I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.
So this is the last episode I'm recording up north in my undisclosed location.
I am joined by my producer, Jesse, at the Deep Work HQ.
Jesse, there's a lot I'm going to miss about being up here.
The one thing I am looking forward to is getting back to the HQ.
I need to record podcasts.
Yeah.
I've spent too much time recording podcasts on dresser drawers and in front of windows with too much light.
Without my good mic and without my camera, I do look forward to the HQ.
We do have to put in a giant stuffed black bear, though, so I don't miss Vermont too much.
Oh, I revealed where I was.
Uh-oh.
Okay.
Somehow the paparazzi have not found me.
Anyways, up north or not, we've got a good show.
We got a deep dive.
We could unexpected connection between something I was reading and something we talk a lot about on this show.
We got good questions.
We got a cool case study and our final segment.
Instead of what I'm reading, like we normally do, I'm going to do what I'm writing.
I actually want to talk about a recent newsletter article that that I thought was worth sharing, because it elaborated on some ideas that we had mentioned earlier this month.
All right, so that's the game plan, Jesse.
I think we should get right into it and get started with the deep dive.
All right, I want to try something unexpected here.
I'm going to start with a little-known story from the life of Walt Disney that I came across recently while reading Richard Snow's book Disney's Land.
I am then going to connect this tale from the 1940s to our current moment in the 2020s, and I am going to extract from it a useful strategy to For trying to combat that all too common sense that we are sleepwalking through life subservient to our screens.
Okay, so let me set the scene for this story.
It's the late 1940s.
Walt Disney is going through a hard time in his life.
So here's a timeline you got to understand.
Sort of the apex of the first half of Disney's career was 1937.
That is when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs comes out.
It's the first full-length animated movie.
It was the highest grossing movie of all time when it came out.
So this was a phenomenon.
But after that high point, his animation studio collapsed, had begun to suffer financial difficulties, in particular because of World War II.
So his follow-up films, which we now see as classics like Fantasia and Pinocchio.
They struggled in part because there was no European or otherwise international market for these because of the ongoing war.
Then we get in the early 1940s this big animator strike at Disney Studios.
This was really traumatic for Disney.
Several of his biographers, including my favorite biographer of his, Neil Gablers, talks about how this really was a period of emotional and creative malaise for Disney.
He felt betrayed.
He felt drained.
So here we are as the 40s wear on, The high point of the animation studio is down.
They're struggling.
They're having to do – I don't know if you've ever seen this before, Jesse.
But they were doing propaganda videos on contract for the government animated propaganda videos because they needed the money.
So there's nothing really exciting going on.
They were always short on money.
He felt betrayed.
He's not having a great time.
Then came the trains.
So Disney was fascinated with steam trains.
This is not unusual for someone who was born near the turn of the 20th century.
You have to imagine what it was like if you're Disney's age.
When you were growing up in the 1920s, right, steam engines were magic, right?
Think about it.
You had horse transportation.
It's all anyone had ever known for centuries.
And suddenly you have these massive machines.
You've never seen something like this.
They were blowing and hissing steam like a dragon of a size that you've rarely seen anything man-made that large that could actually move.
And they could rush across the landscape 60 70, 80 miles per hour, pulling these massive lines of freight over giant trestle bridges.
I mean, it was the thing.
There was nothing else to be as amazed by in the period when Disney grew up than it was trains.
So like many people from his era, he always had had a fascination with trains.
He worked selling papers on a train for a while as a kid.
And so he bought – he was 46 years old.
It's 1940.
He's not feeling good.
He buys a Lionel train set.
You know, the –
What do you call model trains you set up?
He's like, oh, this is kind of fun.
Then he discovers that one of his animators, Ward Kimball, was essentially building a full-size steam engine in his backyard.
This started to get Disney going like well, wait a second, what are you doing here?
And so he travels with Kimball.
They go to a train show where I think I forgot exactly where this was.
It might have been Chicago, it might have been somewhere in the Midwest, but it was a train show where they were bringing together all these like great steam engines from times past and it was like really amazing.
And he saw that Ward Kimball was building like a fake set in his backyard to put the steam engine and.
And Disney felt something that he hadn't felt in a little while, which was a spark of inspiration.
And so he hatched a plan.
He said, I'm going to build not a model train, but a 1-8 scale train.
So to put that in the perspective, a 1-8 scale train.
The engine is just big enough that, like a full-grown man, you could sit on it.
And, you know, your legs would kind of be over the side.
But so it's like the size of, I don't know, you think of it as like a wagon.
Right.
So he was like I'm going to build a train at that scale and I'm going to build a track to run this thing on.
Now, he didn't have enough room where they lived.
So he bought a new house.
Right.
This is 1949.
Disney purchases a five acre plot in Los Angeles specifically because the land would be well suited for building this one eight scale train that he suddenly had come up with.
It's like this will be fun.
Right.
He laid out nearly 800 meters of track for his steam engine, which he called the Carolwood Pacific Railroad because it was on Carolwood Avenue.
He ended up with a 46-foot-long trestle.
So that's an old-school railroad bridge that was large enough that it fell under L.A.
County's jurisdiction as a real bridge.
They had to actually check that it was properly built, had loops and overpasses, a gradient bridge, an elevated dirt berm and a 90-foot tunnel underneath his wife's flower bed.
They engineered the tunnel at great expense to have an S-turn so that when you went in one end you couldn't see out the back.
So you had no idea how long.
It felt like the tunnel was going on and on for a long time.
We have some photos, I think, right, Jesse, of this track.
So if you're watching this on YouTube instead of just listening –
We're going to see if we can pull up on the screen.
Jesse will pull up, while we're talking here, some photos from an article I found that were pretty good.
So we see here, there he is on the train.
So that's what 1-8 scale is.
You see he's riding on it, but close to the ground.
Scroll some more, Jesse.
That's the layout.
Look at that.
Oh, I'm so jealous.
And then you see here, there's his barn.
If you're watching, keep that barn in mind.
I'll mention that in a second.
I think there's like maybe one more photo on there.
Yeah, there they are going by the flower beds.
All right.
So amid this circuit, Disney also built a barn where he could store and maintain his rolling stock.
It was also the control room for the –
Pacific Line as well.
And as long as he was building it, he designed it to look like his family barn he had growing up in Marceline Missouri.
