Back in 2008, in the early days of my writing career, when I had just published two books and my newsletter was still new, I published an essay with an anachronistic title.
It was called, Would Lincoln Still Be President If He Had Email?
I actually want to load this newsletter essay up on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.
Here it is from my calnewport.com website.
I'll be honest, Jesse.
My main motivation at the time I remember this clearly was I just wanted an excuse to use this meme, which I thought was funny.
For those who are just listening, it basically shows on one side of the picture there's a guy with reading glasses and a typewriter and it says research paper on a handwritten side above his head.
And then on the other side, there's a sign lit up with bulbs that's labeled the internet.
And under it is a dinosaur and a woman in a bikini wearing birthday hats with a birthday cake and fighter jets flying behind them.
I remember at the time I thought that was funny.
But if you...
If you look at the actual article, if you look at the actual content of this post, I was making an essay, or an argument rather, in this essay back in 2008, that perhaps many of the heroic figures of time past would have had a hard time being as impactful in our current world because of all of the distraction we now face because of the internet.
Now I mentioned email in the title of that 2008 post, but if I was to rewrite that today, I would have to also mention would Lincoln have been president if he had had not just email but smartphones and social media and AI and online mobs and streaming entertainment and video games and mean culture and so much more?
At the end of that article...
I asked the following question.
I say this.
History's greatest figures have been those who are willing to put in those long, hard hours of difficult focus on the difficult questions of their age.
Do we have that ability in us today?
Now, that seemed to me to be an important question back then.
The way I saw it back in 2008 was, you know, how many potential Lincolns are we losing today?
Because their ambition is redirected today into things like video game culture or chasing clout online.
Or maybe their minds never sharpen to the point where they can become influential because that type of development is lost to the much easier distractions they can face on their screen.
I'm not the only one to have this thought.
Here's a tweet from 2020 that sort of did the rounds.
This is from Owen Cyclops.
He wrote the following.
The main issue with video games is that a guy who, if he lived in the 1820s Germany, would have done something like document every type of beetle in his local province instead ends up making a 26-part YouTube series about how to get all the rings in every Sonic game.
So a lot of us have or had that fear that the distractions of the internet might be derailing a lot of what might have been very interesting, meaningful or significant lives.
But here's the thing.
In the years since I wrote that post back in 2008, I've read a lot about Lincoln.
I was doing a count on my bookshelf as I was preparing this episode.
I've read at least a half dozen full-length biographies of Lincoln, and that number continues to count.
And in doing so, in learning so much about our 16th president, I've come to see this issue differently.
It's true that Lincoln, of course, did not have digital technology trying to distract him, like smartphones and video games, but the world he grew up in was defined by many of the same general issues that we worry about today in online culture, issues like distraction and danger and darkness.
And yet he was able to cut through all of that and make one of the most improbable rises in the history of America.
So I now believe that not only would Lincoln have still been president in a world with digital distractions, but that we today can actually learn important lessons for thriving in our own time by looking back and studying how Lincoln evolved, escaped the trials and traps of his
This then is what I want to talk about today.
Lessons for escaping the worst elements of digital culture taken from the life of the great emancipator.
As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.
Today's episode...
The Lincoln Protocol.
All right.
So before we can draw lessons for our current time from Lincoln's life, I first need to elaborate my claim that Lincoln's time has a lot in common with the traps of our current moment.
So what I want to do here is I'm going to take those three concerns and of our current moment that I mentioned briefly in the intro.
And for each I'm going to argue that the same general concern existed in the time and the place where Lincoln was coming of age.
So let's start with distraction.
This is the thing we think about most often when we think about the traps of current digital culture.
We have apps on our phone.
We have high-budget streaming content, addictive video games.
These all offer a sort of hyper-engagement that can be so compelling in the moment that it keeps us away from other, harder activities that are ultimately more useful or rewarding.
Now, Lincoln didn't have any of those technologies, but in the time and place where he was coming of age, he faced similar issues.
Consider Pigeon Creek.
This is the town in southeastern Indiana where Lincoln spent most of his formative years.
He was there roughly from the age of 7 to 21, before he sort of went off and was an independent adult.
Like many frontier towns of that time.
In the first half of the 19th century, the biggest sort of life-diverting distraction that people faced wasn't their phones, but was alcohol.
Now, I'm going to bring up on the screen here a quote.
This comes from William Lee Miller's magisterial book Lincoln's Virtues, but this is a quote that's actually contemporaneous.
So this is someone who remembered Pigeon Creek from the time of Lincoln talking about it.
I'm going to read this here.
This is someone from Lincoln's time talking about Pigeon Creek.
Incredible quantities of whiskey were consumed.
The custom was for every man to drink it on all occasions that offered, and the women would take it sweetened and reduced to toddy.
So there was a lot of drinking going on.
So almost everyone drank back then.
That's sort of how you escape the hardness of life on the frontier.
Almost everyone also smoked and chewed tobacco, men and women.
Gambling on almost everything was also endemic.
Miller, in his book, dregs up a historical record from a town that was not Pigeon Creek but right next to it, a town that was right near where Lincoln grew up.
And Miller says if you look at the archives of that town it shows that in 1819 alone there were three separate retail liquor licenses granted right.
These are what you would grant for basically a saloon.
And that was in a town that had a population of less than 100.
So this was everywhere.
Drinking and related vice was sort of the main thing that was distracting people in the moment was much more appealing than the hardness of what you had to face in your life.
All right.
What about danger?
This was the other thing I mentioned about our current digital world.
That's a bit of a trap, but we have to worry about encountering bad faith forces that will try to disturb us or push us into all sorts of disturbing beliefs and behaviors.
We also face online the threat of sort of cancellation from online mobs that are policing the purity of their tribes.
All of this can make the online world of today a sort of a dangerous place that can suck you in and disrupt your life to the point that meaningful action becomes all but impossible.
But here's the thing.
In Lincoln's world back in Indiana in the first half of the.
There were mobs there as well, but these weren't digital cancel mobs.
They were actual mobs.
And the threat that they posed was not you're going to have your reputation sullied, but physical violence.
Men fought all the time in these frontier towns.
If you read Lincoln biographies, nothing comes through clear from this period than the amount of violence that was going on.
You would fight each other for social standing.
You would fight each other out of boredom.
You would fight each other out of revenge.
And these fights could be brutal.
People would lose their eyes in this fight.
Lincoln knew people who lost their eyes.
He would break bones.
People would lose their ears because someone would bite them off.
These were brutal fights.
When Lincoln moved to New Salem in 1831, as soon as he was old enough to be free, no longer basically the property of his father Tom, he arrived to become a clerk at one of the local stores.
He had to fight the local gang leader, Jack Armstrong of the Clary Grove Boys, just to see if he would be allowed to participate in economic life.
Fortunately, Lincoln was 6'4", 185 pounds and strong.
And so he won that fight.
That danger, Lincoln had to deal with this all the time.
All the time there was distracting, life-sapping danger everywhere he looked.
The final issue we grapple with today in our digital world is darkness.
We think about the different ways that online life can bring out the dark in people and add darkness to our lives.
The hatred that can spread and corrupt souls, the grim meaninglessness that can drive people to rage or nihilistic violence.
This was common in Lincoln's frontier world as well.
As William Lee Miller points out, for example, hatred for Native Americans in particular was and I'm going to quote him here ubiquitous.
It was a ubiquitous Western presence at that point because many of the violent encounters between white settlers and the indigenous populations remained within the recent memory of the people who still lived there.
Lincoln himself had experienced just such a history.
His father, Thomas, when he was a boy, Thomas' dad, so Lincoln's grandfather, had a good plot of land in Kentucky, was killed in his farm fields by a traveling band of the local Native Americans.
Thomas himself barely escaped being killed.
This threw the Lincoln family into the poverty that afflicted Abe Lincoln himself as he grew up because, with Thomas' father dead, they couldn't maintain the land.
They lost the property.
There was no inheritance to go to Tom.
There was no land to be passed down to him.
And so Lincoln came up in much more poverty.
