We often talk about the ways that digital devices undermine our ability to consume complicated and meaningful information.
If you spend too much time scrolling TikTok, you'll eventually start struggling to read Tolstoy.
But what about our ability to produce complicated and meaningful information?
I'm talking about original and creative thoughts, or deep insight into yourself, that or a new understanding of the wondrous complexity of the world, or exciting new visions for what's possible.
This is what I want to get into today.
I'm going to go in three parts here.
In the first part of our discussion, I'm going to introduce an idea that I call long thinking.
I'm going to explain why I think long thinking is critical to creating a flourishing life.
In part two, I'll explore why specifically, our modern technological environment is undermining our ability to perform long thinking.
And then, in part three, I'm going to present a simple but effective training plan for regaining this ability.
Believe it or not, it's going to be based on an idea that I first wrote about in 2009 and have been practicing ever since.
All right.
So if you found yourself struggling to hold a line of thought or to make sense of complex ideas or material, if your world seems to have collapsed into shorter digital takes and cruder primal emotions, then this episode is for you.
As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.
Today's episode, the lost art of long thinking.
All right, so I want to start here with an example from my own life.
I'm going to load on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.
An essay that I published on my blog and newsletter back in the fall of 2012.
This was right at the start of my second year as a young professor.
The title of this article was Solutions Beyond the Screen the Adventure Work Method for Producing Creative Insights.
Now, I've loaded this up because I have some original photos I actually took here.
Actually, this is not my photo, Jesse, but someone else took this photo.
I did take photos.
This was not one of them.
So this is a foggy, it's a foggy street with trees and it's sort of desolate and romantic.
This was taken in Berkeley.
All right, let me read a little bit what I wrote here below that picture.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a brief visit to Berkeley, California for a wedding.
My wife, Julie had to take a conference call the first morning after we arrived.
So I decided to get some work done myself.
I didn't bring a computer.
So work couldn't mean email replying, the standard instinct in this situation.
Just as an aside, Jesse, there was no smartphones back then.
So if you didn't bring your computer, you weren't doing work.
Instead, I decided to log some hard focus hours on what I like to call the beast, a particularly vexing theory problem that my collaborators and I have been battling for many months.
Another aside, notice my use of the term hard focus.
It was actually a year or two before I actually started using the phrase deep work.
I got some coffee and headed toward the Berkeley campus on foot.
It was early and the fog was just starting to march down the Berkeley Hills.
I eventually wandered into a eucalyptus grove.
I'll show that on the screen.
Not my photo, but that's the same grove I wandered into.
Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.
Our existing strategy for the beast included a complicated algorithm which none of us looked forward to analyzing.
Deploying a trick I learned while a grad student.
I avoided needing to understand why the complicated algorithm worked by instead turning my attention to understanding why simpler strategies failed.
After only an hour, which included a strategic fill-up at the free speech cafe, I had an idea for a more concise and easier to analyze algorithm.
That seemed to work.
I realized, however, there's a limit to depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind.
Looking to get the most out of my new insights and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method, I trekked over to a nearby CVS and bought a 6x9 stenographer's notebook.
I then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally.
Here's a picture of my notes from that day, Jesse.
I did take that photo.
I'm trying to remember from those diagrams.
I can't really read the text, but I'm trying to remember from the diagrams exactly what problem this was I was working on
It looks like it was in the local model of distributed communication.
But anyways...
The combination of pen and paper notes with exotic content in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding.
Our battle with the beast continues, but in the latest draft of The Solution in Progress, those Berkeley simplifications play a useful role.
All right, that's a real case study from earlier in my professional career.
And it's a type of activity that, for me, had become second nature and continues to be second nature for me, but I think is more rare for other people.
What I was trying to do in that story was extract from my mind an original new, But something that had actual value to me and others, not like a eureka moment, just like an idea out of the blue.
Oh, now what if we?
What if we put ham on shoes or some sort of like a great brainstorm like that, but a persistent focus, application of my brain to slowly but systematically move towards something useful and new, and then captured in a form that I could share with others.
There's a term for this type of cognitive activity that I was doing there in the hills of Berkeley.
Long thinking.
Now, I think the first place I actually heard this term was from a TEDx talk that was given by the Italian professor Giovanni Corazzi, who works at the Marconi Institute for Creativity at the University of Bologna, where I've been.
I think ironically, the same year that I wrote that essay, I gave a talk at the University of Bologna.
It's a super old university.
Very cool.
I want to play a clip from Corazzi's talk where he introduces this term, long thinking.
We need to value long thinking.
Normally we talk about brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking.
But here we're talking about something different.
Long thinking.
What does that mean?
It's some thought that takes us far.
It's as if you were reading poetry or listening to music.
You don't judge the single notes.
You don't judge the single words.
It's the ensemble that gives you a feeling and takes you far.
We must do the same thing with our concepts.
We need to go far.
And so we can use association of ideas, combination of ideas, extraction of principles and application of those principles to areas where they were never applied.
All right, so notice what he's talking about there.
Again, long thinking is not about a sudden insight.
It is not about practicing something again and again.
It is about that persistent, intentional application of your brain where you're trying to create something new.
So you're taking existing ideas and information, you're pulling them out of the original context, you're reordering them, you're recombining them, you're finding new associations.
These are all terms that Corozo used.
Trying to come up with new principles or new structures of knowledge.
So it's like you're in the workshop of your mind, taking pieces that are in there and then experimenting with putting them together until you can build a new useful structure.
Now long thinking, I think, is so important that I want to give it a slightly more formal definition.
I'm going to put one up here on the screen.
This is just one of many we might use.
All right, so here's the definition that I have up on the screen right now.
Long thinking is the persistent and intentional application of thought toward a specific issue, problem or idea, with the goal of creating substantial and useful new insights.
All right?
So this is something that I want to talk about today.
Now a natural follow-up question before we get into the weeds about you know why this is useful and how to be better at it.
The immediate follow-up question that listeners of my podcast are going to have is like whoa whoa, whoa whoa.
This sounds a lot like deep work.
Is this just a rebranding of deep work?
What's going on here?
How do these two concepts relate?
Well, they are related, but they're not exactly the same.
And it's worth taking a moment to explain why before we move on.
So I'm going to put another diagram up here on the screen.
So for people who are listening, what I have up here is a Venn diagram.
You have a circle labeled long thinking.
You have a circle labeled deep work.
They overlap, but not completely.
And there's different activities that fall in different parts of this particular diagram.
So certainly in the intersection of long thinking and deep work, we can find things, right?
Like, so for example, this is where you might find, you know, I'm going to put the beast, right?
That was the problem I talked about in my 2012 essay I just read from.
It's a professional problem that required long, persistent thinking to like slowly make progress on.
So yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the intersection of long thinking and deep work, but there's other things that are over here in the world of long thinking that are not also deep work.
So for example, over here, we might have, you know, you're making sense of your life.
That benefits from long thinking.
You're trying to take information you have from your experiences and knowledge and rebuild a new structure that makes sense of your life.
But it has nothing really to do with work.
Deep work is about professional activity, focusing without distraction on professional activities.
Your world.
That's another element.
That's in long thinking about deep work, trying to make sense of your world.
I want to understand a political concept.
I want to understand a theoretical concept.
I'm in this workplace seminar and people are throwing at me all this terminology about critical theory or whatever.
I want to understand what that is.
I want to make sense of the world.
I want to know about specifically the trees in my yard.
It's not deep work because it's not a professional problem, but it benefits from long thinking.
And then we also have things over in deep work that are not long thinking right.
So you know we would have under this category, for example, a big one would be i'm gonna put dp for deliberate practice, trying to systematically get better at something that's demanding.
As i talk about about deep work and my book so good, they can't ignore you.
That requires deep work.
You're practicing it, so you're focusing really intensely and trying to push yourself past your comfort level.
It's not long thinking.
You're not creating something new.
You're not creating new thoughts.
You're not reorganizing the information in your head and the new structures, but it does require focus.
And so it's deep work, but not long thinking, right?
So we have these things overlap, but they're not exactly the same.
Long thinking can take you from your career into all sorts of other types of thoughts as well.
Deep work can benefit from long thinking, but there's other types of deep work activities that aren't long thinking at all.
The thing that unifies long thinking is creativity. you are creating something new.
With your brain, you are creating something new.
