Cal Newport on Knowledge Work and Effective Communication | Don't Be Satisfied With This

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Cal Newport about his new book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, how knowledge workers can improve their efficiency and gain autonomy, why effective communication is so important, and more. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the bestselling author of 6 books including Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He is also the host of the Deep Questions podcast which launched in May 2020. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Streak is a fully embedded workflow and productivity software in Gmail that lets you manage all your work right in your inbox. Streak gives you tools for email tracking, mail merges, and snippets to save time and scale up your email efficiency. Sign up for Streak today at Streak.com/stoic and get 20% off your first year of their Pro Plan. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Cal Newport: Homepage: http://www.calnewport.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Don't be satisfied with this. You bought meditations and you skimmed it. You read the summary of anti-fragile or essentialism on one of those business sites. You've seen a couple of TED Talks on evolutionary biology and psychology. You're following politics through a couple of people on Twitter. So you've got it, right? You're informed? No. Even as an old man, Marcus Aurelius was chiding himself not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. Instead, he knew he had to read attentively. He told himself he needed to go directly to the seed of knowledge, and he continued to seek out tutors and mentors. He lingered, as Seneca said, on a small number of master thinkers,

• 1:29Speaker 00

  reading and rereading their work until he'd gone way beyond just getting the gist. The wisdom of the Stoics did not come easily. Today, in the modern world, understanding is even tougher, deluged as we are with misinformation, partisanship, distractions, and infinitely more complexity. So you can't settle. You have to really work for it, really work for it. And that starts right now.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest today is not just one of my favorite people, one of my favorite authors, not just someone who gave me a ton of great advice when I was writing Ego is the Enemy, and not just someone who is a great thinker, but someone who I think now with this episode holds the record for the most appearances on the Daily Stoic Podcast, even more than the great Robert Greene. Talking about Cal Newport, his new book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, is great, very timely, like all Cal's books, give me a ton to chew on. We talk about that in the episode, but as always seems to go with Cal, we get way into what I think is the pressing question for me and

• 2:44Speaker 00

  for most of us in this modern world, which is, how do we become the best at what it is that we do? And most of us perform some form of knowledge work, right? Knowledge work is when you're using your mind, when you're creating something, making something, when you're leading in some way. And Cal, like a great performance psychologist, I had Michael Gervais on the podcast recently, I think Cal is the equivalent of that in this knowledge workspace. You know, how do you get better at making decisions? How do you get better at managing your productivity? How do you get better at concentrating? How do you get better at eliminating distractions? How do you get better at setting up systems? How do you get better at thinking, defining goals, coming up with metrics? These are

• 3:29Speaker 00

  the kinds of things that Cal thinks so much about. He's not just a great writer, written a bunch of bestselling books, which I love, So Good They Can't Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism. His time blocking calendar is great, as I talked about, and this new book is, he said, four years in the making. So what I love about Cal especially is that, yes, he's an academic, he's a philosopher about these ideas, but he also clearly puts them into practice in a real way, right? He's not just talking about these things from the comfort of a classroom, but having to execute on them in real life, not just as an academic, but as a writer. I mean, he's written more books than- than most nonfiction authors will ever write. And he's, I think we're roughly the same age. He's got kids, too.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Cal has done it at an extremely high and extremely consistent level that very few people can match. So Cal is a legit dude. We really get into it in this conversation. We talk about, you know, sort of the role email plays in our lives and the distractions that it can offer. I personally actually happen to like email quite a bit. I prefer email to phone or meetings. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem. That it's not a distraction. That doesn't eat up more time than I'd like. And it doesn't mean that as a business owner and as an entrepreneur, it doesn't impede the productivity of people that I pay to do stuff. So I think a lot about systems and Cal's book gives you a lot to chew on. But I think you're really going to like this interview.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I wrote down some changes that I'm going to make actually in sort of on my site as far as like how emails come in. Cal always has interesting, intelligent ways of doing it. And we nerd out about performance and investing in performance, which is what we all should be doing. So here is my interview with Cal Newport. His new book, A World Without Email. Read his book, Digital Minimalism. Definitely read Deep Work. Definitely read So Good They Can't Ignore You. I tell you to follow Cal on social media, but of course, he doesn't have one. He does have a great podcast, though, which you should check out. He interviewed me for it not that long ago. So that might be a good episode to start with. In any case, here is my interview with my friend, Cal Newport.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  I was thinking about you the other day because, like a lot of people, the last year of my life, as disruptive and awful as it was in many ways, was also extraordinarily productive. Even though we had no childcare and, you know, had to work from home and so many options were closed. It seemed kind of like a case study in the power of deep work in a lot of ways.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think that was true in particular for people who had a lot of autonomy, right? So if you were self-employed or a freelancer or a solopreneur, so you could adjust. Okay, I have a more constraints, more flexibility. Let me radically change how I work. There is a lot of really positive experiments. And I think what happened is the disruption was so intense about what happened with the pandemic is that that gave you permission to try radical responses in a way that pre-pandemic, you know, were much more incremental. Let me adjust a little bit how I work. I think for a lot of people who had the autonomy that said, okay, everything is blown up right now. So I have permission to blow up how I work. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to work on this. I'm going to go over to these other offices to work. I'm going

• 6:54Speaker 01

  to change my garden shed. I'm going to not have coffees or phone calls anymore. So I'm hoping there's a lot of interesting insight. I think you're right. It'll come out of that experimentation. Now, for people who had normal jobs with bosses who had been in an office and had to suddenly switch home, it just got terrible. So basically, all of the random back and forth, the hyperactive hype myself, it just got more hyperactive. And a lot of people in that circumstance are completely burnt out. So I think people like you and I could feel a little lucky.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Did you read that New York Times piece about the YOLO economy, as they were calling it, that like people who have sort of gritted their teeth and just put up with it for the last year, sort of the pandemic, plus watching, you know, people make millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies and all this other nonsense, they're just sort of like, screw it. Like, I'm just not going to do this anymore. And they're quitting to follow their passion, which is funny, because I was reading, I was reading that. And then I thought of your other book, because this is basically the conceit of so good, they can't ignore you, which is that when we're dissatisfied, or we feel like we're not, you know, totally locked into something we're connected with or well suited for, we can

• 8:01Speaker 00

  overreact and go do something wild and crazy, which also blows up in our faces.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of that. And it's going to be an issue that the, the pressure got really intense to do some sort of deep reset, which is the term I like to use. But as I talk about, so good, they can't ignore you. We're bad at that. At least our instincts of that are bad. And one of the stories I told in that book, which I think is probably relevant to what a lot of people are about to do. I told the story about, it was a successful ad executive that was just feeling overwhelmed by work and said, great, I need to do something different. Let me quit this. And become a yoga instructor. And the, the point of the story was that that didn't work out. I mean, he was not able to transition to that job and make a really big living. The underlying moral of that book is that when you're thinking about what makes a job

• 8:50Speaker 01

  great, you have to think about it from a market economy point of view, like the traits that make great work, great are rare and valuable. You have to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. It's all about this exchange, like building skills you can leverage to make your life more remarkable. If you leave out that part where you have to have something remarkable to offer in return, you say, great, I'll just go to an online yoga instructor tutorial and then just live as a yoga instructor. You have nothing really to offer that's rare and valuable. It's unlikely that you're going to end up crafting a working life that's rare and valuable. So yeah, I think suddenly that book is way more relevant than it's been recently because everyone is thinking about these type of transitions.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Well, if I was to connect them, what I would say is sort of the pandemic revealed first and foremost, how broken a lot of modern work is. And then it also revealed how broken a lot of our lives are, you know, whether we're spending time doing something that makes us happy, whether we're happy in our marriage or not, or, you know, where we're happy. I know so many people that are moving. They just actually being forced to spend time where they live. They were like, why am I here? I have no reason to live here. Or, you know, certain, certain benefits of that place, whether it's the restaurant scene in New York City, or the, you know, whatever in California, they're like, I don't like where I live, so I'm going to move. And then of course, it also revealed how

• 10:09Speaker 00

  broken a lot of our institutions and government is. But, but so, so it's created this opportunity for, as you said, a reset. And I think the way I think about those, like a transition like that, or having a wake up call like this, you don't go like, what's my fantasy? What's my dream? I think you actually want to start with a smaller building block, which is And the pandemic was a good refresher in this for me, which is like, what do I want my life to look like day to day? Like, what do I want my day to look like? You mentioned the idea of autonomy. Like, to me, success and autonomy are synonyms. And if they're not, what kind of success is it? And so, when I think about your, the other book, this

