here and you can use it in this chair. And we now use it to sort of bribe kids to come read in there with us. So anyways, it's super comfortable. So between that and our bamboo sheets and our Cozy Earth towels and my Cozy Earth shirt, my Cozy Earth sweatshirt and our Cozy Earth PJs, I have all of these things. It's like our, our house, especially like our bedroom is basically like a private spa. If you're not

• 50:17Cal Newport?

  already part of the Cozy Earth community, you should be. If you want to know where to get started, I suggest get started with the bamboo sheets. They have a 100 night sleep trial, so you can try them out. And if you don't love them, they'll, you can return them hassle free, but trust me, you're not going to return those. They also have a 10 year warranty because once you feel this level of comfort, you'll want it to last at least a decade. So go to cozyearth.com/deep to get up to 20% off. That's cozyearth.com/deep and use the code deep to get up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, make sure you tell them that you heard about Cozy Earth on this podcast, so they'll know that people are actually listening. Because home isn't just where you live, it's how you feel. Let's go home with Cozy Earth.

• 51:02Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. If you run a small business, you know, there's nothing small about it. Every day, there's a new decision to make, and even the smallest decisions feel massive. When you have a decision that's a no brainer, you should take it. And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no brainers. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together both in-store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations. It has very impressive features like endless aisle, ship to customer and buy online, pick up in-store. And with Shopify POS, you can get personalized experiences to help shoppers

• 51:42Cal Newport?

  come back. And they will, based on a report from EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits, equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average, relative to the market set surveyed. To get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. Shopify.com/deep. All right. And with that, let's get back to our show. All right, Jesse, what's your reactions?

• 52:25Speaker 04

  First off, what was the, when you made the comment a little bit meta, was that your way of being nice with Mark Zuckerberg?

• 52:34Cal Newport?

  Oh, what did I say about meta? I think I was saying-

• 52:36Speaker 04

  You said a little bit meta. Obviously, you weren't talking about meta, but-

• 52:39Cal Newport?

  That is basically-

• 52:39Speaker 04

  I did think that was funny.

• 52:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's all Zuckerberg over here. Yeah.

• 52:45Cal Newport?

  Yes, do you remember that when we did that reset reinvention episode? That was a while ago. I was trying to place, like, where were we in the life of this podcast? 2023, summertime, we're like a couple of years into this. We were doing a lot of like deep life stack stuff.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:05Cal Newport?

  And it was like in that, in that period where like I was, I was experimenting with drawing stacks. And let's be honest, it was an excuse for me to draw a lot on the tablet. Like, I think that was going on. I mean, I rewatched that whole episode and that's where I compared my drawing ability to Picasso drawing to peasants hands. I think I just, I think we were like, we liked the tablet back then. So we were doing a lot of stuff on that, but for whatever reason, this one, the specificity of it, I think is what worked.

• 53:30Cal Newport?

  But it's, I don't, do you think we can take credit for all of those videos that followed? Probably not, but I like to, because all these are like reinvent, they're all like reset and reinvent your life.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:40Cal Newport?

  And they all came out after that, that video did really, really well. And then all these other podcasters and started doing the same type of topic.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Two quick things, I just finished the Picasso Genius Series on Amazon Prime, even though it's like a couple of years low, it was 10 episodes, so Picasso was an interesting dude, but it was like a-

• 53:56Cal Newport?

  Interesting.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  -real show.

• 53:57Cal Newport?

  Is that the same series that had like the Einstein one you were telling me about? Okay, I gotta watch these.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  And then you made a reference to a new app that you've been using? Are you gonna let the audience know at some point about that?

• 54:08Cal Newport?

  Things 3? It's a beautiful app. I like it a lot.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  I feel like the audience is gonna be all about this.

• 54:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because, well, you know, I have Trello for like my complicated sort of professional obligations for all these various reasons, but for a lot of my- Personal like home-based obligations. So honestly, it's eating up more and more stuff that was on Trello. It's so it's a enthusiast love it. It's a to do app that costs money. Old fashioned. You want it? It's this much on your phone? You gotta buy it. On your computer? You buy it, right? No software as a service. No, like we'll, we'll premium, we'll add features. It's like, this is what it is. You pay for it, right? And it's a, it's a beautiful interface. The whole thing is made to be as like elegant and simple as possible. And it's just, you have collection of tasks and you add tasks to them. And it's really like simple,

• 54:55Cal Newport?

  just what you tap and type. It's like very intuitive and simple. And you can click to like set a date, you know, here's a deadline or do it today or something like that. And then you can just sort of see, you know, upcoming tasks. Like, yeah, here's things you have for lists, or you can just click on these lists. And like, that's it. That's all it does. They don't try to do anything else. Anyway, so people love it because it's like old fashioned software, where we just want to make the interface as natural and good as possible, not try to put as many features as possible into it.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  Maybe we'll make a YouTube video about that separately.

• 55:25Cal Newport?