Whether it's inside ideas, understanding or vision, professional or personal, it doesn't matter.
It's the creation of new things from the information you already have.
That is what Barraza was emphasizing in his definition of long thinking.
That's what we're going to emphasize here.
Okay, so why is long thinking important?
In the big picture, we can make big, grandiose claims about it, right?
It's what built world as we know it.
The world that emerged out of prehistory, and everything about it that we think made life better than it was 100000 years ago, came out of long thinking.
We're talking technology, science, philosophy, theology.
That all required long thinking, the ability to put internally persistent thought on information.
You had to try to rebuild it into other structures that could be useful to you and others.
We would still be in small bands of hunters and foragers, fighting other bands to the death when our territories became too crowded, if not for humans developing the ability to do long thinking.
But that's a sort of like cultural historical, societal argument in favor for this particular ability.
What we care about more today is how long thinking is going to help you, as an individual, flourish in your own life.
And long thinking has three big advantages overall.
All right.
God help me, Jesse.
I'm going to draw a picture for each.
I'm going to put my arrows here.
I'll put my arrows here first.
I'm going to have three things that I am going to.
I will draw a completely self-explanatory and fantastically rendered photo for each.
Okay.
There's three advantages that long thinking gives you as the individual.
All right.
So for the first, let me draw the picture as I like to do.
I like to draw the picture first.
And let's see if Jesse can guess what it is.
Jesse, is that clear what that picture is?
Somebody thinking?
He's looking to a mirror.
Oh, okay.
Right.
So we got someone looking into a mirror.
All right.
The first benefit of long thinking is that it helps you build, over time, a more nuanced and grounded understanding of yourself.
Now, without such an understanding, you're going to be buffeted by the world, a conflicting ball of emotions and reactions like you're outraged.
No, you're nihilistic.
No, you're radical.
No, you just...
You just want to numb yourself and escape.
Your journey through life, by contrast, is so much richer if you can regularly take time to just be alone with your thoughts and then try to make sense of them.
Move them around, recombine, find associations, extract principles.
Long thinking lets you do that.
All right, second advantage, which I will now also perfectly draw.
All right, let's see here.
Second desk.
I'm giving some subtly giving some.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Oh, God, Jesse.
I don't know what I'm doing.
All right.
Now, that's the person at a desk.
Yeah.
Is that working?
Yeah.
All right.
That is working.
Again, brilliant artwork.
It helps you create useful things that impact the world and can provide economic value.
All great innovation strategies and ideas come from long thinking.
If you're adept at this, you will find a much clearer and more rewarding sense of purpose.
So clearly.
This is what I was using long thinking for in the example from the beginning of the episode.
It was helping me figure out how to make progress on a really complicated theory problem that me and my collaborators called the beast.
I published a lot of papers in 2012.
So I don't know what – that was at the height of my theory career earlier, when I was a new professor.
I was publishing a lot of papers back then.
So I don't know which of the papers that was.
I was doing a lot of long thinking back then.
So that was the advantage I was getting, but there's a third as well.
I have like a, uh, it's not an abstract artwork to do here, but it's, I'm doing artwork here.
That's going to represent something.
All right.
So I'm drawing for people who are listening, not watching.
I'm drawing what can only be described as like expertly rendered humans.
And they're each holding signs.
That's clear, right?
Jesse.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's like a lot of people like holding up signs and, And then, oh, this is going to get profound.
Jesse's going to wipe a tear away from his face when I'm done drawing this.
There's someone over on the side.
This is not looking like a hope.
It looks kind of bad, Jesse.
He's helping up someone.
You get that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's doing something to someone.
Yeah.
So it's like there's a whole group of people waving signs, but someone else is off to the side actually literally helping someone.
So what is that supposed to represent?
It helps you avoid fall into the trap of an easy tribalism.
With the ability to apply long thinking to important issues, issues you care about, issues that are important to the world, you will fall back on a more easy tribalism, where you just choose a tribe to be yours and you're like all I care about is making sure that we keep calling all the other tribes black-hearted and scoundrels, and I just want to focus on hating them.
Instead of having original thoughts or extracting my own principles for understanding the world, I will just consume short summaries of what the leaders of my tribe espouse as being true, and then I'll just parrot those.
I have no real understanding of the world.
I just want my tribe to succeed.
I kind of pretend like I'm helping the world, but really I'm just liking being part of a crowd.
The result of that sort of easy tribalism is often a mixture of anger and despair.
It might help you feel sort of alive in the moment, like it gives you some chemicals, that.
But long thinkers instead find real fascination and beauty and challenge in confronting the issues of the day.
They have clarity that comes not just from a desire to win over another tribe, but from putting in the time required to grapple with something difficult and find their way to its roots and really believe to their core.
This is important to me and I'm willing to go and act on it.
All of the great prophets and activists of history, from Jeremiah through MLK, all depended on long thinking, not an easy tribalism.
So for those three reasons self-reflection, production of things that really are valuable, and the ability to escape tribalism and really know what you believe in and really try to make a difference all of that depends on long thinking.
You take long thinking away, you have a much more impoverished life.
And I think a lot of people today are suffering from exactly that type of impoverishment.
All right.
Brings me to the second part of this discussion.
Why...
Are we losing our ability to do long thinking?
Well, obviously, the general cause, right?
This is me.
This is my show.
This is a show about understanding and responding to technology in a way that helps human flourishing.
Clearly, the problems come back to our modern technological environment.
They almost always do in this show.
But I want to drill a little bit deeper.
I think there are two particular reasons that come out of our modern technological environment that are, more specifically, making long thinking something that's becoming more and more difficult for the average person to do.
The first thing is the way that digital distractions undermine our comfort with sustained attention right.
Long thinking requires sustained attention because you have to keep your thoughts intentionally and persistently on trying to work with the information you have and try out different structures.
Your mind's eye has to be focused and unwavering.
That requires sustained attention.
The digital distractions that are readily abundant in the modern digital environment, as we know, makes us worse at sustaining attention.
That's because we have hyper palatable content.
We have algorithmically curated content that's selected for our own particular interest.
It gives us a peer reward signal.
We've talked about this for the last couple of months on this show.
That creates a bundle of neurons in your short-term motivation system that are super well-tuned to giving a super clear vote for pick up phone.
Pick up phone.
Pick up phone because it's getting such a clear, consistent reward with the occasional intermittent, very big reward.
That vote is powerful.
And so you're constantly breaking up your attention and you get less comfortable sustaining it because you can't politically speaking, in this metaphor, you can't win the vote against to pick up the phone neurons that long before you get exhausted.
In the professional setting.
Then we also have a hyperactive hive mind collaboration scourge where too much work is happening with back and forth unsynchronized messaging, which means you constantly have to check email, you constantly have to check Slack, and that makes it impossible for you to let your attention actually do the slow focusing on a single topic.
So We've got hyperpalatable content, hyperactive hive mind.
You put those two things together, we really lose our ability to sustain attention.
One of the many casualties of that common problem that we talk about a lot is long thinking is something that's uncomfortable, because you can't keep that mind's eye focused when it's phone email, phone email.
The second reason the modern technological environment is undermining long thinking is that the necessity for this activity, the things that drove us towards some sort of long thinking on a regular basis, have been significantly reduced due to technological replacements, in particular, tools like Google, AI and social media.
So, for example, we used to do self-reflection style long thinking much more often because we had a lot of time alone with our thoughts, and those were often the thoughts we were having.
Hey, something happened.
I'm upset about it.
I'm excited about it.
I'm down on myself for like this day went really poorly at this like work off site.
Like what's going on in my life?
What's going on professionally?
And then, when we're alone with those thoughts, we have nothing else to do but to start moving them around.
And let me file them away and take this out.
Let me try recut combinations of new associations.
Here's the structures I use for myself.
Meaning now maybe I need to do some renovations over here.
We got used to that out of necessity, because we had a lot of time with our thoughts, and those were a lot of thoughts we had.
I mean, think about the teenager alone in their room playing the Lisa Loeb songs, right?
What are you doing up there?
You're writing your diary and trying to make sense of your thoughts.
Today, when you have smartphones that can deliver alternative programming that will distract you in any situation, we're not forced to do that anymore.
We can numb away our thoughts today.
Or avoid the thoughts, the teenager who's upset, the business person upset after the bad meeting.