• 10:53Speaker 00

  is the new email book, A World Without Email, one of the things I think about when I'm like, what do I want my day to look like? I think, I don't want to spend a lot of time on email, right? I don't want to spend a lot of time on phone calls. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing things that I don't like. So I think, instead of going like, hey, I hate being an ad executive, I'm going to become a yoga instructor, actually sit down and think like, what do I want my life to look like day to day? And that includes, where do I live? What do I do? What's my routine? What's my structure? Who am I with? That's how I would approach, you know, this sort of wake up call that we've had over the last year.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Well, I just want to say that I wrote an article about this a long time ago. It's one of my favorite articles that is probably my least read among my well-known articles, because I wrote it so early in my writing career, it was on my blog, this must have been 2008, or something like this, right? And it was titled something like The Graduate, I was at a, I was at my sister's college graduation when I wrote this. And it was something like, The Graduation Advice You Never Hear, The Career Advice You Never Hear. And this was exactly the idea. Work backwards from your vision of the lifestyle, what you want your life to be like, work backwards from that and say, okay, what are the different ways to get there? What would I have to do to get there? Which of those paths do I want to take? Okay, now I have to get after it. Actually, doing the steps of that path. And

• 12:10Speaker 01

  this was before I wrote So Good They Can't Ignore You, but it was really laying the seeds of this notion of, you can't just work from, I don't know, this is the job I want to have, or I don't like my job. These random fluctuations don't happen. You work backwards from the lifestyle. As a lot of people discovered in the pandemic, the attributes of your lifestyle are often way more important than the specific content of your work. And I think that's something that we, in the last 20 or 30 years, often get wrong, especially in the American context. The passion-centric mindset is really focused on the content of your work. This particular job is what I'm wired to do. So I need to have the job I'm wired to do to be happy. Where when you do the exercise you're talking about, often what comes up is I want a lot of autonomy in my time. I want to be near nature. I want to spend a lot of time with my family.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  I want to have seasonal work where there's intense periods and then I can spend whole summers where I'm really quiet. I want to have creativity. I want to whatever. A lot of that is completely agnostic to, oh, are you a social media brand manager or an EVP at a, you know, consumer good products? Like, who cares about the content of the work? What's the attributes of your life? And then how do you fit work into a plan of how to gain that? It's, it's a, I think it's a much more sensical way to think about life shaping. We, we focus way too much on what that actual line says at the top of your resume. That's only a little piece of implementing a much bigger plan.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  That's interesting too, and I relate to it, which is weird because I'm someone who has like a calling, like I, I am a writer. I love writing. That's my passion. At the same time, there's lots of other stuff that I do and I like doing. So what, what they all have in common, I would say, is that I like to be in control of how and when and why I do them. Right? And so to me, that's where it comes down to this idea of autonomy. And it, sometimes I'll talk to people and it like, they'll be so much, so successful, 10 times more successful than me, a hundred times. And I'll look at their life and I'll be like, that sounds awful because they're in so little control of their life. You know, they've got a car waiting for them downstairs. They're scheduled down in the five minute increments.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  You know, to me, I think what I actually like of all the things that I do is the ability to focus deeply on it. So whether I'm investing in something, whether I'm, you know, working outside of my farm or whether I'm writing, what I like is not the specific content, as you're saying, but it's, it's the ability to concentrate and really give myself fully over to it, not Knowing that I have seven minutes to finish this task or else I'm going to get in trouble, you know, literally or figuratively.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, what some people like, by the way, so this is like, what's interesting about that exercise is some people look at the things that you and I like, like, I really like, for example, I want to have a high stakes project that has to be executed over a long period of time entirely autonomously, a project in which whether or not I do anything on it today or not, doesn't matter. But if I don't do anything on it for the next month, it's going to be an issue. I thrive under that type of autonomy. It's just my schedule, but done on my terms.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  You're going off and you're going to come back with the thing.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I'm going to come back with it. Yeah. And there's no pressure for me. I like having no pressure on any particular day. Like, you know what? I call it the sick day effect, right? If I get sick tomorrow, it's not a big deal, right? Because it's just this week, I want to make progress. But if I don't do it today, I can do it tomorrow. Some people hate that. Like, for some people, it is their worst fear of, wait, you're telling me I have six months and come back when I'm done? And they would much rather have, no, I want to be more frenetic, like more connected to people, making moves. I'm a sort of a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates style, like, let's roll. I want to be having ideas and moving teams on actions, but just knowing what it is. And, you know, some people like, I don't really like working much at all. I like nature. I like, I like having a lot of free time.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  There's so many options. When you're working backwards from what you want your life to be like, there's many, many paths and so many options how to implement those. You get rid of all those options when you instead work backwards from this job. It has to be this. And now suddenly you're left with, okay, this is my only option is to try to succeed in this particular field. And then what happens when you don't? So I, I used to call this, now I'm remembering the term, lifestyle centric career planning. That was my new Portian phrase for this.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it's funny, what all those things have in common, and you know, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, whether you like nature, or you like, you know, being in an urban environment, whatever. I would say the one thing we all have in common is that we all hate email. Like, we just all hate having lots of emails to respond to, which of course is the, the concept of the new book.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, my sort of magna opus, magnum opus on work and tech-related writing, because I've been

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Your big project.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  I've been working on this for a long time.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  2016, right? So I started writing this, working on this before Deep Work came out, right? So Deep Work was done, but hadn't come out yet. My initial interviews in this book take place in 2016. I put it on pause at some point to write Digital Minimalism, which came out in 2019, because it was very timely, what was happening with our changing relationships with our phone. And then I, then I came back to it, right? So this is kind of my definitive word on the world of work. And yet it comes down to, we have developed this remarkable love-hate relationship with email, which is so universal and so high impact that we absolutely have to unpack it. Why is that we can have a tool that we absolutely would think life would be worse without? Because otherwise, we're using fax machines and we're using voicemail. And that sucks. And yet we hate it. It's like the bane of our existence.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Like, both of these things are true. It's this like wonderful, confusing dichotomy that we have to pick apart, or we're going to end up remaining miserable.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  It is funny, though, because I like, I hate email in the sense that like, when I, whenever I look and there's lots of emails, I'm like, it gives me anxiety and I want it to go away. I've always been, and I was probably like an inbox zero person, basically until the pandemic. And now I'm more of like an inbox, like 30. And there's just like 30 emails that are like too important to delete, but I'm just hoping will magically go away on their own, you know, like that. So my discipline collapsed a little bit under the pressure of the, of the last year. But I also feel like, like in the last week, like multiple people have like gone like, "Hey, Ryan, I want you to meet like so-and-so." And it's like some, let's say, an important person.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  And the person's first impulse is like, "Hey, let's get on the phone." Right? And I, my, I, I always, I'm pretty artful about it now, but I do everything I can to keep it in email. I'd rather do 30 emails back and forth with this person than get on the phone. Why is it that I hate the phone more than email?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Well, this is the overhead of synchrony, right? And this is, it's an issue, right? That if you're going to interact with someone, let's say to try to solve a problem or make a decision or get to know someone better, real time is way more effective. And if we're just looking at the, the efficiency with which you can come to that conclusion, back and forth in real time is more effective. It has a huge overhead, however, because you have to actually arrange for that time. You have to put aside the, the time for it. This was really at the core of that New Yorker piece I wrote a couple of years ago. Well, it was email a mistake where I actually was talking about asynchronous versus synchronous communication systems. In my field as a computer scientist, we actually study these mathematically. So we're used to thinking about their advantages and disadvantages. Synchrony allows for a highly effective communication, but it is hard to set up.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Asynchrony is very easy to set up, very low overhead, just shoot off the message, whatever. Sure. But the communication becomes much more complex because you need much more back and forth to reach a decision and these back and forths are going to trigger, it's going to trigger overhead, it's going to, it's going to trigger context shifting. It's a really difficult balancing act because what you essentially have to do is find out how to amortize the overhead of the synchrony so that you can prevent many of these conversations from having to be constant back and forths. Because back and forths mean every message is something you have to check, you have to check for, when you see it, you have to respond. But you also don't want the overhead of, okay, I have to have a completely separate meeting for this. Like the middle ground I use, for example, is I'll deploy first line of defense is office hours.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Office hours is, is like a classic way to amortize the overhead of synchrony. It gets rid of the overhead. Here are times I am available, I'm on Zoom or my door is open at the university and you can just deflect, this is what I do for students at Georgetown. I'm happy to talk to any student at Georgetown about anything, but it has to be in my office hours, you know? Like, great, use my office hours whenever you want to stop by, whenever you want to stop by. Works out great. Very effective communication, very little overhead because it's office hours. And then the second line of defense is the like highly restricted scheduling slots that you control with, you know, Calendly or Schedule1. All right, fine, grab a slot when you can, but it's these highly restricted slots just for that purpose. All of these techniques make more sense when you realize here's what I'm trying to do is I want

