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

29:07My friend, friend of the show, Ryan Holiday, he talks a lot about this stuff. I mean, often through the lens of stoic philosophy. But he has lots of books and videos and podcast episodes about how do you improve your life? How do you, if you're stuck, how do you get unstuck? How do you make things better? And so it was actually pretty hard to try to find just one Ryan Holiday video to pull from. But I found one that's very popular and it's sort of right down the line of what we're talking about. It was published late last year and it's titled How to Reinvent Your Life, Eight Stoic Practices You'll Actually Use.

29:41This also has around 800 ,000 views. So I'm going to pull one idea out of this Ryan Holiday video. So let's play that clip, Jesse. Seneca said that too many good brains have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge. Seneca thought it was super important to read, but he said we got to linger on the works of the master thinker. So as you're thinking about reading this year, as you're thinking about getting better, don't just resolve to just consume a lot of raw information. Think about what books you need to reread. Think about really big, important books that you're going to actually struggle with and stay with, that you're going to get something out of.

30:18It's not just about impressing people on how much you put on your Goodreads. It's about actually getting better. It's filtering what gets in your brain. It's asking yourself, can I use this? How am I going to use this? What am I learning from it? Now where everyone's going to have different personalities, different interests, different obstacles, different areas they're trying to improve in. Look, I own a whole bookstore. I got lots of books for you to recommend. I have a million other videos. All right. There's Ryan Hawley. Also good music. The key is that music in the background. It doesn't even sound so much more profound.

30:48Yeah. I was thinking about Hollywood and how they always have music, like cinematic music. Yeah. It kind of tells you how to feel. Yeah. I mean, because I'm this way my mind worked, I couldn't help thinking about like, what would be the worst music? Oh, we had some complaints on some of the some of our music people said was the worst. OK, I was thinking like, would you refer to some sort of help to help music that we had before the was it? Was it not not good? You made a reference. I'll think of it while you. Well, we need to get that music and not whatever it is that people dislike that we do.

31:22like bad music would be i think circus music would be a fishing music that you said that oh that i like that the bass fishing music where it's just like guys holding up basses and high-fiving with like oakley sunglasses on and oh yeah i like that music that's a different type of vibe though so for those who don't know there was uh some we like to play with theme music because we get bored and it was theme music that i thought sounded like the intro music to a a show about competitive of bass fishing that music was cool it was like like a lot of like high fives and waving american flags we got some complaints yeah what from bass fishermen who thought i was making fun of them no just like people wanted piano music i know all right we'll get some more profound music but ryan had uh he had a point there that uh i want to i want to highlight right so ryan is one of the more prolific readers i know i mean i'm convinced that he bought that bookstore basically because because his wife was like, you can't have any more books in the house.

32:19And so it was like a workaround that he could have even more books if they were like in his store that he was selling to people. But he doesn't just read to read. As long as I've known him, he reads for insight. He reads for wisdom. So he really knows what he's talking about here when he quotes Seneca. This doesn't mean everything you read needs to be Tolstoy, but you do need serious books that challenge you and provide new ideas and insights that are complicated, that stretch you. those need to be a regular part of your reading diet. These are the books that can reconfigure how your brain actually understands the world and therefore literally opens up a new world to you, new possibilities, new understandings.

32:58So this idea of not just reading, but getting serious reading into that rotation, I think is really critical for resetting your life. I think he's absolutely right there because it will change the way you understand yourself in the world if you're doing that on a regular basis. So let me give you some concrete advice. Let me transform that into some concrete advice because here's the problem. It is difficult to just say, hey, go read something really hard and complicated. Go read some like Jungian philosophy or something like this. You're going to pick it up and say, this might as well be French, right?

33:31I don't know what any of this means. And am I just forcing my way through this book so I can be like I got through it? And I don't think those of us who talk about reading hard things talk enough about how to learn how to read hard things. So here's what I want you to consider doing. Climbing what I call the book complexity ladder. There's a sort of a well-known ladder of complexity you can move up in books that's just like a sort of workout progression that over time makes you stronger and stronger at like what you can do physically. There's a similar progression that you can make your way up for increasing the complexity of what you're able to read and understand.

34:07So I'm going to go through the rungs of this ladder. And the idea here is you start on the bottom rung, and then once you're comfortable there, that should be a bit of a stretch. And once that's no longer a stretch, you move to the next rung, then the next rung, and the next rung. So you're going to work your way up. So the first rung of this ladder is working with secondary sources that make hard ideas more accessible. So by secondary source, this means you're not reading the original sort of famous or hard idea. You're reading someone else writing about the original famous thinker or ideas. So this would be books like Sarah Bakewell's Act the Existentialist Cafe, which you can learn all about existentialist philosophy without having to first confront the existentialist philosophers themselves, which can be a little bit harder going.

34:50a book I talked a lot in I think in Deep Work I talked about All Things Shining by Herbert Dreyfuss and Sean Dorrance Kelly which like again it draws from a lot of primary sources that talk about you know about sort of wonder and mysticism in life and it's like but it's a secondary source so it's more accessible so you read secondary sources about smart people and ideas next rung up the ladder non complicated but profound primary sources So now you want to go straight to profound books where you're reading the actual book itself, not a book about it. But you want to start with the sort of tranche of these books that themselves are not super complicated.

35:32So they're not pulling upon a very sort of either complicated language style or a very complicated set of references that they're building upon. For example, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a profound book but very accessible. You can understand it when he talks about his experience in the concentration camps, when he talks about the development of logotherapy and the necessity of meaning, having something that you are doing that is meaningful as like the key to sort of mental health and thriving. It's profound but it's accessible. I think you could read like Matt Crawford shop class of soul craft.

36:10Again, it's like it's it's smart and there's some profound ideas, but you can come into it without a huge background in a particular type of discipline and still understand it. At this point, you already, by the way, tons of insights, right? You're going to be just doing these two rungs of the ladder. Like once you're there, you're like, OK, my world is already much richer, but let's go up another rung. approachable, but more complicated primary sources. So what I mean by that is now you're now again, smart books written by famous people where they're more complicated than the other ones. What I mean by that is you're not going to necessarily understand everything in it, but you will understand enough things in it that you can get great insight out of it.

36:53This is the way, for example, I think about Walden. That's a very inspirational book to me. I now know a lot about it. I've read a lot of secondary sources about Thoreau. But if you read Walden, and a lot of people have had this experience, you are going to have profound – there's going to be moments of profoundness in it. There's going to be – profundity I guess would be the word. there's going to be sort of ideas about work and economy and meaning that are going to hit home. The nature writing is beautiful. And the effect that the nature writing has in Thoreau is not that like nature writing was what's good, but he's actually trying to capture like the value of a sort of non-economic slower existence, that he's trying to make this point that I'm living deliberately by this pond.