We can let Father TikTok take that off our hands.
And so we don't get that experience.
We don't get that experience with self-reflection.
Okay, the other way.
The other thing that we've lost necessity for long thinking that we've lost has to do with how we just understood ideas.
It used to be, if you didn't actually go pursue ideas, information about something you were clearly ignorant about it.
Like if, if you weren't reading the newspaper, you didn't know how to talk about what was happening in a political campaign.
If like the, the day we're recording, this is the mayoral election in New York city.
If this was like the mayoral elections when I was a kid.
This is like the, the Giuliani Dinkins before that Dinkins like that type of years.
If you weren't reading the newspaper, like you would have no idea.
I have no idea what's going on.
Today I can grab almost any kid and they'll have something to say because they've seen some Mondani TikToks or you get these little quick summaries of things and you can kind of feel in the know.
You can see what your tribe feels about something without having to actually just read more raw information.
And so you don't need that today.
But back then for anything you wanted to know more about, you had to kind of take in raw information.
Not raw, but not takes.
Not like, here's how your tribe feels about it.
It's like it's a 2,000-word article in your local paper.
It's a news report with Dan Rather, right?
It's a special on PBS.
It's a book.
So you have to engage with a lot more information that wasn't yet I'm not going to say wrong and say unrefined that you had, that didn't refine yourself to pull out of it some understanding and compare it to other things you know and be like okay.
So how do I feel about this?
Not today.
Your phone can do this for you.
Social media will just like, okay, I kind of follow people in my tribe.
I get the quick takes.
I like this guy.
I don't like this guy.
This guy, it's great.
It's like young, sexy mayor.
Like, no, no, he's scary socialist.
Or like, you get the answer right away.
But in those old days, you had to like, I'm going to have to read about this.
And then on my own, figure out how I feel about that.
Right?
Because you weren't getting this information in a way that was already partisanized.
So you would read kind of boring, unrefined information and then say, how do I fit this into things?
Oh, I guess I like this guy.
I don't like this guy.
I have reservations.
We'll see.
I want to see this or that.
And that was the act of having to integrate less refined information to your existing understanding so you didn't seem ignorant or dumb.
Required long thinking.
But again, we don't do it today because you don't have to.
We can just tell you how you're supposed to feel.
Everyone has an opinion on everything.
People know very little about it.
I know this, Jesse, because I've been doing a lot of AI criticism.
Everyone has an opinion about AI, and so few people know anything about it.
It's crazy.
I think I'm going to grow a beard like Eliezer Udowski, and then I'm going to seem more profound.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to wear a wizard's hat, like a Harry Potter-style wizard's hat, and I think that'll just make it seem when I have a long gray beard, like Rick Rubin.
And then I think people – that's it.
And then I'll just – whatever I say about AI, people are like, that's probably right.
That wizard knows what he's talking about.
I'll talk real profoundly.
So that's what's going on.
So that's the second reason why technology undermined our ability to do long thinking.
So, okay, just to summarize, issue number one, it fragmented sustained attention.
Now long thinking is hard.
Issue number two technology made information that's already refined just to tell you exactly what you need to think and know gets rid of the like natural need to have to actually process less refined information into your own personal understanding structures.
People don't have personal understanding structures anymore.
They join teams and then they get a quick telegraph updates of how that team feels about things.
Don't need long thinking in that world either.
All right.
So I've made my case now that long thinking is both important for a flourishing life and, due to the modern technological environment, is diminishing.
The next big question then is how do Do you get this skill back if you want it?
That's what we're going to tackle next, right after we take a quick break to hear from the sponsors that make this show possible.
All right, this is a true story.
When I arrived at the Deep Work HQ this morning, they were in the process of hanging their traditional large Christmas wreath on the second floor of the building, above the door.
Do you see that coming in today, Jesse, with the flashing lights?
I don't.
Missed it, actually.
How could you miss it?
It's massive.
It's flashing.
But I was also flustered because I forgot my keys.
Yeah, Jesse was locked out of the HQ.
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All right, let's also talk Grammarly today.
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I want to tell you about a particular feature that I've been enjoying, the proofreading agent.
So here's a real example.
I had to write an email that was going out to like a somewhat large group of people.
So I typed out a quick draft, but before sending, I had the proofreading agent take a look.
Of course, it found some straightforward mistakes.
You know, Grammarly is good at that, which is great, but it can do a lot more.
There's a whole list of functions you can apply.
So, like when I clicked on sharpen opening point, it suggested ways to be less wishy-washy in my language in the opening sentences, which actually made that a better email without me having to like sit there and pour over it like I was writing a New Yorker piece, right.
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All right, Jesse, let's get back to our deep dive.
All right, as promised in our final section, here we are going to get into the ways that you can get better at long thinking, now that you're convinced that it's worth it, and you need some practice.
So I'm going to suggest a concrete strategy and I'm actually going to get this strategy from an essay I first published all the way back in 2009.
It's like the early days of my blog when my writing was still student facing.
It describes a strategy that I started back then and I still do today.
And I think it is the best training, the best single thing you can do to train your ability to do long thinking.
All right, I'm going to load this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.
You'll see here the name of this method is the notebook method.
Now, the subtitle says, how can pen and paper transform you into a star student?
Because again, I was writing just for students back then.
But stay with me because this advice is relevant to anyone.
That's what I learned as I advanced in my career and kept using it.
All right, so I'm going to scroll down here a little bit and I'm going to start at the paragraph that says the idea is simple.
There's four steps here.
I'm going to read each of them.
Number one, buy a sturdy college-ruled notebook dedicated to the relevant class.
So that was for school, but we can just generalize that to say to the relevant problem that you want to make progress on.
Number two, buy a good pen.
Nothing beats a black uniball microphone.
0.5 millimeter.
I've been talking about those.
Jesse is literally holding one.
Show us, Jesse.
I adopted it because I was a fan.
This is proof I've been using those for a long time.
Number three take your notebook and pen and go to the most relaxing meditative, non-distracting place possible.
The deep stacks of the library is okay.
Hiking 30 minutes into the woods or onto the dunes, overlooking a windswept springtime beach, is even better.
Number four...
Spend one to three hours working out your thinking on the task at hand in your notebook.
Spend the last 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page that you mark with the date and a title.
For example, here's a snapshot from a page in my PhD thesis notebook.
There we go, Jesse.
Look at that.
All right, so I recognize this.
This was from my doctoral dissertation, which I defended later that year.
The composition algorithm...
Right now, I know, Jesse, you're seeing multiple mistakes probably as you're looking at this.
But I actually remembered it.
It was taking two randomized algorithms, one of which was simulating a channel and one of which is simulating an algorithm that uses that channel, treating them formally as formal IO automata.
And then it's a systematic algorithm.
So it's a conceptual algorithm, not something you actually run.
That just shows the existence of a combined algorithm, composed algorithm, in which the channel, the algorithm on this channel simulator behaves like the algorithm on the channel.
It was a pain to work out these details, but that was a big part of this thesis.
This was actually, interestingly, the work I presented in Bologna.
There we go, full circle.
This should look familiar because that's exactly what I was talking about in the article from the beginning of this podcast from 2012, when I was at Berkeley working on a problem as a professor.
That was three years later.
So clearly this notebook method of I'm going to take a notebook, I'm going to go somewhere scenic and I'm going to sit there and just work in the scenic environment on this problem.
And then, in the last 20 minutes, summarize it the best I can with a title and date, to kind of make it all official.
In 2012, I was still doing that.
I still do it today.
So this method has stuck with me.
Why does it work?
Well, I'm going to scroll down farther in this article, because here is my best explanation for why the notebook method is so successful.
I said it's power sources from the following truths.
Number one.
Writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you're thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies.
It's hard work.
You'll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere.
Eventually, you gain familiarity with the novel sensation of deep thinking.
Number two, You can't check email using a spiral bound notebook.
You also can't update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel.
That's somewhat timely.
That's from a while ago, 15 years ago, but those technologies still exist.
If you're high up in the library stacks or, better yet, in the woods or at the beach, it's just you and your notebook.
Eventually, your urge towards distraction will give away.
And three paper facilitates creative thinking.
You can draw arrows and circle concepts and sketch structure.
Something about a good ballpoint.
Scraping across a thick grain paper stock unlocks area of your mind that tend to hibernate when you're slumped over your laptop in a crowded study lounge.