• 20:58Speaker 01

  real time back and forth when possible, if I'm actually trying to reach a decision or get information, I want to reduce the overhead of setting that up. Now, you might also have the other problem of I don't really actually want to talk to these people.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say, that's the real problem is I don't, I don't want to be rude, but I also don't, it's like, what's that Drake thing, like no new friends? As like an introvert who's also busy, I kind of have like a no new friends policy. And I feel like email is a way to not be rude and be helpful, but also not, it's like not breach the defenses, like it's in kind of like a quarantine, like safe room. Like I'm entering the room, you're entering the room, but then I can leave like, like, or I think about it like you watch The Crown where she like presses the button when she wants the person to leave the room. She's just like, the meeting is over and she's like, so I feel

• 21:50Speaker 00

  like on email, I can get out in and out much easier, even if I have to do it multiple times, then, you know, okay, I gotta drive here, then we meet and then you're 20 minutes late. And then we have to do pleasantries and then blah, blah, blah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. Right. But what you could delay or something on top of that, you have a good out. So like one of my, one of my good outs is often I'll say, oh, I'm, I'm off the grid or I'm in monk mode because of, and I'll tie it to some sort of stage of the book writing process. Um, you know, I'm trying to finish up my manuscript. I'm in monk mode, you know, I'm in publicity mode, so I don't really have time. Yeah, I'm just, I'm overwhelmed or, you know, I just finished publicity mode and now I'm taking a break. So now for you, because you're on an even faster publishing schedule than me, every moment counts. It's one of those probably. So like, maybe that's what you need is the like the clarity. It sounds like you're doing the soft no, like I don't want to just say, I don't want to meet in a nice way. So you do, you basically just meet poorly. Like I'll, I'll just email you back, but kind of with long delays and not send you

• 22:48Speaker 01

  very good emails and hope eventually that you're like, all right, fine.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  I have started to be a bit more honest too, where someone will be like, you know, like, so, so someone, someone like connects us and they're like, you know, so and so is working on a book and they wanted to ask you some questions, you know, and, and they go, hey, it's great to meet you. I'd like to ask you some questions. Like, when can you get on the phone? And I just reply, oh, you know, like, what are your questions? Like, just give me the questions. I'll answer them. And then they're like, well, I have a bunch of questions. Uh, let's get on the phone. You know, like, after like three or four sort of not reading the rooms, I usually just go like, uh, literally, there's nothing I hate more than getting on the phone. Uh, I, there's nothing I want to do less than that, but I'm happy to answer your question over email. And then usually it gets to the point, and the question is always like, uh, will you blurb my book? You know, it's

• 23:35Speaker 00

  like some three second question that could have been answered over email to begin with. And I think other people, either they're very sort of extroverted or gregarious, so their impulse is to talk, or they think it's rude to just get to the fucking point, you know, so they're not getting to the point and just making the ask.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  But also, it's really cool to talk to Ryan Holiday. So you, you have that factor going against you as well. Like, in their mind, they're like, it's not just like, oh, this would be more convenient. It'd be like, one of the, it's a cool story to have. Like, I, uh, I, you know, I get some of that too. I think people are just like, I think it would be cool just to talk.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Do you get that email from like, uh, younger people who are like looking for a mentor or whatever? They'll go like, hey, I'm a huge fan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can I ask you a question? And I'm like, I, I sometimes if I'm in the, the mood, I'll just be like, you just did. I'll talk to you some other time. You know, like, like you just wasted your question, asking if you could have a question. If you had just said, you know, if you'd shot me a, a seven word question, I could have gotten you a response back very quickly. But instead, you decided to ask if you could ask. And, you know, here we are.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  But see, you still have a general purpose, publicly accessible email address, right? So I used to do a ton of questions because of, of the student focus back in my early writing days.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Uh, I would answer questions from Students because I was writing books for students and I actually really enjoyed doing it. I felt like it was a service and then it got out of control and doing it half ass was worse than just being clear. And so I got rid of all my general purpose, public facing email addresses. So I don't get this as much because now if you go to like my contact page, there's channels for particular purposes like, oh, if you want to like talk, book a talk, talk to this person. If this is about an interview, talk to this publicist. If you want to send me links or tips or ideas, I love to see them, but I'm not going to respond, send them here and that's it. There is no actual, and so no one actually expects that I'm going to respond. And therefore I get a lot less of those messages. And if I get them, there's so somehow resetting expectations goes a long way. Like we assume that people just want you to be accessible.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  It's not really they want you to be accessible. It's that if you seem accessible, then they might have an expectation of, well, then you'll, you should respond. And if you don't, that's a problem. But if it's clear you're not accessible, then there's really less, less bad feelings than you would expect because there's not an expectation actually being forwarded.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is something you talked about in the book that I liked, that, that I got this invite for this advice from, from Steve Cam, who runs nerd fitness. He's like, just have rules. Like, don't say like, don't ignore it or don't not do it. Although I'm also a big fan of just the ignore, you know, like, I think that's, that's hard for people. But like, you know, if I were to email the president, I would just not get a response, right? He wouldn't be like, I can't respond, right? Like, and I think having interacted with busy people, you get used to the fact that like, oh, they just didn't see it, or they just, they couldn't even give you a no. And so you have to get to a place where you're just comfortable, like pocket vetoing stuff. But, but one, if you

• 26:45Speaker 00

  are going to say no, if it's someone that you can't just sort of like, do that to, having a rule is really important. So mine is like, hey, I just don't get on the phone, or hey, I just don't give book blurbs, or hey, I just don't do X, Y, and Z. And you talked about like, having quotas, like, I only do three of these a year, or six of these a year. Like James Clear was telling me, he, he, he sets aside, like, X speaking spots per year. And then that's also how he decides what his fee will be. But, but I did like the idea of like a certain amount of slots or a certain amount of nights away from home or a certain amount of, you know, I don't know, things that you do.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  You know, maybe you're really important and you, you agree to sit on one board per year or you make two investments per year. Having a rule sort of takes the willpower out of things.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need, you need controlled serendipity because yeah, people often argue, well, if I go complete Neil Stephenson and it's, you know, I, you can't contact me. I don't want to hear from you. I don't talk to the public or whatever. If you're in more of a nonfiction role, you have more of a business aspect to your writing business. Like, wait a second, I might get interesting ideas, meet interesting people or whatever. But controlled serendipity works great. And, you know, the two things I think work well for authors is A, have a, a no response expected incoming tip line. It's really been great for me. Articles, interviews, books you think I should know about. My address I use is called [email protected]. It just says, it's not my name. That's crucial, right? Name gives someone, if it's [email protected], people think it's a person. Why is this person ignoring me? If it's an abstract entity, they don't, they don't expect that.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And I get fantastic links and interviews and books that I follow up on and learn a lot about it. And I just say, I read these, but I can't respond. And then the quota system is great. My only addition to that is the quota should be at a time scale, maybe quarterly or monthly. Right? Otherwise you'll fill the whole quota in the first month. Like if James was just saying, I'm going to do five, five talks a month. Well, he would fill that by February. So it's like, yeah, I do, you know, I'm going to meet with a couple entrepreneurs a month. I'm going to do one coffee with a new person a month or whatever, you know? And it's great because the serendipity is great. I've met a lot of interesting people, but, but yeah, take the willpower out of the equation. I love it.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  The, the other rule I'm, I'm having trouble figuring out how I want to slash enforce, slash talk about, like I got a text, uh, which I don't, I don't like unsolicited texts from people that I don't know, but I got a text from a mutual friend who was like, hey, I'm in town getting together with all these people. And it's like, I happen to know that like, you know, let's say three to four of the people on the 10 person list are all not vaccinated for, you know, deliberate reasons. So it's like, first off, I was probably not going to go to this random get together, you know? Originally, but now I'm definitely not going, right? I might as well just get COVID at home than go into this infectious disease room.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  But I think the pandemic has also helped give me some clarity on like, who do I want to spend time with or not? I think certain crises or situations, one of the upsides, downsides is that it reveals character. And I think it helped me get some insight as to like, what people do I want to have in my life? What people do I not want to have in my life? Who am I on the same wavelength with? And who am I very far apart from the wavelength on? And that's given me some clarity, too.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, like getting more serious about social connection, which again is one of these things I think the pandemic helped underscore is that sociality is complicated and requires time. And like, one of the big ideas in sociality is that actually non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of someone else, I'm going to spend a lot of my time, I'm going to sacrifice a lot of time to come see you and come do something with you. Like, really does help engender a sense of strong connection. Connection activities that don't require a lot of effort or sacrifice, like just shooting off a whatever text message or social media thing, does very little in terms of your brain actually feeling socially connected. But that's a really limited pool of people, to which you can actually sacrifice non-trivial time and attention. So if you work this all out, the optimization strategy for feeling connected is to have