  We should. It's a really cool app. All right. So we got some questions. And this is a topic we get a lot of questions about. People who are wondering about various parts of trying to reinvent or reset parts of their life. So we got a, we have a bunch of questions about them. We picked out some good ones today. So we can sort of apply these general ideas to real people's situations. All right. So Jesse, what do we got here? Who's our first question from?

• 55:44Speaker 04

  First question from Laura. I've been thinking a lot on how to live a deep life. I've been reading lots of interesting books and taking lots of notes. However, I'm having a hard time summarizing the good ideas about other people. How do I extract these ideas for living deeply from these books?

• 55:59Cal Newport?

  All right. It's a good question. I've been thinking a lot about this for the book I'm writing now, the book on the deep life. So I'm getting super specific on some, some of these questions. So here's one of the things I want to say, Laura, that I'm working on in this new book. The type of notes you take matter. So it's not just enough to say, take notes on stuff you noticed that might be relevant to improving your life. It helps to say, what specifically should you be looking to write down? And what format even should you be looking to take those notes in? And one of the things I think is really important is to look out for things that, I use the word resonate. I've long used that word in talking about the deep life. I think it's the right one. You encounter an idea or a person or a situation in a book, an article, documentary, podcast,

• 56:44Cal Newport?

  or movie, and something about it resonates. So you feel a sort of intrinsic, deep inside you attraction to what's going on there. The note you should take is, here's a description of the thing. Here's the description of the feeling that caught my attention. You don't have to figure out why. This is the big trap sometimes people have, like in the moment, I'm watching the, you know, Laird Hamilton surfing video, and why is this like really resonating with me? You don't have to figure out, what does this tell me I should do for the rest of my life? What you write down is, here's what I was watching, and here are the feelings I'm feeling right now. That's what you want to capture. Cause I think that feeling of resonance, that is your intuition.

• 57:28Cal Newport?

  That is your intuition about what it is that like you're, you're, you're, you're, you're being craves, like what's missing from your life, what you want in your life. That's an important feeling. You're just recording that, and then later, you can try to make sense of it. And there's a lot of ways to do that. In my book, I'm working through some like pretty systematic ways of doing this, but like basically, when you have a lot of notes like this, and you go back through them, and you should review these like every month, that's what I always did, especially when I was in the phases of my life where I was like in my twenties and filling my mole skins. I would review them every single month, like really trying to figure out what was going on and what I was trying to do. You will begin to notice patterns. And as you read it, and then read it again, and then read it again, you'll begin to realize

• 58:09Cal Newport?

  like, oh, like these five things are all, they're all kind of an example of this. I see this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm missing in my life. And so you figure that out later over time. In the moment, you don't have to try to figure it out. So use that format. This thing, how it made me feel, or for things to resonate. That's what you should capture in your notebooks. All right. Who do we got?

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Next up is Jake. After building 10 years of career capital and consulting, I was able to arrange a reduced work schedule for eight months where I spent lots of time in nature. I debated starting my own company, but ultimately decided to stay at my job. I felt overwhelmed by the idea of all that would be involved with creating a deeper life. How do I avoid being overwhelmed by everything required to seriously change my life?

• 58:54Cal Newport?

  Well, I think this is the, the big issue that I've been grappling with, with all my thinking and writing about the deep life is that we, we, we spend too much time by we, I mean, like as a culture who cares about these issues. And I just listened to a ton of these videos. So I kind of know this. We spend too much time often talking about the content of what should go into your life to make it better. Like, what are the specific things you should add to your life? That's going to be, but you need friendship. You need work that's a challenge. You need some sort of like spiritual connection to the transcendent. Like, we like to talk about the content of what you're missing from your life. We don't talk enough about the mechanics of how do people actually successfully change their life, independent of like what changes they're making. What are the mechanics of how you actually succeed with that? And I think that's

• 59:39Cal Newport?

  what's tripping you up here. You went into this experience. It was very meaningful to you. You probably had all sorts of intuitions and resonances like, man, I don't know. I don't, I don't think what I was doing before this is right. I think there's something better, but you didn't know what to do with that feeling. And so when that eight months was up, you're like, I mean, here's a job I'm good at. I make money at. I don't know. Am I supposed to like, be like the Unabomber, move to a shack? Like, what do I do? And then you end up back where you were before. So the mechanics, I think, matter. It's the missing piece of the conversation on major resetting or reinvention of your life. So if you look back at my deep dive, I would say if you want to pull one piece of the five concrete devices out to really focus on that might have helped you there, is maybe the realistic goal setting would have been a big one.

• 1:00:23Cal Newport?

  What are the different areas of my life? Your buckets, right? What's my vision for each? And that's what you can update. That's where, when you're like Laura from the past question, you're taking these notes in your notebook about stuff that resonates. I did this thing and it resonated. I did this thing and it resonated. As you process that over time, where is that in this scheme going to be impact? It's going to impact this vision you have for different parts of your life. Like, oh, I get this now. Like, I need us, I don't want to be busy. So my vision for my, the professional area of my life maybe is I'm doing important stuff, but like, I'm not busy. I'm not stressed. I don't feel the, the palpitation of like too many things going on. I'm not sure if I'm going to get it done, right?