I think those explanations are exactly right.
Writing down your thoughts as opposed to just keeping your head makes you be more organized.
That's exactly right.
Your thinking is clearer.
That makes your long thinking better.
Being without technology in a very scenic place reduces distracting pulls, helps you focus more.
I kept pushing for inspiring places in this article.
So yeah, library stack, sure.
Beach, better.
So if you're in an inspiring place, that gives you an extra bit of energy.
It's so different.
You feel chemicals, but they're not the standard chemicals.
It really unlocks new things.
And finally, you're in a paper form.
You can draw pictures and squares and boxes and mathematical formulas and connect things together with arrows.
And so it unlocks as sort of like a freer type of thinking than if you're just trying to hold something in your head or just typing.
I think those reasons do a very good job.
Whatever I identified back then in 2009 does a very good job of explaining why this method works.
And so this is what I want you to do.
If you want to become a better long thinker, implement the notebook method at least once a week, preferably in the most scenic places possible.
It could be a work problem.
It could be something about yourself, like a self-reflection thing you're working on.
It could be visioning or planning for your future, like what your deeper life is missing.
It could be about making sense of something in the world that's catching your attention.
It could be about clarifying your personal principles, values, or beliefs.
Whatever the target, take that good notebook, take that good pen, go somewhere scenic, one to three hours, last 20 minutes, write it down.
This is calisthenics for your ability to produce thoughts.
So if reading hard things, like we talked about a couple episodes ago, is like calisthenics for being able to understand hard things for a mind that has new connections and can take in complicated thoughts,
The notebook method is calisthenics.
For then how do you produce original, complex thoughts of yourself?
You read, combine that with the notebook method, and now you have a brain that's internet proof.
Now you have a brain that's algorithm proof.
There's other things you can do to become a better long thinker, but I'm just saying notebook method once a week.
Simple, but that really does make a big difference.
I still do that to this day.
The idea is not new.
I'm not the only one who does this.
There was a section in my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, that I particularly liked that I get into where I go and visit the, the soldiers, the old soldiers retirement home up now in like Petworth in DC, but it was sort of in the Hills above where the white house is in DC.
And Abraham Lincoln, I wrote about this.
So Abraham Lincoln would go there.
That was his, like his weekend retreat up into the Hills to this house they had up there.
And he would go there to basically apply the notebook method.
He would wander the grounds and think and try to make sense of whatever the issue is of the day.
And he would write his ideas is not always in a notebook, but famously on scraps of paper, some of which he would hide in the lining or store in the lining of his sort of famous stove top style hat.
It was up there wandering, trying to make sense of his thoughts that he reached, like his decisions about the Emancipation Proclamation, some of his biggest military decisions.
So I'm not the first to come up with the notebook method, but it is a great way of extracting long thinking from your day.
All right Jesse, let's do some takeaways from today's discussion.
All right, so here's the thing.
We like to imagine that our brain is a neutral observer of an objective world that surrounds us and that our daily experience is therefore determined by whatever we happen to encounter in the world that day.
But this model isn't right.
Our experience is determined by a combination of what we encounter and all of the relevant mental structures that we have built in our minds.
The structures that help us explain ourselves and our beliefs and our understanding about how other people and the world functions.
If you're comfortable with long thinking, you can create these structures in ways that are meaningful and important to you.
This allows you in a literal sense to help shape the world you live in to be more rich.
Now, if you allow instead, the modern technological environment to degrade your long-thinking ability, you'll end up encountering the world through impoverished mental structures that were implanted haphazardly in your mind through distracting content and random things you happen to come across.
You are, in that case, letting a bunch of random algorithms essentially shape your world into something that's most likely to be nihilistic angry, random or boring.
So if you don't want your phone to determine your world, then you need to re-embrace the joys and power of long-thinking.
Not that hard to do.
You buy a notebook, you hike somewhere scenic, you work out a complicated thought on paper, you end with a clear summary and you repeat.
It's a simple habit, but over time it will help you re-engage with long thinking, and as long thinking becomes more common and comfortable for you, you will be able to transform your world into something that is much more meaningful and satisfying.
So give long thinking a try.
All right, there you go.
We still have a lot of great show ahead.
Jesse pulled a collection of questions here that a lot of them are about like notebooks and trying to take notes and organizing your thoughts.
And so like we're going to get into the nitty gritty of sort of how you have notebook assisted long thinking,
We have a case study.
We've got a call.
And because this is the first episode we're recording in November, at the end I'm going to tell you I'll review briefly the five books I read during the last month.
Before we do that, though, let's see.
Let's do some housekeeping.
All right, Jesse, so they can find these episodes if you're listening on YouTube.
Just search for Cal Newport Media.
You'll see the latest episode.
Subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already at calnewport.com.
So the newsletter discussion, it often complements the podcast.
It'll take it in a different direction or add something that wasn't in the episode or vice versa.
So if you like the podcast, you really got to have that newsletter.
It's also where I announce things and talk about things.
And hey, here's a book I recommend, or I'm going to be showing up in your town to talk.
That comes out the same time every week.
Yeah, it's the same time.
They come out together.
You'll get it in your inbox, and the newsletter will tell you what's in the podcast.
And so you've got to subscribe to that.
That's been around for a long time, 2007.
Yeah.
You could subscribe.
CalNewport.com has been around for a while.
And we love your questions, Jesse.
Tell us about how to submit questions, what type of questions you're looking for.
You can go to the deeplife.com slash listen.
There's two links there where you can submit questions.
Audio questions or written questions.
So just go there and check it out.
Make them short and sweet.
Preferably questions about different ways of either understanding technology or responding to different technologies, whether in your work or your personal life, are preferred.
All right.
So, speaking of questions, I think Jesse, it's time for us now to hear some questions from our listeners.
All right.
First question is from Tara.
How do you organize your notebooks, physical or remarkable for your books and New Yorker articles?
Well, I'll still say I'm still using, by the way, people have asked me about this.
I'm still using my remarkable.
I'm now upgraded to a remarkable paper pro.
And I still really like that product.
Usually I kind of fall out of favor of products that aren't just like notebooks and 05 millimeter ballpoint pens, but I've stuck with it.
All right.
So here's how I use my different technologies.
I still have physical single purpose notebooks.
I use field note notebooks.
For particular issues that I want to come back to again and again.
So if I'm like working on a book, or I'm going through like an important life decision, or I'm trying to like an overhaul, or I want to like do something like specific that I want to come back to again and again,
I like to have a single purpose practical notebook that I can bring with me and just let those thoughts begin to collect.
I use notebooks, on my Remarkable so virtual notebooks, on my Remarkable e-ink notebook for a lot of ongoing projects where I need to organize, especially notes that are taken over time.
If I'm having a series of meetings, like I'm on the board of trustees for my kids' schools, I want to have a notebook to keep track of those notes from the different meetings and they're dated.
That type of notebook I just keep as a virtual notebook within my Remarkable, my Halloween design planning.
I do in the Remarkable
I actually got a lot of I was happy, Jesse, like on Halloween.
I didn't know if people would appreciate what went into my custom-built light sound controller.
I was going to ask you about that.
I was like, people are just going to be like, oh, because it's not like it's a super impressive.
It's not a super impressive big thing to see.
It was just like a synchronized laser battle.
A lot of people came up and appreciated the technology like the complexity of actually the circuits for that.
So I really appreciated that.
I don't know if people would get it, but they did.
I have ideas for next year, by the way.
There's going to be movement.
What you put in your remarkable notebook.
I do use my remark.
I have a Halloween notebook in there.
I decide that goes in there as well.
Okay.
Then for, for my, like the specific things I do again and again for my professional career.
So the things that are at the core of what I do for my job, I have more customized tools.
I've talked about this before, but books and non-mathematical articles are.
I use Scrivener and it's in the Scrivener project for each of those that I collect all the notes and clippings and thoughts and articles and links.
They're all in the various research folders I keep within the Scrivener project.
More mathematical articles of the type like I've been talking about in this episode.
I don't write as many of those right now anymore, but my old theory articles.
I would use Overleaf, which is like a web-based collaborative editor for the markup language you use for mathematical articles.
And I would just start putting ideas in the actual tool I'm using to do the writing.
So I've got a lot of tools still.