• 30:58Speaker 01

  community feel really connected in with a relatively constrained number of people that you're deeply involved with them and their lives is like actually the human optimal strategy. And maybe the pandemic helped make that clear, like what you were missing and what wasn't helping. Because we all went through a period of like, what if we all just did the lightweight, easy communication for a year? Oh, yeah, that doesn't cut it. You know, I think that it made that really clear. But yeah, it's another thing, just resetting.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Well, it's also like, social media allowed you to have connections with a huge group of people who you were maybe loosely affiliated with in career, or lifestyle, or industry, or you met at a conference, or whatever. And then... The events of the last year, politically, socially, public health wise, really helped to see who these people were and whether there actually was a shared worldview or priorities or principles. So I think the other thing that it's done is it's helped, it's helped sort of generate kind of a friend purge or an acquaintance purge where it's like,

• 32:06Speaker 00

  look, I don't like hate this person, but like, I'm not like, it started because like, hey, you got to keep this buffer to keep your kids and your family safe. But then it's also like, life is too short to humor, you know, a person who's, let's, let's say, full of some darkness that maybe you didn't know, or, you know, maybe operates under a certain set of priorities that you find to be repugnant.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you got, you got a lot of clear, well, you got a lot of clear indications. I mean, basically also what social media gave us during the pandemic, its basic pitch was like, do you worry that you don't spend enough time just yelling at people and being completely angry? We can help you. If you, if you missed during the pandemic, what it feels like to, you know, be on a civil war battlefield and bayonet charging the, the enemy, if you've missed that in your life, we can, we can digitally recreate it. Which, which by the way, leads me, here's my, my unrelated, the email, but this is my, my, my big idea I'm gestating right now is that we're, social media, it's dead. We just don't know it yet. I mean, it's, there's a lot of momentum going here, but we, there is a, there is a downslide happening in sort of digital culture that is now inevitable.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Well, I would agree with that. I, I looked at like, uh, because they were talking, as we're talking today, that Facebook upheld the ban against Trump. And so a bunch of, a bunch of right wing people were like, you know, Facebook is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But all that aside, what I thought was interesting is somebody posted in response, this idea that Facebook is biased against like conservatives or whatever. It was like, here are the 10 most popular posts on Facebook right now. And it was like,

• 33:44Speaker 01

  All Ben Shapiro, probably.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  All Ben Shapiro, then, then some other right wing guy I didn't know about, uh, you know, anyways, it was all right wing stuff, but not right wing, like, like, not like center right stuff, but like extreme right stuff, basically. And you're like, If this is the 10 most popular things on Facebook, Facebook essentially already is dead to 50% of the population. And it's just overrepresented and overly popular with essentially people our parents' age.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, it's just like and like Twitter, for example, is it's incredibly overrepresented of a very small, in a very small group of people, but those people happen to be

• 34:23Speaker 00

  On the other end.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Journalists and people who have like large, you know, public. So it seems as if like Twitter's at the, but okay. So here's the foundation of my, my, my social, my social media is dead theory. So here's my, here's my idea. So social media pivoted away from the original selling point, which was network effects. Right? The people you know are on here. And this is an easier interface to connect with the people you know than to try to build your own blog or do this or that. Right? It pivoted away from that between 2012 and 2014 to go towards the newsfeed model that Twitter innovated and then Facebook followed, which is we will mine your connections, what you look at, what the people you look at, yeah, to give you distraction. Like it's, it's interesting, like really engaging content because we can mine this.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Socialization, digital socialization moved increasingly to things like group chat and instant messenger tools like WhatsApp. Like, actually, I don't need Facebook's interface to talk to someone. I'd rather just have them on a, on a group chat. Right? So now the network effects go away. It doesn't matter that my cousin is on Facebook or not. If the main reason I'm using it is because it selects the Ben Shapiro article that thinks the, you know, it's going to press my buttons in the moment.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Once that becomes its main selling point, though, it's like, we're offering you entertainment. Well, now you're competing against all the other sources of digital entertainment. And now you're competing against podcasts and now you're competing against the rise of the streamers and you're, you're competing against audiobooks, stuff that's really innovative, really high quality, long form, short form, like all this interesting innovation is happening. And you go through something like the pandemic, you're like, actually, the, the content that you're offering me through social media algorithmically is increasingly just leaning too much on either the absurd or the outrage. That's seeming lower and lower quality to me when I could listen to like a podcast conversation or go from Disney plus the Peacock over to HBO Max. And all this stuff is so much more interesting and higher quality. I don't think they can win.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  They, at least they can't survive at that scale, at a sort of $500 billion scale, if that's their main play.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Well, and like I think about it, it's like, do you feel better after using it? Yes or no? And they're like, I would say Instagram, I feel okay. But the other social networks, I'm, I'm, I'm very rarely ever thinking like, I'm so glad I did this. You know what I mean? It's, it's not a pleasant experience. So you're trapped in it in some way, just in the way that you're trapped. You know, you had to have cable because network television sucked or whatever. What you're somewhat trapped in it, but, but I would agree that I guess it's really just a question of how long is the half-life of the decay?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and, and you don't need the scale anymore. They're losing the, there's no more network effect advantage, right? So there's not a huge, so Facebook has what however many billion users or this or that to produce the content. But you could produce content that is as engaging without needing a billion users. There, once you lose the network effect advantage, now you have to compete against everyone else who is trying to produce interesting content. So then look at like TikTok came along and it was like, we don't, we didn't need the same user base. Okay. If this is the game we're playing, content algorithmically selected that is going to like press some buttons. And then also we're going to be very careful about doling out likes to you algorithmically. So you feel like you're always right on the brink of breaking out, you know? We'll just distill that down to its essence. Who cares if your cousin's on it, right? We'll just like purify that element and they're blowing up past those.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  The competition becomes fierce when it's no longer, everyone you know is on here. And there's no way that you as a competitor can get nearly as many people on your platform. So you won't be as, as valuable. So yeah, that's my theory. And then the pandemic reduced the quality of the content. People came out of doom scrolling on Twitter or fighting on Facebook from the pandemic. Feeling like I just really, I'm associating it with negativity. Like I'd rather watch like a daily stoic video and then an episode of The Crown. And then, you know, get inspired by listening to like a Jaco podcast, maybe instead of looking at an Instagram influencer, fitness influencer, right? I just think, I think it's dead. They just don't know it yet. That's my, that's my theory.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  So I'm curious, because this probably pertains to you professionally, both as a, as a, as an academic and as a writer. When you start to have something like that, like you have a theory or you have an argument or a thesis. And I noticed this when I spent some time with Peter Thiel, as an investor, he's always kind of coming up with like a thesis or a, I forget what he, what did he call it? You, you sort of have like an argument or a, or a supposition about something. How do you then develop?

• 38:47Speaker 00

  That. So like, how would this idea that social media is dead, they don't know it yet? How does that turn into an article, a book, an academic paper, a talk? Or even just like, you know, one of the, I don't know, just a pillar of your worldview? How do you take a germ of an idea and develop it?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Well, so I talk about it. That's my first step. So like, I'm talking about it with you. I'll talk about it on my own podcast. I've written about aspects of it. I bring it up in conversation. I talk about it. Talking about it forces you to structure your thoughts. The mental schema is associated with the idea. Get more definition to them. When they get more definition, it's easier to bring new information and put them on the schema. If it feels stable after a while, I'll usually pitch it as an article. So like, this is where I'm getting with this concept. Like, do I, do I want to pitch this to The New Yorker, for example? Do I, do I think it's there? Once you pitch it to a bigger venue, now that's going to require like a much more studious level of research to really bring in the pieces and then you see if it sticks or not.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Because you have to get buy-in from someone else, right?