This is why, for example, that Abraham's uncle, his dead uncle, his dad's brother, Mordecai was like fearsomely known as a sort of rabid Indian hater.
They called him Thomas.
For his part, suffered through like a very grim life marked by repeated bad luck.
You know, he scraped together all these resources to buy a few hundred acres of land in Kentucky because he didn't inherit any and he lost it all.
And he lost it all.
The like legal disputes about, you know, the land, claims about who owned what land, what settler had what was a little bit hazy.
So basically, in his mind he was sort of tricked out of his land by elites.
Then he lost his wife, Nancy, to milk sickness when Abraham was only nine.
That's like a comically absurd, tragic way to die.
It has to do with like the animals you eat themselves have been eaten a certain poison plant.
So she dies and Abraham's only nine.
Tom goes blind in one eye.
He has to sort of do work where he can feel with his hands, because he can't even really see that well.
But these were a lot of darkness back in that world.
It was a hard time.
There was a lot of hatred.
And a lot of nihilism and sort of like dark depression, right?
You saw all of that just in like two generations of the Lincoln family.
And that was just sort of assumed how life was going to be on the frontier.
As Sidney Blumenthal summarizes in his Lincoln biography, called A Self-Made Man, which is also very good.
Thomas expected his son Abraham to quote suffer adversity silently, like he had.
All right, so let me put this all together.
Here's what I'm trying to say.
Life in the early 19th century frontier was not easy.
It featured the same general things that upset us about our current digital moment, like distraction and danger and darkness, but in a much more sort of amplified and physical and life-threatening form.
Lincoln did not have it easier.
He had his own versions of the type of stuff that sort of like distracts and upsets us today.
And yet, Lincoln escaped all of those traps.
Here's Miller's majestic summary of Lincoln's feat in escaping all of those traps of frontier life.
I'm going to read this here from Lincoln's Virtue.
In a world in which men smoked and chewed, Lincoln never used tobacco.
In a rough and profane world, Lincoln did not swear.
In a social world in which fighting was a regular male activity, Lincoln became a peacemaker.
In a hard drinking society, Lincoln did not drink.
In an environment soaked with hostility to Indians, Lincoln resisted it.
In a southern flavored setting soft on slavery, Lincoln always opposed it.
In a white world with strong racial antipathies, Lincoln was generous to blacks.
So he successfully somehow avoided the ubiquitous traps of distraction, danger and darkness that were all around him in a way that many of us fail to do with the modern digital version of those traps that we face today.
And because of that he was able to rise well above his station and have again what's sort of astonishing rise.
I mean, people know, of course, where Lincoln ended up.
But it's worth just quickly going through the timeline of how fast he moved out of a life that – poor on the frontier, where he's expected to suffer in silence like his father had.
Let's look at this timeline real quick of what happened.
We can put this on the screen here.
Okay, here we go.
1831, he moves to New Salem.
He turns 21.
He's able legally now to leave the employ of his dad and as soon as he could he left to make his own way.
He moves to Salem.
He becomes a clerk in a store just because he impresses people so much when he talks.
They just give him a job.
He has to, of course, fight to earn that job.
He begins to teach himself the law.
1832, they're already electing him captain of the local militia.
This was during the Black Hawk War.
He makes his first run for state legislature.
As a 23-year-old, he loses, but does surprisingly well.
1833, now he's starting to get...
Prestigious positions in town.
He's appointed the postmaster.
Now he can read all the newspapers.
He's appointed the county surveyor.
1834 runs again, all of what, 24, 25, elected to the state legislator successfully.
1836, he passes the bar.
Completely self-taught, is now a lawyer.
1836 to the 1840s.
He's a very successful legislator in the Illinois State Legislature, becomes a foreleader for his party.
He's a member of the Whig Party back then, becomes very successful.
1846, elected to the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Then we have this sort of period where he's basically – he steps down.
He's doing a lot of lawyering.
1858, this is where the famous run begins.
He runs for the Illinois Senate seat against Stephen Douglas.
This is where the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates occur on slavery.
Douglas in favor of expanding slavery.
Lincoln offering an eloquent and super research defense and moral defense of why that was wrong.
He does not beat douglas for the senate seat, but that makes him a national figure 1860.
Because of that he's nominated for president by the, the new republican party, which he helped start, and of course we know what happens from there.
That's a that's a astonishing rise from where he was, And part of what made that possible was he was somehow able to again to avoid the hypercharged distraction, danger and darkness that he faced.
The sort of amplified version of what we face today.
All right, so that's Extraordinary Rise.
This brings us to the meat of our discussion.
We want to know, how did he do that?
And then what can we take away from what he did back then to do our own version of that today?
That brings us to the second part of our talk.
There's a short answer and a long answer to the question of how Lincoln both avoided those traps and had that astonishing ride.
Let's start with the short answer.
He read I'm going to put some quotes up here from various people in Lincoln's life, just talking about him as a young man reading
Here was his stepmom Sarah Bush.
Lincoln said the following Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on.
Later, she gave this quote, Here's John Hanks, who lived with the Lincolns during this period.
He described young Abe as a constant and voracious reader.
Here's another description of Lincoln.
This is from when him and his mom were essentially like rented out as free labor.
The money came back to Tom Lincoln, to a local family that was better off, the Crawfords.
And here's how they described Lincoln at that time.
While other boys were out hooking watermelons and trifling away their time, he was studying his books, thinking and reflecting.
What these quotes tell us is Lincoln never stopped reading.
When he was with the Crawfords, he negotiated access to their library.
They had money.
They had a library.
When he moved to New Salem he basically found the most educated man in town, the first person he had ever met who, at any time of a college education from a local small college, was the only college-educated man he ever met.
He began borrowing books and participating in a discussion salon with him.
It was actually in this gentleman's collection that he first studied and read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
When he clerked in that store, and especially when he became, the next year, the postmaster, he could read all the newspapers that came through Illinois.
He would read every one before he would distribute them.
When he had the opportunity to become the surveyor of Sagamon County, he read Euclid's Geometry.
Like, I got to learn geometry to be a surveyor.
He's like, I'll just teach myself that.
He somehow tracked down some of the only law books you could find in a very large radius.
This was rural frontier county and began teaching himself the craft of law until he could get a mentor to read with more formally.
During his stint in Congress in the late 1940s he camped out in the Library of Congress here in Washington DC.
So he could do deep research on the history of slavery.
Like he could go back and read the congressional record and who exactly had said what.
This became the foundation of what became his much more sophisticated anti-slavery stance, that he sort of pulled out in various speeches and then ultimately in his Stephen Douglas debates and so on.
So he read, read, read.
But here's an important qualification to this.
He didn't just read to become smart.
As Miller points out, Lincoln wasn't a brilliant person.
I'm quoting Miller here.
He does not appear to have been a precocious child or any kind of natural genius.
Lincoln also wasn't reading mainly for entertainment.
He wasn't reading just for some abstract notion of mental exercise.
He was almost always reading with a purpose.
Here's Miller again making this point in his book.
He did not aim to be and never became a learned man.
The prime quality of his mind was not speed which, in the different world, a century or more later, would be thought to be almost the defining feature of intelligence.
It was also not breadth.
The embrace of the best that had been thought and said in the world of learned persons was Thomas Jefferson aspired to, or the instant knowledge of the inner details of public affairs, of the 20th century policy wonk?
Lincoln's mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly, or at least with effort and concentrated attention, into a relatively few subjects.
It was purposive, personally, politically, morally.
That word there, purposive, is important.
If you look that up, it's a 10 word for a 010 concept, which is having serving or done with a purpose.
So again, Miller is saying his learning was purposive.
It was done with a purpose.
It was always aimed towards a particular purpose and, in particular personal, political or moral self-improvement.
These were the main targets that he was looking at.
So what Lincoln recognized early on in the world of hard labor, of sort of having only a little bit of land and always struggling for money, he learned in the world of hard labor brawn could only get you so far in that sort of early industrial United States.
But the human mind was malleable.
You could shape that, change its abilities, change what it understands, change what doors it opened.
You could directly shape that just by looking at words on a paper and giving those concentration.
