Slow Productivity and Anticipating Consequences | Cal Newport PT 1

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2:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. Setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing.

3:15So let's get into it.

3:46and it turned out he was a fan of me and I so I said hey would you mind hopping on the phone I thought we'd kick something around with you and he was like I had some questions for you anyways I remember I went for a walk in Boggy Creek Park over in East Austin and I must have walked maybe an hour or so and I got on the phone with this guy named Cal Newport and we were both young I think we'd both done one or two books at this time we could have maybe seen each other as rivals. We could have been threatened by each other. But I just remember the generosity that he took the time to kick things around on the phone with me.

4:18And I was probably just thinking out loud. I don't remember really anything that came from the conversation. But whenever I think of Ego is the Enemy, I think of that conversation. It was instrumental as I got ready to start that book. Flash forward now, basically 10 years later, I've become friends with Cal. I've talked to a bunch. His books have gone on to sell millions and millions of copies. My books have sold millions of copies. And, you know, we're peers who root for each other, who help each other. I remember I was, I gave a talk in Abu Dhabi, maybe five, six years ago. And I was talking to this sheik, very high up in the government.

5:03And he was like, oh, you're from America. You write books. He was He's like, do you know Cal Newport? And he takes me over to this nook in his office that has no windows, like very little light. And it's like his deep work nook. That's where he goes and just thinks, has his best ideas, all influenced by Cal's book, Deep Work. I had a U.S. senator show me like a very similar room not that long ago. and then Cal came out to the bookstore to do the podcast. He's on tour for his incredible new book, Slow Productivity, which I absolutely loved. The subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

5:49And by the way, some great stories in this book about John McPhee, who is one of my all-time favorite authors. My wife's been reading his book on oranges lately. As it happens I used levels of the game in The Obstacle is the Way. I used it again in Stillness. I used a chunk of that in Discipline is Destiny as well. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. But what was cool as Cal and I were walking around the bookstore, my sister is in town visiting, and she walks up and she says, oh my God, you're Cal Newport. I got to tell you, we do all this stuff at my job based on your stuff. So anyways, it was just all a very, very, very full circle thing.

6:33I'm a huge fan of Cal Newport's books. Every single thing that he writes, I read. I've had him on the podcast a bunch of times, and he did an awesome deep dive in the Wealthy Stoic Challenge we did. Again, it's a different understanding of money and wealth. It's not a get-rich-quick thing. I think it's one of the best challenges we did. you can check that out. I'll link to that in the show notes. But Cal's one of my absolute favorite people to talk to. And we talk a lot about the themes in my work, a lot about the themes in his book. And it's just an awesome conversation. And I think you're really going to like it.

7:11Cal is not just a thinker. He's a doer. He's a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is a leading scholar on distributed systems. He writes for The New Yorker. He's written eight books. He's got young kids and just one of my favorite people. And I'm very excited to bring you this conversation. I would tell you to check him out on social media, but he practices what he preaches and doesn't use it. But you can check out his Deep Questions podcast, which is wonderful. And I'll link to that in today's show notes.

8:01There's a Latin expression. You probably know it. You know, Festina Lente. Yeah, I wrote about it. Is it in the book? I don't know if it's in the book. I wrote an essay about it, though. Someone sent it to me. This is very Ryan Holiday. What's the Emperor Hadrian's favorite expression? I looked up all the different extant artwork. Yeah. the festivate lente artwork to all the different diagrams, the pictures that people would use for it. It means make haste slowly. I thought that's the essence of the idea of slow productivity, right? Which is that sometimes rushing is the slowest way to do it. And sometimes going slowly is the fastest way to do it.

8:38Yes, exactly. See, I think I came across it after I wrote the book. Oh, really? Yeah. So I was like, this is it. Yeah. This is it. I was like, man, we could have had this right up front. I could have been talking about Hadrian. It'd be great. Yeah. Well, no, you think that cramming it all in or like working very hard on it is going to be the deciding variable. But oftentimes it's like it's a singular idea or a breakthrough or a new way of looking at it that solves the whole problem or allows you to go forward. So if you don't have that, there was no point in doing any of the things before. And then also once you have that, things tend to go very quickly.

9:16Well, also this idea that you can throw a lot of busyness at something, that's modern. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's not, this is why in the book I do a lot of older stories because my contention is look at people who use their brain to create things historically. Yeah. They tended to have a huge amount of autonomy and flexibility. Yeah. Which meant they could experiment. What works? What doesn't work? If I'm Galileo, if I'm Marie Curie, if I'm George O 'Keefe, I have flexibility. So what works? What doesn't work? They can figure that out. Yeah. then you can isolate those ideas and say, how do we adapt these now to, you know, like a modern world, modern job?

9:51So if you go back and study these traditional knowledge workers, the idea that you would just be getting after it, you know, sort of modern 2020s email all day long, let's hop on call since just didn't compute. They took their time. They were making haste slowly because when you zoomed out, their production was incredibly impressive. When you zoomed in, they would look by modern standards like they're lazy. Well, yeah, it seems like they're laying on their back looking at the trees or they're taking long lunches or long walks. And this all seems like it's not work. Yeah. But if in doing that, you have the idea that unlocks the work or allows you not to burn out while doing the work or you have the conversation that inspires, that's where the work is being done.

10:39And sometimes just the time required, it's not even a breakthrough, just to mature something. Yeah. I mean, this is Lin-Manuel Miranda, his first play in the Heights, right? Which is a little overshadowed, but it won eight Tonys, right? It was a big deal play. Yeah. He first wrote that in college. He was a sophomore at Swarthmore. He put it on, right? It wasn't very good, that first version. It took him seven years from there to it actually having its debut on the stage. And if you look at those seven years, he was working on it steadily, but not intensely. So they would come back to it. He was working with a couple of alums from Swarthmore who had a theatrical company.

11:16And what they would do is on a regular basis, we're going to bring in actors and we're going to read your latest version of the book. But then a couple of months will go by and then we're going to bring them back. So you have to keep working on it, keep maturing this. But he was also doing a lot of other things, right? He was touring with his freestyle rap group, Love Supreme. He was writing a restaurant column, he was substitute teaching, but he had to take that time because he was 22. He wasn't ready. If he just said, I'm going to just go after it. I'm going to go into debt, spend six months after college, let's make this play work.