• 1:01:08Cal Newport?

  You're kind of like honing in on this sort of declarative first person description of what you want these parts of your life to actually be like. And now you have something to actually move towards. Now you can start deploying. All right, what can I do with my career capital? What's the next goal I can pursue for each of these? Which of these can I make the most progress on now? Is there some bigger change I can make that's going to actually help three of these areas move closer to the vision, right? Oh, what's the thing I'm doing now that's most getting in the way of like my vision over here? Oh, this job is making this, this, and this worse. I can't get to these visions because this job is a hundred hour a week job. Okay, I'm going to have to change that. But I have my career capital, so how can I use that? So then you can start doing the more systematic work of evolving and changing your life. It's what I often call lifestyle centric planning,

• 1:01:51Cal Newport?

  because you're working towards this multifaceted vision of all the different parts of your life, not just changing one thing. I'm going to move to the nature and be completely different. I'm gonna, you know, move to an island. I'm going to quit my job. So like, I think this sort of having a vision, separating it from goals, clarifying this vision over time. Like, you should have come away from that experience in nature, having clarified lots of visions. But then said, now the hard work begins of how do I start moving towards these different visions? And it can be more incremental with, until it's not. And then you find something that's a big leap, et cetera. So my bigger picture there is I think the mechanics matter, not just the content. You're not going to fix things usually with one big change.

• 1:02:32Cal Newport?

  So let's get more systematic about what does it mean to have a deep life for you? And it's going to be a more detailed answer than probably you had before.

• 1:02:41Cal Newport?

  All right, who do we got?

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  Next up is Juan. You often emphasize fixing the lifestyle you want, then working backwards. But in today's fast-paced world, especially in software engineering, things evolve so quickly that I struggle to visualize what my lifestyle might look like 10 years from now. How can I do that?

• 1:02:58Cal Newport?

  All right, so this is good because this builds on what we were just talking about before. So I'm saying, okay, we're kind of building answer by answer. You have these different areas of your life. You sort of develop through experience and exposure to things that resonate or don't, a sort of vision for each of these parts of your life. And then you begin trying to move to more concrete, smaller goals with the occasional big change when they appear and seem obvious. You're trying to move closer to these visions.

• 1:03:22Cal Newport?

  So Juan is saying, oh, I'm struggling to cope with these visions. He must mean for his professional life because

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Cal Newport?

  the speed of software engineering probably doesn't affect like his vision for his like health or something like that. Like, how could I have these visions if I, you know, I don't know 10 years from now, like what's going to happen in software engineering? You're being too specific. So, once we separate visions from goals, we can say, what's the, what should a vision be like? And what I think a vision should consist of is first-person declarative statements of lifestyle properties. So a lifestyle property is a description of something that like, it describes a property of your, it's a circular answer, but it describes a property of your current lifestyle, not a detail of your lifestyle. And I know that sounds similar, but there's actually like a, like, there's really, there's really a clear distinction.

• 1:04:11Cal Newport?

  So like a detail of your lifestyle is something that it's, there's only one way to satisfy it. It's like a thing that's, that's like true or not, right? So a detail might be, I am an executive vice president at, you know, at my software company. It's like a detail, it's a specific thing. It's like either true or not, or whatever, right? It's, it's an actual detail about, you know, your life. A lifestyle property, by contrast, has to be general enough that there's multiple ways you might satisfy it. There's not multiple ways that you can be the executive vice president of your software company. You either are, you aren't. But a lifestyle property might be, my schedule is such that I rarely have to work past five.

• 1:04:57Cal Newport?

  And if I occasionally want to leave at 12 and go see a movie every couple of months, no one cares. That's a property. Lots of different professional configurations might satisfy that property.

• 1:05:09Cal Newport?

  But it's a property of your life. So like, let's, let's talk about health, right? So you're thinking about the area of your life, about your health or fitness. A lifestyle detail would be like, um, I've, I place top five in the, the sort of the, this triathlon. It's like running my city each year. That's a specific thing that either it's like a goal. It's a detail, like either there's only one way to, for that to happen. You either, you have or you, you do it or you don't. A lifestyle property might be something more like, I'm heavily engaged in like amateur athletics as like a hobby. And like often have successes with it. It's a property. There's lots of ways you could satisfy it. Like what that means, what successes mean with the sports, but the, the general property there is like, uh, you know, part of my life is like, I'm very competitively involved in athletics.

• 1:05:54Cal Newport?

  So I think vision should largely be made up of lifestyle properties and they, they should be first person declarative. I am blah, you, you described some property of your life. If you describe your visions that way, you're getting at what really matters. It's the properties that resonates, the properties that you're looking for. And it opens up so many more options and pathways for you because there's many different configurations that might get you to those properties. As soon as you build a vision around details, all your chips are in on one, you know, they're in on one hand. This, I've just decided this specific, I'm fixing now a very specific life configuration. And I have to get there. I won't be happy and it might be impossible to get there. But properties you have, I could do this, I could do that. This could mean different things.