This also became a place for him to relax and to brainstorm about future projects.
So he went all in on this.
His biographers talk about him really coming alive once he was able to start working on this railroad, this project that he was spending more and more time on.
He bought a house just to build.
It had nothing to do with his work, but he really began to come alive, which made it all the more surprising when in 1953— an accident happened.
It wasn't a major accident, but he let someone drive the train.
A young guy drove the train and he went too fast and it derailed and some of the steam came out of the engine and a five-year-old girl got some minor burns.
She was fine.
But right after that accident, he's like, okay, I'm done.
And he shut it down and they stored away the cars.
The locomotive went back to, I think they had under a desk somewhere at Walt Disney.
His friends and family were surprised.
Like, wait, you're just going to shut this whole thing down?
But it was not a surprise to Disney, because the Carol of the Pacific project had accomplished its purpose.
It had reignited his ability to feel wonder and motivation to build things and do things that mattered.
And in that barn he had built where he would sit after a day of working with his train, where he'd been working in there and brainstorming he had been, it turned out mulling an idea for the next chapter of his career, the chapter that would occupy him happily for the rest of his life.
He had decided, reinvigorated by that railway project... that he was going to build a theme park.
And that's where he then turned his energy.
Now, Disney used this experiment to overcome the professional malaise.
But I couldn't help think when I was reading Richard Snow's book recently, I couldn't help coming across this story, that there might be a lesson in here that is relevant to people today and who are suffering from what I think is a related condition that's at the same time very of our current moment.
Here is the issue I'm observing today that Disney's scheme might help.
We spend all of our time on screens.
At work, it's email, it's Zoom, it's web interfaces, it's on laptop screens, and it's on our phone.
When we're not in work.
It's on our phone and it's text messages and it's social media, and maybe at some points it's on a TV screen and it's streaming media.
And we're sitting here just swiping these things with our small motions of our hands.
There's nothing wrong with a screen, but weird things happen when most of your life becomes mediated through these screens.
Right.
And when we live in what is basically an artificial or abstract world.
My conjecture is this dulls our nervous system.
We begin to lose what it feels like to be a being that exists in the physical world, that is shaping that physical world, that is enjoying that physical world.
So much of our nervous system, our senses, is built around experiencing the world.
So much of our brain is built around projecting things into the world, imagining what's going to happen and finding satisfactions when they do happen, as we expect.
And we lose touch with all of that when our life is increasingly through this abstraction that we're seeing through screens.
It's a digital grayness where we exist, where these real-world sensations have been dulled and where we get our sensations from.
Instead are these highly optimized and artificial pings that are delivered by memes and comments, and highly produced videos that are squeezed on the glass.
It's a sort of a fake or artificial version of the feelings we would have used to have being out there in the real world.
It creates a condition I call the digital doldrums.
And it makes life seem sort of listless, sort of like you're sleepwalking.
Not miserable, but not really fully all there.
Now, let's bring this back to what Disney discovered, which was the power of engineering wonder.
So if you take something that really interests you, like for him it was trains.
And that has no instrumental purpose.
It's not like this is going to be good for my career.
It's going to make me healthier.
It's something I can brag about because God knows Disney was not bragging about.
It wasn't that cool that he was building this weird train in his backyard.
You find something that has no instrumental purpose other than you find it remarkably interesting.
I think interesting things happen, right?
Instead of buying the Lionel train, you buy five acres of land and build a one eight scale train you can ride.
I saw a guy to give some more examples of this.
I saw a guy on YouTube once who had built a reproduction of the Haunted Mansion ride from Disneyland.
I mean the whole thing.
He had built a darkroom.
He was using tarps to make the passages and there was a track system and actual homemade doom buggies and prop controllers and he really did the best he can and this was like thousands of hours of work.
My old hairstylist in Georgetown that I used to go see.
He took me once to his house and showed me that he had built this – commercial-grade glassblowing studio, that he was building this wonderful art out of glass.
The whole salon he used to work before he left had his custom glass creations hanging from the ceiling.
God knows how much effort went into it, but it was really kind of incredible to see.
I call this engineered wonder, and I think it is an effective way to free you from the digital doldrums.
I think it works because it reactivates your actual analog world nervous system.
You get used to what it feels like to be really engaged with something that exists in the real world, not just feeling these sort of artificial, simulated emotions.
You get used to having an intention in your mind that your nervous system then sees being made manifest naturally in the real world.
That's an incredibly powerful thing.
We lose.
What that feels like when more and more our accomplishments have to do with numbers next to a thumbs up on a social media post, but it feels fantastic when you get back to it.
We get used to how much better the analog setting is to work, and we feel that it feels like they have actual, authentic wonder for something and not just an artificially manipulated emotion delivered through a screen.
And I think, once all that's reinvigorated, that screens no longer seem so great and you begin seeking other things, you can do your version of Disney saying I'm now going to start Disneyland, opening up new chapters of your life that really can be profound or meaningful in a bigger way.
Now look, I know there's an irony that we're using Walt Disney, creator of Disneyland of all people, to give us a solution for escaping artificial worlds.
But I still think there's something here in this notion of engineered wonder, that That can be an important part of building a bridge from a shallow life to one that's deeper.
So there's my monologue.
This was the thought I had when I encountered that story.
And this is what it made me think about.
So I need to go do something crazy, Jesse.
My Halloween decorations are not nearly enough.
Why did you come up with the term digital doldrums?
Have you had it for a while?
No, I came up with it earlier today.
Okay.
But it seemed about right, because when I think of the doldrums, I think about the nautical version of the term, which is, you're in a position in the ocean where you have no prevailing winds.
And so your sailing ship is just sort of sitting there and drifting around.
That's what it feels like sometimes, right?
This life – this very screen-mediated life.
It's not just being distracted on social media.
It's like work becomes this, like artificial performative, pseudo-productive dance of – busily answering emails and jumping off of zooms.
But like all work is the same in this world.
It's all just like moving text back and forth and jumping under these small screens and everyone's very busy and sending google docs back and forth, but nothing's really happening, right.
So you're you're, you're busy.
It's like you're in the, the sailing ship in the doldrums, like furiously trying to adjust your sails and tack, but nothing's happening, right.
And so that's what I thought about.
It really is like the doldrums.
I think we're sleepwalking.