37:38And the economic output I need to sort of live is like pretty low. But look at the wonders of like watching the ice change. He needed the language to be poetic for that point, the land poetically, and that anyone who reads that has that. But then there's other references he had. The language is weird. He's referring to things you might not quite get. Well, who is he talking about there? I don't know what these references are. These like references in the first chapter about this sort of like oriental thinkers. Like, well, what does that word mean from the 1850s? And who is he talking about? He's talking about Hinduism.

38:07like it you know there's a lot of stuff you won't get as well but you will you will come away from reading it with okay there's stuff in there that really changed me i think letters from a stoic is kind of similar you're like oh yeah i don't quite get all the things that are being referenced here but a lot of people have read that book cold and like there's a lot of things that still hit home that then brings you up to the the final rung which takes a while to get to which is complicated primary sources that require preparation to actually make your way through but then if you make your way through there's there's there's super deep insight right so now you want to read young you want to read um um Nietzsche you want to read like a lot of Aristotle you want a secondary source or two to read first and to help you go along or like you want to read you know Finnegan's Wake yeah uh for example right Joseph Campbell read a whole book about it it was like the skeleton key for this book and like if you read that book and then you go and reading like, oh, I get what's going on here.

39:04So that's the final place you get is books that require preparation. I have studied this field. I know the references they're drawing from. I've even read about this particular book and why it's important. Now I'm ready to read it. And Heidegger is like this as well. He's very, very difficult. You can't really cold read them, but it's, you know, I've heard Adam Smith. I haven't read it, but if you read, you know, you want to read, you know, classic Adam Smith. Again, you need some preparation to get in there. If you work your way up this ladder, I think a year or two, it completely changes your perception of the world and your life.

39:39Because when your brain gets more complicated, your world gets more complicated. And there's more to appreciate and there's more options and it's richer and it's more interesting. So it's good advice, good general idea from Ryan. Working your way steadily up the rungs of the book complexity ladder is my concrete advice for actually acting on that. All right. My final video that I want to draw from the most, uh, the most popular of the videos we cite. And I think we could agree, Jesse, the most profound videos. Um, I I'm drawing from my own because I figured, okay, I had that popular video that came out in 2023.

40:16It was called how to reinvent your life in four months. My full step-by-step process. That must've been our YouTube guy who added that part. My full step-by-step process. Uh, 1.4 million views. It's like one of the more popular things that I, I have put out. before. If you listen to this podcast, you may have heard we re-aired this episode over the summer, but I thought here's what I would do in the spirit of this like all-star advice selection. I would go through and say, if I had to choose just one of the ideas from this four-month process to include in our list here of selected advice, what would be the one idea?

40:47If you could only take one from the video, what would it be? So there's a little bit meta here, but I'm about to play a clip of myself on this podcast talking on this podcast. So this is going to get really circular, Jesse, but let's hear this profound words that I had to say a couple of years ago. When it comes to your professional life, put multi-scale planning into work. Get this executed. This is where you have a quarterly or semester plan that you update every quarter or semester or season, whatever, three to four months. You look at that plan every week and use it to create a weekly plan.

41:19Your weekly plan, you're consulting your calendar, you're seeing what's actually on your plate that week, and you're looking then also at your seasonal semester, quarterly plan for reminders of the bigger things you're working on, and you write out longhand, here is my plan for the week ahead, okay? Then you look at that weekly plan every day when you do a daily time block plan for the actual hours of your day. I, of course, recommend my own time block planner, second edition, timeblockplanner.com, but you can use whatever you want, but your time block plan in your actual day in consultation with your weekly plan.

41:52It's your time block plan every day is informed by your weekly plan, which is written every week, which is informed by your seasonal plan, which is updated every three to four months. That's multi-scale planning. Again, violin music, twice as profound or bass fishing music. Okay. So the idea I pulled from my plan video from a couple of years ago is multi-scale planning. I think that's kind of the glue that's going to help you take advantage of all these other ideas. All these other ideas that are going to add new insight into your life. They're going to add better – your day-to-day is going to feel better.

42:29You're going to have a richer understanding of the world. You're going to be clearing things out of your head so that it's not so stressful. You're careful about your information. You're careful about the goals so they're realistic. You're clearing your head. You're reading stuff that's profound. how do you actually take consistent action if part of your reset is actually like changing things how do you take consistent action on that now that you're in this much better place and there i've talked about all the time but it's worth reiterating it's multi-scale planning so that clip actually gave my concrete advice because i always talk in terms of concrete advice the concrete advice i gave in that clip was multi-scale planning you have a vision for your quarter you look at that every week to create a plan for your week now when i talk about weekly planning these days, I'm a little bit more specific about it.

43:15I say during your weekly plan, you look at your quarterly plan, you look at your big brain dump of all the tasks you're supposed to do. You look at your calendar ahead. You write out a plan for the week ahead. Like what do I actually want to make progress on this week? And when you're doing that, anything that's big, anything that's going to take more than like 20 minutes, actually find time for it and put on your calendar right there. That's one of the additions I've had to this thinking right now is if it's going to take time, figure out that time right then when you're doing the weekly plan.

43:41When is that going to happen? And that might lead you to actually change some things on your calendar, cancel some plans or consolidate some things, and then highlight the other sort of things you want to get done. And then as you go through each day of your week, you should make a daily plan where you start by copying onto a daily plan where you have a block for every hour of the day, the stuff that's already on your calendar. And then you make decisions about what to do for the rest of the plan during your workday. You don't just sort of stumble from moment to moment and say, what do I want to do next?

44:05You figure that out in the morning. You execute the blocks. And then when you're done, you do a big shutdown. Now, that's multi-scale planning. It is the best way I know to actually orient your energy in the moment during the workday as intentionally as possible all the way back up to your biggest dreams, ambitions, all of your obligations. It's like the – if you wanted to make sure your energy at any moment is like the best thing you should be doing that moment, this is the best tool I know. It's draining. Only do it during the workday. You're going to be getting a lot more done if you do this.

44:33So like choose workdays to end earlier or start later because you'll be getting 2x more done and you don't want to burn out your brain. But yeah, that's the sort of really tactical glue that helps you take advantage of all these other sort of – all the other sort of upgrades you'll get to your life. So you put those five ideas together, I think you have yourself a pretty good plan. All right. So we heard five ideas. So I think it's time for me to get to my takeaways.