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  In each, you have to get buy-in at the dinner conversation. And then, but your friends could just be humoring you. And then to get it through your editor, now you not just have to, it has to be more than compelling. You, you have to be able to get past any reservations or debt. You have to win the argument with them because they usually sort of play the devil's advocate.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has to be airtight then, right? Like, if you're going to publish it, if it's going to be like a New York Times op-ed, a Wired op-ed, New Yorker, like these are various places, like outlet ideas. It's got to be airtight. Like, you can't actually have an aspect, well, that doesn't really make sense. It doesn't really explain this. It immediately falls apart. Now, I'm used to this a little bit because that's what it's like doing the academic work I do. So, you know, I do math proofs as an academic. That whole game is you work over a long period of time until The thing works and it's interesting. It's a good result and all the pieces fit. So I'm very used to like this doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. I'm filling in the pieces, trying to make it work, bringing together the pieces. I'm used to that from mathematics, but you can bring that over to ideas. But I emphasize this to people a lot.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Don't underestimate the amount of time like professional idea people spend thinking about those ideas. It's a lot, a lot of time and you have to think about it like an athlete doing their off season training. I mean, for someone like me, and I'm sure for someone like you, I'm constantly have to be thinking about ideas. I mean, it's hours a day, walking, sitting, reading, like constantly taking notes, thinking, taking notes, thinking. You can't get away from, and this was this, this, this article I wrote, my blog post, it was somewhat controversial recently, called in defense of thinking. And I was basically arguing, uh, we talk about writing. We put too much emphasis on the act of writing. It's all about getting in your writer's hours. You got to sit down and write your crappy first draft. And like you're really, this undersells the amount of time you have to spend thinking about something before it's probably even ready for that.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  That you can't just sit down and write on a blank page. Like you might take 50 hours of thinking about something before you're really ready to start trying to craft it into a written form.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  That's totally right. Um, I never start on a book until I, I've cracked it. Like I have to know what it is. I have to understand the idea. Like right now, I know what my next book will be about sort of vaguely. Like I already sold, I know that the general, this is probably the vaguest I've ever been on a book that I've sold. I know that, that I know the bucket, I could give you the word, uh, that it's about, but I don't actually know what my argument is yet.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I have nervous, you probably feel nervous right now about knowing you that, does that make you a little uneasy because

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  It's not clicked in the place yet. Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yes, I've, it's a, you know, um, uh, Keats talks about negative capability, the ability to sort of have uncertainty or contradiction in your brain. To me, this is the least comfortable part of the project because like, not only do I know vaguely what it's going to be about, but I haven't solved it. I have in my head the day that I want to start. I want to start it on June 16th, which will be my birthday because that's when I started the last one. And so it's like, I could kind of, it's like, I know when the plane is going to have to take off because I can see the end of the runway, but I haven't gotten up to the, the ground speed yet. And so I, I trust the process. I know that it'll happen, but it's nowhere near happening yet.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  What's the process? So what's going to happen between now and June 16th?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  So, uh, right now I'm doing my note cards. So I'm just going, one, I'm still reading widely, but I'm just starting to go through, uh, you know, what I'm, what I've read, organizing the notes. So I probably went through and sorted about, you know, 500 note cards this morning. So I have a huge box of the material on June 16th. To go to your point, I probably won't start writing, but I will lay out all my material on June 16th and go, this is my first day at work, you know, on this project. Where am I starting to see patterns? So I'll start, I'll start in earnest, really trying to crack it. But I talked to so many authors who have just,

• 44:05Speaker 00

  they, they haven't figured out where they're going and how they're going to get there. And then they think sitting down and writing is where to get, is how you get there. And it never happens. There's this great quote from Marcus Aurelius that I think to me is, um, he, he says like, he says, if somebody asks you what you're thinking about, you should be able to answer. Like, you should be able to describe. So, so I think there's obviously a period where it's kind of just vague and, and, and ill-defined in your head. But as you're working towards the start date of a project, you know, going out for investments or pitching or whatever, you know, the sort of shit date is on your thing, you have to be able to go like, this is what

• 44:45Speaker 00

  it is in clear, defined language. And here's how, here's this, the eloquent solution, or the elegant solution that you've come up for. It can't be like loosey goosey. Like, you gotta know.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that and that takes time and it and it feels and it feels distinctive. I mean, so this is what I got yelled at a little bit about. So I write that piece. And a lot of people were like, no, no, no, that's that is the best way to write. That's the best way to work out your thoughts is you got to write it down. It's all about because the premise of this piece is I used to go to these dissertation boot camps earlier in my academic career where I'd give advice to grad students who are working on their dissertations. And I kept noticing that all the advice was about get in your writing hours. You got to write, you got to write every day. And I'm thinking, these are academic dissertations. The writing, you know, that's in some sense, the the craft at the end, you have to do.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  It's the easiest part. The writing is the easiest part, knowing what you have to say.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I didn't say this in the article, and I'll say it now. This is maybe a little bit glib, but I'm like, it's almost like you're looking, you have training wheels. You're a big training wheel proponent on your bike. And you're like, yeah, you got to have training wheels. That's how you bike without falling down. At some point, you have to say like, yeah, but if you want to be a professional bicyclist, you got to learn how to do it without the training wheels. It's like really slowing you down. And so I it's an interesting point. I think we don't think enough about thinking was what I ultimately came along with. It's like someone who's a professional thinker. All of this stuff comes into play. I really think about how and when I think, and this is a big part of my big part of my life. But for a lot of people that you're sort of doing some tangential thinking. We have no, we have no structure around it, you know? It's just like, I guess I need to write. I need to do a thousand, a thousand words a day.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Nothing makes me more distressed than when I hear about a first time author talking about, yeah, man, that last, you know, two months before the deadline was terrible because I had to write eight hours a day to get this book done. I'm like, you didn't do any thinking.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  You planned poorly. Yeah, you planned and organized poorly.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you this sort of taken you. It takes me usually on average about a year to get a book idea ready just to sell.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  No, you can, you can write. I wrote The Obstacle is the Way in less than six months. I wrote this, the book that is at the publisher now in. You know, wrote, wrote it in less than six months, but there was six months of thinking beforehand. And then, you know, however, many years of sort of marinating before. And then there was six months of refining and polishing and, you know, fixing, which goes on now. But the actual sort of core, getting the idea down on paper, that's in some ways the easiest part. If you've done the other hard part beforehand and people don't, don't do that.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Or it's a separate hard. It's a, there's a writing craft hard. Okay. But it's like a craft. It's like, I know how to whittle wood. Okay. I know how to, I know how to shape sentences. I know about rhythm and rhythm and repetition and, and, you know, they're great. But that's like a completely orthogonal skill. There's a lot of great writers, right? Who have never had an original idea in their life, right? And there's a lot of people with really original ideas who can't write it. Yeah. I, my wife would say like the time when I'm most testy and miserable is when I'm like halfway done with a book proposal. I, I feel I'm getting like the pieces are there and they're not clicking. And for me, it creates cognitively, a real feeling of distress. You know, I have these pieces, but I can't quite fit them. It really makes me feel physiologically not good.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  No, I know the exact feeling. I've described it. It doesn't happen as much anymore, but do you remember like, uh, you would have your laptop and you'd shut your laptop? And instead of going to sleep, you'd come back like three or four hours later and it would be like so hot. Like it, it hadn't turned itself off because something was operating in the background. It just didn't quite like click into like restorative mode. That's what to me, sort of the gestation period of a, of an idea is like you, you're not thinking about it, but you really are thinking about it because something isn't connecting. And your mind is just churning in the background all the time. And so, yeah, it, to me, you have to, but obviously you, you, you can't be a perfectionist.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  You have to be comfortable with some certainty, some stuff you're going to figure out as you go. But like, I always say like, don't start until you've figured it out. Like you have to have cracked what it is that you're doing. Otherwise, you're going to end up doing a lot of work and spending a lot of time that's ultimately going to turn out to have been for the wrong thing or in the wrong direction.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna go in a random direction. Yeah, cracking, cracking is the key. And then your taste just gets better. Right? So if you've, you've read more, you've written more, your taste gets better. So now my wife knows, like when I'm working on a big article, it'll be really clear. Like, I don't have it. I don't have it. I don't have it. And then I'll say, okay, I've cracked it. And then like, almost always, I will then, four hours later have finished a draft and it's liked by the editor. Right? Over time, you develop this sense of like, it's not there, it's not there. And it's like, super crystal clear. You know, it's like, nope, nope, nope, nope. Yep. All right, we're good. And you move on. And that's just, I guess that's just built through. But anyways, this is a diversion, obviously, from email. But I think it is interesting, because there's a general point here that I'm fascinated by, which is just the intellectual life in general, is one that is completely underdeveloped in terms of our understanding of it in our culture. And it shouldn't be.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  So all of these type of things, thinking, gestation, cracking ideas, finding internal schematic fits of mental concepts, like all of these things, we don't have any good vocabulary for it. And we're reduced down to like, you know, I don't know, write a crappy first draft, ship, put in your writing hours, you know, I don't know, we don't have much, we just don't have the vocabulary. And we're leaving along the table.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  It's, it's interesting, because we both like sports, and we've both done a little bit of work in sports. Like, you sort of, you go into these locker rooms or these front offices, and it's like, they know how to shape and optimize and get the most out of athletes. Are there people that fall through the cracks? Sure. But like, they can take an overweight, you know, aging star, they can take a raw college recruit, they could take, they could take a, a, a, a small forward from college basketball and turn them into an NFL tight end. You put them in the system, they know what gets the most out of performance. And intellectual life, because I think, two things, it's primarily a solitary pursuit,