And he realized that would be his opportunity to make his mind, his portal to option and opportunity after option and opportunity.
And he was not going to miss that opportunity.
So why did this work so well?
Why did purposeful reading actually help Lincoln escape those traps and then have that astonishing rise?
And then how do we translate that to the 21st century world?
All right, that's the practical questions, and we're going to tackle those questions next.
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All right, Jesse, let's get back to our discussion of Lincoln.
All right, I want to get pragmatic here now that we've learned about Lincoln and what he did.
I'm going to generalize this into a protocol.
In fact, I'll even put this up on the screen here.
I have a name for it.
I call this the Lincoln Protocol.
There are three steps in the general protocol that Lincoln is revealing.
All right, step number one, pick a useful project that's ambitious, but also tractable.
So it's stretching you, but it's still something that, with a stretch, is reasonable for you to accomplish.
Step two, do the hard work necessary to learn what's needed to succeed with that project.
Now it's probably going to be primarily reading.
This was the main tool that Lincoln used to prepare to succeed with his various projects that he thought about as he made his rise.
Three, reflect on the outcome, whether it was successful or not, then loop back to step one.
You pick a new project that's even more ambitious.
You do even more hard work to become even more capable.
You reflect on that and you loop and you loop and you loop.
So the key to the Lincoln Protocol is that, as you keep repeating those three steps, you're building towards ever more ambitious and therefore ever more useful projects, right?
So Lincoln didn't start at 8-7 saying, okay, I want to be president and free the slaves.
The steps were smaller, and you see that in that timeline I showed you before.
It was getting established in a new town with a job.
Then it was, okay, I want to get a respectable sort of government job, a surveyor, a postmaster.
Then it was like I want to be a legislator.
Then I want to be a successful state legislature.
Then I want to be a lawyer.
Then I want to be a successful lawyer.
Then I want to be a politician at the national level.
Then I want to be the leader of this, one of the leaders of this national party.
So he kept raising the ambition of these projects.
And all along the way, it was reading, reading, reading.
He would do the work necessary to take in the information to reconfigure his mind to tackle the next project, and then he would go after it.
They didn't all succeed.
He had several runs that failed.
His first run for state legislature failed.
He stepped down from the House of Representatives because they had been told you had to take turns.
But then they kind of changed the program.
He never got to come back again after that.
He had an embarrassment during his time in the House of Representatives, where he gave this speech that he thought he was proud of about the American-Mexican war.
They called the spot speech because he was like, Show me the spot where they crossed the Rio Grande.
It didn't go well, but he learned a lot about that and became a much better speaker after it.
He had dark times in his life.
He went through a depression earlier in life in New Salem when his girlfriend, fiancee died.
He went into a depressive state.
Joshua Speed took away like razors from his room for a while but he kept adjusting, reconfiguring his mind to go after a new project, tackling that project learning, repeat.
That's the Lincoln Protocol.
So why was this so successful?
Why did this keep him away from the traps and help him make progress?
Well, one of the things that's going on here is neurological.
When you're working towards an accomplishment that seems useful, like this is useful to the world or to myself, because I need to establish myself, I'm on my own, or now, after I've established myself, I want to do something that's useful for my state or for my county or for my country, you are going to recruit in your brain what we can call the long-term motivation system.
The long-term motivation system can suppress the impulses of the short-term motivation system, which looks at the possibilities that are right around you.
So it's your short-term motivation system that pushes you towards the traps.
In Lincoln's time.
Why don't you just grab a drink or gamble or really worry about the violence and try to hide or retreat?
The long-term motivation system can come in and suppress that.
Same thing is true today with the digital distractions, dangers, and darkness.
The phone beckons, the video games beckon, the streaming content beckons.
But if you're working on something that you really deem to be useful, that long-term system says I'm in charge here.
It's going to suppress that and allow you to resist and keep moving on the bigger term thing.
Once you've chosen one of those more ambitious accomplishments, the best way to succeed is going to be to reconfigure your brain in the way required to actually understand that problem and what the solutions work like, and take the right efforts forward.
And reading is a great way to reconfigure it.
So Lincoln then, making reading his primary, purposive reading, purposeful reading, as primary way of moving towards his goals, was very smart.
Because for these type of goals, if they're nonphysical, reconfiguring your brain is what's going to give you a chance of succeeding.
And then, as he would succeed with one project, your long-term motivational system takes in that experience.
It gets encoded in the hippocampus and therefore accessible again when it comes time to work on the next project.
And now your motivation is stronger.
Now your ability to suppress the sort of short-term proximate distractions is much more powerful.
So it's this virtuous cycle that builds.
That is how I believe Lincoln was able to escape the traps and then make his fast ascent.
And I think the same holds for our current digital world as well.
If you're engaged in the Lincoln Protocol, maybe at first You'll be trying hard to resist the pull of the distractions, the darkness and the danger that's online.
But then as you have some successes and I can get something useful, a morally useful, ethically useful, pragmatically useful project, and you're used to how to reconfigure your mind and now I'm going to make progress on it.
You've done this a few times.
Man, that long-term motivation system will say, TikTok, what?
Get out of here.
We're on our way to doing stuff that matters.
There's nothing that's more motivating or fulfilling for the human experience.
The Lincoln Protocol says, taken from the 1820s to 1850s, is a fantastic way, I think, in the 2020s, to actually navigate away from the digital traps and have some more sort of meaning and autonomy in your life.
Now there's three pitfalls you have to be careful about if you're implementing the Lincoln Protocol.
Number one, don't make your projects too ambitious.
It needs to be tractable, meaning it has to be something.
Maybe you can't do it tomorrow, but that it's reasonable.
You can see a reasonable path and a reasonable timeline for you to learn what you need to learn to make progress right.
Like it was reasonable for Lincoln in the 1820s to say, I can learn geometry.
It's hard, but I can learn enough geometry to be the county surveyor.
But it would not have been reasonable in the 1820s for him to say I'm going to run for president next year.
So it has to be ambitious, but not too ambitious.
If it's just, I want to be a millionaire in six months, your mind is, we don't know how to do this.
The second pitfall, your project needs to be useful.
So it has to connect to things you really care about which, for Lincoln at first, was really self-improvement, in the sense of he was on his own and came from a hard situation.
So he was really motivated to, I need to get established politically, socially, and economically.
So I don't feel like I have to go back to splitting rails and being rented out to other families to do manual labor.
But then as that got more solidified, he began to redefine useful to mean useful to other people.
At first, useful to his town.
Then useful to his county when he was in the state legislature.
And then as he moved up in the state legislature, useful to the whole state of Illinois.
He was a Whig, which means he was really big on internal improvement projects.
We need to fund canals and toll roads so that everyone has more economic opportunity.
And then, as he moved to the national scale, of course he turned to the national goods of trying to hold the union together and ending slavery.
So it needs to be a useful project.
If it's just something you think is like cool or fun or I want to crush it on TikTok, that is not going to necessarily generate enough positive feedback from your long-term motivational system for you to suppress the short-term system and to get out of those traps.
The final pitfall is avoiding doing the actual hard work required.
For most of the things that Lincoln went after, it was reading hard books that mattered.
Those books were hard and he would just do the work to learn them.
If you don't do the equivalent hard work for the useful projects that you choose, you're not going to make progress.
If you want to tell yourself the story that I have this ambitious, useful project and what really matters is looking up these easy-to-watch tutorials on YouTube that have these checklist productivity ideas about hey, make your profile great and people will come to it, or whatever.
You don't actually want to do the hard work of reconfiguring your mind to understand something new and then apply that knowledge to actually produce new things there out in the world.
If you're there trying to configure, you know, maniacally and manically trying to configure AI to systematize and automate everything so you can avoid any sort of beyond minimal effort.
That's not the Lincoln Protocol and you're not going to succeed.
And, you know, hard things require that hard effort, so that has to be part of it.
So those are the pitfalls you have to avoid.
All right, but if you do those, avoid those pitfalls.
The Lincoln Protocol is a fantastic way to think about traversing our world, just as it was back then.
All right, let's do some takeaways.
All right.