45:08This does make me sound more profound. I appreciate it. All right. What are my takeaways? We took five popular videos about resetting your life, and we pulled out my favorite piece of advice from each. We get a sort of all-star reset strategy. Let me quickly list all five pieces of concrete advice that I identified during this process. Number one, update and review your brain dump every week. number two have a plan for the information you consume i'll kind of put in parentheses do a call and score experiment to figure out what that plan should be number three choose goals that are hard but not too hard again in parentheses separate vision from next goals and only work on a few next goals at a time number four read increasingly smarter and complicated books.

46:03And number five, control your time at multiple scales. That's a pretty good collection of advice. If you do those things, if you were feeling stuck right now, like I want my life to be something, this just feels like I'm in neutral or it's not where I want to be or I want that spark back that I had before. Or again, because as a technology podcast, I'm on my screens all the time, not because I lack willpower, but because there's nothing on the other side that's like worth it. This distracts me from it. I want to feel something. These five pieces of advice will go a long way to helping you have a sense of reset.

46:37To do this, revisit this advice every fall will probably have a pretty big impact. So more than anything else, though, when it comes to reset in your life, the most important thing to do is taking intentional action. This idea of if I don't get involved and say, like, wait a second, where have I veered off to? And maybe I want to course correct. Maybe I want to lever myself out of the mud. Maybe there's something I need to change. It's that this idea of like, of course, I have to like intentionally intervene on a semi-regular basis in the journey of life to keep that journey heading in interesting directions.

47:12That's the biggest thing I want to get across is that matters. That's never been more important than it is right now in a time when, again, I'm telling you, the digital world is happy to just sort of consume all of your attention and redirect your life into its metaphorical attention minds. You can just basically be like generating attention and data for a small number of billionaires to make money off of. There's never been more pressure to take you off an interesting journey for life and make you into sort of this, this, you know, unpaid attention factory worker. So it matters that you keep coming back and saying, how do I make this better?

47:43What do I need to change? So whether you use this advice or the advice from my original video or the other advice from those videos or the advice from any number of podcasts and videos that are out there about resetting, I love the idea of thinking this mindset that you have to regularly re-energize what you're doing in your life if you want to keep it moving in directions that you choose, not other people, not other circumstances, and certainly not technology. All right. So we have a lot more on this topic coming up, including reactions from Jesse, some listener questions that are all about resetting or reinventing your life, including from a consultant who took eight months off to live in nature, but it ended up right back where he was before.

48:24So we've got some really good scenarios here. We have a great case study, a good call, and then also I have a recent article I wrote about this. I want to tell you about a reaction I got to that article from a reader that I think was very profound. So we got a whole lot of show on this topic still to come, but first we need to take a quick break to hear from a sponsor. So stick around and we will be right back. All right, Jesse, we have to talk about Cozy Earth. As listeners know, I'm a huge fan of their bamboo sheets, which are the most comfortable sheets we own. We have something like three different sets that we rotate through because we never want to be without a set of these sheets on our bed.

49:01But we just last week got our hands on a new cozy earth product that has created a bit of a war within my family. This is their bubble cuddle blanket. I was tempted to wear this thing like a shawl in our podcast recording today. It is the most comfortable. It's hard to explain how comfortable this is. I'll do my best. Okay, so it's called a bubble blanket because it's textured in this like bubble design. So like there's bubbles kind of on it, like bumps all over the mattress. It's covered in ultra soft fibers and it has weight to it. They added weight to it. Not as heavy as a full weighted blanket.

49:40But when you put this thing on, you are getting comfort out of it. Anyways, it was just a war with different family members trying to steal it and steal time from it. So eventually my wife and I had to make a rule. It lives on the chair and a half that's in our bedroom. if you want to use it you have to come in here and you can use it in this chair when and we now use it to sort of bribe kids to come uh read in there with us so anyways super comfortable so between that and our bamboo sheets and our cozy earth towels and my cozy earth shirt my cozy earth sweatshirt and our cozy earth pjs i have all of these things it's like our our house especially like our bedroom is basically like a private spa if you're not already part of the cozy earth community you should be if you want to know where to get started i suggest get started with the bamboo sheets.

50:22They have a 100 night sleep trial, so you can try them out. And if you don't love them, you can return them hassle free. But trust me, you're not going to return those. They also have a 10 year warranty because once you feel this level of comfort, you'll want it to last at least a decade. So go to CozyEarth.com slash deep to get up to 20 % off. That's CozyEarth.com slash deep and use the code deep to get up to 20 % off. And if you get a post-purchase survey, make sure you tell them that you heard about cozy earth on this podcast so they'll know that people are actually listening because home isn't just where you live it's how you feel let's go home with cozy earth i also want to talk about our friends at shopify if you run a small business you know there's nothing small about it every day there's a new decision to make and even the smallest decisions feel massive when you have a decision that's a no-brainer you should take it And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no-brainers.

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52:02You can sign up for a$1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash deep. Go to shopify.com slash deep, shopify.com slash deep. All right. And with that, let's get back to our show. All right, Jesse, what's your reactions? First off, what was the, when you made the comment a little bit meta, was that your way of being nice with Mark Zuckerberg? Oh, what did I say about meta? I think I was saying. You said a little bit meta. Obviously you weren't talking about meta, but. That is basically. I did think that was funny. Yeah. It's, it's, it's all Zuckerberg over here. Yeah. Um, yes.

52:45Do you remember that when we, we did that reset reinvention episode, that was a while ago. I was trying to place like, where were we in the life of this podcast? 2023 summertime. We were like a couple of years into this. Uh, we were doing a lot of like deep life stack stuff. yeah and it was like in that in that period where like i was i was experimenting with drawing stacks and let's be honest it was an excuse for me to draw a lot on the tablet like i think that was going on i mean i re-watched that whole episode and there that's where i i uh compared my drawing ability to picasso drawing to peasant's hands i think i just i think we were like we liked the tablet back then so we were doing a lot of stuff on that but for whatever reason this one the specificity of it i think is what worked um but it's i don't do you think we can take credit for all those videos have followed probably not but i like to because all these are like re reinvent they're all like reset and reinvent your life yeah and they all came out after that that video did really really well and then all these other podcasters and started doing the same type of topic two quick things i just finished the picasso genius series on amazon prime even though it's like a couple years load it was 10 episodes so picasso was an interesting dude but it was like a interesting real show is that the same series that had like the einstein one you're talking me about okay i gotta watch these and then um you made a reference to a new app that you've been using are you gonna let the audience know at some point about that things three it's a beautiful app i like it a lot i feel like the audience is going to be all about this yeah because well you know i have trello for like my complicated sort of professional obligations for all these various reasons but for a lot of my personal like home-based obligations though honestly it's eating up more and more stuff that was on Trello.