And when you realize what it's like to actually be back in the world again this stuff on your screen it doesn't seem so exciting anymore.
At least that's the hope.
So I like this idea of engineered wonder.
I'm playing with this for my deep life book.
So this is why I've really been thinking about it.
But I wanted to test it out here.
I'm interested in both examples and feedback, by the way.
You can send those to jesse at calnewport.com.
I got to say that guy who built the Haunted Mansion in his yard.
I showed my kids that video.
That's a full-time job.
And I got to tell you, I admire it.
I think that guy has it all figured out, Jesse.
Full-time.
I think he starts working in June to get that thing set up.
It's an amazing build.
All right.
Well, we got some cool questions here.
Some of them a little bit more reasonable to get to.
I'm excited for it.
But first, Jesse, it's time to hear some ads.
So, as you know, I'm recording this ad up in New England, where my family and I have been staying for most of the month.
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All right, Jesse, let's move on with some questions.
First question is from Natalie.
I left a long software engineering career to start an art business, while also learning to paint, with the goal of becoming a full-time artist.
I have a financial cushion to last for a bit.
I'm weighing different strategies for balancing business growth and my creative ambitions.
Typically I have a large time block for the art business before lunch, a time block for marketing and admin for both pursuits after lunch and then painting after dinner.
How should I pursue these two different goals?
Well, I think there's two things going on here, Natalie.
There's the big picture question about what you're doing with your career, the sort of like the general deep life question.
And then I think there's the tactical question about what's the best time to do art training.
Let me start with the easy one first.
Once you're in a steady state, you kind of have your art business going and you're like okay, where is art training?
Go into this.
You probably need to let your internal creative rhythms take the lead.
You own your art business, so you probably have I don't know exactly what it is, but you probably have some autonomy about how this business like, when and where it happens.
Like it's not you behind a counter at a store, I'm assuming.
So you should decide when and where do I do my best artwork?
When am I most inspired?
Like what location, what time?
Make that your time block for doing your painting and then run the art business other places, right?
That's just going to give you a bit of a multiplier on your return of effort for working on a creative pursuit.
Find the best time, best location, because I can.
I'm going to get 20% more out of those sessions.
That adds up over time.
All right, let's go to the general question here, the harder question.
Leaving a long-time software engineering career to start an art business.
I'm a little bit worried.
I know you have a financial cushion but I'm a little bit worried because about how much prep you did before making that change.
The typical argument that I would make in my book So Good, They Can't Ignore You is that you really want sufficient career capital in the new thing you're doing, that you can exchange it for success, that you're not coming into a new field where you have very little rare and valuable skills, because that is a recipe for really falling behind.
And one of the best ways I talk about this in So Good, one of the best ways to check your career capital stores when it comes to a new professional endeavor is to use Derek Siver's concept of money being a neutral indicator of value.
That is, running the art business on your side until the income it produces is enough to cover your needs.
Now you have confidence that the business will work.
Now you make your change.
So if you made your jump before then, and I guess it's all hands on deck with the art business until that income is coming in.
And only if and when it feels stable would I really start prioritizing more time for the more personal pursuit of working on your own art.
My concern is you're going to burn through this cushion and nothing comes of it, because it's hard to run a new business if you don't have very invaluable skills.
So really, I'm just going to say put your focus on that until you feel comfortable and then do more time on your own art and do it when necessary you feel like is the best time for you to do the art.
But you know, I've got some alarm sirens going here Natalie, and I might be missing context here where it's safer than I think, but I want to put out that fire before I worry too much about extending the proverbial house here.
All right, who do we got next, Jesse?
Next question is from Vishal.
I've been a business analyst for 11 years and it provides stability and good balance.
I have a chance to buy a retail convenience store.
The expected financial returns are roughly equivalent to my current full-time role.
This new potential role is a major shift from my current career capital.
However, if successful, owning multiple stores could provide long-term upside.
Ideally, I want to take three to four months off each year.
So I think this question has a lot of related themes to the last question.
And again, I have... deep life alarm sirens going off.
The benefits of a professional pursuit are are directly proportional to how rare and valuable the skills involved in that pursuit are.
This is just the way the market works.
The more you're leveraging rare and valuable skills, the more you get back, either in terms of compensation or autonomy and flexibility.
If you are really really good at throwing a baseball with your left hand, You could get 20 25 million a year for doing that right.
Because it's an incredibly rare and valuable skill.
You can leverage that to get a lot in return.
If you are very, very good at writing dark fantasy novels – like Rebecca Yaros then you can have an extreme amount of flexibility in your life.
You write one book every year or two.
You make a massive amount of money.
That's all you have to do.
You can dictate when and where you work.
The more rare and valuable skills, the better.
I get worried about things like retail convenience stores, because where's the rare and valuable skill?
If you don't have a particular hard-won skill in this field, Then why do you think that I can just relatively easily be making the same money as a business analyst and then maybe buy a few other stores and then I could have a pretty good lifestyle business where I make a lot of money and I don't have to work three or four months a year?
If that was possible without you needing a hard-won skill, guess what?
Everyone would be doing it.
First it would be people, and then you would have like private equity funds come in and everyone would be like this is great.
What an easy business.
I don't need to know much about it.
Anyone can just – if you have enough capital, you can have a retail convenience store.
Do well and just buy three more.
Everyone would be doing it.
I'm always really wary.
If you don't have a rare and valuable skill being applied, I don't trust a person saying this thing is going to make you a lot of money.
It just never works.
The market is too efficient.
The market of professional pursuits and rewards is very efficient.
And if there's ways to do really well without rare and valuable skills, people move into it until it's saturated.
Then people try to automate and systematize it.
And then all the opportunity goes away.
I think of it as like the efficient, I don't want to call this like the efficient job market theory.
Now I could be wrong here, but I know I've seen some books for some stores, including several stores in Tacoma Park.
I know the owners.
These are hard businesses.
It's hard work.
It's hard to scrape a margin.
Almost certainly.
You're getting a much higher return on your time and much closer paths to autonomy and flexibility and being something like a business analyst with a specialty than you are running a retail convenience store.
So all this is just to say, be wary.
Now, that's not to say that this is not a bad business.
Because I'm going to play devil's advocate for myself here, Vishal.
There are some types of retail outlets that can be pretty profitable, like a good McDonald's franchise in a good location can do really well.