So in the opening of his book Lincoln's Virtues, William Lee Miller, in his esteemable conversational tone, writes the following
I'll put this up on the screen here.
It's a curious truth, is it not, that an unschooled 19th century American politician named Abraham Lincoln, from the raw frontier villages of Illinois and Indiana, has turned out to be among the most revered of the human beings who have ever walked this earth.
Curious and perhaps a little moving if you think about it.
Lincoln's path to that status was not mysterious.
It didn't rely on generational gifts or some sort of grand inheritance.
It was a result of a simple protocol applied repeatedly that helped him overcome the distraction, dangers and darkness of his period to systematically build toward a more meaningful and useful life.
Now, at the core of his rise, as we covered, was this idea of purposeful reading.
He didn't sit in an ivory tower and study abstract theory or memorize facts that he could pull from at dinner parties, nor did he get lost in the most sort of diverting writing of his time.
He was more pragmatic.
He read to improve his brain in exactly the ways he needed to do things that he thought was useful.
And it turns out, if you do this deliberately enough, for a long enough time, you can literally reshape not just the world that you perceive through your brain, but actually change the world around you for the better.
Now the same protocol is available to you if you feel stuck in a digital morass of distraction and energy sucking terribleness.
Just think about Lincoln's perilous situation as a kid.
You too can escape these type of traps and do something more interesting.
You might not become president, but you can become more than just a group of ones and zeros in one of Mark Zuckerberg's user databases.
So read with purpose, aim towards useful projects that you choose with care, and repeat.
In an age where you can now literally download an app that will generate an AI video of yourself boxing with Queen Elizabeth, or when over 15 billion people spend at least some time each month on TikTok, aimlessly scrolling through carefully curated nothingness.
Lincoln's self-improvement lessons have perhaps never been more relevant.
There you go, Jesse.
That's an excuse for me to nerd out on Lincoln.
You know what's interesting, though?
So you know how I started this whole deep dive with that post from 2008?
Yeah.
So when I went back to find that post, I went back to the archive.
So at calnewport.com, if you go to the essays link, there's an archive link on the side.
And so I was going back to the archives to find exactly where that article was, and it came from February of 2008.
That was a crazy month. or Cal Newport ideas.
I didn't realize like there's sort of a historic month from the perspective of like the stuff I'm known for.
First of all, this is crazy.
I wrote 18 articles that month.
Cause that's what it used to be like in the old days of blogging and email newsletters.
Like you wrote, it was, I would write three, at least three articles a week.
One of them would be a link roundup.
One of them would be student advice.
That'd be on Monday.
I called it Monday masterclass.
And then Wednesday would be like all like ideas, like the Lincoln article.
I looked at those 18 articles.
I had some of my like more classic ideas of student advice during that month, including the Morse code method for taking notes, which is more or less how I take notes today.
So you mark the side of the pages with really efficient marks.
I had the idea of the post-exam post-mortem, a huge student idea of mine of like after each test, you have to go back and say what worked and what didn't and how I studied.
Also had this idea of pseudo-skimming in there.
But outside of the student advice, I had three of my most important early non-student posts.
So I had the Lincoln post which honestly, was like one of the first times I dealt with digital distraction.
Obviously, I'm known for that today.
That was a very early example of me talking about digital distraction as a problem.
It's also the same month where I first introduced the phrase, be so good they can't ignore you.
So I, that's when Steve Martin's memoir born standing up came out.
So I had the article, it was called like Steve Martin's career advice.
So that's where that came from.
And fixed schedule productivity, which is like one of my more well-known for a long time.
It's one of my more well-known productivity ideas.
All that's in the same month.
It was like the, the, my version of Einstein's and it's mirabilis.
I just checked to see when the financial crisis was in 2008.
It was in September.
I was like, imagine if it was the same.
I see.
I was, we were all optimistic back.
Yeah.
You know what the other the other 12 articles were?
You got to buy more, more mortgages.
No money down the market.
I think the most popular article that month is this market's going nowhere but up.
I think that was, that was the post I had there.
So anyways, I thought that was kind of cool.
Um, All right, speaking of presidents.
So I geeked out on this article because I'm a big Lincoln fan and Nate, who helps me research these things, is a big Lincoln fan, so we kind of nerded out.
I do have a – I don't know where else to put – I have a bone to pick, speaking of presidents.
I have a bone to pick with the classic NBC show, The West Wing.
And I don't know where or how to pick this bone, but because we talked about a presence, I'm going to do it now.
And I think this is very important.
I hope Aaron Sorkin is listening to this.
And I know this is going to upset you Jesse, but it's a mistake that I think needs to be dealt with.
In the pilot episode of season one there is a gag where Leo McGarry, the chief of staff, is on the phone with the editors of the New York Times crossword and saying oh, your answer for like number 17 across is wrong.
That's not how you spell Gaddafi.
I would know how to spell Gaddafi.
I've met the man twice and once recommended an exocet missile strike against him, right?
So that's kind of, you know, it's like Aaron Sorkin pilot episode humor.
Two episodes later, It might even be the next episode or go Hawk Proctor Hawk.
The whole premise is there is a US plane is shot down by by Syrians and they're going to have to retaliate.
And the whole point of this two episode arc is that it's the first military retaliation that they've had to do in their administration.
So they don't know how to do it.
They've never done it before.
They've never fired a missile or dropped the bomb on anyone yet.
This is the show starts one year into it.
So when did Leo McGarry recommend an Exocet missile strike against Qaddafi if this was the first attack they've ever done and they've only been in office for one year?
Yes, he was in the government before, but as the labor secretary.
Why would he be recommending missile strikes?
Look.
I'm sure you're as outraged as I am, Aaron Sorkin.
Shame on you.
All right, I don't know where else to put that.
Quick housekeeping before we move on here.
We need questions.
We always want questions.
We always want calls.
Go to what's at the deeplife.com.
Slash listen.
Slash listen.
Jesse, what is your advice if there's a listener who really wants to get a question or a call on the air?
Do you have any advice for what they should do?
Because you're the one who goes through these.
I think I have a couple of ideas.
But what do you notice?
Because I want people to feel emboldened.
People can always email me.
I don't tell them that.
You can get a lot of emails.
Jesse at CalNewport.com.
Some people do email me directly and then I have like a relationship with them.
Here's my thing I would add.
Make him short.
Right?
So don't think of it, as I have a very intricate scenario i'm in right now that i want like long counseling on.
Yeah, it's what's the concept you want answers on.
I would lean away from really detailed like deep work, digital distraction in the workplace question.
We need some of those, but we, you know, mainly we deal.
We deal with technology, understanding how to respond to it, including technology in the office, but a lot of other technology as well.
So you probably have a better chance if you're asking about Technologies that are in the news, that you're worried about, or other sorts of technologies that are intersecting with your life that you're worried about.
If every question is like really detailed situations about the exact managerial email chain that's disrupting your deep work, I'm not going to call your boss.
I don't know.
So, all right, that'd be my advice.
All right, enough of that.
Let's move on to, speaking of which, to some questions.
All right, who do we got first?
First question's from Paul.
What is your scheduled routine for reading long-form articles, as opposed to your current monthly books?
I typically default to my current book in order to meet my book reading goals, but this means that I never get around to reading the long-term articles that I have saved.
Yeah, it's a good question.
So I often...
I'm often not reading a ton of long-form articles because a lot of my reading time is going towards books.
I read a lot of books, and the long-form articles I read tend to be those that are very narrowly relevant to something I really specifically care about.
Like, oh, this is a topic I write about or I'm thinking about, and then I'll read it.
Which is fine.
I actually – books are great.
Books are like a bunch of long-form articles that have been thought about for another couple of years, and they have been polished at a higher level of sheen.
So I think there's no issue with that, as long as you're reading my New Yorker pieces, which is non-negotiable.
However, what you can do – because long-form pieces are – you could have more of a diverse array of ideas.
Because you don't have to stick with something for 60,000 words to 100,000 words.
And it can be more contemporaneous.
So one thing you can do, and I recommend doing, is having a virtual book.
So let's say your goal has been to read three books a month.