• 51:01Speaker 00

  but secondarily, it's the money. Money's not there like it's just it's not as big of a business or an industry. There's not as much riding on it and there's not a lot of one, there's not enough competition where you can judge results. But like, it's always been interesting to me at how poorly sort of writer or artist athletes, you know, manage to to get the most out of their talents. But I also think it's interesting that like, say publishers or movie studios or or or art galleries or whatever, the institutions that benefit from that product, how poor they are at shaping and optimizing talent.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Like every, every sports team has a psychologist, a high performance psychologist that helps get the most out of their athletes. And, you know, you talk to, you know, a publisher, they've got all these athletes and they're just like, I don't know, come back with a book. We hope you can do it. You know, it's interesting. The idea that like talent is not enough. It has to be shaped and optimized. Distractions have to be eliminated, you know, performance has to be enabled to get the best on field product. That was, that was helpful for me to understand this. This shit doesn't just happen.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is really interesting that we don't do more of that in intellectual fields. And that's actually one of the ideas in the new book, which is an idea that I think was new. It's like a scoop, right? I don't think it was an idea that was out there before is I looked at knowledge work in particular. So office work is mainly brain based. And the big point I argued is like, there was this moment when knowledge work became a thing, when office style work, not just in support of a factory, but companies that primarily the value they produce was knowledge based. That began growing, especially in the American context in the 1950s and then became a dominant aspect of our economy since then. The guy who coined a term, Peter Drucker, who coined a term in the 1950s, knowledge work, and really helped everyone understand what it was and how it differed.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  He had this agenda of autonomy that really permeates all of his work and now completely permeates the way we think about intellectual work, which is, it is up to the worker to figure out how to do their things, how to get their work done. And it, it came from a really good place, right? He had been working, doing, wrote a real famous book, a management theory book about GM before he came to knowledge work. And actually, he actually invented management theory. It's not just he wrote a management theory book. This book actually invented the idea that you can study management. I'm sorry, he was really. Clued in on what the industrial world was about, and it's all about assembly line processes, right? It was making this really big point, which was very relevant in the 1950s. Hey, this new type of work, like the guys on Madison Avenue writing the ad

• 53:41Speaker 01

  copy, the Don Draper guys, you can't break that down into assembly line steps, right? You can't do what you would do in the factory, which was have a small number of managers, figure out the optimal process, and then assign those pieces to basically unskilled workers to execute it, something that Harry Braverman called de-skilling. Oh, it's not going to work for Don Draper. It's creative, it's ambiguous. You gotta just leave people alone to figure out how to execute it. And that was a big idea at the time, because managers at that point were used to thinking, what's the optimal seven steps? And then we should just plug people in. We took that too far, though, right? And autonomy became gospel in a lot of cognitive work. That all aspects of the work is up to the individual. That's why if you go into a modern office, they say, yeah, it's management by objectives,

• 54:25Speaker 01

  which is what Peter Drucker's called this. We will make it clear what you're supposed to do. Here's your wildly audacious goal. Here's your OKR. Go do it. We won't get in your ways of how to do it. That autonomy, I think, has been a curse, because when you leave it just up to individuals to figure out everything about their work, how they organize their work, how they train, when they work, and you leave it all up to the individuals, you're never going to get the same innovation that you get when you have an organization thinking about it. Like an NBA team, like we've both done work for NBA teams, the reason why they're so good at optimizing athletes is because the organization, the league as a whole, the organizations as a whole have been really focused on what can we do to make the athletes better? If it had been entirely left up to the athlete,

• 55:05Speaker 01

  like, look, LeBron, here's your OKR. Try to score a lot of baskets, but otherwise, it's up to you. We're not going to get into, we're not going to get into like how you train and how you eat or whatever. Like, that's not for us to tell the athletes how to do. You'd have a lot of overweight athletes out there that, you know.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  No, it's so funny you bring this up, because you're right. Not only do they have a sense of how it works for the athlete, but they have a sense of how it works for the team and for the league. And I think I would argue that two institutions, two organizations that have dealt with the pandemic quite Well, have been the NBA and the NFL, right? And and I on on Sunday night, I went to a Spurs game. I've been vaccinated and I happen to know R C Buford, who's the the G M of the Spurs, a great dude. It was amazing, you know, having seen the pandemic mismanaged essentially at every level in Texas to to pull up at a stadium. Everyone's wearing masks.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  They tested me on the way in, gave me a thing. I sat in a section where there was no one around me and you weren't allowed to eat or drink nearby. And like, it was like, oh, they figured out a system and they're they're the system is based on the information, on the facts, on trying to get to an outcome. But the the way the Spurs is doing it fits inside the way the NBA is doing it, which is which is also the way that they're trying to get the most out of the athletes. I think I benefited. Another way this benefited me in my life is like being a research assistant before I was an author. I learned a system. Now, I probably, if I'm being honest, there's nothing magical about the system that I learned from Robert Green.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  It's that I didn't make it up myself. It's that he was like, here's how a book is made. Here's how a writer does what they do.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  And because I was following a system, it was I've adapted myself to the system and and it's pulled, you know, a product out of me as opposed to me reverting to whatever like the lowest, my lowest impulse or drive is. Do you know what I mean? I think systems allow us to make good decisions.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, apprenticeship. I mean, and Green talks about that in mastery, right?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  There is an apprenticeship phase that happens. Whenever you're going to see someone who ends up a master at something for I mean, you can invent it from scratch, but but often that's not the way to do it. Yeah. Which I mean, I guess the lesson is you have to find a way to induce an apprenticeship in whatever you're doing, because there's probably not going to be a formal system. I mean, I'm all I'm often surprised by how much of my audience coming to me for, let's say, advice on basic productivity things. How do I just keep track of what's on my plate and and manage my time or this or that? And I'm thinking. These employers are paying you a lot of money. They're paying you a lot of money and they're getting like a fraction of the value out of you. Like this is crazy that you have to come to my podcast or something like this to figure out that like, maybe you shouldn't just like, open up your email inbox and like, kind of

• 58:09Speaker 01

  rock and roll and sees what happens. Like, like, basic ideas about weekly planning and daily planning, quarterly planning and capture an organization. And like, to me, why is this not, okay, you're being taught this by your like apprentice, like when you, when you first get in, I agree. Why are not publishers, publishers are the ultimate autonomy engines, right? It's like, I don't know, we just like, have these authors write and it's great.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  They're like, here's a large advance.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Please come back here, please come back in seven to nine months with something that's almost good enough to, to put out in the world and will make us back our investment many times over, right?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  And it's good luck, probably won't work, but we hope enough works that it works out, you know? And now, again, I think it's good for like you and I, because we have, we have systems, we've trained, we're from that sort of like professional writer class. It's like, you know, you gotta get after it, like, write, writers write, you gotta be highly structured, you gotta move. It's good for us, because so, so many other people fall apart, you know, like, because of all this, but it shouldn't be so good for us, right? It should be if I'm investing in an author, yeah, okay. First of all, we've got you a space to work. We have you a mentor where for every day, you know, every week for the next month, we're going to sit you down with like, a great writer in your genre, who's very successful, who's under our same imprint or this or that. And you're going to sit and kind of learn at their feet. Like, all of that should be involved.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I think it's why a lot of really successful general nonfiction comes out of journalists. Because they, they have training, right? They, they go through a much more systematic training.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  It's a job, too.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like you get Robert Caro, well, he, you know, all the writing and he learned how to do investigative reporting for Newsday, or same with McCullough, or same with Isaacson. Like, you get people that had come out of time, limited, high standard, with specific work structure type writing. And now, when they get to write nonfiction books, they can write them like Isaacson in his spare time and, you know, win national book awards type thing. So, uh, yeah, it's crazy. I don't know why we don't, when it comes to cognitive work. And again, we would never put up with this in an athletic situation.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Or the military, can you imagine they're just like, oh, you've been in the military a while, you can be a general. No, you have to go to, you have to go to officer training, then you have to do postdoc work, then you have to have a rotating series of jobs that expose you to different things. You have to have a certain amount of time in. It's a system that, it doesn't always work, and certainly mediocre people make their way up through the ranks, but it does, for the most part, eliminate the people who are utterly unprepared. And it takes the people like you and I, if we were to go through some sort of writing system, it would only add to the original sort of capital that we're bringing to the