And you could say, well, then why does anyone do it?
Well, it's because McDonald's has a – if you want to be a franchisee, they have this rule that says you can't finance more than some small percent of the purchase price of the franchise.
So you have to have – it depends on where you are but many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of capital.
Now, if you have that, it could be a pretty good investment.
McDonald's are relatively turnkey how they run, and you can scale them, and it's –
A situation where not everyone can do it because not everyone has 700000 worth of capital to buy a McDonald's and Silver Spring or whatever it is.
So there is some devil advocate here that if there's capital at play and that's what's keeping people out of the market, or it's an unusually good location and you have an inside connection to it, maybe that helps.
But I just want to make this general point regardless of the details of this whole situation.
I want to make this general point for anyone out there.
If you think a deal is too good to be true like wow, I can just do this and make a lot of money and I don't know much about it, you're probably the sucker in the bet.
Probably the sucker in the bet.
So be very wary about career capital and be very wary A about things that require career capital and be very open to where can I take the career capital I already have?
Specialize it a little bit more in six months from now, have a very big piece of leverage I can use in my life.
If I'm a business analyst...
Is there a new market emerging that has some complicated technical component that I can master and then go freelance and do this 20 hours a week?
Or do this 40 weeks a year and take the other 12 weeks off?
And if I change my living expenses, it can work.
I can imagine many more potential paths to a deep life building on the career capital you already have than I can imagine building a retail empire being the way to get there.
All right, so that's my sermon.
I'm just very worried about anything where, if I'm not leveraging a hard-won skill, I'm nervous about the idea that this is going to be a pretty good or easy or lucrative job.
All right, who we got?
Next up is Doug.
You've said before that the real way to improve as a writer is to write for publications.
My niche is small.
I've submitted pieces before, but the responses have always been no with no suggestions or edits.
I haven't tried often because the process didn't help me grow.
I also prickle at the prospect of using my precious limited writing time to do the non-writing that would come with searching for other avenues.
How should I do this?
Jesse, I feel like I'm in my curmudgeon mode today because I've got another curmudgeonly answer coming.
I don't know.
I'm sort of feeling like Angry Uncle today.
Again Doug, not knowing all your circumstances, and I don't mean to rant, but writing for publications is how you get better.
Now, if you're journaling for yourself, if you're writing fiction just for the creative expression or to share with your friends, if you're poetry because it just helps you get your feelings out of course –.
It doesn't matter if you publish it or not and if it's a pain.
I agree with you.
Don't waste the time.
But if you're trying to become a better writer, like I want to get good at this.
Maybe I want to have this be, if not a career, like a component to my professional life, something I'm known for, something I do at a high level.
Writing for publications is how you get good.
Yes, you've submitted some pieces and the response has been no.
There's been no suggestions.
That's because it takes a lot.
It's hard to be a published writer.
If it was easy, everyone would be like yeah, I'm going to spend four months and start publishing stuff and it's great.
Yeah, it's a hard entry ramp, but it is worth keep pushing yourself to get past that gate of being published.
Stephen King, he writes about this in his book On Writing.
When he first started writing fiction and he was aiming in the short story market.
There was a lot more short story magazines for horror and speculative fiction back then.
Up in his attic.
He took a railroad spike and he knocked that spike into the wall above the typewriter where he was writing up in that attic room.
And he said, that's where I'm going to put my rejection slips.
Not a nail because a nail is not long enough.
And he began filling that railroad spike with rejection slips.
And you know the story he tells in On Writing?
Reminds me of you.
At first, no.
Rejections, no information.
After a while, hey, this was kind of good, but it's not for us.
Maybe a couple sentences of feedback.
After a while, hey, I think this was close.
Steven, I like this.
This is close, but I'm not quite sure about it.
Then stuff started getting in.
And then he started messing around with novels.
They weren't working.
And then he had one that did work.
It was about a young woman who had telekinesis, had this power of telekinesis and what happened in a small town.
And he sold it.
Hardcover, I think it was like a $2,000 advance.
He was a teacher in Bangor, having to work summer jobs to cleaning industrial laundries, cleaning tablecloths from New England, lobster joints and maggots on them.
It's gross, right?
But he needed the summer job to make the money.
The book does pretty well, though.
It catches some attention.
It's starting to get some heat.
He doesn't really know this.
There's no internet back then.
A call comes in to his agent.
They've sold the paperback rights, $400,000.
This is in the 1970s.
Railroad spike filled with rejection slips before he made that progress, which is all to say.
This is part of the rite of passage.
Of writing.
The key is, when you're getting the no's, you say well, how do I get better to try to make the next one not be a no?
So even while you're waiting to get feedback from publication, have a writer's group.
Work with other people.
What's working here?
What's not?
Be brutally honest with me.
Get the feedback.
Try harder.
Try a different format.
Try a different style.
What if I try this?
Maybe this is a better match.
It's that hard work of trying to get accepted is the first major deliberate practice stretch that happens in the life of a professional writer.
Once you're writing for publication, the next large, deliberate practice stretch happens, where you go from not bad to good and then really cool stuff.
Can go on.
So don't write a story.
If again, If your goal is to be like a good writer, don't try to write yourself a story where it's all gatekeepers.
They don't know what they're talking about and you're just going to do your thousand words a day because it's fun and you like the idea of it, and you have your herbal mate tea and your Instagram photos of it.
Don't write your own story about how you want the world of writing to work.
The real story is it's hard, but that hardness is the edge against which the blade of craft is sharpened.
And even that push to get past the simple no.
If you're really pushing, if they anger you, when you push back and you have friends and you have writers groups and you're trying and you're relentless, that's when you start to get good.
And so maybe my problem is I left off that first part, Jesse that sometimes it's hard to even get into publications in the first place.
And that's okay.
That is the first step of getting better.
We're going to revisit Doug too in the case study.
Oh, okay.
Excellent.
Is that the same Doug?
It's the same Doug.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
And the case study is having a great time.
Yeah.
All right.
This will be interesting.
All right, Doug, stay tuned.
We're going to revisit listeners.
Doug story in the case study.
He says like Hey, I just sold.
I went around trying to write for publication and an editor just showed up at my house and said Hey, I just happened to see this on your computer screen through the window.
We're just going to give you this giant check right now.
I'm glad you didn't waste your time writing submission letters.
Doug actually has a cool story.