• 1:06:36Cal Newport?

  So anyways, not to get too technical, but make your vision about properties, not details. And then you don't need to be up on, you don't need to predict what's going to happen in 10 years. Because that's not what your, your vision for your career is not going to be about like what type of tool you make or something like that. It's going to be about the property of your lifestyle that you have. That makes sense. Am I, I wonder if I'm like slicing it too fine. I've been working that out in some of my writing recently, but the property versus details.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Yes. Like another example would be. Of a good property?

• 1:07:04Cal Newport?

  Um, like, let's fix a different area of life. Well, like, um, let me, let me give an example about something being not a property because it's too vague, right? So

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Cal Newport?

  A detail is an issue because it's too specific. The other issue people have with property with vision is they get too vague. And by too vague, I mean, it's something that you can't determine if you've satisfied it or not. Right? So if I say like my property of, uh, you know, I'm involved in amateur athletics. I'm good, right? You could look at someone's life and be like, yeah, they are or they're not like they are they, they look, they ran in this race. They do this, like they, they seem pretty competitive. A problem sometimes people have the other way is saying something, there's no way to like measure if you've done it or not. So maybe like you're thinking about the relationships areas of your life, like the community aspects. And you say, I live a life filled with love.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Cal Newport?

  That's very admirable, right? Like, yeah, we all want that, but it's not a good property for a vision because how do you know if you've done that? Or like, how, how do you measure love? How much is enough love or something like that? Whereas you could have a, a good property on that sort of thing might be something like, um, you know, I'm, you know, heavily involved in the lives of like multiple good friends. And like, we sort of know what's going on in each other's lives and in a way that like, whatever. That's a property. You're like, oh, that's, that's either I could watch your life for a while and say like, yeah, that seems true of Jesse. Like here are these good friends. They seem to be really close. Like he's satisfied it, right? So that'd be a good property.

• 1:08:38Cal Newport?

  And you could go the other way there. And then, you know, the detail could be like, I am married to this person who has never met you or something like that, you know, like, I don't know. I mean, they, they might, they might creep you out a little bit, right? I mean, I don't, you know, that's too specific. So, so, I mean, I'm kind of working that out. Uh, but again, my bigger project here, talking about life reinvention, especially my new book is again, the mechanics matter. We don't talk about the mechanics. We talk about the content. And then it gets, I don't know, I find it, it gets kind of boring because either it's like you're drawing from scientific studies. You know, your researchers at the University of Michigan show that like you're 17% more happy when you have like 3.2 hours of friendship contract contact per week versus like 2.3 contact hours. And then you're like, you step back or like, so friends are important. Like, I, you know, it's fine, but I get bored with that stuff.

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Cal Newport?

  So the mechanics matter to me. Okay. Who do we got?

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Fiona, I recently left a high school teaching job because of burnout and I decided not to return to teaching. I want to find a short to medium term role that provides financial stability and opportunity to redeploy my transferable skills. What practical steps would you recommend?

• 1:09:44Cal Newport?

  All right. So first of all, make sure that you have a working vision for the professional part of your life. So again, like we just talked about, you have these first person declarative statements of lifestyle properties, which there's multiple ways they can be satisfied, but you can tell whether you satisfied them or not. In other words, I'm saying have a good general vision for like what you do want. And you can learn a lot from what didn't work with teaching to help specify what it is you are looking for. So, you know, we talk a lot about something resonates and that you, you keep a note on that because like, oh, I want that in my life, but things that go the opposite direction are just as useful. This made me miserable. So I definitely don't want that in my life. Like what aspect was, was what made me miserable? Okay. Like, I don't like that. Like maybe you hate kids and you learned that like, oh, I don't like teaching. I really hate kids. They're really

• 1:10:29Cal Newport?

  annoying. Like, okay. My vision is like, I'm not working around kids or whatever it is. Right? So have a good vision. Now, when we go to the nuts and bolts about how do you move forward towards a vision? We haven't really got, we talked a little bit about this in the deep dive with realistic goal setting, but how do you choose those goals? How do you figure out how to move closer to your vision? The key thing here, especially for professional visions is evidence-based planning. You have to have direct evidence, like you were going to make a case in the court of law for why you're doing the thing you're doing and why you have evidence that is likely to lead to moving you closer to the thing you want, which is getting closer to your vision. That sounds obvious, but people do not do it. They would rather write a story about what they want to be important based on what it is.

• 1:11:14Cal Newport?