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  equation. It would just hone our natural abilities. And so, yeah, that's something I'm trying to think about now that I have a decent amount of people working for me is like, how do you, how do I get the most out of these people instead of just assuming they are going to produce the work that I want to see at the level that I would expect myself to produce?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Which comes back to one of the ideas from the book, which is, okay, one, one aspect where you can be useful if you're managing people is to say, let's actually be crystal clear about what are the things we do, right? And I call them processes. You can use whatever word you want, but like, these are the things like you do or we do as an organization or a team, like again and again, right? This is what kind of like makes up your job and our work. Let's actually think about each of these things and say, how do we want to implement it? And like, part of figuring out how to implement it is, how do we want to keep track of the information relevant to this? How do we want to communicate about this thing? Like, how is the collaboration going to happen? Where are we going to store things? Answering those questions is, it's like a small example, but answering those questions about the processes you come back to again and again can exponentially make the work more effective. Because when you don't answer those questions,

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  you fall back on defaults. Defaults are often lowest common denominator. And in the world of work, for example, the default is often just, we'll just rock and roll on Slack, or we'll rock and roll on email and kind of figure things out on the fly, which is a cognitive disaster. It's a terrible way to try to organize brains to actually produce value in a systematic manner, right? And so, like, that's, that's one step is, let's actually write down all the things we're doing. It's like the case studies in the book. How do we want to do these things? How do we communicate? How do we collaborate? It's like a step in the right direction of like, let's be clear about how we, how we're actually going to work in a way that's going to be best for you. It's not going to burn you out. You're going to produce better work. You're going to be more proud. It's going to be less ambiguous. I think at least that is a first step you can do if you're running something.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  Well, the other thing I think about that I've started to ask more often is like, and this is, this came from having some people who burned out or didn't succeed or sort of problems that festered too long is like, I want to check in on a regular basis and go like, what is not working? Like, what is taking up an inordinate amount of your time? Because invariably, it's something that is actually not important to me either. Right? So it's like, hey, I'm spending all of my time doing, you know, having to respond to this person over here. And it's like, don't ever talk to that person again. Like, they're not important at all. Right? Like, like, you can just, I can cut that Gordian

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  knot right here. Or, you know, hey, you know, formatting things this way takes, we're just looking at something on Daily Stoic, where the, we have like a membership program called Daily Stoic Life. And we were looking at the backend, like, 80% of the customer service requests have to do with people paying via PayPal. Right? And because if it comes via PayPal, then everything has to be done manually. Well, so this was not brought to my attention until recently. But then my first question was, well, what percentage of the orders is PayPal responsible for? And it's, you know, like 5% or something. So it's like, oh, if you tell me I could get rid of 80% of our problems for a trading

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  5% of revenue, I mean, I'm going to take that any day. Right? And so I think one of the things that good managers do is not just like, hey, I'm going to set up the system, but I'm also going to be fine tuning the system. And my job as the manager is to reduce friction for the knowledge workers as much as possible. This is why, why do you think that NBA teams travel in a private jet? It's not because, it was because they used to travel commercially, and it was causing the following problems. And they did the math and said, hey, for a 20% increase in our travel budget, we can address the following problems. And it's also a perk, so on and so forth. But how do we eliminate friction? So we get more out of the things we're already paying for?

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, which sometimes is elimination. Like, okay, we don't take PayPal anymore.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Uh, or this client is just terrible. So we just don't, that's the Tim Ferriss thing, right? His famous story, like, I'm firing this client. Like, this, this person is terrible. Yeah. Or you, you, you put in a system that has more cost, whatever that means, might not be monetary. Uh, like another example of this is, uh, client communication within companies. Like, one example I like was, uh, the particular story was the clients were just all the time hectoring this particular company and they were using Slack and the clients wanted them to be on their private Slack channels. Their solution, which they deployed in desperation, by the way, it was like, we might go out of business. Like, we don't know it's going to work, but we can't do what we're doing anymore was, uh, no, here's how it works. We have a weekly call.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  And on that weekly call, we'll give you updates, you ask any questions and we will commit the writing that everything we said and everything we said we were going to do, we'll write it down and send it to you. Right?

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  So we will, we will get in front of what the real issue here was, which was accountability, like the client, like, are you going to do this? Did you do this? I don't want to have to think about this. Um, so I have to wait for you to respond. So I know you know about it. It got rid of that issue. Like, okay, we have this document, you guys are held to it. And all of this constant back and forth Slack hectoring, now it's an hour once a week. And like, everything gets discussed, it gets written down, that gets sent to it, the whole team's on the call, they make their, you know, whatever. And like, they're done communicating with that client. Yeah, it's another example, because they've lost two engineers at this company due to burnout entirely induced by the Slack barrage from clients. What about this? What's going on here? What's going on here? What's going on here? And so, yeah, it's more of a cost, it's annoying for the client, a little bit more overhead.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  They had to actually have the client sign a contract that said, this is how we will communicate, right? And so that, that, there was a psychological cost that they were worried about what was going to happen. But the benefits were so massive and like, now their engineers could just work.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  It cuts both directions too, right? As a manager, you have to manage down, figure out how to eliminate friction, blah, blah, blah. It would be nice if your manager or the people that you work for, your clients, were doing the same. But it's not how it works. You also have to manage up and you have to say, hey, when you just call me out of the blue 16 times a day, it knocks me off my rhythm all the time. Or, you know, you have to say, hey, I don't answer emails. On the weekend, or hey, you know, set up a system where you are, unfortunately, you have to manage yourself. As you have to manage the person managing you to make sure they don't burn you out, barrage you, eat up your deep work time, whatever. You, you have to figure that out also.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And sometimes you have to earn it. So there's that notion of, uh, you can trade accountability, you know, for accessibility. And Adam Grant uses the term idiocy secrecy credits for this, but I think of it more as like, uh, performance credits. Like basically, hey, if you can deliver.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  You gain a lot of autonomy. Yeah. You're like, okay, yeah. You know, yeah, I'm not that responsive. I only, I have office hours. I don't answer emails all the time. But like, I ship stuff that's really great. You get away with it. If the reason why they're hectoring you all the time is because you keep dropping the ball. I said, number one thing I tell the new people, like, uh, young people I talk to. They're like, I have my first job and I want advice. I was like, you can't ever drop the ball on something. It's just, you have to say, this is not an option. If something comes onto my radar, it could never be an option that I just like, I'm just gonna let that one go. Cause I like, everything will fall apart if that's, if that's who you are. You're going to be constantly bothered by the people above you because they don't trust you to get things done. You will never build a foundation on which you can take a next step up. So you should put all of your energy, reading David Allen, like reading me, like figuring out everything you can.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  To make sure you have very good full capture and organization systems that you're diligently reviewing. Nothing gets forgotten. Even if you can't do it all, you're the one who says, I know about this. I know I committed to this. I can't get it done by Wednesday. I'm sorry. Here's why. Here's my new deadline. But everyone around you trusts that you will never forget something that they put on your plate. It's like the number one thing you can do in your first, you know, two years of employment. It's going to earn you the ability now going forward to start crafting your job more and more towards what you like. So that's like my number one advice, uh, refuse to ever drop a ball, no matter what.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  The wicked feedback loop on incompetence is that you then get ridden even harder. And you have even less time to dig yourself out of this. You know what I mean? Like now your judgment's being questioned. Now you're under more scrutiny, you know, now the, uh, like the, the, the, the people that have worked for me or worked with me that I feel like have their shit together. They make good judgment calls that, that, that are accountable, that, that give it to me straight. I'm like. I don't care if we ever talk, just deliver the results, right?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  And it's the, it's the one who, who has shattered the suspension of, like especially with work from home stuff where it's like, there's a certain suspension of disbelief in, in tail. Like, I'm going to assume you're working all the time, but really all I care about is the results. I, I don't want to see how the sausage gets made, but I'm going to eat it. Right? But if you break that faith, if you get caught not working, or you make a lot of mistakes, or you show, if, if you get a call and they go, hey, what's going on with this? And you're, not only can you not say, here's what's going on, you could be like, wait, what was that again? You know, now, now you're, now you're in a spiral that it's very hard to pull out from because you don't have the slack you need to, to,

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  to, to right the ship.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I tell people, here's a hack. Like, one of the things you should do early on in a new job is say, uh, great, I will get this to you on Wednesday. And then whether or not you have time to get that done by Wednesday or not, write them on Tuesday, you know, afternoon and say, you know, like, Ryan, I'm sorry, I said I was going to get this to you Wednesday. Uh, the schedule got a little tight, so it'll, it's going to be Friday morning, I apologize. And then, and then deliver on Friday morning.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Or Thursday.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Delivered it on Wednesday, right? Because it, it shows that you're on top of your stuff.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Right? Like, it's more important that people realize, like, Cal is on top of his stuff, he knows what's on his plate, he sees the whole picture, he's not going to forget things, he's organized. Oh, I don't care if, yeah, sometimes that gets overloaded and he has to shift, you know, when he delivers, that's not the problem. It's the fact that he's organized. And there's no way more, clearer way to show that you have your, your act together than to say, commit to something and then come back and say, like, I know I committed to this, but I'm going to have to shift it by two days or like by 48 hours, and then hitting that new mark. Because no one would ever say that unless they were actually incredibly organized about what to do, when, am I going to be able to actually make it, you know?