11:48It wouldn't have worked. He needed seven years, coming back to it again and again, as he matured creatively, the play matured. And then when it was ready to go, it really popped off. And then it was a really quick year of development and this thing was on Broadway. In Discipline is Destiny, I contrast these two Civil War generals. There's George McClellan, who's sort of always preparing. He said he never had enough supplies. Never fought, though. Yeah. And he would never sort of do the thing. He would get started. He'd start moving. And then there'd be some breakdown. It would take him like five days to cross a river.

12:22Lincoln said he's got the slows, right? And so you would think the contrast would be like the one who's always aggressive, always moving. And it is, but I was really interested in this General George Thomas, who they called him old slow trot. And he was seemingly slower than McClellan in a lot of ways. But when he was preparing or revving up, he was actually doing that. McClellan was using it as an excuse. He didn't actually believe he could win once he was in motion. He was hoping, he kept believing there would be this one singular decisive battle that would decide everything. And then also I think deep down, he didn't actually want the North to win the civil war.

13:08He wanted some sort of negotiated settlement that would preserve slavery. But the point is it was all kind of for show. And then he didn't have the killer instinct to finish the thing. And old slow trot, General Thomas, he was equally, if not slower to get going, but once he got going, he didn't stop. And I think that's, sometimes we, when we look at artists or whatever, go, they're just like procrastinating or thinking or planning. And they actually could be doing that. That might be what they're doing. So there's a difference between this like, sort of like, oh, I'm just waiting for all the conditions to be right.

13:44And then the person who actually is not saying I'm waiting for the conditions to be right, but like making the right conditions. And then when they have everything they need, it actually happens. Yeah. I like the metaphor. Right. Yeah. You, you, you're making progress towards the objective. It might be slow, but it's actually progress. And that's Lin-Manuel Miranda. If we go back to that example, he wasn't just sitting there in those seven years thinking I'm going to get, I'm letting it marinate, but like one day soon, you know, I'm going to write this play and make it right. He was working. Like they kept doing different shows and they would, uh, this is goes through a lot of different stories.

14:16Pretty systematically figuring out what's not working. We tried this, this is not working. How do we fix that? What unlocked that particular play was Miranda was good at the music. They're doing something innovative with the music, but the book wasn't very good. And they eventually brought in another playwright and she was fantastic. She went on to win her own Pulitzer in 2012 for a completely different play. They brought in the talent when they figured out, oh, this isn't what was working, right? Then he met his music director. Okay, now things are really starting to, but you don't get there unless you're slowly but steadily.

14:51Let's try. This isn't working. Let me try that. That is working. Let me do a little bit more. This is a little bit short. Well, what's the best way to fix it? Well, let's find out. This might take us a year to figure out how does one fix this? So you never stop. But I like slow trot as a metaphor. You could be going what seems to be slowly in the moment, but you're advancing on that territory bit by bit. Yeah. There's a lot of people who have been working on a play for seven years. And it's exactly the same as it was when they started. And yeah, there's a difference between working and working.

15:22Yeah. Well, I mean, I use myself as an example. I decided when I was 20, all right, what am I going to do? Computer science writing, right? And I sort of knew what that meant, what I wanted that to be. My entire 20s are just slow trot, right? I'm writing paperback original books that aren't at the time making a big splash, but I'm honing the craft. I'm in grad school, right? So everyone goes to grad school, but I'm honing the craft, right? It's not really till I get to 30 that anything I think that would be impressive to the outside world happens. My first sort of real hardcover idea book, front table book comes out when I'm 30.

16:02I get hired as a professor when I'm 30. So it's 10 years. I never stopped writing the next book. I take it on magazine commissions where I would try to polish specific writing skills I thought I wanted to improve, trying to as an academic, build those skills, publish new papers. Now try to publish papers that win awards. It's slow and steady, nothing flashy. I wasn't getting involved in other new media. I waited to get involved in new media until after all of that was established. I wasn't starting companies. I took that 10 years. And then after that 10 years, oh, things are kind of clicking and interesting options begin to pop up.

16:40But what's weird about that is it's sort of the same contrast you mentioned earlier, which is like day to day, it doesn't look like they're being productive, but then you look at the output and very clearly they were. So you're like my 20s, I'm just blah, blah, blah. It's slow. But then like to be a professor at 30 is an accomplishment in and of itself. to publish your first book by 30 in and of itself. Like people are like, you're so young, right? So there's this weird thing where it doesn't seem like you're being productive or you're operating quickly or sort of beating the curve. But then when the results come in, it actually does look that way.

17:16So it's this weird contrast where, yeah, the day-to-day-ness of it, you can't see where it's leading, but it is leading where you want it to go. I mean, it's a timescale issue, right? What does that mean? Like what timescale am I measuring productivity on? So when you say, I'm measuring productivity in my twenties on the decade timescale, like I want to look back at my twenties and say, I'm proud of what I did in my twenties. That makes a random Tuesday seem a lot different than if your productivity timescale is like this week, I want to get after it. Yeah. So if that's your timescale, like I better fill today.

17:53And then you're going to start coming up with activities that's going to allow you to be busy, right? Because I need to be productive today. So, okay, if I add this into my life and that in my life and have a bunch of coffees with other people and go through all these ideas, then I'm going to feel productive on the daily scale. But when you get to the 10 year scale, you're going to say, oh, you know, I had a lot of sort of like ventures and things and this and that, and then nothing really added up. So, I mean, a lot of this, it's a timescale issue. I was thinking about that the other day, it was my dropping my son off at school and it was sort of taking longer than usual.

18:24And I started, I like to be like sitting at the desk and writing by like nine-ish. And by nine-ish, I mean like nine. And so like it was like, okay, this is going to be one of those like 9.15, like 9.30 days because this thing was out of my mind. And so I started to feel like, not insecure, but I felt like rushed or anxious about like I have to get this thing over so I could do this other thing because it can't be late, whatever. And then I was like, okay, but what if I, instead of thinking about this like today, like what time am I supposed to be sitting there writing? What if I just think about where I'm going to be at the end of having written the book?

18:56And I won't be sweating whether I was there five minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, 20 minutes later, even if I skip today entirely and I just, you know, decided to do this family thing. And so that was like helpful. It's like, okay, it just, let me turn down the stakes here and just think about it in light of a larger timescale. At the same time, that's also the logic that people who don't get things done tell themselves. I go, oh, today doesn't matter. Like the goal I set in my head or the commitment I made, it doesn't matter. And so I think it's a tricky balance for people because you can say like, look at it in terms of decades.