  They like, I want to go to take these classes at the community college. That feels kind of like romantic to me and I miss school and it'll be fine. I'm going to, or I'm going to go back and get this master's degree or whatever. And you say, but why? What is the particular type of position that you have evidence is going to move you closer to your vision? That you have clear evidence that doing this thing is going to open that to you. Then in other words, like you could not get that position without this thing, but with this particular thing you're doing, you likely will. And people don't want to do that because you know, it might turn out like, actually, you know, that doesn't matter if I go take these courses, like I'm not qualified for that job. Or actually, you know, that job, I don't really want to look too much closer at it. But if I really did and talked to people, I would see it's really going to mismatch my vision in a lot of clear ways. And people just want to tell themselves a story about what's going to happen in their

• 1:11:59Cal Newport?

  next chapter of life, like what, what their days are going to look like. I, you know, I want to be like taking these courses and then there's just like this magical job I get and like everything's better. You have to base everything in evidence, which means talking to actual people who can confirm or deny the assumptions that are going into your plan. What is the reality of this job? What's it really like? How much is it? Money do I make? What are the days like? Okay. How do people get hired in this job? Like what do you need to be like a shoe in for this job? Oh, okay. So what then would I have to do to make me be one of those people? And is that something I'm willing to do now? And it might not match what I want to be true, but you always want to be working from evidence. It will be frustrating at first because a lot of your initial ideas and schemes and plans are going to turn out not to be good ones. But then you'll feel better.

• 1:12:43Cal Newport?

  It's like, well, I'm glad I kind of didn't waste a lot of time and money on that. And it's going to make you be more creative and it's going to open the scope of your search for how am I going to make sense in my life and go forward? And then you'll eventually come across like this, this opportunity, I met this person, I have the right skill set for it. If I do this and I could do it in this config, oh, that works. And then you have the aha moment when you get there. So you have to search harder with evidence-based planning, but the things you find when you ultimately find them are much more likely to work. So do not just assume. You need evidence for this thing is going to make my life better and I'm doing the right thing to get there. Cause often that's more, the reality is not what we hope it to be. All right, those are our questions. We have a case study. This is when people write in to talk about how the advice we talk about on the show specifically affected their situation.

• 1:13:28Cal Newport?

  I think it's good to learn from real people. So we have a case study today from Reese, and it's also an excuse to play our case study theme music.

• 1:13:47Cal Newport?

  All right, so Reese says, "I spent over a decade after high school, meandering in and out of different jobs and industries, trying everything I could. I was looking for the perfect fit for my skills and lifestyle, while also hoping I could follow my passion at the same time. It took me to university at 25 years old, but I made the mistake of not knowing exactly what job I was aiming for at the end. In retrospect, it was a grand goal passion project. As a side note, I used your tactics during university and crushed it. My first son was born after I graduated, and I got offered a job in residential construction as a project coordinator. I originally didn't want to take the job, and it was nothing like what I had studied at university, but it would allow us to move to the town we wanted and give us the possibility of purchasing our first home. So I did it.

• 1:14:29Cal Newport?

  It was the best decision I ever made. The details of the work were satisfying enough, but it was the lifestyle that afforded me and my family. No overtime, flexible hours, and we did buy a home. I decided to double down, get as good as I could, build up some career capital, and see where it took me. I am happy to say that using your time blocking system and basic task capture, I was able to increase my value as someone reliable who gets things done. I got promoted to project manager and got paid to upskill in my field. After nearly six years, I had enough career capital to get a higher paying job again that is situated 10 minutes from my home. Between my wife and I, we can easily pick up and drop off my two boys at school. We are on track to pay off our mortgage within the next 10 years, and then we plan to cut back to work three to four days per week.

• 1:15:14Cal Newport?

  I have completely given up social media and used that time to grow veggies, read books, or write in my journal. I have gone a little over the top with my journaling habit, buying myself a really nice A5 leather cover and a selection of fountain pens that cost more than any normal person would be willing to pay, but it enhances the experience, and I love it. I'm reading upwards of 50 to 20 books per year now and really enjoying fantasy for the first time." All right, Reese, that is a fantastic case study because it gets at the core of this whole idea of reinventing your life through lifestyle-centric planning as opposed to other strategies. Many of our questions we just answered Got at different aspects of lifestyle centric planning. This shows that that whole philosophy and action.

• 1:15:55Cal Newport?

  What ultimately determines the subjective, the quality of the subjective experience of your day to day life is not any one part of your life. It's the, all of the aspects of your life contribute positively or negatively to your, your experience of that day. And so if you work backwards from, I want each of the major areas of my life to align as closely as possible to my vision for what matters there. You are going to feel like you have a meaningful, interesting, intentional life. That's the right way to do it. And it's different than the standard ideas. The standard ideas for changing your life that are popular out there are usually based on building the courage to make one radical change you hope will fix everything. But that rarely works.

• 1:16:38Cal Newport?