54:25So it's an enthusiast love it. It's a to-do app that costs money, old-fashioned. You want it? It's this much. On your phone? You got to buy it. You want it on your computer? You buy it, right? No software as a service. No like we'll premium, we'll add features. It's like this is what it is. You pay for it, right? And it's a beautiful interface. The whole thing is made to be as like elegant and simple as possible. And it's just, you have collection of tasks and you add tasks to them. And it's really like simple, just what you tap and type. It's like very intuitive and simple. And you can click to like set a date, you know, here's a deadline or do it today or something like that.

55:05And then you can just sort of see, you know, upcoming tasks. Like, yeah, here's things you have for lists, or you can just click on these lists. And like, that's it. That's all it does. They don't try to do anything else. anyway so people love it because like old-fashioned software where we just want to make the interface as natural and good as possible not try to put as many features as possible into it maybe we'll make a youtube video about that separately we should it's a really cool app all right so we got some questions and this is a topic we get a lot of questions about people who are wondering about various parts of trying to reinvent or reset parts of their life so we got a we have a bunch of questions about them we picked out some good ones today so we can sort of apply these general ideas as to real people's situations.

55:42All right, so Jesse, what do we got here? Who's our first question from? First question from Laura. I've been thinking a lot on how to live a deep life. I've been reading lots of interesting books and taking lots of notes. However, I'm having a hard time summarizing the good ideas about other people. How do I extract these ideas for living deeply from these books? All right, it's a good question. I've been thinking a lot about this for the book I'm writing now, the book on the deep life. So I'm getting super specific on some of these questions. So here's one of the things I want to say, Laura, that I'm working on in this new book.

56:12The type of notes you take matter. So it's not just enough to say, take notes on stuff you notice that might be relevant to improving your life. It helps to say, what specifically should you be looking to write down and what format even should you be looking to take those notes in? And one of the things I think is really important is to look out for things that, I used the word resonate. I've long used that word in talking about the deep life. I think it's the right one. You encounter an idea or a person or a situation in a book, an article, documentary, podcast, or movie, and something about it resonates.

56:47So you feel a sort of intrinsic, deep inside you attraction to what's going on there. The note you should take is, here's a description of the thing. Here's the description of the feeling that caught my attention. You don't have to figure out why. This is the big trap sometimes people have. Like in the moment, I'm watching the, you know, Laird Hamilton surfing video. And why is this like really resonating with me? You don't have to figure out what does this tell me I should do for the rest of my life? What you write down is here's what I was watching. And here are the feelings I'm feeling right now.

57:21That's what you want to capture. Because I think that feeling of resonance, that is your intuition. that is your intuition about what it is that like you you you're you're you're being craves like what's missing from your life what you want in your life that's important feeling you're just recording that and then later you can try to make sense of it and there's a lot of ways to do that in my book i'm working through some like pretty systematic ways of doing this but like basically when you have a lot of notes like this and you go back through them and you should review these like every month that's what i always did especially when i was in the phases of my life where I was like in my 20s and filling my moleskins.

57:59I would review them every single month, like really trying to figure out what was going on and what I was trying to do. You will begin to notice patterns. And as you read it and then read it again and then read it again, you'll begin to realize like, oh, like these five things are all, they're all kind of an example of this. I see, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm missing in my life. And so you figure that out later over time. In the moment, you don't have to try to figure it out. So use that format. But this thing, how it made me feel for things to resonate. That's what you should capture in your notebooks.

58:30All right, who do we got? Next up is Jake. After building 10 years of career capital and consulting, I was able to arrange a reduced work schedule for eight months where I spent lots of time in nature. I debated starting my own company, but only decided to stay at my job. I felt overwhelmed by the idea of all that would be involved with creating a deeper life. How do I avoid being overwhelmed by everything required to seriously change my life? Well, I think this is the big issue that I've been grappling with, with all my thinking and writing about the deep life, is that we spend too much time, by we I mean like as a culture who cares about these issues.

59:06And I've just listened to a ton of these videos, so I kind of know this. We spend too much time often talking about the content of what should go into your life to make it better. Like what are the specific things you should add to your life that's going to be better? You need friendship. You need work that's a challenge. You need some sort of like spiritual connection to the transcendent. Like we like to talk about the content of what you're missing from your life. We don't talk enough about the mechanics of how do people actually successfully change their life independent of like what changes they're making.

59:36What are the mechanics of how you actually succeed with that? And I think that's what's tripping you up here. You went into this experience. It was very meaningful to you. You probably had all sorts of intuitions and resonances like, man, I don't know. I don't think what I was doing before this is right. I think there's something better, but you didn't know what to do with that feeling. And so when that eight months was up, you're like, I mean, here's a job I'm good at. I make money at. I don't know if I'm supposed to like be like the Unabomber and move to a shack. Like, what do I do? And then you end up back where you were before.

1:00:02So the mechanics, I think, matter. It's the missing piece of the conversation on major resetting or reinvention of your life. Um, so if you look back at my deep dive, I would say, if you want to pull one piece of the five concrete advices out to really focus on that might've helped you there is maybe the realistic goal setting would have been a big one. What are the different areas of my life? Your buckets, right? What's my vision for each? And that's what you can update. That's where, when you're like Laura from the past question, you're taking these notes in your notebook about stuff that resonates.

1:00:39I did this thing and it resonated. I did this thing and it resonated. As you process that over time, where is that in this scheme going to be impact? It's going to impact this vision you have for different parts of your life. Like, oh, I get this now. Like I need us. I don't want to be busy. So my vision for my the professional area of my life maybe is I'm doing important stuff, but like I'm not busy. I'm not stressed. I don't feel the palpitation of like too many things going on. I'm not sure if I'm going to get it done. Right. You're kind of like honing in on this sort of declarative first person description of what you want these parts of your life to actually be like.

1:01:16And now you have something to actually move towards. Now you can start deploying. All right. What can I do with my career capital? What's the next goal I can pursue for each of these? Which of these can make the most progress on now? Is there some bigger change I can make that's going to actually help three of these areas move closer to the vision? Right. Oh, what's the thing I'm doing now that's most getting in the way of like my vision over here? Oh, this job is making this, this and this worse. I can't get to these visions because this job is a hundred hour a week job. Okay. I'm going to have to change that.