You can say, I count five long-form articles or six long-form articles as a book.
So I'm going to read two books and six long-form articles.
And then that same motivation that you're putting towards, like getting through your book chapters, you can turn that towards like keeping up with your New Yorker issues or whatever Atlantic or whatever long-form articles you read.
I mean I think that's just as fine.
And then – so it just depends on like what mood you're in or what's going on.
Like often, if we're in a time of like, political turmoil or geopolitical turmoil, I'll say I don't want to be contemporaneous and I'm going to – let's read some books that are 100 years old.
And other times I'll be like, you know what?
I want to know what's going on in the world.
Or if I'm deep in a book that I'm writing.
I'm like I don't really want to know what's going on in the world, because I'm going to get ideas.
I can't deal with ideas right now.
I'm working on this thing.
But if I'm in between books or in between big New Yorker pieces, I'm writing.
I'm like oh, I want to be more exposed to ideas.
So it's okay if you read long form or not.
If you want to do more long form, just make a virtual book.
You know, five to eight, depending on how long these articles are.
Let that count as like one short book.
All right.
Who do we got next?
Next up is Fred.
I've been working on improving my focus by spending most of my time reading.
I'm on my fifth day of a digital declutter, but I've hit a problem.
I often have to reread the same sentence or paragraph several times before understanding it.
I'm worried that I'm not improving.
Is this normal when building focus?
Well, good for you for doing a digital declutter.
Good for you for trying a bunch of reading.
This is one of the things you want to do within a digital clutter.
As I always say, it's the reflection and experiments you figure out what really makes you tick.
So you want to try things that are new.
You do this temporarily step away from your typical optional digital technologies.
You want to be aggressively trying new things to feel out like what matters to me or not.
So you might be reading more now than it's going to be sustainable, but it's a great way of sort of feeling that out.
Congratulations on that.
You're doing the right thing.
Keep doing lots of experiments.
Keep doing lots of reflection and thinking walks.
In terms of your specific issues with reading, there's two things that you're going to have to keep an eye on.
That could be an issue here.
Either your problem is coming because you're reading too much at a time like your focus is just not ready to sit down for three hours and read a book, and so you're just losing focus.
Or you're reading things that are too hard for your current state of preparation.
So the solution to the – you're losing your focus.
So if you find like I understand things for a while, but in the same book I begin to lose understanding as I go on, you need to make your sessions shorter.
And then you stretch incrementally how long those sessions are over two, three weeks at one length, before you sort of stretch them.
You've got to give your mind time to actually get stronger.
If the problem is not how long you're reading, but just the material is too hard, well then you need to work on sort of laddering up complexity.
I've talked about this before on the show where I've kind of gone through in detail about how you ladder it up.
Like roughly speaking, you start by just reading like whatever is the most interesting.
So you just get into the habit of the mechanics of reading.
Then you're going to move to like specific topics like Lincoln might be interested in would have done, on topics that are interesting to you about the world or issues that are of useful reading.
Like I kind of want to understand these things.
Maybe it's a political issue.
Maybe it's like a spiritual issue.
Maybe it's like an issue of health or physical fitness or a psychological or philosophical issue.
It's stoicism, whatever it is.
You're like, you know, now I'm reading for utility.
I want to sort of understand this thing better.
So that's sort of like the next level as you move up these ladders.
But you start with very accessible texts. you don't jump into like a textbook on stoicism.
You start with like Ryan holidays, much more accessible series.
All right.
Um then what you want to move up.
If there's a topic you know, useful reading, now that you're locked into useful reading um, You can move your way up to what I think about as like more challenging secondary sources.
So it's.
You know you're not reading like the original philosopher or the academic, but you're reading people talking about their ideas.
And now they're talking about a little bit more sophisticated way.
Now you're laddering up your understanding.
From there, you can then go to accessible primary sources if they exist.
Like, again, they use the Stoicism example.
You know, I think Marcus Aurelius, it's approachable, right?
The text is approachable.
It's not like in a good translation.
It's not like reading Heidegger or something like that.
Or like Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
It's an accessible text, right?
You don't need like a huge background and specialized terminology to understand.
And then you finally move up to I want to read non-approachable primary sources.
And the best way to get at that is you sort of read it in conjunction with secondary sources that tell you about the book that you're reading.
You're not coming in blind.
So you're working up a ladder.
You do this for a year.
And on the other end, you're going to be tackling like pretty sophisticated books.
And in the topic area that you're laddering, you're going to have accrued so much understanding and terminology and structural frameworks of knowledge that you're going to be like oh, now I can tackle things that are way more complicated than I could a year ago and get meaningful value out of them.
So it's something you can move yourself up to.
And Lincoln did this.
This is kind of like the Lincoln Protocol in action.
It's very worth doing because as you get a more sophisticated understanding of a particular type of relevant, useful topic,
Your understanding of the world through that lens changes.
Your world literally changes, including both how you understand it and the options you now have for taking action in it.
It really like changes your world.
You're putting on different glasses and opening up doors that were closed before.
So it's worth doing.
It's a good question.
All right, who do we got next?
Next up is Chelsea.
What are the mechanics of finding and keeping a deep reading habit alive?
I find that I always start and stop.
Plus, I can't find good books on topics that I'm interested in.
You should have regular times.
Again, good question.
I love that you're thinking about having this regular reading habit.
All these questions, of course, fit right in with the sort of Lincoln Protocol type of idea.
Have regular times when you read always helps.
I read over lunch.
I read when I go to bed.
If I have free time in the evening, I always do a half hour before TV shows or I alternate.
Some days I do TV shows, but other days I sit and I read and I have a place I go and a certain type of tea I make and a certain type of music I put on.
Start with books that you really find interesting.
That's different than starting with topics you find interesting, than finding books for them, because sometimes that can be really narrow.
So you want to be more broadly exposing yourself to different types of books, to be like oh, here's a genre fiction, a genre fiction I really like and I can read through there.
Here's a type of nonfiction book.
I didn't realize there was like a lot of books on personal finance.
But it's kind of inspiring because I want to get my money.
I'm kind of in control and I like getting this information.
Or I didn't realize like this type of nonfiction, like business idea books is really interesting.
Or memoirs, that are, you know, people moving to Provence and France and Italy and trying to there's a whole bunch of books like that or whatever.
So it's not so much like I am very interested in nuclear waste disposal.
That's why.
So I need to find books on that.
I can't find that many interesting books.
You'll find books that are very interesting to you, but be really open to what those could be.
And then you get some sort of goal.
Like there's a classic Lincoln protocol where That begins to push you to finish books and get more ambitious about it.
But you're in the right place.
Reading takes time to fill it out.
Be more purposeful.
Start really interesting.
Have regular habits and then start getting purposeful.
Get those goals.
I now want to learn about this so I can do that.
Finish, repeat, finish, repeat.
And then it's going to become much more a part of your life.
All right.
So we have a few more questions to go as well as a case study.
We have a call about Apple Watches and then a segment where I'm actually going to go back and read comments from that original post in 2000.
It's fascinating.
I haven't looked at them.
I think it's going to be a fascinating time machine into how we were thinking about distractions and Lincoln all those years ago.
But first, we've got to take a really quick break to hear from another sponsor.
So stick around.
We will be right back.
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We also want to talk about our friends at 1Password.
Back in the old days, password management at companies used to be simple.
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That's a War Games reference, Jesse.
I don't know if you get the reference.
That's not the way people run their businesses anymore.
Now what you have is each of your employees.
Maybe they have one computer, but they have all these different web-based apps that they're using, some internal, some external.
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All right, Jesse, let's get back to some questions.
Oh, it looks like we got a long one here.
This is a long one.
Oh, that's good.
Let's settle in, everyone.
Luke has a lot to ask us here.
Hi, it's from Luke.
I've just completed my master's in mechanical engineering and have been hired by a large construction company to carry out a PhD.
I spend basically the first 12 months defining my research topic.
However, just six weeks in, I'm already finding the situation difficult to reconcile with the kind of deep life I hope to build.
The project site is far, far away, but they put us in a hotel.
The pay is good.