So I look forward to returning to that.
All right.
Do we have another question from someone with a name that starts with a D?
Because that's what I really want right now.
Daniel.
Ah.
And Daniel says, well, Companies investing in AI see a tool that should decrease time to value.
Knowledge workers should now be able to produce faster, in the company's view.
How should we argue to companies that the long-term benefits of allowing slow, friction-laden skill building outweigh the shorter-term benefits of faster project completion through AI assistance?
So, Daniel, don't have this argument with your company.
Executives are acting differently, kind of delusional about AI.
Because it's this We don't understand the technology.
We don't really understand exactly how it works.
But we're seeing on our phone all these crazy headlines from Fortune articles.
And so I think...
If you get a chat GPT description, what I can tell here is it'll automate all of your work in about 17 minutes.
Wow.
So we should just do that.
So executives are like, we use AI.
And if you're not using AI, then we don't want you here or whatever.
But honestly, it's pretty narrow still.
And we'll get into this more in the third segment.
But it's pretty narrow still the niches in which there are significant productivity improvements happening from AI.
So you have to kind of just tune out the almost delusional exuberance of the executive class right now.
Look at what you do.
If you see people using AI in what you do in a way that seems really helpful, then say hey, teach me about it and use it.
It might help some.
But that's kind of it.
And if you don't have a useful way to use it, you know, tell your boss.
Yeah, I have my chat GPT description and just go on and do the hard work of getting really good and so good.
They can't ignore you.
There is a lot of energy that right now is kind of rootless and disconnected from reality right now.
So you are not probably missing out on some way that AI was going to fully automate your job.
So keep an eye on it, but just look at the people around you.
Hey, are you using this?
Are you finding any use in it?
And if you're like I don't know, I'm like having conversations with it for 45 minutes a day before I write my email to make sure that I feel good about it.
You could be like, that's great.
And you're doing good.
And that's a really good idea.
And then you can go back to your desk and just do the work.
But if there really is something that's helping, then use it.
But I think most people right now, there's not a major – it's okay.
You're not doing something wrong if you don't have a major productivity-boosting use case for AI.
It's not your job to figure out how to use their products.
It's their job to convince you that the product is indispensable.
So, no matter how excited your boss got because he watched a YouTube interview of Dario Amadei saying all jobs are going to be automated within 19 minutes, keep doing your work.
Keep doing it well.
All right, who do we got?
All right, next up is Amy.
Naval Ravikant in his podcast with Chris Williamson says that inspiration is perishable.
He argues that there is value in doing things spontaneously instead of having scheduled time for it.
You won't be in the mood to do that thing when the time arrives.
He also mentions that being able to do something that you want at the moment you want it is liberating.
He does embody...
He does embody the removing the unnecessary overhead part of where he has no meetings, et cetera, but says that the overly scheduled life is not worth living.
Does this contradict with the deep life?
I mean not to be spicy and like every one of my answers today, and maybe it's this New England air, but Naval is basically describing the life of like an 18th century aristocrat.
Like, yes, if you're a moneyed gentleman.
And we can play it if you want to play the clip.
Do you have a clip of it?
Well, I think you captured it.
I think I captured the main thing.
Okay.
If you're the type of person that would come calling in a Jane Austen novel, sure.
It's probably right.
This is like a great way of living, right?
Because our income comes from our investments and we have freedom of time and we want to use the time in the highest ways.
And to have a day that's overly scheduled.
It probably is like not as life-affirming, as sort of taking the interest as it arises and pursuing it.
And it could be that you're like –
I don't know, like Jason Priestley – I just said Jason Priestley.
Jason Priestley is from Beverly Hills 90210, Shannon Doherty's brother.
I'm thinking about someone who's very similar –
Joseph Priestley, I think.
Let me just get this name right.
Jason Priestley.
You need to be like Luke.
I don't remember this guy's name.
Jason Priestley.
All right.
So who I am thinking about here is Joseph Priestley.
I'm pretty close, Jesse.
Yeah.
And similar to Jason Priestley.
Joseph Priestley was a gentleman, scientist from the 18th century, contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, who he crossed paths with, who helped isolate oxygen because he, just like, ran these experiments, because today I shall horse ride, tomorrow I shall work on experiments.
And I agree.
It's probably a really interesting day-to-day way to live.
But Naval Ravikant is an incredibly successful seed-level investor who had early money in Uber and all these other types of companies and has a lot of money and doesn't have to like a.
Gentleman aristocrat of the 19th century can just sort of like let his day unfold.
The rest of us.
However, if we want to master a craft that's going to be meaningful and profitable, it takes really hard work.
It's diligence.
Diligence, not just to return to that craft day after day and push yourself deliberately, but the diligence to say no to other things that are more interesting in the moment, because crafting that skill requires repeated time.
You want to produce something that the market respects.
Produce something that matters, to have leverage.
Create leverage in your life through the value you produce.
That is hard work.
It's diligent work.
You have to time block.
You have to work with your motivational systems.
It's not always fun, but it can be really fulfilling.
I'm sure Naval went through all this when he was an early stage investor, making his moves early on and trying to understand the market and get in on these early startups he was involved in.
It was hard work, but it was probably also really satisfying in that stage of life.
So anyways...
I'm sure Naval is right that it is very liberating not to have a schedule.
And actually, you would enjoy a lot about your life in the moment.
But most of us don't have that opportunity.
But more importantly, and I think this is maybe the contrarian stance here, is it really better?
Again, when are people alive?
When are they fulfilled?
When they have a purpose they're pursuing?
When they're able to Take their energies and to shape them with discipline and motivation to creating something that makes the world better or that's interesting.
What deeper satisfactions, outside of those of community, do you get in?
Actually, that type of motion, that type of movement towards making your intentions manifest concretely in the world.
To borrow the Matt Crawford phrase.
And that's often hard.
Crawford talks about that in shop class of soul craft, the deep satisfactions of commercial electrician work, bending those conduit almost like art, so that all of the wires can fit into the commercial junction box and it just works.
That's hard.
You're bending pipes.
I watched our AC guy bend like two pipes a few months ago.
We got a new AC involved.
That's hard work.
You're heating it up at the soldering thing and you're bending it.
But he was pretty satisfied when he was done because he made that thing work.
And the machine turns on and the house gets cold.
So I don't know.