Those are the ones I mainly use.
So you use your remarkable pretty much every day.
Yeah.
I use it a lot.
Yeah.
I use a lot.
I like it.
I think it's a really good product.
They're not even a sponsor.
They just, you know, they sent me one, but I appreciate that they did.
All right.
Who do we got next?
Next up is Megan.
How do I get better at reading?
I'm an 18 year old student and my reading has dropped in recent years.
How do I reverse this?
Should I just read more or all books or articles fair game?
Yes.
And right.
Yes.
You need to read more. for now, just whatever you're most excited to read.
Great.
The key is actually minutes of eyes on page because you're reactivating those reading circuits.
You're re sort of myelinating them.
You're trying to get, you're trying to get that the friction reduced or the active reading.
So if you can get involved in like a reading fandom, I'm going to read whatever like dark academia books which, as far as I can tell or tend to be, it's always like young women and these like always like some sort of weird secret society cult.
And then at some point, like a ghost is beating them up.
Like so whatever, if that's your thing, or fairy romance or whatever it is.
Whatever, I don't care what it is.
Minutes, eyes and minutes on page.
But I said, yes.
And because the other thing you need to do is make attention, sustained attention be less foreign and scary.
You're an 18 year old student.
So I'm going to assume that the very best way to do that is you have to stop using your phone so much.
You got to just stop.
Having your phone as a constant companion is not normal or healthy, and I don't care if everyone does it.
You're noticing the beginning of those side effects now.
Reading is like the basic activation of advanced symbolic thinking.
If you're struggling reading, your whole brain is struggling because of that stupid piece of glass.
So take social media off of it.
They're not going to miss you.
Take social media off of it.
Keep it in one room when you're at home, not with you.
Just be used to having long periods of your day. where the phone is not there.
You cannot be interrupted.
Your mind has nothing to check.
You have to drastically reduce the footprint of your phone in your life.
I don't know how else to tell you this.
If you want your brain to get re-comfortable again with sustained attention, which you'll need to do reading.
The reading will build the circuits.
That sustained attention will then help you do long thinking.
All this is going to make your life better.
The phone wants to make it worse.
You've got to renegotiate.
Now that you're an adult, renegotiate your relationship with your phone so that you can build a life on your own terms.
All right, who do we got next?
Next up is Francis.
My father was an English teacher who passed away a couple years ago.
While clearing out his house, I was reminded how I used to enjoy creative writing.
I'm currently a university professor that writes for my work, but not creatively.
I don't want to write on computer, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions.
I own and use Irremarkable.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, speaking of professors, I always thought this was an interesting observation.
So my...
My dad was a professor for a while.
My grandfather was a professor.
My grandfather was a very prolific professor.
So I'm from a line of scholars.
My grandfather wrote a lot of books.
I don't remember how many, but at least a dozen academic-y books.
He was a Baptist Christian apologist, was at Rice for a long time as an endowed chair and then the provost of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, right before the fundamentalist takeover.
So he was in that world of religious scholarship, wrote a ton of books, never had a computer, bought his first computer after he retired.
He would hand write those books on yellow legal pads and then a typist would type it up and he would look at the type drafts.
He would mark up those type drafts and then someone that would type it up again and he would look at those.
To modernize we have this, this efficiency thinking.
We've taken the idea that comes out of like industrial manufacturing in which like, all that matters is Because it's a set process.
So all that matters is the speed at which things happen.
We look at that and we say, oh, that's so slow.
Writing on a tablet is slow.
Having it typed and you have to hand mark it and hand it back, that's slow.
But he wrote way more books than most professors.
He wrote more books than I've written.
Because with cognitive activities, it's interesting.
Efficiency and slowness isn't the same thing as an industrial manufacturing.
In fact, going slower probably made the books better.
And also like the raw hours that you're actually writing when you write a book is like a fraction of the time involved in, like creating that book.
So anyways, I always thought that was interesting.
So you have a lot more flexibility than you think when it comes to writing.
I have a friend who does a short story writing on typewriters.
He really likes it.
So if you're looking for an alternative, there's several things you can do.
There's a product I'm interested in called the FreeWrite, W-R-I-T-E.
It's an e-ink product.
It's like the same type of screen as a Kindle.
It's a keyboard with like an e-ink screen.
They have a couple different models.
And basically it's a drafting tool.
So you can see what you're typing in the little screen as you're writing.
All you can do is like write and you can have different folders with different files in it, and you can select one through a pretty slow interface and then just start writing.
You do basic editing.
There's like a backspace key or you can move to your recent text, but you can't do – you don't have a mouse.
You're not cutting and pasting and spell checking and doing this.
The whole idea is you're supposed to – it's for creative writers.
Like I just want to get a draft of this done.
And I have a really good mechanical keyboard and I see the words there and I can fix my typos in the moment.
But I'm just writing until I'm done.
Then you can export them off of the free, write into like Google docs or word or something and and uh, do like a better editing pass and work from there.
But it's like mint as a drafting tool that you could just carry and it's portable.
I think that's really interesting.
Another thing that some people do.
I believe I first heard about this from I think it was I think it was Dave Eggers.
It might've been Michael Shea.
I don't think it's Michael Shea Bond.
I think this was Dave Eggers.
Um, He had an old laptop where it had no – he had disabled the internet.
So it had no workable Wi-Fi.
And it's old.
There's nothing else on it but like Word.
And he would use that laptop to write.
So now like you can edit like a little bit, right?
You can do all your editing on it.
You copy and paste and move things around.
And like it's not just like I'm writing a draft.
But you can't do anything else on this computer.
There's no internet.
And then, when he's done, USB key.
All right, I'll move the file over there and I can move it to like my other computer.
And then I can, if I want to email it to someone or do something like that.
That, to me, is a cool idea.
You just get like a simple computer and just never activate, never activate the internet.
I would go so far as like break that wireless chip and have someone do that for you.
Like I really can't use this on the internet.
So this is just like a nice writing machine.
I spent $300 on it.
So you have options from paper to something like free, right?
The remarkable has a keyboard.
I bought a remarkable with a keyboard.
I don't, I'm not going to recommend that, it's too clunky when you try to type with the keyboard.
The keyboard's fine, but it's, you have no control.
I feel like I don't have enough control of where that text goes.
It's too hard to edit.
It's not really, it's meant for like adding some annotations to notes.
So I wouldn't use a remarkable for it, but I think the free write might be an interesting tool.
And then really the best solution is cheap laptop, no wifi, nothing else on it.
All right.
Let's see here.
All right.
So we have some More questions coming up, including a call that's on these topics and we'll review the books I read last month.
So you're going to want to keep sticking around for the show.
We're going to take just a brief break to hear from a couple of the sponsors, and then we're going to get right back in it.
All right.
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Jesse, I want to tell you something that I'm not very good at.
That's hiring.
As I mentioned on the show before, we recently hired a creative director to help run the newsletter and it made a big difference.
I was really neglecting that newsletter and now it is going out regularly.
What mattered was he was the right person with the right skills.
That makes all the difference in your business.
And this is where Indeed enters the picture.
It took me like over a year to find the right person.
And in the end, it was because I just happened to Someone else I knew, knew this person or whatever.
What I should have done is used Indeed.
It would have made this process much easier.
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All right, Jesse, let's get back to those questions.
Next question is from Sidi.
You have discussed Teddy Roosevelt's astounding productivity and his ability to read at least one book per day.
When I read, I don't get the most out of the book unless I write reflections or spend time thinking about the concepts presented, and reading one book per day would not allow me to maximize the benefit from each book.
I'm still not completely sure how Roosevelt did that while in the White House, mind you.
While in the White House, he supposedly read a book a day.
I think he was a very good skimmer.
I think he was very good at getting to exactly the points because he had read so many books.
He'd be like, interesting, interesting, skip, skip, skip, interesting, skip, interesting, got it.
I think that's what was happening.
When it comes to your own reading practice...
Read at the pace that allows you to get the most value.
And for a book where you're really trying to extract new ideas like so a book that's going to trigger a lot of long thinking could take a long time to read, and that's fine.
Annotate it.
I often do that with those books with my pencil marking method.
Do summary notes.
So for big idea books, I really want to understand.
I'll start a document where I write summaries of each chapter.
That really helps me like long think through, like what the ideas are.
Go for long walks to try to integrate ideas in your life.