19:36That's also a way to let yourself off the hook right now. Yeah. But I think this is the key challenge of doing impressive work, right? So if you doubt your ability at this moment to be able to balance those two things, tomorrow doesn't matter, but what I do this month does, right? Like a typical writer's mindset, right? It doesn't matter if I can't write tomorrow, as long as I write enough this month. If that feels like it's going to be a challenge, you're not ready to be going after what you're doing. And now there's, there's ways you build up to get ready for it. So it's, you know, it's why one of three principles in the book is obsess over quality, which at first feels a little bit orthogonal to slow productivity.

20:12The other things are directly connected to pace and workload, but it's actually critical for all the other things to happen. Because if you train yourself to understand what's quality in my field, you systematically work on your craft, you build that obsession with quality. You don't have the problem of, I'm not able to write today. And I'm going to use this as an excuse because you're obsessed with, I want to write something really good. This is what I do. What's going to make me happy is having finished this chapter this month. You probably feel the same way I do. When I can't write for a few days, there's a compulsion of like, I can't wait to get back and like the, the work on this.

20:48And so I put that in the book because this, I think is a problem. A lot of people face. If you just jump right into like, I'm going to be the greatest, whatever, and now you're procrastinating all the time. That might be an honest signal from your brain, which is like, we're not really ready to do this. Yeah. I find that like, if I, if I'm like what they call writer's block, like when I'm sitting down and I'm like, I don't know what to do today or I don't know what to say. It's really that I just haven't done the research. Like if I, if I have found, if I have gathered the materials necessary to do the thing, doing the thing is easy.

21:23When I am, I have, I have taken shortcuts or phoned it in or, you know, rushed things, then I'm like, I don't know. Like that, that, so, so Stephen Pressfield as he talks about the resistance, sometimes it's not the resistance. Sometimes it is a signal that your intuition is picking up that there's a less fun part of the process that you have to go back to first. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely right. It's a way your mind is saying you're not really prepared to do what it is that you're actually about to do. I mean, I used to get upset about this exact issue when early in my career as a professor, they would have me come talk at what are called dissertation boot camps.

22:05It's like doctoral students, as they get closer to writing their PhDs, the grad school at various colleges will often have these boot camps. To teach you how to write your - Yeah. And also to motivate each other. We'll all get together and you write, like you have writing sessions and then you'll have speakers come in. And so like when Georgetown learned about my older books, they're like, hey, you should come and talk. And so I would talk to these boot camps, but I would get so frustrated because the only verb they would use for work on the dissertation was writing. You got to get your writing hours in.

22:32How many pages did you get in? How many words did you get in? And I would always come in and sort of give this righteous speech of like, well, writing is part of it, but what about the thinking? What do you have to say? Yeah. I mean, it's not just sitting down and writing. Don't make that the verb. If you really want to be a professional thinker, which is what these students were trying to do, you have to have a much more sophisticated relationship with thought. Now I was a mathematician essentially. So writing was really kind of the last step of that type of dissertation. Like by far the harder part was solving the proofs.

23:04The write up the proof was not. So I had this extreme vision of it that I was trying to generalize, but so we can't, the writing is expressing an idea that idea has to be interesting and right. And how you form that idea is some of it happens on the page, but you also have to think. I think very little of it happens on the page. I think, I think this is a much more generalizable thing than maybe you're giving yourself credit for because people are, it's like, look, you don't just start building a house. Like you have plans for the house first, you know, where everything goes and you know, all the materials that you need first.

23:39You don't just start like sawing boards and hammering stuff and pouring cement. Here's my, here's my shitty first draft of my house. All right, now I'm just going to like fix the walls. Yeah. You have to, you have to crack the whole thing. And that's not to say, you know, like, like, look, you design the house and then maybe later you're like, actually, hey, we got to move the refrigerator over here because like these doors are hitting each other. Like there are going to be specific granular problems that you can really only wrap your head around once you're in the middle of doing those things.

24:11Like, like it's a, you know, that's a, that's a much later in the process problem. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But if you don't have a sense of the whole and you don't have a sense of how the large pieces, like nobody does a puzzle. Like I, there's this funny, uh, scene I remember in that show, new girl where this guy loves doing puzzles and he's like, I think I figured out what it's going to be. Like he, he, he without the box. Yeah. He was like, well, you don't look at the box first. He's like, you, you're just, no, like you're making this, you know? And, and like, obviously that might be a more intellectually challenging way to do a puzzle, but it's also insane.

24:50You You know, like if you sit down to write a book or start a company and you don't know what it is that you're doing, you're just like, how can you know what the next right thing is?

25:09I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do, and then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market, has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards, so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

25:42You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house.

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27:35You know who I think ruined this for people? It's novelists. because a lot of novelists do this. So it's the one type of writing. In fact, I'm surprised the extent to which novelists do this. A lot of novelists excavate the story as they write. So Stephen King famously does this. He talks about that in on writing. But a lot of literary novelists do it as well. They don't plan it out. I was talking to a thriller writer who writes mysteries. You would think a mystery writer needs to understand in advance like this is the twist. yeah no she just rocks and rolls she's like i figure it out i figured out as i go along right so i think this has pervaded culture so anything that's adjacent to writing we're thinking about stephen king on writing yeah like yeah i'm just gonna we think of a musician writing the song in seven minutes but we're not thinking of like taylor swift who thinks not just in terms of this album and the next album but how these easter eggs and this song connected like the the best stuff is for the most part, not stream of consciousness.

28:36And the fantasy is of course that it is, but it's almost never that way. And even the novelists, I bet you could have sat down and had conversations with them and they would have told you more or less where they thought it was going. Yeah. Because they've done it enough that they're probably just internalizing outlining like inside their head. Like, yeah, I know what the third act beats going to be. And oh, this guy, okay, let me set him up now because I want to twist him to be the - Or maybe once you have developed characters who have a logic or a set of values, you have effectively outlined the project because it is clear what they would do in a situation, right?

29:14And you can talk to novelists or TV writers or whatever, and they're like, well, they would never do this. Or Jim would never do this to Pam. Or of course, the season, the show is going to end with this relationship or this action, right? Kendall was never going to be the CEO, right? Like, you know, they know this stuff because they have developed the ethos of the people and then that's deterministic. But this is Lee Child, right? He knows what Jack Reacher, because someone wrote a book about how Lee Child writes his books. I don't know if you've seen this book before. Yeah, Yeah, it's really fantastic.

29:54He spent a year following Lee Child while he wrote a Jack Reacher novel and then wrote a book about it. It's all really interesting. But he knows Jack Reacher so well. Yes. Yes, he doesn't have to. He has to come up with a setup. A plot. Yeah. And then every time a scenario happens, I know exactly what Jack Reacher is going to do here. Yes. He's not going to get beat up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he's not going to be a wuss. He's going to probably crack some skulls. And we know what he cares about, what he doesn't. But I think something that was an advantage for me that I then tried to convey when other people are thinking about creative processes.