1:01:42But I have my career capital. So how can I use that? So then you can start doing the more systematic work of evolving and changing your life. It's what I often call lifestyle centric planning, because you're working towards this multifaceted vision of all the different parts of your life, not just changing one thing. I'm going to move to nature and be completely different. I'm going to, you know, move to an Island. I'm going to quit my job. so like i think this sort of having a vision separating it from goals clarifying this vision over time like you should have come away from that experience in nature having clarified lots of visions but then said now the hard work begins of how do i start moving towards these different visions and it can be more incremental with until it's not and then you find something that's a big leap etc so my bigger picture there is i think the mechanics matter not just the content you're not going to fix things usually with one big change so let's get more systematic about what does it mean to have a deep life for you and it's going to be a more detailed answer than probably you had before All right, who do we got?

1:02:42Next up is Juan. You often emphasize fixing the lifestyle you want and then working backwards. But in today's fast-paced world, especially in software engineering, things evolve so quickly that I struggle to visualize what my lifestyle might look like 10 years from now. How can I do that? All right, so this is good because this builds on what we were just talking about before. So I'm saying, okay, we're kind of building answer by answer. You have these different areas of your life. You sort of develop through experience and exposure to things that resonate or don't, a sort of vision for each of these parts of your life.

1:03:12And then you begin trying to move through more concrete, smaller goals with the occasional big change when they appear and seem obvious. You're trying to move closer to these visions. So Juan is saying, oh, I'm struggling to come up with these visions. He must mean for his professional life because the speed of software engineering probably doesn't affect his vision for his health or something like that. Like how could I have these visions if I don't know 10 years from now what's going to happen in software engineering? you're being too specific so once we separate visions from goals we can say what's the what should a vision be like and what i think a vision should consist of is first person declarative statements of lifestyle property so a lifestyle property is a description of something that like it describes a property of your guess a circular answer but it describes a property of your current lifestyle, not a detail of your lifestyle.

1:04:07And I know that sounds similar, but there's actually like a, like, there's really, there's really a clear distinction. So like a detail of your lifestyle is something that it's, there's only one way to satisfy it. It's like a thing that's, that's like true or not. Right. So detail might be, I am an executive vice president at, you know, at my software company. It's like a detail. It's a specific thing. It's like either true or not, or whatever, right? It's an actual detail about your life. A lifestyle property, by contrast, has to be general enough that there's multiple ways you might satisfy it.

1:04:43There's not multiple ways that you can be the executive vice president of your software company. You either are, you aren't. But a lifestyle property might be my schedule is such that I rarely have to work past five. and if I occasionally want to leave at 12 and go see a movie every couple of months, no one cares. That's a property. Lots of different professional configurations might satisfy that property, but it's a property of your life. So like, let's talk about health, right? So you're thinking about the area of your life, about your health or fitness. A lifestyle detail would be like, I place top five in the sort of this triathlon.

1:05:25that's like running my city each year. That's a specific thing that either it's like a goal, it's a detail, like either there's only one way for that to happen. You either you have or you do it or you don't. A lifestyle property might be something more like I'm heavily engaged in like amateur athletics as like a hobby and like often have successes with it. It's a property. There's lots of ways you could satisfy it, like what that means, what successes mean with the sports, but the general property there is like, part of my life is like, I'm very competitively involved in athletics. So I think vision should largely be made up of lifestyle properties and they should be first person declarative.

1:05:59I am blah. You describe some property of your life. If you describe your visions that way, you're getting at what really matters. It's the properties that resonate. It's the properties that you're looking for. And it opens up so many more options and pathways for you because there's many different configurations that might get you to those properties. As soon as you build a vision around details, all your chips are in on one, you know, they're in on one hand. This I've just decided this specific I'm fixing now a very specific life configuration and I have to get there. I won't be happy and it might be impossible to get there.

1:06:32But properties, you have, oh, I could do this. I could do that. This could mean different things. So anyways, not to get too technical, but make your vision about properties, not details. And then you don't need to be up on. you don't need to predict what's going to happen in 10 years because that's not what your your vision for your career is not going to be about like what type of tool you make or something like that it's going to be about the property of your lifestyle that you have that makes sense it might i wonder if i'm like slicing it too fine i've been working that out in some of my writing recently the property versus details yes like another example would be of a good property um like let's fix a different area of life like um let me let me give an example about something being not a property because it's too vague right so yeah a detail is an issue because it's too specific um the other issue people have with property uh with vision is they get too vague and by too vague i mean it's something that you can't determine if you've satisfied it or not right so if i say like my property of uh you know i'm involved in amateur athletics i'm good right you could look at someone's life and be like, yeah, they are or they're not like they are.

1:07:40They look, they ran in this race. They do this like they seem pretty competitive. A problem sometimes people have the other way is saying something. There's no way to like measure if you've done it or not. So maybe like you're thinking about the relationships areas of your life, like the community aspects and you say, I live a life filled with love. Yeah, that's very admirable, right? Like, yeah, we all want that. But it's not a good property for vision because how do you know if you've done that or like how do you measure love? How much is enough love or something like that? Whereas you could have a good property on that sort of thing might be something like, you know, I'm heavily involved in the lives of like multiple good friends.

1:08:20And like we sort of know what's going on in each other's lives and in a way that like whatever. That's a property. You're like, oh, that's that's either I could watch your life for a while and say like, yeah, that seems true of Jesse. Like here are these good friends. They seem to be really close. Like he satisfied it. Right. So that would be a good property. and you could go the other way there and then you know the detail could be like i am married to this person who has never met you or something like that you know like i don't know i mean they might you might creep you out a little bit right i mean i don't you know that's too specific so so i mean i'm kind of working that out uh but again my bigger project here talking about life reinvention especially my new book is again the mechanics matter we don't talk about the mechanics we talk about the content and then it gets i don't know it gets kind of boring because either it's like you're drawing from scientific studies you know your researchers at the university of michigan show that like you're 17 more happy when you have like 3.2 hours of friendship contract contact per week versus like 2.3 contact hours and you're like you step back like so friends are important like i you know it's fine but i get bored with that stuff yeah so the mechanics matter to me um okay who do we got biona i recently left a high school teaching job because of burnout and I decided not to return to teaching.