That's all great.
The only thing I would add to that is having some diversity of books.
You don't want every book that you're reading to be such a heavy lift.
You're going to burn out.
So mix those in with other types of books that you can read fast, maybe even in a day, and go back and forth between these.
But let each book get the time that it needs for you to get the most out of it.
It's not a race.
And so you don't have to do the Teddy's pace on everything.
I was recently listening to Tim Ferriss interview with David Senra, who runs the founders podcast.
Right.
And he reads a ton of books, but he was saying he reads really slow.
He only reads like 25 pages an hour.
Yeah.
So it's like I like this idea of like minutes of eyes on page is important because it's all a stage where your brain is making connections and you're building up your knowledge, and speed depends on like the book and the person.
I'm not a particularly fast reader.
It takes me the full month to do my five books for sure.
All right.
Who we got next?
Next up is Bridget.
Can you revisit your explanation of single-purpose notebooks and reflection walks?
Is this something that you do every day or just sporadically?
So now we have terminology for this.
That's basically the notebook method, what we just talked about in our deep dive.
So, going for a walk somewhere scenic with a single-purpose notebook that can do nothing but hold notes on this one topic, it forces you to do exactly long thinking, persistent thought, towards one problem that you're trying to make useful progress on.
You have to reorganize, build new association, extract principles, write it down, think about it.
That's not quite right.
But the single-purpose notebook in the short term acts as like an extension of your working memory.
It's a way, okay, let me write this down.
Let me think about that.
Let me reorder it.
Okay, now this is what I really mean.
It allows you to hold more pieces together and rearrange them.
Over time, it also becomes a repository for how your thinking has evolved.
So you might have like a few pages of kind of scratch pages as you're working through thoughts on your walk.
That, And then the final page you maybe have like a star or a box around like okay, that's kind of the work product of this walk.
That's the key observation.
And then the next time you do a walk or go somewhere scenic whatever, you start from that like okay, I can get up to speed on where I was.
Now you're doing more.
So the short term is like a working memory.
Long term is like a record of your thoughts.
Since that notebook fills.
You're capturing an artifact of the human brain, seeing what only human brains can do.
So I love the practice of single purpose notebooks on thinking walks aimed at a given problem.
That is purified long thinking.
And once you've started doing it.
It really can be addicting.
I really always look forward to my long thinking.
I have a stack.
I have like 50 single purpose notebooks just waiting for me.
And a hundred of my pens.
I love the idea that I. No matter what comes up.
I can grab a clean notebook and a fresh pen.
And head out the door.
I keep like a big stock of those in my library at home.
Alright we got a case study this week.
Where people.
They send in their examples of their stories of using that type of advice we talked about on the show in their own life.
We have case cutting.
Yeah.
We have music.
We have music.
Let's hear some music.
Now we're in the mood for a case study.
All right.
Today's case study comes from Mason.
Mason says, I struggled for a long period after college.
Then I discovered your concept of deep work and was immediately a convert.
I consumed your content.
I made my phone as dumb as possible and have long been off social media.
I wrote out my key documents, drafted a quarterly plan.
I set up a working memory.txt file.
I ordered the time block planner.
I made a Trello board and assessed what kind of deep to shallow ratio was possible given my weekly responsibilities.
I put my phone in the kitchen and tried, though often failed, to meditate productively, and I embraced boredom.
I enrolled in you and Scott Young's course on the focus life.
And then I started evangelizing.
Through all of this, I got promoted.
I got married.
I started visiting immigration detention centers.
I'm working through.
It'd be funny like you think that's like for a positive thing, like to help the people who are detained.
It'd be funny if he's like to rob them.
Turns out, you can steal the wallets of people in detention centers if you think deeply enough about the security lapses.
No, you're doing something very noble, Mason.
I'm sorry to joke about it.
I'm working through Tolstoy and spent a lot of time practicing photography.
I go to therapy and I coach at a local CrossFit gym.
I massively reduce my anxiety and have created systems that are a ballast when things feel out of control.
But these systems aren't perfect and I'm still vulnerable to slipping back into the old ways, which include YouTube rabbit holes and hours on my phone.
I'm not expecting this to be easy and maybe I just need to keep practicing.
But when it comes to cultivating the deep life, I feel like something is missing.
Maybe your new books get into whatever that something is.
Do you ever get tired?
All right.
It's a great case study followed by a great question.
So what I like about the case study is it indicates like a lot of the things I talk about I talk about a lot of things are all like loosely responding to either understanding technology or responding to the culture of problems that technology creates.
One of the categories of these things I talk about is like, about the type of things he talks about there.
They try to like organize your life, Be less distracted, but also be more intentional and have plans at different levels and deep to shallow work ratios and be super intentional.
Because a lot of what makes life today seem busy or boring, or nihilistic, or exhausting is that these different forces, a lot of them technological, can push you into this sort of unintentional artificial, frenetic state where you're bouncing off the walls.
You're like, what's even going on?
When you get intentional about all this stuff.
Look what all this, the good stuff that happens promotion marriage, helping people, reading hard things in good shape, anxiety lower, talking to a therapy therapist like his life is under control.
And that's why, by the way, I would always get frustrated.
Well, first of all, I don't like being described as a productivity guru because, like these are one column of, like a massive structure of things that all come back to technology.
Right.
But I get even more frustrated when people who don't know my work assume that They think they're the first person to discover Frederick Winslow Taylor, who they completely missight and completely inflate his importance, which really wasn't that much.
His main importance was for later writers to look back and try to feel like they're smart.
And you're just trying to squeeze more work.
Basically, this is like warmed over Marx's critical theory.
It's just.
You're creating this sort of false consciousness so that you can squeeze more labor out of the sort of brainwashed bourgeoisie.
It's work for work's sake and hustle culture and all this type of thing.
No.
It's about gaining control of your life from the technological forces that want to make it chaotic, frenetic and seemingly meaningless.
These things work.
Think about time smartly.
Think about attention smartly.
Think about workload smartly.
It matters.
You can get your arms around this current world that has so much that's being thrown at you with so little controls.
But it's for making your life better, not making you faster and more efficient or more hustly.
But Mason brings up a good point here.
Is that enough?
And there the answer is no as well.
This is so you can get control over stuff.
But you still.
It's up to you to cultivate a deep life.
This was the major turn that my thinking and writing made around the beginning of the pandemic, especially the first months of the pandemic, when I coined the term the deep life, because I was at peak form then of I.
You know I was worried about technology and distraction and email and I was working on my email book, but I was in peak form of like I understand information flows.
I understand human psychology and I understand neuroscience.
I understand modern work, culture and technology culture and like how to uh The problems all these things are creating, how to be intentional and push these problems back.
But the pandemic began, I said, yeah, but then what?
Push them back to do what?
And that's when we get to talk about the deep life, which was about being systematic, about what your life is, about reducing the stuff you don't like.
Amplify the stuff you do.
Make a life of meaning and satisfaction on your own terms.
And I've become increasingly convinced the deep life is really, really important, especially if you're trying to deal with technology.
It's the bigger, better offer you make, so that TikTok and Sora and Reddit wars with your tribal compatriots is not so interesting anymore.
You have nothing else going on in your life.
Your life is super stressful.
You're like, well, that's better.
But if your life is built on your own terms.
I don't want to watch Bob Ross breakdancing on a piece of glass.
I'm living life here.
This is more important.
The deep life ultimately is the anecdotes.
The antidote, rather.
The antidote to a lot of the poisons of the modern technological world.
So how do you do that?
Well, that's the new book I'm writing now.
I'm in the middle of it.
We're more than a year out from this book coming out, so there's a lot more to go.
But the approach I'm taking on this book is, Mason, you will like this.
The whole point of this book is I don't want to tell you what you need in a deep life.
This is not like Oprah and Arthur Brooks' book, where it's like let me tell you the five things you need to care about in your life for your life to be better, right.
It is a book that, on the topic that not enough people talk about, which is just a straight up pragmatic, technical processes that'll let you succeed in directing your life to something more meaningful, whatever that is.
And in fact I've given you the technical processes.
For how do you figure out what meaning even means for you?
And then once you know that, how do you actually make progress towards that?
How do you avoid just like having a sort of sporadic burst of inspiration where you're like we're going to move?
I'm going to like buy a dumbbell or whatever.