30:26So going back to the idiosyncratic field in which I came up in. So coming up in theoretical computer scientists before I became a known writer, mainly I was doing applied mathematics. The core of that is proofs. And there's this feeling that our brain is wired for when the pieces click together. So you get very familiar with this feeling of the pieces have clicked together. Oh, that works. Even if you haven't worked out all the steps, it's like, boom, right? That exact same feeling is how I approach writing, right? It's the same thing when I'm walking and thinking like, how is this chapter going to work?

30:59Oh, I see. If I move this here and bring this thing here and I pull this out, it clicks. And it feels the same as when a proof clicks. Nothing about that process involves hands on a keyboard. But it's something I think that's foreign sometimes when people are new to writing. it's it's the sense of you're you are planning and going for a sensation of rightness before you even are looking at a sheet of paper you're thinking about this will follow this does this idea make sense is this a bit of a macguffin is there a red herring here like all these movie terms show up in non-fiction writing as you know right i mean why am i introducing this concept if it contradicts what comes later and there's no resolution of why it does like that's going to sit in just going to be grit in the gears of someone who's reading and so when all that clicks in your head, then you know, okay, now I'm ready to write.

31:44Well, I've been thinking about this because I've been doing, this is the first time I've ever done interrelated books. So like most authors, especially nonfiction, you're doing on independent self-contained projects. You're like, I'm doing a book about this, I'm doing a book about that. And perhaps you might sell one or two books at the same time or two books at the same time, but they're usually two unrelated books, right? I just had two ideas at the same time they wanted to buy them. But to sell this series on the Cardinal Virtues was weird because first I've had to go, okay, the next four projects I'm doing are outlined.

32:15The order I'm doing them is outlined. And then I had to think on the first one, you know, okay, how do I crack this book on courage? Who are the first, the first thing was, what are the three parts? And then who are the main characters in those three parts? Because that's the structure I was doing. But then I had to go, okay, does this thing that I think is an important trait of a, you know, a virtuous person, is this actually in courage or is this actually in justice? Is this a self-discipline thing or is this more rooted in wisdom? And so, because if I make a decision in book one, it has implications for book two, three, and four.

32:54And that's something I've decided, I came up with it maybe in the discipline book, but I decided to move it to the wisdom book, which was a form of wisdom and talent. And I think it fits into this idea of like truly being productive is like an awareness of downstream consequences or how moving this thing changes these other things. And people who don't, who are too rushed or frenzied, or they haven't stepped back and gotten a larger perspective are not able to do that. So, so like you can be talking to an employee and go, ah, sorry, uh, Tuesday's thing isn't going to, or the email or that, that thing isn't going to work.

33:35And you take it for granted that because you've touched this thing, all these other things now have to change, but they're, they just do this thing. It's like, Hey, if I like, Hey, you're doing my calendar. And then I just told you like, actually I have to get on a plane on Thursday. You have to cancel everything that was in the calendar on Friday. Right. And that, that requires an ability to see how things are interrelated. And you have to have a sense of the whole, what you're trying to accomplish to know what they're related to and leading up to. Yes. So now we're getting really far away from let's just rock and roll.

34:08Yeah. What are you doing right now? You know what? This is a bit of a divergence, but I've been working on this article for the New Yorker, an artificial intelligence article, but this exact distinction comes up and maybe this will be out by the time this interview airs, but it's an exact distinction between what large language models, like the GPT models at PowerChat GPT, what they can and can't do. The number one thing they can't do if you're looking at it from an actual engineering perspective is look into the future and understand, simulate possibilities in the future, right? So it can only look at what you have right now, knowing what it knows, spit out some good words that matches this.

34:44And so the future of AI are these systems where you have a language model and then you have these simulators. And the technology comes out of game bots. This is how you win at chess. It's how you win at Go. It's how you win at checkers with a computer. You have to look into the future. Well, if we do this, what might they do? What might this do? And so generalizing that is what's needed for AI to look anything like we might actually think of as a human intelligence. Right. So like in 2001, Hal, right, the supercomputer won't open the pod bay doors. Right. So the Dave is like, open the pod bay doors and Hal knows like this, you want to disconnect me.

35:21Yeah. How does he know that? Well, he has to be able to simulate, well, if I do this and you're going to do this and this is something I don't want you to do. So actually the kind of the takeaway here is simulating the future and the article is core to how humans think. Yes. And it's like one of the reasons why there's a big gap between, you know, chat GPT and a human is seeing the implications of things in the future, but a bit of a divergence, but it's interesting though. I mean, do you think like game theory would be this thing that like Aristotle was talking about, but it's like really recent.

35:50It's von Neumann. Yeah. I talk about, I tell the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so this is the key, which I think is another example of this idea of stepping back and seeing the big picture. Like the military advice to Kennedy is unanimous. Like bomb Cuba and like, you cannot wait one more second until you do this. Like the future of humanity depends on you basically wiping Cuba from the map. And only Kennedy, who's not trained in, you know, these things goes, but what will the Russians do? Yeah. You know, and the ability to just think like, well, I'm going to do this. And then what they are going to, he's thinking, what are the people in the room with Khrushchev telling him?

36:32Yep. Right. And obviously they gave him bad advice because the idea that the United States is just going to allow there to be missiles on Cuba was like ridiculous on its face. But Kennedy realizes like he has the same hardline advisors that I do. And he steps back and to his credit, like we call this the 13 days, like it could have happened in 13 minutes. You know what I mean? Like he says, we need time to think about this. And they both finally do. But he has both the empathy, the self-control, the wisdom, also the sense of like, hey, if we screw this up, we're all going to die to go like, yeah, my best option is this.

37:12Yes. But your only option after I use my best option is the worst option. Yes. And we're not going to walk away from that. Well, I'm going to complete the circle then because so part of what Kennedy coincidentally compared to the last story, part of what he was doing in this time is in the Kennedy White Whitehouse, they were a big fan of this new board game called Diplomacy, right? Which was, it's a board game. I don't know if you know it, but it's sort of like Risk. It's a World War I Europe. But the key to Diplomacy is before every move, all the players talk privately with each other, right?