I'm sure it's fun.
I'm sure it's fine in the moment.
I'm sure it is liberating to not have a schedule, not be pushing.
But when you're pushing on the right things, sometimes that's even better.
All right.
Hopefully our call today, Jesse, doesn't get me fired up anymore.
We need something to... I don't know what it is, but we need something to calm me down.
So if this is a call that says, how could I find time to deep work when I am on a submarine in charge of the nuclear reactor and it requires 18-hour shifts and my child is with me and I'm doing childcare on the submarine while I'm doing that?
When am I doing my deep work?
I hope it's not a call like that.
I hope it's something that's going to call me.
Here we go.
Hey, Cal, this is Catherine.
You've written a lot about how we shouldn't be beholden to our email inboxes and the email that comes in should not set our priorities for the day, which makes total sense to me intellectually.
But as a lifelong inbox zero person, I find it incredibly difficult to let go of the sense of control that comes from addressing everything in my inbox.
Do you have any suggestions for people, people like me, who want to reply to things and address things that come in?
Are there half measures that you would suggest we take or kind of other strategies to lessen the stranglehold of the desire to keep on top of our inboxes?
Thanks.
Let me ask you this, Jessie.
Do we still have the slow productivity theme music loaded up on that board?
Because I think this will, I'm in a spicy mood.
I think we've got to calm things down.
All right, that's putting me in the right mindset here.
So I'm going to approach this question with calm.
So I'm going to start by saying with calmness.
I know it is a common thing people say about email.
Don't stress what's in there.
Don't make that be your priority.
There's more important things than it.
These aren't urgent.
People should have better expectations.
I know that's a common response to inbox overload.
I don't agree with it, though.
I actually think... you should deal with what's in your inbox.
You should be able to deal with everything in your inbox.
And the solution is not to pretend like your inbox isn't there.
It's not to pretend like people's expectations are wrong for emailing you.
It is to reduce the amount of those emails that arrive in your inbox in the first place.
I'm also an inbox hero person.
I get very stressed by it.
It's social stress.
We talked about this in the context of text messages in the last week's deep dive.
So I wrote a whole book called The World Without Email.
It came out in 2021.
And the whole premise of that book, well, I guess there's two premises.
The premise is having a lot of back and forth communication is terrible for us.
It makes us stressed out.
It doesn't make us more productive.
But the main idea of the advice in that book is is we can re-engineer how we collaborate in a professional context so that we're not so dependent on unscheduled messages that require responses.
That's the thing that creates an anxiety-producing inbox full of messages that have to be dealt with is that you have a dozen or two dozen ongoing virtual asynchronous conversations unfolding, with messages being bounced back and forth.
So any moment you look in your inbox...
75% of those conversations have the next message waiting for you.
And you kind of have to answer those pretty quickly, because when you bounce it back to them, they'll bounce it back to you and you'll bounce it back to them.
And you're doing this game where you're trying to get to an asynchronous conclusion before too much time goes on.
So you have to check that inbox and you have to get down to zero.
And by the time you get down to zero, there's 24 more messages arrive because they just bounced them back to you.
The key then is not to ignore that.
It is to stop there being so many proverbial ping pong balls coming in your direction.
And the whole second half of that book, or what's it called?
A World Without Email.
I was going to say How to Become an Email Superstar, which is another awesome title.
But A World Without Email.
The whole second half is saying when you get emails that are part of a conversation, so not something you can just either informational or something you can just answer with a single message.
When they're part of a back and forth conversation, ask yourself, What is this conversation about?
What type of thing is this trying to bring us to a resolution about?
And then you have a short-term and long-term solution here.
Short-term for that particular conversation.
Say how can I respond to this email that is going to move this out of unscheduled messaging from here on out?
And that might mean spending more time on that particular email.
They say, okay, here's the decisions we need to make.
Here's the way I think we should do it.
You finish this draft by Wednesday, put into this Dropbox folder.
By close of business, I'll pick it up first thing Thursday morning.
I'll annotate it.
I'll have any of my annotations in that Dropbox version by noon.
You can pick it up any time after noon on Thursday morning. to act on those.
By the way, we have a meeting on this unrelated thing Thursday afternoon.
So any unresolved questions, let's just chat real quickly after that meeting.
But otherwise, whatever you have in there at the end of day Thursday, I'm going to send on to the designer.
We'll have that report put together.
That email is more of a pain to write than just answering the current email with like yeah, I think so, but when are you available?
It takes more time to write, but you have just cauterized the wound of all of those back and forth messages.
That conversation will no longer generate new messages that require a response in your inbox, so the effort was worth it.
So we call that process-centric emailing.
You respond to ongoing chains in ways that breaks the ongoing chain.
That reduces the pressure in your inbox.
That's the short-term solution.
The long-term solution is you say, what is the general type of work that this responds to?
Like, is this conversation about something that I do again and again?
Is there like a type of report we put out?
Is there agenda planning we do for this weekly meeting?
Is there client issues that come in that are kind of complicated to figure out?
What is the regularly occurring work-related process that this email conversation is related to?
And you can step back and say Let's put in place a different protocol for dealing with this type of thing.
Here's our process for how we produce reports and we synchronize it.
We don't need unscheduled messages.
Here's our process for dealing with clients.
There's three days a week where they can call at this time if they want.
They don't have to if they have nothing to talk about.
But we will be there and we will answer and chat with them about any question you have.
We'll have our intern take notes.
We'll send them a summary of the notes right after and about all the things we've committed to doing, and And when they next call, we'll tell them how it's going.
And there we go.
We now have a way of dealing with clients that don't require back and forth messages.
So the long-term solution is creating protocols for regularly occurring business processes that are right now generating these unscheduled back and forth conversations.
That is the killer of inboxes.
Back and forth conversations consisting of unscheduled messages that require relatively timely responses.
That is the productivity poison that has to be neutralized.
And in this sort of medical analogy, the activated that you would use here and I'm really stretching this analogy is being smarter about process and protocol.
So I don't think we should ignore inboxes.
This is, by the way, why I think most advice about inboxes fails, because it ignores the psychological reality of having messages waiting that require a response.
And when you tell me to batch, when you tell me to don't check email first thing in the morning, when you tell me to tell people to have new expectations for when to expect a response.
None of that works when you have dozens of messages that really do need to be replied to quickly for you to be a useful collaborator in your company.