When broken down hours work, some of the weeks it's comparable to what I could earn elsewhere.
On top of this, I've recently started a business with a close friend.
He's a marketing expert and I handle the technical side.
And that could potentially match my salary in about six months.
I find myself torn between the two paths continuing down the structured, stable and intellectually demanding route of the PhD, or committing to an entrepreneurship and the freedom to live more intentionally with my partner.
This is like the Tolstoy of questions.
All right, Luke.
So I don't know if you're sensing this, Jesse.
I'm getting like a little bit of push-pulling in here where, like you're asking a question but the question is trying to push you towards an answer.
There's a little bit of like well, you know it's far away and I really don't make any money at it and like it's probably leading to the death of puppies, but like you know I could do it.
Or like there's this wonderful, awesome thing as autonomous entrepreneurship with my friend that is going to make a life great, but I don't know, what do you think I should do?
But I'm going to put the push-pulling aside a little bit and try to take this, these two options here, really straight, right and So clearly the thing you want to do here is classic lifestyle centric planning.
And that requires you to look ahead a little bit farther into the future.
And when you look ahead, you want to be describing what your ideal lifestyle is going to look like.
Let's say like a couple of years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, like you're looking into the future,
The key for a good lifestyle vision is that it needs to be comprehensive.
So you cannot just focus on one thing.
This is what really catches people up.
They'll focus on one thing, like in your case, autonomy or something.
I think this is definitely like a big Gen Z thing right now is like autonomy is a really big deal.
Like I need to, I can't be in a situation.
And look, I built my whole life around this instinct.
But I can't be in a situation where, like I, have to keep doing work.
I need the ability to like control my work and chill.
I need to chill.
Don't just have one.
You need to have a lifestyle vision that covers a comprehensive, uh, Description of your life.
I suggest breaking it up into what we call buckets, but like different areas of your life.
It's, you know constitution, which is like your health and community, which is like your connection to other people, and craft, which can capture things like work and other sort of like useful things you build with your hands or mind.
Contemplation which can capture, like the spiritual, philosophical context, like what, the what it's like physically where you are, like what what where you live and commutes, and like the physical surroundings that you're in every day.
You really want to have a vision that, That spans many of these buckets.
So it's comprehensive.
And then the game is just how do I get closer to this broad vision?
And that's how you should be comparing these two things.
Don't fix it on one thing you don't like about the current training portion of this job.
Don't fix it on just one thing you really like about the other thing.
I'd have more autonomy in the short term.
Which of these is going to give me the better route to covering more of this vision?
And that's the way.
And just do that analysis honestly.
And that's the way to think about it.
And if one of them you know like hey, it gets me really far here, but I'm really doing bad on this other vision.
And this one doesn't get me as far there, but it doesn't have these negatives.
I'm doing okay in these other parts.
Like, then that's the way I want to go.
But you want to give it a good broad vision and give it a good sort of fair analysis.
I'm thinking about this a lot because I'm writing a book on the deep life.
And again, we mainly talk about things that relate back to technology here, problems caused by technology, we're trying to solve.
I can't think of the deep life without also thinking about technology, because to me the most powerful thing – this is like the Lincoln Protocol.
That's why I put this question in here.
The most powerful thing you can do – to resist just being falling into numbness or nihilism or rage through online distraction machines is to construct a life on your own terms.
That's more compelling than what is offered in Sora or on TikTok or on an Instagram scroll.
So, knowing the mechanics of how do I take control of my life, and given the circumstances I have, the opportunities I have and my obstacles, my idiosyncratic setup, how do I steer this towards a better, better life that's more intentional?
As you do that, just like Lincoln discovered The allure of these traps, these distraction danger, darkness-producing traps, digital today is something different back then.
That allure dies down.
It's just like the answer to distractions in the office was having a bigger, better offer, which was deep work.
The answer to all these sort of distractions and numbing and psychological manipulators that are on our phone is to have a bigger, better offer in your life, which is a deep life that you've constructed.
And it's just more interesting than watching the queen wrestle someone on Sora.
That's why I talk about this a lot.
It's why we talked about the Lincoln Protocol on a podcast.
It's from a computer scientist and digital ethicist that talks about like hey, how do we respond and understand technology?
Because this is how we respond to technology.
I think it's one of the big things we do.
So I wanted to work that in there so I could do my little pitch there.
All right.
Do we have one more question?
Yes, we do.
All right.
It's from Ben.
As a father of a toddler, I have plenty of time playing with him without much stimuli.
While a bit of boredom is appreciated, these large spans of time is too much, leading me to excessive phone usage.
What should I do?
Well, Ben, toddlers are boring.
Men talk about this.
I don't think they're as boring to women, I guess.
My wife would point this out about me that when we had our first kid, we just had one, and he was young.
My wife would be very happy.
Like, we're just this is great.
We're like sitting in our living room and we like have our two year old and we're just kind of here.
And I would be like, this is boring.
Like, what are we doing here?
We're just he's on the blanket.
Like, this isn't this is boring.
I need to go hunt the mastodon or something like that.
So I want to.
What I want to do there is validate that, that feeling, and tell you that if you can't find a mastodon and you instead try to spear neighborhood dogs, as I did, you're going to get.
The police are going to come over.
So don't follow that path.
So they are boring.
So what do you do as a dad?
Well, you got to put on your dad hat.
Moms have their own way to deal with toddlers.
They're happy to gaze lovingly at them.
Dads, you got to take that kid and go do stuff.
You got to be active.
We are going to go on adventures.
I'll push you in the thing until you can walk and then I'll walk with you.
And you invent the adventures.
I mean the old house I lived in.
There's a park down the street and there's like a little bit of woods at the end of the park.
Well, that became the wizard woods.
We went to the woods.
We had the different logs we would go to.
We named the different things.
We had to build traps for goblins.
Like we had to go do things.
We're going to go to the library.
We're going to look at certain books.
That's fine.
Like go be active, put on your dad hat, have more things to do.
But do have the rule when you are, it's just you and the kid, right?
Don't use your phone.
Don't have that be an option.
If it's like a boring thing, like you're waiting and they're just like doing their, you know, boring toddler thing.
Sorry, toddlers, but you are kind of boring.
Read a book.
That's fine.
Let them see, oh, like, dad's kind of reading a book.
We're just sort of hanging out here in the yard on the first sunny day or whatever.
I remember doing that.
I have all these memories from our first kid.
Because there'd be various times, like, the way we shifted...
The way we shifted our schedules, typically I would – my wife would go to work early.
So I would have the early shift with the kids.
And then she could be back consistently in case I had to teach an evening class.
But sometimes I would be the first one home.
And I would remember I liked – this was a habit from when we lived in Boston.
We like, craved the sun, like you know, um people from, like the Morlocks, from the HG Wells, the time machine in Boston.
Like the sun, the sun.
And we all like come out or whatever.
And I had that instinct for a while.
So on the first sunny days, I like to go in the yard.
We put down a blanket and the, and you know, Max could just sort of roll around on it.
And I would read, uh, you can imagine Jesse thrillers.
Cause that was part of my thing.
The first sunny days I want to read thrillers.
So we do some of that.
I'd rather him see me reading books and be on a phone.
I just don't want that to be an option with young kids that they see me on a phone instead of them.
I can be reading a book or whatever.
Um, But I want to go back to the bigger parenting point that it's okay for dads to acknowledge that toddlers are boring.
So just go be super active.
And it's okay if that's different than like what the moms do.
Nothing gets us more male than when we talk about parenting.
Moms love when I talk about like what moms do.
We're going to get the emails.
I always get the same email.
Who's watching the kid when you're doing deep work?
That's going to be fine for you.
Who's watching the kid?
When you're filling out your time block planner.
I wish I had a full-time staff that did nothing but allowed me to fill out my time block planner.
I get a lot of that.
All right.
Do we have a case study?
We do.
All right.
Let's get some theme music and get into this.
These are where people send in.
Their accounts of using the type of advice we talk about on the show in their own life.
If you have a case study, send it to Jesse at Cal Newport dot com.
But our first case study or our only case study for today comes from Lisa.