37:43So you have these one-on-one private conversations, you're making deals and alliances, you're backstabbing, it's all relationships. And then after you talk to everybody, everyone writes down their move and gives it to an arbiter who then does all the moves. And you see, A, was I of a trade or this or that. So Kennedy was really into this game. Supposedly Kissinger, Dolores, would train by playing this game to get ready for his real politic role as secretary of state. You know, it's funny, you can see these notepads from Kennedy during the missile crisis. And I'm just thinking of this as you say it right now, he writes diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy.

38:16He's just writing it down. He's been playing this game. Yeah, so that's probably what he's thinking. But here's what's interesting about it. So in this article I was working on, what was interesting, what it's about is a group of engineers at Meta created an AI that wins that diplomacy. Okay. Right? So they're using web diplomacy server. People don't know they're playing against a computer. And how did that work is the only way this could work, and I talked to some of the engineers at Meta, is they at first tried to just train up a language model like a GPT-4 to just know a lot about diplomacy.

38:48And like, this is a good move based on other moves I've seen in the past. They said, it's terrible. Right. But when they added in a future simulator, right. Because the, the, the, the main engineer on this had, had come up winning at poker. He built the first bot that actually beat professional poker players. Right. So he knew, and that's all simulating moves in the future. They put these two things together. That's how they began the win at diplomacy with AI. Interesting. Is that they had the language model could say, here's what the other players just said. And here's what I think this means.

39:18and then a simulator model that was figuring out. So if this happens, what would they do? And if, well, if they're lying though, what would happen? And it would work through the possibilities. You put these two things together. Now you can play diplomacy well. So it all connects. Yeah, I was just, I'm writing this story in the book I'm doing now and there's sort of a controversial figure in it, but I really want to include the story. And so like, I think earlier on in my life, like let's say when I was obstacle, I'd just be like, I like the story, I'm including it. And now knowing that, okay, then you get asked about it or then it doesn't age well or whatever.

39:51I'm like, okay, what is the footnote that I have to put here to anticipate the objection? And addressing, you have a good one. I forget who you're talking about. Les Moonves maybe? Yeah. No, there's someone else. That was one we thought about. Yeah. There's someone else you mentioned who wasn't good. I forget who it was, but it was interesting. You were like, oh, someone who marries their Mitch. Ian Fleming. Oh, Ian Fleming. Yeah, you're like, hey, I'm only using him in this regard. I do know about the other stuff. Not a great husband. Yeah, I know about the other stuff. I'm just choosing that dimension.

40:23This is not necessary for this story. But to me, that's a good example of aware of downstream consequences. You're like, I've done this enough times. I know if I do this, a potential reader objection is why. Yes. So if I do this in the interim, I can preempt that and then we can just move on. Yes. Which is, by the way, all nonfiction writing now is like, because there's a whole segment, there's a whole segment of review strategy, which is if I have an objection, my review is sophisticated. So it's like a lot of what we do these days is having to play defense against that, but that's insider baseball.

40:59No, no, no. Of course. Well, okay. So I want to talk about something that I thought about in the book, because you tell the story of Merlin Mann and he has this sort of breakdown in box zero. I am curious as I've read that story. I hear people, they're like, Oh, I was burned out. You know, I was doing too much. But then I actually like, look at what they did and how busy they were and I don't get it. And then I also look at their output and productivity after, and it doesn't look that much better either. Do you know what I mean? I feel like there's, there's almost this, like, this, like competition to like claim you had this like breakdown and then you had this breakthrough and on either side, I just go like, show me the work.

41:44Do you know what I mean? Right. Like, what have you done? Well, you're saying someone will have like a breakdown of like, I'm burnt out. Yeah. And then be super hustling on the other side about the story of slowing down or something like this. Yeah. Yeah. Or just like, like, I just, I guess it's, I guess what I'm saying is when you look at the productivity space as a whole, yeah the people who are writing about either like you gotta hustle you gotta work 40 hours a week you know or sorry 40 hours a day blah blah i'm like show me what you do like show me show me that like show me the actual success because i don't see it and then on the other hand i see that the people who are like i i was doing that but now i'm doing this better thing and i'm much more balanced and i go also show me the fucking work yeah and i like to me the people i admire aren't talking about productivity that much.

42:31Yeah. And they're just like the proof is in the pudding. Do you know what I mean? And I think you're a good example. You've, you've written all these books. You're talking about it, of course. But my point is like, to me, the ultimate validator of any strategy is like, what's the outcome? Yeah. You know, and there is this whole sort of guru space and I just don't see it. Like, you know what I mean? Like the, the marketing people who have never sold anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the productivity space is, I mean, I'm interested in your take on it. It's a weird space, right? And if we look just in books, for example, it's often claimed, like you mentioned there, like, oh, there's all these people out there saying work 80 hours a day or whatever.

43:14Actually, they're not. Like no one writes books. The last book I could find, maybe you know some others. I've looked into this, like, okay, every article about productivity starts with, I know everyone else is telling you to work all the time, but guess what? Shocker. I'm saying work. No one is actually saying that. The only book I could find along those lines was maybe Extreme Productivity, which was this book that came out about 10 years ago where it was just like a, actually I thought it was a good concept book. It's a busy executive and he just says, I'm very busy. Here's how I do it. I think the hustle porn.

43:46It's more online. I think it's definitely online. Yeah, you're right. It's not in books, but, but there is, it's like when, when you see it, like, here's my schedule and the schedule's insane. You know what I mean? It's an online thing. Yeah. Yeah. And there is a whole sort of more youth oriented Instagram, YouTube, TikTok culture. And I've learned more about that. And some of that has gone to weird extremes, right? Like I used to write about how to study when I was in my early twenties. There's a whole study YouTube space, which is now someone will live stream 12 consecutive of hours of studying.

44:20It's performance art, right? I mean, it's not at this point actually - I've never done anything where 12 hours consecutively in my life, it's ever asleep. It's crazy. And then people, yeah, the people lot it, right? So I agree that's true. The nice thing about productivity as a space though, is that you can just study people who aren't writing about it. Yes. Right. You can actually just say, right? Like what, which is what I do heavily heavily in the book. And it's why like a big portion of this book, for example, is also trying to understand, because looking more at knowledge work, understand what we even mean by productivity now because it's broken, right?

44:52Like trying to understand how did we, what do we actually mean by productivity? We don't really know. And if we really nail it down, it's not really working well. So what would it look like to do something different? There's a whole cultural critique aspect, but even that is getting tricky because I think in response to the same cause, right? There's this growing burnout among knowledge workers. There's also been a huge rise in what I think of as the anti-productivity movement. which is also heavily critical, but in a way that I think is less - Like the anti-work movement? It's like an anti-work movement as response to the burnout, right?