There's too much social stress around it.
So we've got to prevent those messages from getting to the inbox in the first place.
Read a world without email.
More people should read that.
I mean, it's not that that book did poorly, but it probably came in a little bit under the radar in 2021.
There's a few other things happening in the world and people weren't thinking that much about reengineering their business processes.
So check that book out if you're curious about the type of things we're talking about.
I don't know if the theme music really calmed me down, Jesse, but I tried.
It's good to hear it again.
Yeah.
All right.
We got a case study here from Doug, who I sort of gave a sermon about Stephen King and a railroad spike.
I gave my son that same sermon, by the way.
I made him read on writing the Stephen King nonfiction book, so I'm already fired up about it.
Doug, let's hear your case study because I think it's going to make me chill out a little bit.
All right, so Doug says, I'm a public school teacher in Atlanta, and I also write a blog.
You talk often about how time and place affect creative energy, and I've leaned into that more than ever this summer.
The routine I've settled into has been…
One.
I do most of my writing in the nearby university library, which is only about a mile and a half from my home.
It is beautiful, inspiring, and mostly empty over the summer.
Doug, I've been doing the same thing here this summer.
I did a lot of work at Dartmouth and I was in the tower room again today.
It's empty.
It's motivating.
I love it.
All right.
Two, I write there in the mornings, usually for 90 minutes to two hours.
I don't set a timer.
That's just about how long I usually maintain a flow state session.
Three, to get there and back, I willingly walk even in the Atlanta heat.
I choose a route that takes me through a nature preserve on the grounds of the university and then through the prettiest part of campus.
It takes about 30 minutes each way.
That whole routine is incredibly productive for me without feeling like work whatsoever.
The time place and mode of transportation makes it feel like an indulgent choice of how to spend my time rather than work.
This deep summer has been incredibly satisfying.
It's funny.
Everybody I know is worried about me.
I haven't done any of the things teachers usually do over the summer, so people are worried that I'm bored and depressed and they're surprised when I tell them it's been one of my favorite summers ever.
All right, mea culpa, Doug.
You say here that the writing you're doing is for a blog, which I think might be exactly one of those cases I was talking about, where you don't necessarily have to worry about publication.
You're enjoying the craft of writing, you're getting better on your own pace and you're reactivating your creative circuits.
This reminds me a little bit of the engineered wonder we talked about in the deep dive, right?
I mean, it's a little bit over the top, which is what's good.
30 minutes, beautiful library, two hours, isolation, flow state.
I mean, I think you're getting benefits right now that might be completely unrelated to the writing.
And then you add on top of that the benefits of having a creative outlet during this quiet season in your year.
So I am okay that you're saying I don't want to, right now, waste a lot of time trying to get better with publication, because your goal here is not.
I want to be a published novelist or like a well-known columnist.
So my rant before doesn't apply to you Doug, but does apply to other people who heard that.
And we're thinking like yeah, I want to be a professional writer, but I shouldn't have to submit things.
That takes too much time away from my writing.
That's who I was talking to, but Doug, your deep summer sounds delightful.
A great example of lifestyle-centric planning and a great example of engineered wonder, that idea that we talked about in the show's opening.
All right, we got a great final segment.
We're going to talk about an article I recently sent to my newsletter that I want to bring to your attention.
But first, Jesse, let's hear from another sponsor.
So here's the thing about aging.
When you're a guy, guys don't think about their skin.
Not in the way that women know they should be thinking about it.
So what do we do?
When we're young, we can spend all day in the sun basically using industrial roughs removing acid to help our suntan get darker, and our skin still looks like a young.
Scott Baio from Charles in Charge.
Jesse last week thought my reference to growing pains was too old-fashioned.
So Jesse, I updated it to something that the kids would understand.
It was either that or the young character – oh, God, what is his name –
I don't even know his name, but the boy who moved to the dude ranch from the city in the 1989 Nickelodeon show Hey Dude.
That was the other reference I was going to make there.
So anyways, men don't think about their skin.
You're young, like whatever, it's fine.
Then one day, as you grow older, you wake up and your skin suddenly looks like you're a grizzled old gold prospector who, there's a 50 chance, may actually be a ghost.
And you think, why did anyone tell me, right?
I'm supposed to take care of my skin.
And you sort of wander through Macy's and yell out, retinol.
What is retinol?
I want you to avoid that fate.
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They actually accidentally sent me two sets and someone relative of ours was visiting and was like I want that set.
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If you run an e-commerce business, this is what I want to talk about now, Jesse.
If you run an e-commerce business, You know the best way to be successful is to keep your customers happy.
And you know what?
You build trust with your customers one package at a time.
That is why smart retailers use ShipStation.
With ShipStation, you can sync orders from everywhere you sell into one dashboard and replace manual tasks with custom automations to reduce shipping errors.
And you can do this all at a fraction of the cost.
If we ever add an e-commerce piece to our business Jesse, we would 100 use ShipStation so that we could easily track our orders, print labels and enjoy discounts.
With ShipStation on board the only thing standing between us.
Let's think about this, Jesse.
But if we had ShipStation, the only thing standing between us and a business fortune would be and it's a small thing our complete lack of any viable idea for our product to sell.
But if we solve that problem, ShipStation would help us become very successful.
All right, there's two things I want to highlight about ShipStation that caught my attention.
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You can also get up to 90% off of FedEx rates.
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You can also seamlessly integrate their services with selling channels you already use.
And they have these features that'll make your small e-commerce business seem like it's one of the major players.
For example, if you use ShipStation, they can do automated tracking updates that they send to your customers.
With your customers, your company's branding in the email.
So very cool.
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Go to ShipStation.com slash deep to sign up for a free trial.
There's no credit card or contract required, and you can cancel any time.
That's ShipStation.com slash deep.
All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment.
We usually in the final segment talk about something that I am reading.
Today I want to talk about something that I'm writing.
This is an email that went out to my newsletter at calnewport.com last week.
It was called No One Knows Anything About AI.
If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, calnewportcom.
Each week I have an essay about the type of ideas we talk about here on the show.
So I wanted to read a couple excerpts from this essay about, because it gets at a topic we talked about a couple times already briefly in the show in recent months.
So I began this essay by saying, I want to present you with two narratives about AI.
Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions.