Lisa says I was a high performing professional, a young artist curator, educator and a military spouse for the last 20 years.
I was married to a senior officer. but I got stuck creatively in my own career and also motherhood.
This past year I did more block planning, short and long-term planning and, though not perfect, I'm more aware of digital consumption and I am still working to get better at having less distractions.
Either way, this year I was able to one successfully finish my last year teaching at the high school level.
I am opening my own online art education platform that I didn't see possible or even dream of a year ago.
Two, I will graduate with a master's this December.
Three.
I will illustrate and publish a children's book that has been sitting stalled for over a year or two, for my artistic work is starting to flourish again.
It's also giving me the confidence to determine deeper level work.
And if I want to get a PhD and go on creatively to more art history or writing projects.
Either way, my talents are being used significantly better.
I'm more aware digitally of where my rabbit holes are and life is much more fulfilling.
I love this case study.
Let me go back to what the change was that Lisa made that made all this cool stuff possible.
Pretty simple.
This past year, I did more block planning, short and long term.
And though not perfect, I am more aware of digital consumption and working on reducing distractions.
We underestimate how much is possible that we're being held back by being haphazard with our time and distracted more than we think.
And that when you time blocks, like I want to actually give a job to my time, even if that job is resting.
Even that job is relaxing.
I'm just being intentional about what do I actually want to do about my time.
Suddenly, much more things become possible.
When you do long-term planning, you begin to make progress on things slowly and allowing sort of results to aggregate and things that would have seemed impossibly ambitious suddenly become tractable.
And then when you're careful about how much attention is lost to digital distraction and you reduce that, The amount of brain power you can now apply to other things that are meaningful really jumps up.
Because remember, it's not just the raw number of minutes that you look at your phone.
It's the raw number of times you do.
Because every time I glance at my phone, and even if it's just quickly doing a few TikTok scrolls or looking at my Instagram, I do a context shift to my brain and it's going to take me 10 to 15 minutes to get back.
So if I'm just, look, I only looked at this thing four times in the last hour.
It was like four total minutes.
That's 56 minutes.
I was working not so fast, because if those four quick checks are spread out over that hour no no, you lost an hour of being able to do actual good work.
So it's the raw number of times you check is much more important than the raw number of times that you're doing these distractions.
So you know if you're thinking about the Lincoln Protocol, this type of thing matters, but it's virtuous.
And I think this is what Lisa is seeing.
There's a virtuous circle here.
At first, it's kind of hard.
I'm blocking and I'm being very careful at my distractions so I can train for this project, like she's doing.
She's not literally just reading books.
She's studying for her master's program.
But she's going after these projects, reconfiguring her brain.
And then when she succeeds with one, the next one becomes more tractable.
It is easier to move past the distractions.
And as she succeeds with another, it becomes even easier.
That's the virtuous cycle that begins because your long-term motivation system says, oh, this works.
And the rewards we get from this are so much better from the rewards afterwards of when I'm watching the TikTok video and someone falls to the floor or whatever.
It's kind of funny in the moment, not the same rewards as this company of mine is working.
Here's the master's degree I just earned.
So that is an example of the Lincoln Protocol in progress.
The digital world is loosing its grips.
When you escape those traps, the ascendancy becomes possible.
All right, do we have a call this week?
We do.
All right, let's hear this one.
Hey Cal, this is Josh.
I would love to know your perspective on Apple Watches or other smartwatches and how this could be an alternative to using your phone a lot.
The benefit of the Apple Watch is I get notifications for texts and calls, which are really the main reason why I need to stay connected to my phone, but it also doesn't have the capability of getting on certain apps that could be distracting.
So I'd love to know what you think about that.
Is that level of connectivity okay to still be on an Apple Watch?
Or do you suggest in your advice to also try to have times away from that to be fully disconnected?
Thanks so much.
I'm not a fan of Apple Watches.
It's why I somewhat ironically have my Zen 105 here without the UTC complication.
This is an entirely mechanical watch.
It's an automatic, so it harvests the motion of my hand.
I put it on purposely an Apple Watch-style black silicone strap, but there's no electricity in this beast.
That is my sort of little subtle watch nerd commentary on the Apple Watches.
Here's the problem.
One of the big things you want to avoid from a sort of digital distraction perspective is, like we just talked about with Lisa context shifts.
When I shift my attention from what I'm doing, it can take me up to 20 minutes to get it back.
But now the watch just says we'll make sure there is no escaping context shifts, because if that thing buzzes, my brain says there's a person who needs us and it could be urgent.
You can't ignore that.
You got to look at that.
Then you read it.
You say, I go and spare the phone.
I watch people read and dictate the longest messages on these things.
You have just like strapped a context shifter onto your arm.
I understand people like some of the health and fitness benefits, though.
I think that people work backwards.
They just wanted the Apple watch because they felt compelled to buy an Apple product.
And then I'm trying to figure out, like, why do I have this?
I don't think it's that compelling.
So I know some people like it for various things.
Sure. you can sync music on it, but it's a pain.
It doesn't really work.
And I'm not a big Apple watch fan.
It's just a distraction machine.
Listen to some of my prior podcast episodes about how to reform your relationship and expectations with other people about communication and communication protocols in a way that you don't have to be on call all the time for text messages, but the important stuff can still get through.
Those are the right solutions.
So no, I'm not a big Apple watch fan.
Just get like one of these ends and you don't have to worry about it.
All right.
I don't know.
People love their Apple Watches.
I wrote an article when they first came out, the Apple Watches, speaking of my blog, where the premise was it's not our job to figure out your product Apple, because that is how they released the Apple Watch.
They said, here it is.
Tim Cook is like, good news, everybody.
He had just been installed.
You know, this is right after Jobs died.
He's like, good news, everyone.
We figured out the assembly line logistics to be able to package and ship Apple Watches worldwide.
And people are like, yay.
And then someone in the back was like, boom. what are they for?
And he's like, you know, I don't know.
Figure it out.
It's Apple.
And people did.
And I wrote this whole article about, like why we shouldn't have to buy products that don't have a really clear and compelling use case.
It's the same issue we have with a lot of AI tools today where people like you better be using AI.
You better be using AI right now or you are out of here so fast, right?
You know, like this river dredging business cannot survive if you are not ready for the AI future.
And they're like, but what do you want me to do with it?
Like, you AI things.
AI it.
It's not our job to figure out how AI is useful to our job.
Companies using AI have to have a very compelling pitch for this product, whether it uses AI or not.
We'll do this for you.
That's very useful.
It's never your job to figure out why technology products are useful.
If you're an enthusiast, it's fine to experiment and have fun with them, but that's a small percentage of the population.
If you're not...
You should not be.
I do not like models that say like I got to figure out how to make chat GBT useful because everyone says it is.
If it was really going to make a big difference for you, it would be self-evident.
So wait till it's self-evident.
I don't even know how I got on that rant.
All right.
Let's move on to our final segment.
I call this Cal reads the comments.
This is always fun.
What I've done here is I've gone back to that Lincoln article.
Would Lincoln be president if he had email?
That I wrote in February 2008, one of the very first articles I wrote about the dangers of digital distraction, especially in a professional context.
This laid the seeds that grew eventually into what became Deep Work.
This topic was kind of new back then.
It wasn't.
You know, smartphones were new email, people were getting a little bit wary about their email inboxes, but it was still a little bit like oh my God, my email.
But you know, it wasn't so bad.
AOL was still a thing.
At the beginning of us really worried about digital distractions.
So what I wanted to do, and I haven't looked at these, Jesse will attest.
I'm going to go back.
Let's read some of these comments from 2008 to see what did people care or think about distractions back then.
I thought it would be interesting.
We should have like a read the comments theme music.
Yeah.
Could that be an excuse to get the bass fishing music back?
Where it was like, hell yeah.
We'll get that back one day.
All right.
What do we have here?
All right.
Here's a comment from February 20th, 2008.
Amy says She said in the electronic age we're on such an instant schedule that someone like Lincoln may not have been able to cut it.
Imagine the luxury of having an entire day between a newspaper printing and the next newspaper printing to accuse or respond to a comment.