45:24And so ironically, it's out of a non-productive critique of productivity. But workaholism and work aversion are two sides of the same coin. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. And it's culturally salient, right? So there's a certain theoretical sophistication if you can maybe bring in like late stage capitalism or some other types of like grad seminar style critique. But ultimately those critiques end up being pretty nihilistic, right? Yeah. It's like, don't work. Yeah. Except for like subscribe to my sub stack that I'm working very hard on, but otherwise don't work. Well, like I like those two books, the daily routines books or daily rituals books.

46:02They're both very good. There's the one for men and then one for women. But it's like this dude, that's the only thing. Those are the only two things he's done. Like, you know what I mean? And I always go just, that's, I, I know what it takes to do a book, like two books in 10 or 15 years or whatever is like, not enough. You know what I mean? Like they're not like works of staggering original genius, you know? Like, so I'm like, what are you doing all day? And so sometimes I, I, I hear about these productivity experts or these people who are like this tip, whatever. And I go like, but what are you doing?

46:36And I look at it and I'm, I'm, I just don't, I don't get it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And I think maybe they look at me or you or something and they assume we're working crazy hours, but it's like, I'm not at all. Yeah, I don't. I just don't, I'm just like, I guess I can come back to this question. I'm like, what are these people doing all day? Well, I mean, I think it's why it helps me for sure when I write about these topics, the fact that I'm a professor. Yeah. The bulk of my writing, you know, I write for The New Yorker where I'm on the contributing staff. And most of it's really more about techno critique.

47:06Like I run the, or help found the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown. I do a lot of thinking about technology and the way it interacts with us in our lives and do a lot of writing on it. And that's all stuff that's not just writing about productivity. Yeah. And then I think it helps. I'm like, okay, hey, by the way, I don't work big hours. So like, how is this possible? Let's rethink about productivity. Hopefully that lands more as opposed to, you know, what I do is just YouTube videos about productivity, right? I mean, there is a, yeah, I think it does help. Yeah. There's just, there's something, I don't know.

47:35I've said this before, but it's like, I feel like, I said, amateurs obsess about tools and like pros just sort of do the thing. And usually their system isn't this sort of perfect, sexy, like systemic thing. That's what I like in your book. It's like, yeah, it just takes a lot of walks or she sits there a lot, or actually she had this breakthrough on a, on a vacation in the woods. You know, it's never as complicated as the people trying to market some solution or new paradigm for thinking about it want you to think it is. No, they keep shipping, right? Yeah. And they don't procrastinate. Yeah.

48:19It's kind of like, okay, I want to keep shipping something, but it's not just putting something out the door. It's like, I really am trying to make this really good. Yeah. Like, I care a lot about making this good. I'm trying to grow. I'm trying to improve my skills, but also I'm going to get it out the door. And then we move on to what's next. And I think you probably do the same thing, but it's always been my strategy with books is that, well, the next one is going to be a great strategy. I just tell myself while I'm writing, all right, I want to do this as well as possible, but don't worry about like, this has to be everything.

48:48The next book is going to be the one. And then you just ship what you're doing, right? You're like, I'll do this one well, but yeah, the next one is going to win the National Book Award, right? It allows you to, it takes the pressure off. It's like, okay, this just needs to be good. Yes. And you try to do something good and you ship it. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product.

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52:04yeah there's some humility but then also freedom and understanding that quantity is a way to get to quality yeah right so if you're someone who sits down you're a musician and you're like i have to write the greatest song of all time yeah uh you're probably not going to do it because you're not going to write enough songs right like um oftentimes the the the hit that defines a band or a movement, or you're like, this is my favorite in the catalog. It's different. It's unexpected. It was dashed off in a few minutes as part of a larger project. And so the idea that it's weird, you obsess about quality, yes, but then also you do it enough that you're not precious about any one thing.

52:48And so that balance, too, very easily, I think Churchill said you could spell perfectionism as paralysis. And so if you're trying to make something amazing, this work of staggering world altering genius, you're not going to do it. But if you're just consistently making stuff, you're going to be getting better and better. And you're also going to be getting more and more opportunities, some of them very timely and some of them very timeless, to express that talent or excellence you've developed. And you're going to increase the chances that one of those is going to be great. Yeah. I mean, my bestselling book was my fifth.

53:25My first book, Deep Work. Okay. My first book to hit the New York Times bestseller list was my sixth. Yes. This is basically my trajectory also. Yes. It gets rolling. But I think you and I had the advantage, if we're going to think just about writers, is also we started young. Right? It was just like, let's just get started. And I got started really young, right? I mean, I signed my first deal right after my 21st birthday. Okay. And there's very few books they're going to let a 21-year-old write. But that was very freeing. It was like, okay, my pitch was, let me write about college advice because I'm a college student.

53:55And there's an angle there that kind of made sense for turning the keys over to a 21-year-old. But that took the pressure off. It's like, yeah, this is practical. I'm just trying to write a book that works. It's for a very narrow audience. And let me write, and I wrote another one right away. Let me just write another one like that. Let me try to make that a little bit better. There's less pressure than if I had waited until I was in my 30s and established as a professor. And so here's my first book. And this is better be really smart and get a good review in the New York times book review. And what if people think I'm stupid?

54:23By the time I was a professor, I'd already published four books, right? You know, it was a, it was a different, I was like, I've been out there, you know, I've been taking swings. So to be able to just get started when the pressure is lower. I think Michael Lewis is best, his best book. And then I think his bestselling book is the big short, right? And he's like 20 plus 25 years into doing it when that comes out. And he's been writing about finance. He's been writing about characters. He's been writing about the economy. He's been writing about people, unique stories for all this time. He wrote a lot of forgettable books between those two.

54:59And he's written some forgettable ones since, right? But the man met the moment and that man had thousands of hours and thousands of pages of experience. And so that book probably did come together pretty easily. And he couldn't have known just where the Great Recession was going to go, just what it would mean, that it would eventually be. He couldn't have known any of that, but he was uniquely suited to do that thing because he'd done all these other things. And Lewis got started the exact same way you and I did. So my first book, why are they going to give me a deal? Okay, to write about students.

55:36Your first book, it was writing about your specific professional experience he had gone through. Trust me, I'm lying. Lewis's first book about his experience with Solomon Brothers. Yeah. Right. So it was like, get in the door however you can. Right. And so he did that. And then that got him Vanity Fair. He was doing election coverage. People forget this, but like he was making his bones on character writing, uh, doing, he was covering like primary elections for Vanity Fair, which had great editors and that was helping him hone his craft. Right. And then he wrote the new, new thing. Yes. Also great.