1:09:34I want to find a short to medium term role that provides financial stability and an opportunity to redeploy my transferable skills. What practical steps would you recommend? All right. So first of all, make sure that you have a working vision for the professional part of your life. So again, like we just talked about, you have these first person declared statements of lifestyle properties, which there's multiple ways they can be satisfied, but you can tell whether you're satisfied or not. In other words, I'm saying have a good general vision for like what you do want and you can learn a lot from what didn't work with teaching to help specify what it is you are looking for so you know we talk a lot about something resonates and that you you keep a note on that because like oh i want that in my life but things that go the opposite direction are just as useful this made me miserable so i definitely don't want that in my life like what aspect was was what made me miserable okay like i don't like that like maybe you hate kids and you learn that like, oh, I don't like teaching.

1:10:28I really hate kids. They're really annoying. It's like, okay. My vision is like, I'm not working around kids or whatever it is. Right. So have a good vision. Now, when we go to the nuts and bolts about how do you move forward towards a vision, we haven't really got, we talked a little bit about this in the deep dive with realistic goal setting, but how do you choose those goals? How do you figure out how to move closer to your vision? The key thing here, especially for professional visions is evidence based planning. You have to have direct evidence like you were going to make a case in the court of law for why you're doing the thing you're doing and why you have evidence that is likely to lead to moving you closer to the thing you want, which is getting closer to your vision.

1:11:06That sounds obvious, but people do not do it. They would rather write a story about what they want to be important based on what it is they like. I want to go to take these classes at the community college that feels kind of like romantic to me and i miss school and it'll be fine i'm going to or i'm going to go back get this master's degree or whatever you say but why what is the particular type of position that you have evidence is going to move you closer to your vision that you have clear evidence that doing this thing is going to open that to you then other words like you could not get that position without this thing but with this particular thing you're doing you likely will and people don't want to do that because you know it might turn out like actually you know that doesn't matter if i go take these courses like i'm not qualified for that job or actually you know that job i don't really want to look too much closer at it but if i really did and talk to people i would see it's really going to mismatch my vision a lot of clear ways and people just want to tell themselves a story about what's going to happen in their next chapter life like what what their days are going to look like i you know i want to be like taking these courses and then there's just like this magical job i get and like everything's better you have to base everything in evidence which means talking to actual people who can confirm or deny the assumptions that are going into your plan.

1:12:13What is the reality of this job? What's it really like? How much money do I make? What are the days like? Okay, how do people get hired in this job? Like, what do you need to be like a shoe in for this job? Oh, okay. So what then would I have to do to make me be one of those people? And is that something I'm willing to do now? And it might not match what I want to be true, but you always want to be working from evidence. It will be frustrating at first because a lot of your initial ideas and schemes and plans are going to turn out not to be good ones. But then you'll feel better. He's like, well, I'm glad I kind of didn't waste a lot of time and money on that.

1:12:46And it's going to make you be more creative and it's going to open the scope of your search for how am I going to make sense of my life and go forward. And then you'll eventually come across like this, this opportunity. I met this person. I have the right skill set for it. If I do this and I could do it in this config, oh, that works. And then you have the aha moment when you get there. So you have to search harder with evidence-based planning, but the things you find when you ultimately find them are much more likely to work. So do not just assume you need evidence for this thing is going to make my life better and I'm doing the right thing to get there because often that's more the reality is not what we hope it to be.

1:13:20All right those are our questions we have a case study this is when people write in to talk about how the advice we talk about on the show specifically affected their situation I think it's good to learn from real people so we have a case study today from Reese and it's also an excuse to play our case study theme music.

1:13:47all right so reese says i spent over a decade after high school meandering in and out of different jobs and industries trying everything i could i was looking for the perfect fit for my skills and lifestyle while also hoping i could follow my passion at the same time it took me to university at 25 years old, but I made the mistake of not knowing exactly what job I was aiming for at the end. In retrospect, it was a grand goal passion project. As a side note, I used your tactics during university and crushed it. My first son was born after I graduated and I got offered a job in residential construction as a project coordinator.

1:14:19I originally didn't want to take the job and it was nothing like what I had studied at university, but it would allow us to move to the town we wanted and give us the possibility of purchasing our first home. So I did it. It was the best decision I ever made. The details of the work were satisfying enough, but it was the lifestyle that it afforded me and my family. No overtime, flexible hours, and we did buy a home. I decided to double down, get as good as I could, build up some career capital, and see where it took me. I am happy to say that using your time-blocking system and basic task capture, I was able to increase my value as someone reliable who gets things done.

1:14:54I got promoted to project manager and got paid to upskill in my field. After nearly six years, I had enough career capital to get a higher paying job again that is situated 10 minutes from my home. Between my wife and I, we can easily pick up and drop off my two boys at school. We are on track to pay off our mortgage within the next 10 years and then we plan to cut back to work three to four days per week. I have completely given up social media and use that time to grow veggies, read books or write in my journal. I have gone a little over the top with my journaling habit, buying myself a really nice A5 leather cover and a selection of fountain pens that costs more than any normal person would be willing to pay, but it enhances the experience and I love it.

1:15:30I'm reading upwards of 50 to 20 books per year now and really enjoying fantasy for the first time. All right, Reese, that is a fantastic case study because it gets at the core of this whole idea of reinventing your life through lifestyle-centric planning as opposed to other strategies. Many of our questions we just answered got at different aspects of lifestyle-centric planning. This shows that whole philosophy and action. What ultimately determines the subjective, the quality of the subjective experience of your day-to-day life is not any one part of your life. It's the, all of the aspects of your life contribute positively or negatively to your, your experience of that day.

1:16:11And so if you work backwards from, I want each of the major areas of my life to align as closely as possible to my vision for what matters there, you are going to feel like you have a meaningful, interesting, intentional life. that's the right way to do it. And it's different than the standard ideas. The standard ideas for changing your life that are popular out there are usually based on building the courage to make one radical change that you hope will fix everything. But that rarely works. You make one radical change and maybe it makes one thing better, but it might make five other parts of the rest of your life worse.

1:16:44That is that dream job you thought would fix everything, but now you have to longer commute and you're more stressed out and you barely see your kids. And by the way, that dream job is not really a dream job because all these jobs are the same and you're sending a lot of emails. And so why is it worth it? That's a great example of lifestyle-centric planning. Work is fine. It's challenging work. And he has time with his family. They're going to cut back the hours more. He has meaningful hobbies. He's intellectually engaged. Classic example of lifestyle-centric planning at work. I also want to point out, he used a classic strategy within lifestyle-centric planning, which is your job doesn't have to be your source of passion, but it's one of the most important tools you have for actually shaping your life, right?