Like how do you actually like systematically and more consistently succeed in, you know, making your life more meaningful?
So it's.
It's all about just the practical details of chapters, or the sections are all numbered in it.
There's a huge amount of like diagrams, and all right, then you might format it this way and be like purposefully technical in it.
But to answer that final question, But here's the thing.
All that stuff you did Mason, you kind of have to be able to do that before this deep life sort of instructions.
You're going to be able to follow through with them anyways.
Like what you did, I now think about is like the preparation for cultivating a deep life.
I call it becoming a more capable human.
You became a more capable human who's in charge of like, your time and your workload and your life around you.
Then you need to know what to do with that.
And that's where like deep life cultivation methods come in.
And you're like, okay, now I'm going to start figuring out what really matters.
I'm going to start making my life really cool and radical and remarkable.
So that's the book I'm working on, but you're pointing out a good thing.
A lot of this stuff that people call my productivity advice is like how to become more capable human.
What you do with it is also where the really cool stuff happens, and that's its own type of topic.
So stay tuned on that, Mason.
I'm thinking about this stuff all day.
There'll be a lot more of this to come as I get closer to finishing that book.
All right, do we have a call this week, Jesse?
Yes, we do.
All right, let's hear this.
Hi, Cal.
My name's Juan, and I wanted to ask you some advice on some extended adventure workings.
I'm currently hiking the Continental Divide Trail.
I'm taking a pit stop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before continuing on through the snowy mountains of Southern Colorado.
And yeah, for the next five months, my only real priority is to make it through this next adventure.
However, I don't completely want to pause my creative life.
I draw graphic novels for fun, and I'd love for my next project to be about this hike I'm doing right now.
So this brought to mind your idea of adventure work, where you make progress on work by engaging with ideas while immersed in a totally unrelated environment.
How would you recommend that I use my time on this hike towards that goal?
I have some pocket notebooks that I could use as sketchbooks or single-purpose notebooks, and I also have a journal.
However, the vast majority of my time needs to be spent on the trail so that I can cover the 20 or 25 miles that I need to do each day.
OK, so this is a long thinking push to the extreme type of case study you have all day long.
You're just in scenic environments alone with your own thoughts.
It's a perfect environment for long thinking.
The real issue is you're doing too much.
You're going to burn out your brain.
I would choose sessions throughout the day where, for the next hour, I'll be working on the following thing in my brain
Long-thinking target, making sense of a new creative idea, making sense of yourself, trying to make sense of the insights that you're gaining on the trail.
Now I know you can't stop that often, but you're going to get really good at working with these things in your head.
And then, during a brief water break, adding those notes pretty refined, to your page.
Or if it's a graphic novel thing you're working on, maybe you have a sketch.
Though really you're probably working more on ideas and styles and plots and innovations like in your mind, because you don't have much time to draw that maybe at night you can do a little bit of drawing.
But yeah, have long.
If you do long thinking sessions, multiple long thinking sessions every day, you can figure out a lot of stuff.
Be more ambitious than just, I want to think about my novel.
Think about, like your whole creative career, the future of graphic novels.
Build a whole intricate universe Brandon Sanderson level of complexity, type of uh uh, you know creative universe of ideas that all hook together in which you're going to build 20 graphic novels that all intricately and connect.
You kind of have all these notes in your notebooks.
That is, you have the raw number of brain cycles you can now deploy towards whatever you want on this continental divide trip is massive.
And you can come out of it with some like really fun, creative output.
So fill those notebooks, do most of your thinking while you're walking.
It's the best way to think anyways and raise your ambitions about the type of things that you think about.
All right, that brings us to our final part of the show.
Because this is the first podcast we're recording in November, not the first one to come out in November.
The first one we're recording in November.
I want to talk about the books I read in the preceding month.
As you know, my goal is to read five books every month.
Helps keep my mind connected and sharp.
When I produce ideas, I have a better tool to work with.
All right, so here's the five books.
I've wrote down some notes for each interesting topic.
October was an interesting collection.
All right, so here we go.
Book number one, The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill.
So, Thomas Cahill, this is book two of a series called Hinges of History, where every book in this series is about, like a small group of people in a historical moment that ended up having an outsized impact of history.
So I know Cahill because I read his first book years back from the series which was called How the Irish Saved civilization.
I read this right before my first trip to Ireland, you know, a long time ago, and the small group of people here were the Irish monks and it was about how during, like the dark ages, these monks were keeping alive all these manuscripts and recopying them over and maintaining them off on like kind of the corner of the world.
And then those were the manuscripts that like helped for the renaissance because they kept them alive even as like, the rest of Europe was sort of burning up in the fall of the Roman empire in the dark ages of fall.
So like that was like a really cool history because it was a history but it was about a small group had this outsized impact.
So the gift of the Jews is his second book.
The premise is interesting, right?
It's about how this like this small, small group of, you know, herdsmen in Canaan ended up coming up with these ideas that shaped like all of the modern world stuff that we just think now are like self evidence or came out of philosophy, but they didn't. things like the worth of the individual or progressive notions of justice, even the idea of non-cyclical history as a thing.
Cahill does a really good job of talking about the context of the time of when Avram left Haran, like in the Sumerian culture and the Egyptian culture of that period.
There was no history.
Time was cyclical.
All of the people of these first great civilizations, as well as, like all, not like indigenous peoples all around the world.
They kind of looked like the stars and said they're repeating and everything's a cycle and the same things happen again and again.
And no individual is that important and everything's just going to repeat and what's going to happen is going to happen.
The Greeks thought the same thing.
And the Jews are like, no, there's an actual history.
Look, this person was this person's son, and this person, this person and history as a linear thing matters.
Like these were like big ideas.
So I came to this book like, oh, this is great.
He's setting the context, which I love, of like this, the ancient world, roughly like second, third millennium BC, and like how this a small group of people had a completely different way of thinking about things.
It was going to explode and change the world.
But then I think the book fell off a little bit in my opinion.
I don't know if this was filler but, like long parts of the book is just sort of retelling the stories from the Hebrew Bible.
Like we're just going to, and then this is what happened in like the book of Joshua.
And it felt filler.
Like well wait, you had these.
Like great, there's these.
These ideas about their impact are great if a small group had a big impact.
But i don't need.
Like the entire hebrew bible just summarized.
But probably the irish saved america was a stronger book, but like the i the first, it's like 50 pages of this book.
We're really like a tour de force of popular history making.
In a way, my favorite type of popular history maker like oh, i didn't know this.
Like this is a really smart explanation of what the world was like and you're making it very accessible.
But it's actually pretty complicated what you're pulling from.
So great beginning, But then I think it was too much of like.
And then David did this
And I was like, OK, I've heard those stories before.
But interesting read nonetheless.
All right.
The next book I read was this was actually from a listener recommended this.
The new Lin-Manuel Miranda biography by Daniel Pollack Pelsner, who's a New Yorker writer.
So this is, I think, the first like biography, actual biography of him, written with cooperation with Lin-Manuel.
And so it's interesting.
Like you know first, biographies of contemporary figures.
It's really like a big part of the goal is just getting the timelines right.
Cause you're working with the person and various resources and people.
There's been profiles and stuff.
And I wrote about them in my, in my most recent book.
And there's all these like pieces out there that are kind of right and stuff that's not right.
And like, it's just a tick talk of like, I want to get this happened.
Then he went here, then he went here.
And so like, you know, it's, it's, it establishes that.
So it's really interesting to like if you want to just get what is the beat by beat actual story of Lin-Manuel up to this point.
I mean it's, it's a, it's a bit hagiographic, but you kind of expect first biographies to be especially because you have the participation of the person for first biography.
So you're not going to be like this guy sucked, you know, because he's.
That was the first sentence of the biography.
Actually, it's kind of interesting.
Like Hamilton can blow me.
He's Miranda sucked.
There's one right now.
That's not how it started.
It was a good biography.
A couple of things I noticed, uh, that I learned that were interesting.
The thing that uh first sort of vaulted Lin-Manuel Miranda like, uh got the attention of producers coming out of college and got him on the route to his first Broadway musical.
It was the hip hop freestyle narration.
So he had put that into in the Heights.
The version that he produced and wrote as a college student had a lot of issues but it had that hip hop narration that, like you're probably more familiar with from Hamilton, uh.