56:06Yeah. But like people don't remember that book no no remember who jim clark is about netscape hyperion you know he wrote a book called um what is it he wrote a book that came out like on september 11th like about uh that about the tech boom yes then the bubble popped it it was immediately forgotten yeah um yeah he wrote a bunch of and he was writing for slate and the new republic he was just like a magazine writer yeah and always be working on a project what's my next book you know uh and i bet He had that same mentality we talked about. I want this book to be good, but the next one, that'll be the big short, right?

56:39So you ship. Yes. You try to be good, but you ship. But we can generalize this though, right? I mean, I think this is a lot of interesting production, even in a normal job, right? Like even in a normal job with a desk that you have to go to, there probably is, this is what really matters that I could do. Like this is the skill, the type of project I work on. This is what moves the needle, not the email, not the meetings, but the white papers I write or whatever, right? So even there, the same type of mindsets apply of like, I'm going to do really well. I'm going to produce great stuff here. I'm going to keep pushing myself to get better, but I'm not going to get too precious with it.

57:12And if I just start that Michael Lewis writing books two for six, I'm going to end up at some point at this new level of skill. I'm going to be indispensable. So this sort of slowly productive approach, I think generalizes pretty far. That's a really important skill. So like, what is the stuff that matters and what is the stuff that doesn't matter? Like, how do you know what actually is important? Because a job has a whole bunch of responsibilities. There is certain obligations that do matter, certain ones that don't. There are certain traditions or best practices that are important. And other ones are just sort of ritual or, you know, inertia or the status quo.

57:54And so knowing, yeah, hey, these are the, like, one of the rules I have as a writer, and people go, how many pages a day do you write? Or how many words a day do you write? I think those are totally nonsense metrics. Because first off, all books are of different lengths, right? So if I'm a novelist, I have to turn in 100 or 200 ,000 word book, right? Even that's a huge difference, right? Like there's short novels and long novels. like the but every book contract has a different length a word count that you have to deliver and mine's like between 50 and 60 000 words which is a very short book right yeah so if i'm someone who writes 4 000 words a day like some novelists do like it's not gonna take me very long to write these books um so so word count doesn't really make sense pages don't really count because are you counting like in google docs or word or you know that's nonsense i and so i just i just say I have to make a positive contribution every day.

58:52Like I have to do something that moves the manuscript forward in some way. So that could be, I generated a bunch of new pages that also could be, I figured out the subtitle, you know, that could be, I deleted a bunch of pages. I moved things around. I found two chapters actually are about the same thing and I decided to combine them. And so all I have to do is make a positive contribution every day. And so I have a vague sense of what is a positive contribution than what's just like fiddling. But like knowing if you're a stock trader, you know, or if you run a hedge fund or you're a venture capitalist, or I don't know, you coach a football team, what is like, and you're saying, okay, what's my positive contribution today?

59:35Do you actually know what that is? It's really hard. It's probably not that I was here from this time to this time. It's probably not measured by I was in this many meetings or I yelled at this many people. It's got to be like, oh, no, no, no. I figured out that Jordan, was it Kobe or someone? They were like, I figured out Kobe goes to his left. But when he goes to his right, he shoots 11 % worse from the field. And so all I have to do, so that itself is a huge breakthrough. And then the next day, I'm just going to figure out how am I going to make this person go to their right instead of their left?

1:00:06What do I do with my footwork? That's what matters. Not how many weights did you lift? but what's the things that matter that move the needle and to be able to figure that out that's almost everything that is so i think it is almost everything and and i think it is hard harder than we think and also undervalued yeah right like it really is everything but here's what happens uh people don't even try to find it right because what people do instead is they write the story of what they want to be true okay i think this is the the biggest obstacle to people moving really far forward on something they care about.

1:00:42They write a story for themselves about, this is what I want to be true about what it takes to move to the next level because this is what I actually want to do. So I want it to be about, okay, to get my novel published, it's about having the right scripter set up and National Novel Writing Month or doing this many words a day or whatever. I'm going to sit at this typewriter. I'm going to sit at this typewriter. Yeah, because that's kind of fun. Usually the stories people come up with is challenging but tractable. Yes. Yeah. Like it's, it'll be a little bit hard, but I can do it. I can feel good about myself.

1:01:11And we do this all the time. It's about this or it's about that. I think internet culture has also really, especially for younger people, inculcated this idea of the, like the shortcut. Like, Hey, if you, you got the right, you got the right advice here and you're going to really make your way through. And I keep learning again and again in my career. Like the number one thing you can do is figure out how do people actually succeed at this. And like, you have to stare that in the face, right? It's often very narrow. Like the path is very narrow, not really open to reinvention. It's like, no, this is, if you want to play, you're a good chess player.

1:01:43You want to play chess at the master level. This is what the training looks like, right? There's no like way you're going to get around. You want to be professional musician. Like this is what it looks like. And it still might not succeed. You want like your podcast to be successful, right? It's probably, no, this is what you have to do. And you know, that's really hard, right? And sometimes when you face the reality, you say, you find out I can't do that. Yeah. Or - I don't have what it takes. I don't have what it takes. Or I do, but I don't have the willingness to put in that much time. I can't do that.

1:02:13All right. But that's good because you say, great, then let me not try to do that and let me find something else. So we don't try to do that work. And it's really hard work. I mean, one of the things I've recommended people do in a normal job where you're doing this is temporarily make yourself a business journalist. I'm going to like take people out for coffee who they're where I want to be. Yeah. Right. I don't know yet how they got there, but that's my model. Like I like what they're doing. If I could get there, their flexibility, this was where I want to be. All right. Let me now, as if I'm writing a Michael Lewis book about this person, like really interview them.

1:02:47Don't ask them. This is a journalist trick. You never ask people, what's your advice for doing this? Yes. People are terrible at giving advice, right? I mean, trust me, I've been down to somebody who writes and interviews people about advice. they're terrible at getting advice it puts people on the spot and what they do is frantically try to think of something that's internally consistent like that's what happens if i say give me your advice for like succeeding in a bookstore like if i put you on the spot here you would come up with something because like i want to have an answer that makes sense but like it could have nothing to do with what matters so don't ask him for their advice ask him well what happened in your first year yeah when was the next promotion oh interesting what did you do if you think about it what were you doing there that the other people who were sort of up for this and didn't get it, what were you doing that they weren't?