1:17:32And to make that tool sharper, you get better. This is my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. As you get more valuable, like you have more rare and valuable skills, you become more indispensable for wherever you work for, you get more options. You get more control over how you use this tool of your job. You can turn that into more money, which could help other things in your life. You could turn into more flexibility. You could turn it into having more control over exactly where, what locations you work in. This is the way that lifestyle-centric planners often think about their work. Not the only way, but they often think about it as this tool they use to help shape the rest of their life.

1:18:05And the more career capital they build, the sharper that tool gets and the more precise they can be deploying it. They don't think in terms of what's my passion. They think in terms of how can I be more valuable to my employer next year than this? And how do I remember as I get more valuable to leverage that to make my life better, not just to take the next promotion or just to move up the ladder. That's where a lot of the cool stuff often happens in lifestyle-centric planning. That's not the only thing you do with your job. You know, for some people, there's like a particular impact you can have with your work that's really important to you.

1:18:32And that's a key part of your vision for your life. And then you try to figure out how can I have that impact in a way that's not going to step on these other parts of my life and it can help you make good decisions about it. Anyways, classic example of lifestyle-centric planning. All right, do we have a call this week? Yes, we do. All right, let's hear this. Hey Cal, this is Josh. I'm a teacher and a father of two daughters. I have a two and a half year old and a newborn. And I'm quickly realizing that a lot of the principles and methodologies that I was putting in place from your books and from your work and your podcast are getting sidelined because of some of the responsibilities that I have as a father with two young daughters.

1:19:18I'd love to know how you altered your plans and you changed some of your life when your boys were younger. Your insight would be helpful. Thanks so much. Well, kids should take a lot more of your life. If you're not finding yourself way more limited in your time in terms of things you can spend time on or how easy it is to do well at work or this or that, then you're probably not doing a great job with parenting. It should. I mean, I hope it really changes the time you have available. The basic ideas I talk about can work really well in this circumstance, right? Because again, I'm not talking about hustling.

1:19:59I'm not talking about, you know, how do you crush it? How do you like always get ahead? I'm just talking about, you know, when it comes to sort of professional advice, like the reality of like what activities matter more than others. I talk about, for example, unbroken concentration produces more than distracted concentration. So you want to sort of separate those two out in your work. I talk about controlling your time. You're going to get a lot more out of it than going through your day haphazardly. I talk about things like autopilot scheduling your time is going to reduce a lot of like the decision making you have to do.

1:20:33I talk a lot about workload. You have to care about your workload. If it gets too big, that's going to be a problem. All of these tools can be very useful when you're in bunker mode, which is where you are when you have like a newborn and a two and a half year old like we want to we want to keep the wheels on the car but like that's about it right like i want to keep my job but i ain't going for manager of the year if you know what i mean when i have like young kids at home all that type of advice can be helpful like good i'm going to be careful with my time because i have a lot less of it and so i want to make sure i'm like hitting the key things i'm going to autopilot like these these things here just to make sure that these things get done that need to get done so that Like I am not drawing too much negative attention from my boss and I, because I'm too sleep deprived to even think right about how I'm going to schedule it, you know, uh, you know, deep work.

1:21:18You're like, okay, um, I can do less of it. Or maybe, you know what, I'm way more tired now. So I'm not having very effective deep work sessions right now. So I'm going to focus on like other things in my job. I'm going to pull back from things where it's going to require like a big original creative input and just be like generally useful. And I'm around and I'm doing stuff that people ask me to do. And I'm pretty organized. I'm going to keep my head down for a while. Like you can use these tools to adjust like whatever the reality of the situation is, but never for a moment feel bad that, oh, I'm not all in at work when I have like young kids at home.

1:21:50You shouldn't be. That's not the point of having young kids. Just like also if like you're taking care of a like a sick relative or you're sick yourself. There's different seasons of life that have different focuses. Like I spend an inordinate amount of my time right now doing non-professional activities related to my kids, like probably too much. I coach three different teams. I'm all over the place. I'm always I'm on the board of my kids school. I was up there last night giving, you know, I talked to all the middle schoolers about their phones. I'm there like three or four days a week. We're involved in other sorts of communities.

1:22:24Like I am spending a huge amount of time, you know, doing stuff with kids because I have elementary and middle school age kids and they're boys. And this is like a time they need their dad involved in their life. Yes, this probably cuts back on like other stuff I could be getting after it professionally. But like the whole point of me building up, you know, the career I have to this point was exactly so I could have this flexibility. I was like, great. I can kind of pull back. Like I'm not teaching this semester. Like that helps, you know, I'm writing my book slowly. slowly. I've thrown it out a couple of times now.

1:22:55It's okay. I'm going to take my time. I have no rush. Like I am going to go like slowly on it. I'm dedicating a full day every week of like, this is just my day for like the podcast, the newsletter. I just, this is it. That's my studio day. And that's just when I do it. I don't try to do anything else, you know? So I'm with you. Do not feel bad. I never want people to think my advice is like, go get after it. It's not, It's understand how the mind works and then use that information to be much more smarter about how you approach work. Like mainly the things I in my work related advice, most of that is in response to ways that technology made work terrible.

1:23:33And the technology tools we brought in the work really made it worse. And we have to get now we have to think a lot more about work. So it's not terrible. I'm much more about taking terribleness out of work and making it better than I am about like crushing it or, you know, trying to get after it. I just don't have the, I myself don't have the stomach for, you know, being overworked or stressed. So congratulations on the kids. Have no guilt. Use my techniques so that in like a fraction of the time you might have been working 10 years ago, you're not drawing any attention to yourself. And, you know, go home and take a nap.

1:24:05And whenever we had newborns, the other ones I was, you know, this was my duty. So it was a lot of like, I had a lot of time hanging out with two year olds and two and a half year olds. I remember this well. Yeah. But that's what you should be doing. So don't feel guilty. All right. So for the final segment of the show, I'm going to discuss an insightful reaction from one of my readers to the newsletter I sent out last week, which is very relevant to the topic we're talking about. It's something that really helped refine my thinking even more when we think about resetting or reinventing your life.

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1:25:47Vanta makes it automatic. Get started at Vanta.com slash deep questions. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash deep questions. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. Jesse, going online without ExpressVPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on a Zoom meeting. Do you really want your coworkers to hear you trash-talking them? True story. Jesse, this is true. Our good friend Cal Network was on a Zoom call when someone dismissively described his biceps as being at most 29 inches in diameter. So Network single-handedly diverted a river and destroyed his hometown. He's going to put up with that nonsense, 29 inches.