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  Again, it's a simple thing, but it's There's self-awareness.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  So many people don't do this. Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  There's self-awareness there, there's, uh, self-ownership, there's responsibility, there's straightforwardness. And to me, the opposite of that, what's like the death sentence is when, you know, they're like, hey, I'm going to get this to you by Friday. And then you're like, okay, cool, I'll see you Friday. Or whatever. And then like Thursday night, you know, you hear, what was the password again? You know, and then you're like, ah, you haven't touched it. And now there's problems. Now you need help. But you have just, you have just shown me or whoever you're working for, that you're not only not on top of it, you don't feel obligated to be on top of it.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And the worst is if you then try to add an excuse there too, to, if you then try to diminish the importance of the thing. So it's not such a big deal that you're gonna get it done. Yeah. Now you're on my podcast, I use this phrase, facing the productivity dragon. Like it's better to just, you can see, here's what's on my plate. And if it's terrible, it's terrible. And you see the exact extent of the terribleness. This is, look at all these things I'm committed to when they're done. I can't make these pieces work. This is, I'm way overcommitted, but you see the whole thing. You see the whole dragon. Like, don't avoid the dragon. You're going to be much better off because now you can make a plan. Like, okay, I'm gonna have to get rid of this. I'm gonna have to delay this. I'm gonna have to tell them I can't do this. I can get this done really well.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  But a lot of times I think when we get overloaded, we flee, we flee it and say, I just gonna just respond to emails. You know, I can't, I'm just, but you gotta face the productivity dragon at some point. And then say, okay, this is what it looks like. Let me figure out where I'm gonna stab the lance. Like, you know, it's a terrible battle I have to do, but at least I want to come into it with my eyes open, like see what I'm actually fighting. So yeah, I mean, I don't know quite how we got here, but I think it's critical though.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  I think it's a great place to wrap up because I think it's a thing that people struggle with. They think it's about getting your dream job, finding your passion or whatever. And all that's important. But if you can't deliver, like if, if you get drafted, you're, you're playing professional sports. And then you can't figure out how to deal with the pressure, how to be in charge of your training, how to, how to communicate, how to learn the playbook. Like you're, you're not gonna make it because the, the stakes are too high. The competition is too stiff. You have to go, all right, I am, I am way in it. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure out a way to survive. What you can't, what you can't fall prey to, and this is what most people do, is magical thinking or entitlement. Cause both those things will kill you.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  And just a, you know, we're wrapping up. It's like a quick example of that from our lives is like, think about writing. And I don't know about you, but for me, it was like a big goal I had early on in my career is I want to write like bestselling hardcover idea books, right? But you can't just jump into that. Like it's probably not going to work out that way. Right. So you gotta get your foot in the door where you can. Build your skills, earn it, move it up. So for me, where can I get my foot in the door? Student books, because I was a student at the time. Built my craft on the student books. Built up from there to being able to, you know, make that jump. You did something similar like you, you know, your first book, because it was based on your life memoir. Okay, that was a book you could get in the door with because like, okay, it makes sense for you to write that because it's about you and you had an interesting life. And then I know you did like the, the growth hacking as like an ebook,

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  skill building, right? Okay, now, and you trained under all this, under Green and Ferris and other people, and you really saw how it worked. And then you built your skills, earned more and more. And then it was time to like, okay, jump in the obstacle, you know? And just like when I made the jump towards like so good and deep work. So I think there's like a nice thing to pull out of there is yeah, it's not about what's my dream job? How do I get it? It's like, how do I get started? And really systematically with systems, building skills, being responsible, being good, figuring out how to get better, ratcheting up, ratcheting up, ratcheting it up, until you get to a level where now you can actually reach whatever that window is you're trying to get through. And then you make the aggressive jump.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Well, well, Marc Maron talks about this. I think it goes to your point about performance credits to tie this back. He's like, once you've made people money, once you've made other people money, then you have that autonomy. Right? And a lot of people just think, well, I had this great idea. I'm brilliant. I'm special. This is important to the world. And it's like, no, no, you gotta, you gotta fill somebody's bank account first.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Before they're going to give you. So, so some people go like, uh, they get upset that I wrote these other books first or whatever. It's like, the other books would not exist if I hadn't laid the groundwork here. Not only would they not exist because I wouldn't be a good enough writer, but like, nobody is giving, nobody was giving out Stoicism book deals in 2012, you know? It just wasn't happening. And, uh, and, and so you, yeah, you've got to make someone else money. You've got to prove yourself first. And yeah, if you want to, if you want to say, hey, I'm Cal Newport. I have a flip phone and I don't answer email. I don't have social media. That comes from, that's, that's an autonomy that comes from having earned the ability to write your own ticket.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you sold the books, made the money, built the skills. Yeah. And there you go. So yeah, you got it. You have the humility to like build the skills. But then the other side of it is, once you have an opportunity, you also have to be aggressive about it. And I think that's the other hard, I call it the autonomy traps in that old 2012 book. It's the dichotomy is like, if you jump too soon, you're never going to make it to the window. But as you build the skills, if you don't make the jump, once you get high enough, you're never going to get through it either. And I don't know why jumping through a window is my metaphor here, like it doesn't.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  But if you as someone who's jumped out of the window and someone who's jumped out of the window, left the corporate world, there's, there's an optimal point, probably before you have kids, before you're married, before you're too old, before your tastes are too expensive, where you want to be able to say like, hey, I want to work from home. Or hey, I'm, I'm going to, I'll continue programming for you, Google, but I'm going to be doing it on a sailboat around the world. You, you have to be able, that's a risk and you have to be at a place in your life where you're willing to hear, no, you're fired, or that's not going to work. Like you have to be, it's a risk, right?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  You have to be very confident. Yeah. And at the same time, you have to have the humility of like, I'm not there yet. And it's incredibly, it's, this is not very satisfying, but it's incredibly hard. And like, that's actually, that's why I criticized back in that book, this courage culture that was really big back then, where it's all about like, do you have the courage to follow your dreams or not? I was like, that's too simplistic. It's not just about what mattered was I had the courage to go do something. It was like, I had the diligence to build the skill to make that possible. Plus, once I got to that point, having the courage to say, I'm close enough, let's make the jump. And both of those things are hard and so easy to just, this is the, I call it the lawyer trap, right? Like lawyers, they get better and better and better. But there's, they, they have no way of leveraging that skill to make their life radically better. And so their, their life just gets harder and harder and harder.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  And you're like, well, the partner and I work. The operative word there, you have to have courage and leverage.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So build leverage and then have the courage to use it. But you also have the insight to know when you can use it. And it's not always obvious. I guess that's why I wrote a whole book on it.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  But that's the way we should be talking about this problem. Because if we just focus on the courage, then people are going to randomly be doing it. And if we just focus on like, put your head down and grind, skill building, you know, you're going to end up well paid, but overworked and miserable at some point, because you, you never took control over your career. That sweet spot's the whole game, I guess, you know? And it's hard, but I guess it should be hard because otherwise, you know, it would be way more common, I guess. So if you're willing to study that balance, you have a much better shot at making something cool happen.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  I love it. I love the new book. I think you have the most appearances on the podcast, so we'll have to keep the streak going soon enough. Talk soon. All right. See you, Ron.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  The Daily Stoic is today's Amazon Gold Box Deal of the Day for one day only. The ebook is just $3.99 on Amazon. That's pretty awesome. So you can check out the link. We've got it in the show notes page, but check out The Daily Stoic on Amazon for $3.99 or get the premium leather edition at stuart.dailystoic.com.