1:03:30Oh, so I'm isolating. Like, that's what mattered. Okay. What were you doing that didn't really matter? If you rewound that, when you have these conversations, it pulls out like, oh, this is what matters. And there's usually a moment of, oh, shoot, this is what really matters. Right. But that can also be followed by some inspiration. You're like, okay, okay. This is much harder than I thought it was going to be, but at least I see the path that actually goes uphill to the top of the hill. I think Tim Ferriss told me one time, he was like one of the secrets when he's trying to figure something out or learn something that's really hard is he's like, I don't want to talk to like the best person in the world or even like the second best person in the world.

1:04:08I want to talk to someone who's really good at it, but shouldn't be good at it. Do you know what I mean? So if you ask Michael Jordan or Shaquille O 'Neal how they got good at basketball, they're going to tell you this whole, you know, Michael Jordan's like, Like, oh, it's like he makes up this story about getting cut from the high school basketball team, which didn't happen. That's not how it was at all. But if you ask Bugsy Bogues or Spud Webb. I was thinking John Stockton. Right. Like someone who on paper shouldn't be as good as they were. That person's clearly figured something out. Yeah. And maybe and they've probably had to think about it more.

1:04:43Actually, this is an argument in Michael Lewis's Moneyball. He's like, Billy Bean was just not good enough at baseball that he had to really figure out the game of baseball to play it at all. Robert Greene is a good example of this. If Robert Greene was Henry Kissinger, he probably wouldn't be able to write the 40 laws of power. It's that he keeps getting bounced around and it's not working for him that he has to understand it and be able to articulate it in a way that someone who is intuitively or naturally good. or in the room where it's happening, probably not gonna be able to explain it the same way.

1:05:21Yeah, I mean, this reminds me, I was just, before I came here, was on Santa Monica with Mark Manson. Yeah. And so, you know, he co-wrote the Will Smith. Yes. So we're talking Will Smith and it was a great book. And that's one of the things that comes out in that book. And Mark and I were talking about that. You know, Will Smith also is like very unlikely to be the biggest movie star in the world. He's a TV star with a music background. But he studied Tom Cruise. Right? So part of why Will Smith was thinking, okay, what is Tom Cruise doing? What's working, what's not? And he figured out a lot of things that wasn't obvious, right?

1:05:54So he was studying Cruise because Cruise was older and was the biggest movie star in the world. And he figured out things, for example, like, oh, the international markets. I see international box office generates 50 % more money. It gives you more clout. And Cruise is going to every one of these countries and doing these international publicity junkets that no one else is doing. Right. And so then Smith could say, okay, we want to do exactly what Cruz is doing there. Right. And now suddenly - So you think The Tonight Show is why he is an international movie star and it's actually some Dutch newspaper that he gave an hour to over and over and over again, times every country in Europe or China.

1:06:33He's going to Asia. Yeah. Tom Cruz really innovated, go to China, go to Japan. I mean, some of this was before the Chinese market opened it up, but actually go to these other countries. So he was really studying. And then, of course, you can see this becoming almost pathological when you get to the point in that autobiography where Will Smith now is so intent on winning when he plays Monopoly that he hires a professional Monopoly coach to teach him how to always win at Monopoly to the point where eventually Jada was like, what are you doing? We're playing with our kids. But that's the mindset, right?

1:07:05It's like, okay, I want to be, in that case, the number one movie star in the world. I can write a story, which is like have the right type of movie or like be in good shape. He's like, but why don't I get to the core of like what actually matters? No, that's interesting because it does come back to the idea of slow productivity, which is sometimes the thing that makes someone naturally productive, naturally good is that sort of ambition, that drive, that sort of forward motion. And that can make you successful to a point, but it's also very difficult to turn off. and if you're trying to do your thing sustainably over a long period of time, if you don't want to burn out or blow yourself up or succeed, but at the cost of marriage, family, happiness, health, et cetera, to be able to do it slowly and a bit more meaningfully and maybe obsess over quality a bit more, that's a whole other set of skills that are not as celebrated.

1:08:04They're also, depending on your personality type, not sort of as natural. And they're not... The other thing you notice is they're really separatable from busyness, right? So even the super hard-charging driving ambitions like the Will Smiths of the world, right? They are working really, really hard, but they're also not busy in the sense of a normal person might be with, I'm on an email here, a call here, a bunch of different things, a lot of activity. Another Hollywood example would be the director, Chris Nolan, right? Doesn't own a smartphone. Doesn't own a phone at all, right? He's a guy who works really hard, right?

1:08:43And it's not that he never does phone calls. No. And he has people who have phones around them, but it's not really about, you know, who's taking your calls? It's the signal that says, which is, I don't want to be part of the typical Hollywood chatter of like this representation calling about this and let's go have lunch. He's like, I just want to work on my movies. So sometimes slow productivity, some of these exemplars, they're working really, really hard, but it's focused and it's intentional. And there's typically huge variations in intensity. So it's six months until Oppenheimer comes out and I'm in the editing room all day, but then like two years might go by after that when I'm gestating.

1:09:20So it's more balanced, but they're not busy, which is that first principle in the book of doing fewer things. They're not covering their plates with lots of different things and lots of different options because no one ever got great doing that yeah i've i've uh and this ties to your email book but i've the becoming the person who is not on top of their email was a skill i had to learn yeah do you know what i mean like to be to to and it feels almost egotistical or a little like uh what's even the word like it feels like self-important or or dramatic to be like, no, I'm, I'm the, I'm the artistic type that, that does it.

1:10:00Oh, sorry. I didn't see that. Or, Hey, I'm responding to this three months after you send it to me, but I was off doing this thing. Like I actually had to, I had to sort of consciously do that because first off it just became too much, but also that skill, which I learned at some point of like, you hit it into my court, I'm hitting it back into your court. Like that's, that's me getting good at a game that I, that's me being good at a game that I don't really want to be playing. I want to be playing this game, which is I got, I don't know what day it is, or like I lost track of this, or sorry, you were talking to me.

1:10:34I wasn't paying attention. I have to almost cultivate the, again, this is somewhat of a stereotype of the artist or the professor or the finger person, but like, no, no, that's the game that I want to be playing. That's the world that I want to be living in. And, and there's almost an affectation to it. That is the opposite of what most people are doing or what you grew up doing or what you are comfortable doing. And so I'm just like, I just have to go. Yeah. I, I have 400 unread emails, like real emails, not like thousands of newsletters, but just like, there's a bunch of people, some of them very important.

1:11:11I'm not like, I'm not saying like, screw you. I'm not going to get back to you. I'm just saying like, even thinking about what I'm going to say and reply is taking me away from this thing, which is where I should be.

1:11:26Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner. And honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore.

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