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1:27:09So now what do people near you see? What does your internet service provider learn? What does the guy with the attendant in the coffee shop learn? All they know about your internet traffic is that you're talking to a VPN server. Privacy is regained. And if you're going to use a VPN, I suggest that you use today's sponsor, which is ExpressVPN. It's easy to use. It works on all your devices. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. ExpressVPN, it's a fantastic VPN product, and you need a VPN. So what are you waiting for? Good news. Right now, you can get ExpressVPN at its lowest price ever, starting at just$3.49 a month.

1:27:50And if you use my special link, you can get an additional four months. So you have to go to expressvpn.com slash deep to get yourself that extra, those four extra months of ExpressVPN. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, with that, let's move on to our final segment. All right, so last week on my newsletter, I sent out an essay. And if you're not subscribed to my newsletter, by the way, you should. Just go to calnewport.com. There's all sorts of places to sign up. to join another 120 ,000 people who are signed up to receive. I send out a weekly essay about all these topics, about technology, how it affects us, how to respond, and how to build a deep life in an increasingly distracted world.

1:28:33All right. Last week, I sent out an essay that was titled The Great Lock-In of 2025. I'll bring this up on the screen here a little bit for those who want to see it or watching instead of just listening. I got an interesting response to this essay, but let me just tell you what this essay was about if you haven't read it. But here's how I began that essay. I said, if there's one thing that I'm always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I'm only now starting to hear about the so-called great lock-in of 2025. this idea began circulating on tiktok over the summer borrowing the term lock-in which is gen z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal this challenge asked people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the new year it's just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you're going to do explained one tiktok influencer quoted recently in a times article about the trend all right so i wrote about that i went on this essay to say this is great lock in which is like the focus on something without distraction is an idea that gen z came up with in opposition to their phones that to separate from the distraction of their phones to actually make progress in their life you have to have this mindset of lock in obviously this is very similar to the concept of deep work to the point where i actually had someone And it's not the response I was going to talk about, but someone wrote me in response to this article, someone in their 20s and said, look, if you just republished your book, Deep Work, and all you did was change the title to lock in.

1:30:06You would have like another million sales just from Gen Z. Like the content is exactly what they're talking about right now. It's just they don't really read books. That's kind of a problem. So I was really excited about this. And I was like, this is great. Here is my let me pull it up. Here's my conclusion. I said, look, when I first published my book, Deep Work, which centers on the importance of undistracted focus in your professional life, people already knew that spending their days frantically checking email probably wasn't good, but they only felt motivated to change when presented with a positive alternative.

1:30:38Ideas like locking in might provide a similar influence for Gen Z's collective smartphone addiction. It's one thing to be told again and again that your devices are bad, but it's another to experience a clear vision of the good that's possible once you put them away. when you experience life in its full analog richness, the allure of the digital diminishes. So what I was arguing there is like, here's why I like this lock-in challenge. Because when you get used to like pursuing other goals that are meaningful to you, your life gets better. And when your life gets better, you're like, oh, the alternative, which is the fake digital life doesn't seem so good anymore.

1:31:12You can't just tell people your phone is bad. You have to help them to making their life better. Just like I couldn't just tell people email is bad, I had to show them what work could be like without it. The positive induces more changes than the negative. So that's what that article was about. I got an interesting letter from a reader about it, which I'm going to read to you now. So this letter said, the biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing is that it doesn't know what to do. Most of them are chasing shining objects that others are showing whether on social media or in real life.

1:31:49And when they quickly realize it's not what they want, they leave and jump onto something else. This constant switching takes a toll, eventually leaving them with little to no energy for anything useful and actually feeling delusional. Gen Z doesn't know what it wants to do. This has been a common problem across generations, but Gen Z and youngsters after it are making things worse by scrolling through social media, hoping to find their purpose by accident or by someone telling them what they should do. I thought this was a really good point because I was saying, this is great. Focus on real life improvement goals.

1:32:20Your phone will be less alluring. And this reader said, yes, but it's hard to figure out good goals to improve your life. How do you know what you should do to improve your life? Well, if we think about it, like traditionally, where have we found this out? We found this out through role models, people in our life. There's aspects of their life that we admired. Like, oh, look at this person. I want to be like them. And then maybe you go to school. You're like, well, now I met this person as a property I like. We encounter ideas in books. We encounter ideas in events that you attend. You put together over time a sort of nuanced, complicated vision of what you want your life to be like based on these actual experiences that are bespoke to your life.

1:32:59But if you're living digital, you're getting just this funhouse mere distorted vision of goals that play well with the algorithm. them. You're seeing absolute shredded guys, you know, beautiful women, private jets, people crushing it in like really, um, very focused, you know, uh, really kind of unusual ways. I have noticed this. If you talk to like my, my son's generation and I go, what, what do you think would be like the best job or something? They have a hard time thinking beyond like being successful on YouTube because that's the world that you're, that's it. Like that's the world you're being exposed to.

1:33:37That's a really good point. And the solution to this is we can't just talk about making your life richer. We have to talk just as much about the mechanics of how you do that. Like, how is it that you figure out what a good goal is? How do you pursue a goal? It's not enough just to say, hey, lock in, let's go rock and roll and do TikTok videos about it. How do you choose a good goal? What matters to you? How do you make progress on it? You know, I'm writing a whole book on this in part because I think if you don't answer that question well it's hard to do anything else all the stuff i talk about the digital all the talks i give and the videos i do about like the problem with like algorithmic curation and tiktok and the algorithm what's happening in our society and our brains none of that's going to help if you don't have a better alternative to go towards and if you don't know how to get towards a better alternative we'll just fall back on the devil we know so i thought that was like a really good insight you know it's not just enough to say there's more than life than like your phones we have to say how do you navigate that world outside of it.

1:34:36And in a world where more and more of real world role models are getting replaced with these caricatures that are selected and promoted by algorithms through digital screens, that's harder than we realized. So we all could do better here, trying to find real role models and have more nuanced visions of what a good life means. And those of us who have thought a lot about it need to do a better job of explaining the mechanics of that to people. But anyways, great response. I appreciate that feedback. You know, if you don't subscribe to that newsletter, at calnewport.com and I want to hear your feedback on it as well.

1:35:07So thank you everyone for listening. That's our show for today. We'll be back next week with another episode and until then as always, stay deep.

1:35:18Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:36:30Thank you.