  You make one radical change and maybe it makes one thing better, but it might make five other parts of your rest of your life worse. That is that dream job you thought would fix everything, but now you have to longer commute and you're more stressed out and you barely see your kids. And by the way, that dream job is not really a dream job because all these jobs are the same in the end, you're sending a lot of emails. And so why is it worth it? That's a great example of lifestyle centric planning. Work is fine. It's challenging work and he has time with his family. They're going to cut back the hours more. His meaningful hobbies, he's intellectually engaged. Classic example of lifestyle centric planning at work. I also want to point out, he, he used a classic strategy within lifestyle centric planning,

• 1:17:19Cal Newport?

  which is your job doesn't have to be your sort, your, your source of passion, but it's one of the most important tools you have for actually shaping your life. Right? And to make that tool sharper, you get better. This is my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. As you get more valuable, like you have more rare and valuable skills, you become more indispensable for wherever you work for, you get more options. You get more control over how you use this tool of your job. You can turn that into more money, which could help other things in your life. You could turn into more flexibility. You could turn it into having more control over exactly where, what locations you work in. This is the way that lifestyle planners often think about their work. Not the only way, but they often think about it as this tool they use to help shape the rest of their

• 1:18:04Cal Newport?

  life. And the more career capital they build, the sharper that tool gets and the more precise they can be deploying it. They don't think in terms of what's my passion. They think in terms of how can I be more valuable to my employer next year than this? And how do I remember as I get more valuable to leverage that to make my life better, not just to take the next promotion, just to move up the ladder? That's where a lot of the cool stuff often happens in lifestyle centered planning. Now, that's not the only thing you do with your job. Now, for some people, there's like a particular impact you can have with your work that's really important to you, and that's a key part of your vision for your life. And then you try to figure out, how can I have that impact in a way that's not going to step on these other parts of my life and it can help you make good decisions about it? Anyways, classic example of lifestyle centered planning. All right, do we have a call this week? Yes, we do.

• 1:18:48Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear this.

• 1:18:51Speaker 06

  Hey, Cal, this is Josh. I'm a teacher and a father of two daughters. I have a two and a half year old and a newborn. And I'm quickly realizing that a lot of the principles and the methodologies that I was putting in place from your books and from your work and your podcast are getting sidelined because of some of the responsibilities that I have as a father with two young daughters. I'd love to know how you altered your plans and you changed some of your life when your boys were younger. Your insight would be helpful. Thanks so much.

• 1:19:29Cal Newport?

  Well, kids should take a lot more of your life. If you're not finding yourself way more limited in your time in terms like things you can spend time on, or how easy it is to like do well at work, or this or that, then you're, you're probably not doing a great job with parenting like that. It should, I mean, I hope it really changes the time you have available. The basic ideas I talk about can work really well in this circumstance, right? Because again, I'm not talking about hustling.

• 1:20:00Cal Newport?

  I'm not talking about, you know, how do you crush it? How do you like always get ahead? I'm just talking about, you know, when it comes to sort of professional advice, like the reality of like, what activities matter more than others? I talk about, for example, unbroken concentration produces more than distracted concentration. So you want to sort of separate those two out in your work. I talk about controlling your time. You're going to get a lot more out of it than than going through your day haphazardly. I talk about things like autopilot scheduling your time is going to reduce a lot of like the decision making you have to do. I talk a lot about workload. You have to care about your workload. If it gets too big, that's going to be a problem. All of these tools can be very useful when you're in bunker mode, which is where you are when you have like a newborn and two and a half year olds.

• 1:20:43Cal Newport?

  Like we want to, we want to keep the wheels on the car, but like, that's about it. Right? Like, I want to keep my job, but I ain't going for manager of the year. If you know what I mean, when I have like young kids at home, all that type of advice can be helpful. Like, good, I'm going to be careful with my time because I have a lot less of it. And so I want to make sure I'm like hitting the key things. I'm going to autopilot like these, these things here just to make sure that these things get done, that need to get done so that like I, I'm not drawing too much attention from my boss. And I, because I'm too sleep deprived to even think right about how I'm going to schedule it, you know? You know, deep work, you're like, okay, I could do less of it. Or maybe, you know what, I'm way more tired now. So I'm not having very effective deep work sessions right now. So I'm going to focus on like other things in my job.

• 1:21:28Cal Newport?

  I'm going to pull back from things where it's going to require like a big original creative input and just be like generally useful and I'm around and I'm doing stuff that people ask me to do. And I'm pretty organized and going to keep my head down for a while. Like you can use these tools to adjust like whatever the reality of the situation is, but never for a moment feel bad that, oh, I'm not all in at work when I have like young kids at home. You shouldn't be. That's not the point of having young kids, just like also if like you're taking care of a, like a sick relative or you're, you're sick yourself. There's different seasons of life that have different focuses. Like I spend an inordinate amount of my time right now. Doing non-professional activities related to my kids, like probably too much. I coached three different teams. I'm all over the place.

• 1:22:13Cal Newport?

  I'm always, I'm on the board of my kid's school. I was up there last night giving, you know, I talked to all the middle schoolers about their phones. I'm there like three or four days a week. We're involved in other sorts of communities. Like I am spending a huge amount of time, you know, doing stuff with kids because I have elementary and middle school age kids and they're boys. And this is like a time they need their dad involved in their life. Yes, this probably cuts back on like other stuff I could be getting after it professionally. But like the whole point of me building up, you know, the career I have to this point was exactly so I could have this flexibility. I was like, great, I can kind of pull back. Like I'm not teaching this semester. Like that helps, you know? I'm writing my book slowly. I've thrown it out a couple of times now. It's okay, I take my time. I have no rush.

• 1:22:57Cal Newport?