But he was a really good freestyle hip hop, freestyle artist because he was in a freestyle improv group that would.
It was like an improv group but they would do.
It was like you know, you do rap battles but it would be.
They would rap about like things the audience would talk about and they got really, really good.
So he's a super fluent and he was really inspired by nineties era.
You know he's roughly our age, like nineties era hip hop or the, where you had these like super talented uh, wordsmiths and rhymers.
And you know you had the notorious big.
You know you had whatever right okay, that's what they, the producers that were, like we're going to bankroll you, like working on your first play for eight years.
That's what they solved, like that is what's new.
It then turned out later that he was like a melody prodigy as well, that like he could just make you could just play with melody and make really catchy or interesting or like melodic songs, that.
So he had these other skills as well, but that was the thing that caught him out.
He was not a great musician so he had to hire.
It's when he started working with great musicians that it really made a difference in his career.
He wasn't a great storyteller.
In the Heights, they had to hire... They brought on a storyteller to write the book.
That's not his skill, but he was an unmatched songwriter.
And when he got to Hamilton he could really just Between his melodies and his hip-hop skills.
It was just no one was in his same league.
The other thing I learned was...
Hamilton is like a significantly more important piece of artistic work than in the Heights.
It's just a much, much better play.
Even though in the Heights one, the Tony like barely won the Tony for best show.
Whereas Hamilton was like the other Broadway other shows.
Like, I guess we should just shut down.
Like, this is just like significantly, it's just significantly better than anything we're doing.
So I thought that was interesting as well.
And everything I did took forever.
I tell this story in my book.
Slow productivity in the Heights is like years and years and years of work to get it there.
And Hamilton took years and years and years of work before that came out as well.
So it's a, it's a good slow productivity case study.
So if you like Lin-Manuel Miranda, this biography will just give you right down the middle.
Here's what happened.
Here's what happened next.
Here's a weird one.
So someone gave this to me as a gift, inspired by Rachel held Evans, who I, who I think died.
She's not one that old.
I don't know.
Maybe I don't know what the circumstances were.
She's a Christian writer.
So she wrote, she's like a progressive Christian who writes about the Bible.
And I think her most famous book was about the women in the Bible.
There's a more catchier name for it.
But actually someone I know who's Jewish said, oh, you would like this book.
So she's Christian, but it's really mainly about the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament stories, right?
I got started in the Bible.
I'll read this, right?
Someone gives us a gift.
I get started going and I'm like, oh, is this going to be like a cheesy Christian book?
These very, very accessible books where it's like, my emotions and this and it's bubbly.
And I was like, uh-oh.
But then I was actually really impressed.
Evans just takes a lot of really complicated biblical scholarship and then makes it incredibly accessible.
And really getting in the weeds about how people understand how the Bible is written and what it means and how different people thought about it over time and how not to think about it or think about it.
Both theological and historical critiques of the Bible and Apologia and makes it like super accessible.
I'm like, wait a second.
I've read some of these sources.
This is like really deep stuff and she's making it like seem really interesting and accessible.
So I was actually very impressed by that book.
So if you're interested in like biblical stuff, like I am, it was much better than I thought it would be.
So I guess that person knew me well.
Next book I read was actually written by a friend of mine.
The book is called The Future of Tutoring.
It was written by Liz Cohen.
This is an academic press book.
This is Harvard Education Press.
So it's a book about high-impact tutoring, which is this idea that got a huge amount of resources during COVID this idea that if a school is struggling and students are struggling, actually the thing that works best is high-impact tutoring one-on-one.
A tutor is going to sit with you and work with you.
It seems like an obvious idea, but there's this movement.
Now that's like yeah obvious, but why don't we do more of this?
Let's not try to be fancy with complicated educational philosophies.
How do we just get more of someone's going to work with you three days a week for 90 minutes, until your math gets better?
Like just go directly to the problem.
So this is a book that it's, it's exhaustively researched and it just goes in.
There was so much money that got thrown into this.
Liz makes sense of all of these different types of programs, how they were structured, what happened, what they learned, what worked, what didn't work.
So really it's a book that, if you're like an organization or a school or a researcher who's interested in this approach, this is like the definitive book for On what we learned in the COVID years.
What happened.
What tried different models.
What's working and what's not working.
Very well researched.
I appreciated that.
Final book I read was Society of the Spectacle.
By Guy DeBoer.
A 1967 book.
It's a collection of 221 short essays.
DeBoer is a Marxist critical theorist.
And this was kind of back in the heyday.
Kind of the very end of that Marxist critical period.
That period.
You get the like. early 20th century of Adorno and others who are beginning to do critical theory.
And this is like right before the postmoderns came in and were like, you guys are all nerds, right?
So this is kind of like the end of it.
I'm not a Marxist expert but like roughly the way I think about Marxist critical theory is it's when Marxists begin saying we want to study not just like the economic stuff that Marx wrote about, but the ways of these subtle things in society that are constructed implicitly to help reinforce or support or protect the economic stuff that Marx originally wrote about.
So this is where it's.
It's just like Hey uh, these cultural artifacts, the culture around us is actually like a tool that helps keep you know the proletariat, oppressed and the owners of capital, you know, rich and whatever.
Right.
So critical theory was like, we're going to go beyond economic analysis to like cultural analysis.
Right.
And then the postmodernist came along and they were French and they were cool.
And, um, Foucault had a shaved head and they smoked and they were like, you all are nerds.
Meaning is for wimps, you know, you're stupid, you know, whatever.
And they made the whole thing seem like you're also self-serious and upset.
These little details.
And you guys wear berets, you're all nerds.
And that was kind of like the end and that.
And you know we got reports from the Soviet union that like Oh, actually socialism is not that great necessarily.
Like they're sitting over in the gulags.
Those two things the postmoderns and social nation basically came together.
And that was kind of like the end of, um, The heyday of Marxism.
So this is kind of at the heyday.
So there's a lot of stuff in this book.
So the person who recommended it to me, I think this was the part they had in mind.
There's a part of this that I think is relevant to some of our technological analysis today.
So I like getting these type of smart analysis.
It's DeBoer's idea of the spectacular society.
I think it connects to social media culture.
Let me read a quick summary.
I'm taking this from Wikipedia of what he means by the spectacle society.
The spectacle is the inverted image of society, in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, DeBoer writes.
Rather, it is a social relation among people mediated by images.
All right, so that's, of course, how, like, French Marxist critical theorist wrote.
But, like, the idea here is he's talking about you have this sort of, like—
This new falsely – this society that exists between –.
It's like the relationships between these over-the-top images and commodities that relate to each other.
It's not actual society of humans interacting with humans.
That's kind of the social media internet age.
I mean he argues that that helps keep the capitalist imperatives in place and hoodwink the bourgeoisie to thinking that they're happy when they're really just allowing the proletariat to be stepped on.
We can give other analyses for it, but I think there's something there.
I think it's really interesting.
Right like society is mediated between, like images and memes and ideas that are floating around, is not people talking to people anymore?
And I don't think now it's because of like some sort of capitalist imperative.
I think it's.
You know there's a profit making imperative for these companies, but a lot of the harm it causes, I think, like the harm caused by like the modern social media spectacle, society is not harmed.
It's directed directly at it, then loops back and helps the owners of those companies make more money.
It just has a lot of harm as side effects.
So like replacing a society with a special society is good for stockholders in those companies.
Well, all the harms that are created are just also just as like the side effects of doing that, of making life virtual and disembodied and digital.
So I don't know.
He was probably on to something.
A smarter analyst than me should go, right?
This would be like a Harper's essay.
Someone should write like a Harper's essay about revisiting DeBoer.
You'd be doing a lot of like intellectual flexing in that essay.
I can imagine it now.
And you smoke a cigarette and shave your head.
Just be like, these guys are wimps.
That's my impression of the postmodernist.
You know, all right, nerd.
Yeah, I get it.
It's the wheels of history, right, nerd?
Why don't you go write your little red book, nerd?
Meaning's an illusion.
Like those old postmodernists.
Smart guys.
All right, that's all the time we have for today.
I know you'd like to hear more postmodernist impressions.
But once we get to those impressions is when Jesse gives you the high sign that we got to shut this down.
So thanks for listening.
We'll be back next week with another episode.
And until then, as always, stay deep.
Hi, it's Cal here.
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