I think the concept of GTD would be completely lost in those days.
What do you mean that you can have an inbox for everything that you need to do?
All right, that's an interesting argument from Amy.
I would have agreed with that back then.
I think today, no, I wouldn't agree with it.
Like, for example, you know what figure who predates Lincoln in American history?
That was completely overwhelmed with correspondence and messages and everything he had to do.
George Washington.
This is why he had to do whatever he could to get Hamilton out.
Some might say get Hamilton on his side.
Hamilton reference from the play.
I just read a book about it.
He was overwhelmed.
He was constant correspondence.
His inbox was overflowing, and it was like the curse of his life.
He talks about this.
If you read enough, like Chernow's biography of Washington gets into this.
So that was a problem back then, having too many people needing you, too much stuff going on.
Yes, the delivery wasn't as fast, but the actual production of responses was much slower.
You have to keep it in mind.
You had to write these long letters in response.
And back then linguistic communications, epistolatory communication, required these very long preambles where you tried to set the emotional context.
It was very flourishing.
It took forever to write these things, and you had to quill, and you had to dip it in ink.
I don't know, Amy.
I think they – figures the equivalent of 18th and 19th century.
Executives of today had their own overload problems.
What did Martin have to say?
Martin says the picture in your post, the dinosaur and the bikini girl.
I feel like it's following me around.
I subscribe to those different blogs, so I can't wait to see who posted.
Oh, yeah.
I had a whole chain of attributions.
That picture went everywhere.
I had a chain of attributions with like seven.
This went to here, to here, to here to here, with ellipses in the middle, because that thing I was trying to track.
Back then you could track actually.
Man, I missed a pre-social media day.
So you could track.
This picture was posted here.
They got it from there.
They would attribute it.
Then that person, that blog would say, oh, I got it from here.
And you could follow the chain of a meme.
You could trace it back.
Today, a meme goes like 100 million people through exponential growth and cybernetic.
Twitter follower graph.
It's such a different time.
As for the age of focus...
I agree that many of us tend to check things too frequently.
It's not just email.
It could be TV news, RSS feeds, text messages, web forums, instant messaging, the list goes on.
Man, is that anachronistic a little bit?
Remember when those were the things that were distracting us Cable news.
RSS feeds.
RSS feeds, which the social media companies killed because it was a competitor to their closed gardens.
Google killed it because they wanted to make their own social media platforms.
Web forums.
Man, it's a different time.
So interesting.
What did Johanka have to say?
I think the answer is obvious.
Make the high-focus activities far more attractive than those that add to the continuous partial attention problem.
I mean, I think that's right.
I think that's right in the sense that this is like the Lincoln Protocol that we landed on more recently, right?
Is that if what you're doing is really useful in a way that's meaningful to you, your mind will suppress the short-term attention motivational system.
Chris is being a little snarky here.
Didn't Lincoln also have a nervous breakdown of some sort after a family member died?
If we had the internet back then that would be all over the web and I don't think anyone would have voted for him.
I think you could argue that people lived much more privately back in those days.
Not politicians.
Yes, he had a depressive episode after his fiancée died, but he had embarrassments, political embarrassments.
In particular, look up the spot speech that he gave about the Mexican-American War.
I think this was Zachary Taylor who was the president at the time.
It was an embarrassment and it really hurt – it followed him everywhere.
People wrote – newspapers were three editions a day.
People had nothing else to do.
People would write about all these things.
They're all text-filled.
It's full of text or whatever.
Everyone knew about the embarrassments that Lincoln had.
It was like a huge issue for him.
The problems he had in the House of Representatives in the 1840s really followed him for a long time, and he had to sort of earn his way out of it by coming back into the Stephen Douglas debates with something even better to do.
So I don't think that was true back then.
They had all of those problems if you were a public figure just like we do today.
Here's someone – oh, wait a second.
Corrine says Cy, if everyone learned to cite their sources like good little boys and girls, everyone would know that that awesome comic comes from Asher Sarlin at Elephantitis of the Mind.
Corrine, I am going to scroll to the top of my article here.
All right, Jesse, what do we see here?
Hat tip academic productivity via why that's delightful?
Via Omnibrain, via dot dot dot, via elephantitis of the mind.
I clearly attribute it that this started at that particular blog.
I know it's been almost 20 years, but I do expect an apology from Corrine.
All right, let's just look at a couple more.
This is kind of fun.
What did people care about back then?
All right, here we go.
White bread, white beard, thinking about focus back in 2008.
Focus and dedication to mastering hard ideas.
I've been thinking about those lately as I try to understand the behavior of my teenage daughters.
Uh-oh.
What seems to be far removed from the realm of reason.
I'm learning that they do not have focus on ideas their mother and I offer, or what is available in many of the fine books to which they have access.
They have only to go to their bedrooms and text their friends for instant confirmation that what they want do think, believe is not only utterly rational, but absolutely right or an internal truth.
Even email is too slow for the young.
If not texting, then at least instant messaging on the computer.
I'm learning that is not information or wisdom they seek, but instant confirmation from their peers.
Confirmation by responsible adults is simply unwanted or important.
Oh, white beard, man.
It is hard to parent teenagers.
I'm just getting there.
But man, think about that.
He was like three years away from, there was no social media yet.
So things were about to get way worse with these teenagers.
Yeah.
He was like, we're at the peak of digital issues for our teenagers is AOL instant messenger.
They're not doing sufficient research.
And when they cite their news sources, Oh man, white beard, things got worse.
They got dark.
Um, Oh, okay.
Now I'm just looking at a few of my responses.
I respond to Corrine and said, you're right.
I have now added elephant Titus of the mind to the end.
So I added that due to her Corrine.
I take it back.
You don't owe me.
Apologize.
Um, I told Chris that mudsling was pretty dirty.
So I kind of knew these things back then.
Um, Here's me talking to Amy.
I like your vision of GTD in the early 19th century.
I could imagine the next action list under context field is the next action.
Plow under context acts are the next actions.
Chop wood, kill chicken.
That was pretty funny.
A little GTD humor.
That's what we miss in our age of Sora.
You're missing GTD humor deep in the comments.
Uh, let's do one more.
Um, See here, Stefan said, quick question.
I've been thinking about this and was wondering if having a laptop makes it easier to quote get off the computer, end quote when you're studying at your desk, et cetera.
The reasoning is that a desktop computer is right in front of you and taking up most of the space on your desk, whereas a laptop you can put away in a case and temporarily forget about it while you do your own work.
Those that do have laptops, have you ever done this?
Does this work?
Man, can you think about a time when it was having a laptop would be rare?
Like people don't really.
We have this, I think like we're the last people to around.
Like we have lots of desktop computers that are HQ here, but that's like pretty rare, I guess, because we're doing video editing and like audio production or whatever.
Like everyone just uses laptops now.
I think Stefan is right because you can make a space dual use deep work without a laptop.
And then you can bring a laptop when you do need to actually do the laptop work.
What I do is I've talked about on the show is I have two different, well, I'm at my house.
I mean, a lot of different workspaces by my house.
I have two different offices.
There's a library study which has no permanent electronics, and I have a desk, an oak desk made by a company in Maine that specializes in desks for collegiate libraries.
And it's surrounded by books with library brush, library lighting.
And like that's where I go to read and think.
And then we have a separate sort of like small home office upstairs where our printer is, where we have a permanent monitor.
We can plug our laptop in where the filing cabinets are, where the tape and the office supplies are.
So like today I was doing the budget of the taxes.
You do that up there.
If you want to like read a Lincoln biography and highlight things with a pencil, you do it in the study.
So I think having different spaces works.
If you only have one, a laptop can be used to sort of transition the same space into both.
So there we go.
Kind of interesting to get that little glimpse into like what the world was like in 2008.
Yeah.
It felt simpler.
So people had a hard time back then as well.
All right.
So that's all the time we have for today.
Thanks for sticking with me through my Lincoln nerdiness, but I do love it.
We'll be back next week with another episode and until then, as always stay deep.
Hi, it's Cal here.
One more thing before you go.
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