  Like I am going to go like slowly on it. I'm dedicating a full day every week of like, this is just my day for like the podcast, the newsletter. I just, this is it. That's my studio day and that's just when I do it. I don't try to do anything else, you know? So I'm with you. Do not feel bad. I never want people to think my advice is like, go get after it. It's not. It's understand how the mind works and then use that information to be much more smarter about how your approach work. Like mainly the things I, in my work related advice, most of that is in response to ways that technology made work terrible. And the technology tools we brought into work really made it worse. And we have to get, now we have to think a lot more about work. So it's not terrible.

• 1:23:41Cal Newport?

  I'm much more about taking terribleness out of work and making it better than I am about like crushing it or, you know, trying to get after it. I just don't have the, I myself don't have the stomach for, you know, being overworked or stressed. So congratulations on the kids. Have no guilt. Use my techniques so that in like a fraction of the time you must, might've been working 10 years ago, you're not drawing any attention to yourself and you know, go home and take a nap and. Whenever we had newborns, the other ones, this was my duty. So it was a lot of like, I had a lot of time hanging out with two-year-olds and two-and-a-half-year-olds. I remember this well. Yeah, but that's what you should be doing. But don't feel guilty. All right. So for the final segment of the show, I'm going to discuss an insightful reaction from one of my readers

• 1:24:25Cal Newport?

  to the newsletter I sent out last week, which is very relevant to the topic we're talking about. It's something that really helped refine my thinking even more when we think about resetting or reinventing your life. Before we get to that, we have to do one more quick ad break, but stick around because I think you're going to want to hear this final discussion. In today's fast-changing digital world, proving your company is trustworthy isn't just important for growth, it is essential. That's why Vanta is here. Here's the thing, running a company today that basically has anything to do with technology or the internet is going to eventually require compliance with various standards. This can be a huge pain and it can take up a lot of time that you should be spending on like making your products better, making your customers happier.

• 1:25:08Cal Newport?

  This is where Vanta comes in because it makes this process easier. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise-managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. These compliances matter, but they're a pain to go through the process, so you need Vanta. Vanta can also help you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so you can win bigger deals sooner. The results? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slash over $500,000 a year in cost and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional, Vanta makes it automatic. Get started at vanta.com/deepquestions.

• 1:25:51Cal Newport?

  That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

• 1:26:01Cal Newport?

  Jesse, going online without ExpressVPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on a Zoom meeting. Do you really want your coworkers to hear you trash talking them? True story, Jesse, this is true. Our good friend Cal Network was on a Zoom call when someone dismissively described his biceps as being at most 29 inches in diameter. So Network single-handedly diverted a river and destroyed his hometown. He was gonna put up with that nonsense 29 inches. But here's what I'm trying to say, you need a VPN. Here's why. When you connect to the internet, your traffic is contained in these little bundles called packets. And even if the connection is secure using like a protocol like HTTPS, the headers of those packets are clear text.

• 1:26:45Cal Newport?

  Anyone can see them, so they can see what sites or services you're talking to. You don't have privacy about what sites and services you're talking to unless you use a VPN. Because when you use a VPN, you take that packet that you want to send to the site and service you want to talk to, and you encrypt that, hide it with a code, and you send it to a VPN server, which then unencrypts it and talks to that site and service on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back. So now what do people near you see? What does your internet service provider learn? What does the guy with the attendant in the coffee shop learn? All they know about your internet traffic is that you're talking to a VPN server. Privacy is regained. And if you're going to use a VPN, I suggest that you use today's sponsor, which is ExpressVPN.

• 1:27:30Cal Newport?

  It's easy to use, it works on all your devices. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. ExpressVPN, it's a fantastic VPN product, and you need a VPN. So what are you waiting for? Good news, right now you can get ExpressVPN at its lowest price ever, starting at just $3.49 a month. And if you use my special link, you can get an additional four months. So you have to go to expressvpn.com/deep to get yourself that extra, those four extra months of ExpressVPN. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep. All right, Jesse, with that, let's move on to our final segment.

• 1:28:11Cal Newport?

  All right. So last week on my newsletter, I sent out an essay. And if you're not subscribed to my newsletter, by the way, you should just go to calnewport.com. There's all sorts of places to sign up to join another 120,000 people who are signed up to receive. I sent out a weekly essay about all these topics about, you know, technology, how it affects us, how to respond and how to build a deep life in an increasingly distracted world. All right. Last week, I sent out an essay that was titled, The Great Lock-in of 2025. I'll bring this up on the screen here a little bit for those who want to see it or watching instead of just listening. I got an interesting response to this essay, but let me just tell you what this essay was about if you haven't read it. But here's how I began that essay. I said, if there's one thing that I'm always late to discover,

• 1:28:55Cal Newport?

  it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I'm only now starting to hear about the so-called Great Lock-in of 2025. This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer, borrowing the term lock-in, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal. This challenge asked people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the new year. It's just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you're going to do, explained one TikTok influencer quoted recently in a Times article about the trend. All right. So I wrote about that. I went on this essay to say, this is great. Lock-in, which is like the focus on something without distraction,

• 1:29:39Cal Newport?

  is an idea that Gen Z came up with in opposition to their phones. That to separate from the distraction of their phones to actually make progress in their life, you have to have this mindset of lock-in. Obviously, this is very similar to the concept of deep work, to the point where I actually had someone, not the response I was going to talk about, but someone wrote me in response to this article, someone in their 20s and said, look, if you just republished your book, Deep Work, and all you did was change the title to lock-in. You would have like another million sales just from Gen Z. Like, the content is exactly what they're talking about right now. It's just they don't really read books. That's kind of a problem. So, I was really excited about this and I was like, this is great. Here is my, let me pull it up. Here's my conclusion.