So the first narrative that I emphasize in this article is the idea that Computer programming is very well suited for large language models, because programming is basically well-structured text.
Models are good at producing that.
It's also easy to train models on it, because you can compile the code that it outputs and if it works, give it a good reinforcement learning signal, and if it doesn't, a bad.
So it's really like the best case scenario for training language models.
And so this one scenario says it's doing great and programming is basically being taken over by AI.
Here's a few quotes I put to support that narrative.
The CEO of the AI company Perplexity says, said that new AI programming tools have cut the time for his engineers to complete tasks from three to four days down to one hour.
He now mandates that all of his employees use it.
An article in Inc. said the world of software engineering AI has changed everything.
Another article says the tech sector has seen 64,000 job cuts this year due to AI advancement.
And they point out Microsoft in particular had many thousands of those cuts.
Because of AI advancements.
There was a big new splashy Atlantic piece that said the computer science bubble is bursting.
This is my academic home.
Because AI, it says in this article, is ideally suited to replace the very type of person who built it.
So why bother learning computer science?
So you read these type of things.
There's dozens of these articles every day.
And you say, yeah, okay, computer programmers are rapidly going away at the telegraph operator.
This is the first place where AI is having a huge seismic disruption.
But, as I point out in the article, there's a completely different narrative out there depending on what articles you read and what experts you're quoting.
So, for example, just a couple weeks ago, the AI evaluation company Metter M-E-T-R released the results of a randomized control trial where they took two groups of experienced open source software developers and they said great, here's a bunch of tasks, programming tasks for you to do.
Group A, use AI tools.
Group B, don't.
And guess what?
I'm going to quote the paper here.
Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without.
AI makes them slower.
Meanwhile, we're getting all these quotes from experienced developers who are using these tools.
Like, yeah, they're useful.
But this idea that they are like the tech leaders are saying, about to take over all programming jobs like this is preposterous.
Simon Willison said quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career, thanks to the invention of the table saw.
The tech CEO, Nick Comey, said the following responding to the claim that the number of people required to produce software is drastically reducing.
He said, I feel like I'm being gaslit every time I read this and I worry it makes folks early in their software development journey feel like it's a bad time investment.
Okay, but what about like Microsoft firing 9,000 people because now the AI can do their jobs?
Not what happened.
Take a closer look at their press release.
What's going on?
Yes, they cut a lot of jobs across many different divisions.
Not because they were replacing those jobs with AI automation, but because they were trying to free up funds to invest in their AI divisions, in particular, to invest more money into the help pay for the huge expense of running these AI data centers.
So yeah, technically speaking, it's correct that Microsoft fired 9000 people due to AI advancements, but not because they were replaced by AI, but because their work on AI advancements is so damn expensive.
Same thing with the computer science major bubble bursting.
Later on in that same Atlantic article, they noted there's another reason why those majors might be down.
The tech market started contracting after the pandemic because there had been a lot of spending in the tech industry during the pandemic and now they're cutting back.
And as a professor said in that Atlantic article, enrollment in the computer science major has historically fluctuated with the job market and prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than when they started.
This was my first exposure to computer science when I was a young computer science undergraduate in the early 2000s.
2001, dot-com boom had happened, money was contracting and you know what happened to computer science majors.
Everyone was worried, like, oh my God, where did all the majors go?
And then they came back, and then they went down again during the Great Recession.
Then they came back.
It just goes up and down.
So what's the point here?
Let me read my conclusion.
I'm not trying to battle, like, hey, which of these is right?
Here's what I want to say about there being two completely different narratives on the same topic, all from the same two or three weeks.
When it comes to AI's impacts, we don't yet know anything for sure, but this isn't stopping everyone from pretending like we do.
So here's my advice for the moment.
Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.
Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI.
Read widely and, more importantly, ask people you trust about what they're actually seeing and, And beyond that, follow AI news with a large grain of salt.
All this is too new for anyone to really understand what they're saying.
AI is important, but we don't yet fully know why.
So there you go, Jesse.
I just thought it was really interesting that I could find a huge number of articles saying one thing and a huge number of articles saying the other thing.
And it's not like these are sequenced.
Like we used to think this and now our opinion changed.
These are almost all from the same two-week period.
Right.
So headlines are getting out of control when it comes to AI.
Wait until you see the stuff you do is being affected and then talk to actual people who are being affected and say how, because the headlines will drive you crazy.
You're either going to start digging a bunker and doing the pull-ups on the bar from Terminator 2 that Connor has to start doing when she's in the mental asylum, because she knows that the Terminator war is coming, because she's seeing the future and she's trying to prepare for it.
I don't remember her first name.
Man, I'm getting so old connor.
John connor is the son and well whatever, she got really ripped.
The actress who was playing yeah, john connor's, you know what i'm talking about.
Yeah, uh.
So you're either doing that, like preparing to she i think at some point john connor's mom can fire she's firing like an m60 from like a shoulder crook, so you can prepare to do that or, on the other hand, you can be shorting all tech stocks because it's all like a crazy inflated bubble scam, and Or you could say like I'm not going to follow those headlines right now because most of them are crazy.
And it's not my job to figure out what's useful about these products.
It's their job to show me indisputably this is vital for your life.
That was clear to me when I first saw Google.
That was clear to me when I first saw email.
That's been clear to a lot of computer programmers when it comes to some of these new programming tools in terms of, like really speeding up the time of figuring out how to write boilerplate code or figuring out library calls.
When it's clear, it's clear.
And if it's not yet clear, you don't have to go sifting through headlines to figure out why.
It's the product's job.
It's the company's job to figure out why they're useful.
Don't trust the headlines.
Grain of salt.
No one knows anything.
Everyone pretends like they do.
That's basically my summary of AI.
I would say, Jesse, this is one of the spicier episodes we had in a while.
But again, I think it's this cool New England air.
I mean, it's like 72 degrees right now, Jesse.
I don't want to make you jealous.
Yeah.
And there's like almost no humidity.
We got to just build a compound up here.
That's the plan.
We need a Deep Work compound to just escape and have me just do rants about writing habits and AI.
That's the goal.
All right.
Speaking of which, that's all the time we have for today.
I'll be back next week with another episode, God willing, recorded from the Deep Work HQ.
I'm looking forward to that.
But until then, as always, stay deep.
Hi, it's Cal here.
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