• 1:30:22Cal Newport?

  I said, "Look, when I first published my book, Deep Work, with centers on the importance of undistracted focus in your professional life, people already knew that spending their days frantically checking email probably wasn't good, but they only felt motivated to change when presented with a positive alternative. Ideas like locking in might provide a similar influence for Gen Z's collective smartphone addiction. It's one thing to be told again and again that your devices are bad, but it's another to experience a clear vision of the good that's possible once you put them away. When you experience life in its full analog richness, the allure of the digital diminishes." So, what I was arguing there is like, here's why I like this lock-in challenge. Because when you get used to like pursuing other goals that are meaningful to you, your life gets better. And when your life gets better, you're like, "Oh,

• 1:31:07Cal Newport?

  the alternative, which is to fake digital life, doesn't seem so good anymore." You can't just tell people your phone is bad. You have to help them to making their life better. Just like I couldn't just tell people email is bad. I had to show them what work could be like without it. The positive induces more changes than the negative. So, that's what that article was about. I got an interesting letter from a reader about it, which I'm going to read to you now. So, this letter said, "The biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing is that it doesn't know what to do. Most of them are chasing shining objects that others are showing, whether on social media or in real life. And when they quickly realize it's not what they want,

• 1:31:52Cal Newport?

  they leave and jump on to something else. This constant switching takes a toll, eventually leaving them with little to no energy for anything useful and actually feeling delusional. Gen Z doesn't know what it wants to do. This has been a common problem across generations, but Gen Z and youngsters after it are making things worse by scrolling through social media, hoping to find their purpose by accident or by someone telling them what they should do." I thought this was a really good point because I was saying, "This is great. Focus on real-life improvement goals. Your phone will be less alluring." And this reader said, "Yes, but it's hard to figure out good goals to improve your life."

• 1:32:27Cal Newport?

  Like, how do you know what you should do to improve your life? Well, if we think about it, like traditionally, where have we found this out? We found this out through role models, people in our life. There's aspects of their life that, you know, we, that we admired, like, oh, look at this person. I want to be like them. And then maybe you go to school and like, well, now I met this, this, this person has a property I like. We encounter ideas in books. We encounter ideas in, you know, events that you attend. You, you put together over time, a sort of nuanced, complicated vision of what you want your life to be like, based on these actual experiences that are bespoke to your life. But if you're living digital, you're getting just this funhouse mirror distorted vision of goals that play well with the algorithm.

• 1:33:08Cal Newport?

  You're seeing absolute shredded guys, you know, beautiful women, private jets, people crushing it in like really very focused, you know, really kind of unusual ways. I have noticed this, if you talk to like my, my son's generation and like, well, what, what do you think would be like the best job? Or something they have a hard time thinking beyond like being successful on YouTube. Because that's the world that you're, that's it. Like, that's the world you're being exposed to. That's a really good point. And the solution to this is we can't just talk about making your life richer. We have to talk just as much about the mechanics of how you do that. How is it that you figure out what a good goal is? How do you pursue a goal?

• 1:33:52Cal Newport?

  It's not enough just to say, hey, lock in, let's go rock and roll and do TikTok videos about it. How do you choose a good goal? What matters to you? How do you make progress on it? You know, I'm writing a whole book on this in part because I think if you don't answer that question well, it's hard to do anything else. All the stuff I talk about, the digital, all the talks I give and the videos I do about like the problem with like algorithmic curation and TikTok and the algorithm, what's happening in our society and our brains, none of that's going to help. If you don't have a better alternative to go towards, and if you don't know how to get towards a better alternative, we'll just fall back on the devil we know. So I thought that was like a really good insight. You know, it's not just enough to say there's more than life than like your phones. We have to say, how do you navigate that world outside of it?

• 1:34:36Cal Newport?

  And in a world where more and more of real world role models are getting replaced with these caricatures that are selected and promoted by algorithms through digital screens, that's harder than we realized. So we all could do better here, trying to find real role models and have more nuanced visions of what a good life means. And those of us who have thought a lot about it need to do a better job of explaining the mechanics of that to people. But anyways, great response. I appreciate that feedback. Uh, you know, if you don't subscribe to that newsletter, calnewport.com and I want to hear your feedback on it as well. So thank you everyone for listening. That's our show for today. We'll be back next week with another episode and until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:35:18Cal Newport?

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