From the Archive: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Cal Newport

17:34I wanted to play along to Hendrix and do my pentatonic scales or in band practice, just play a song that came easy. I really hated the discomfort of doing things I wasn't good at yet. But that's deliberate practice. That's how you get better.

17:45James Altucher:So to summarize it, doing things that are just slightly out of your comfort zone, doing things that are uncomfortable for you that you don't necessarily enjoy, but will improve your skill. Yeah, stretch. Yeah, it's just like muscles, right? I mean, you got to lift the weight beyond where you're able to do easily until you get muscle failure. Same thing with the brain. You got to push yourself past where you're comfortable with clear target and clear feedback. And that's what stretches your mental muscles, makes you better. So part of that also is like when you're identifying his practice and you do this throughout both books, one kind of interesting thing that comes up is the fact that all of these people who are doing deep work and being so good they can't be ignored are not on Instagram or Facebook.

18:26James Altucher:So they're not kind of like doing 10 minutes of programming or playing the guitar or farming or writing or whatever and checking their emails. They're ignoring that completely. And in fact, many people, like you mentioned the case of Neil Stevenson, who's a great science fiction writer, futurist writer, who very deliberately and kind of almost ironically does not even have email. You know, it's just key to this is avoiding all these distractions. Yeah, I mean, this is my argument. Basically, what I'm trying to model and promote is a relatively extreme lifestyle. We can call it the deep life, which is where you prioritize doing deep work, so focusing hard on hard things.

19:04And you also prioritize cultivating that and training that ability and trying to push your level of focus higher and higher. And in order to prioritize these activities, be ruthless about eliminating and be more efficient with everything else. And that's why, in my case, I've never had a social media account. I don't have a general purpose email address publicly available. I'm kind of hard to reach. I don't web surf. How do I reach you? Well, so what I have is an opportunity address, which is great, which says, if you have an interesting opportunity, I might be interested and send it here, but just know that I'm only going to respond if it happens to match my interest.

19:43So there's no obligation that I... So there's no way that just as a reader, for example, you can just, hey, let's start up a conversation. And there's pluses to all these things. There's pluses to being more available to your readers. There's pluses to being on social media. But by ruthlessly prioritizing your ability to focus, my claim is it's like a superpower. I mean, it's not about you'll be a little bit less distracted, you'll be a little bit more productive. It's about multiplicative factors, more productive and more satisfying. I mean, it's kind of an extreme stance I'm taking, but it's basically the stuff that requires hard, hard focus and pushes your skills to its limit is by far the most valuable, important stuff you can do.

20:19And all the other stuff that's easily replicatable, I mean, you know, any 16-year-old with a smartphone can do social media. Any of these things that are easily replicatable are not adding nearly as much value as you could to your life by concentrating really hard on very hard things.

20:35James Altucher:Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

20:57James Altucher:So I like this phrase, deep life. So prioritizing it, like understanding that I'm rephrasing you, but understanding that you need to do this to have kind of a deep work sort of life or to be so good that they can't ignore you and then cultivating it. So actually, you know, doing the things necessary to get this deep life. So what other things can one do to kind of create this, you know, cultivate this deep life and eliminate these distractions or do whatever else it takes? Right. Well, I mean, there's a few things relevant here. I mean, a key point that's often missed and that's relevant is that the ability to focus is a skill that has to be trained.

21:34So this throws a lot of people off because people think about focusing like flossing, a habit. They know how to do it. They just need to spend more time doing it would be good for them. And the reality is actually it's a skill like playing the guitar. The more you practice it, the better you are. And if you haven't been practicing it, just like you wouldn't expect to pick up a guitar and start jamming if you've never played before, if you haven't really practiced or tried to cultivate your ability to focus, you'll find a deep work session to be frustrating and effective. So that's sort of the first thing I try to put out there is that this is a skill and it's hard to cultivate, but it's very, very valuable if you do.

22:08And then, of course, there's a whole sort of collection of strategies for how you then build your life around deep work, which is more on the strategic side. All right. So, for example, you have to have some sort of philosophy of scheduling for where deep work plays a role in your life. You can't just go through your day and say, at some point, I hope that I just have to this feeling that I don't have much to do and I'm in the mood to focus hard. You'll never do any deep work. Deep work is hard. It's cognitively demanding. It uses up energy. Our brain does not like to use up energy if it doesn't have to because food used to be scarce.

22:39So you're never going to naturally drift towards deep work. So you have to have some sort of ironclad scheduling system. This is the role that deep work plays in my life. And then you need to couple that usually with rituals around the actual deep work sessions themselves. Again, it's all combat with your brain. You have to do all this combat with your brain to get it to actually go into these states of deep concentration.

22:59James Altucher:You know, I hear this a lot from people that kind of a key to success is fighting your brain. You know, we're humans and we develop this amazing ability to adapt to new situations. That's why our brain is better than that of any other species, depending on how you define better. But at the same time, to actually achieve success, we have to kind of fight these inclinations our brain has because we're sort of, the society has evolved faster than our genes have evolved. So a lot of it is battle with our brain. And what are some of the ways that the brain tries to slow us down? Well, I mean, one thing you have to be aware of is the phenomenon of attention residue, which says that if you switch your attention from one target to another, the original target is going to leave a residue in your brain, which can stick around for quite a long time.

23:44And what's an example?

23:45James Altucher:It sounds fancy, attention residue. Okay, so let's say you're trying to write something difficult, and you do a quick check. Let me just quick check my inbox. And when you do so, you see a couple emails in there, and in particular, you see an email from your agent, and you're like, I know I got to get into that, and it's a little bit complicated, I can't really do that now. But I just glanced at this for 30 seconds. Let me put my attention back to the writing. That's going to be bouncing around in your head for 10, 20 of the 30 minutes lab experiments show, and your cognitive capacity is going to be reduced during that period.

24:14You're basically going to lose a major portion of your brain. We all have this experience. They're trying to write your reply and think through what you want to say and the implications. And at the same time, you're trying to focus. And this is a huge problem right now for knowledge workers. A lot of people who think they don't multitask, what they're still doing are these quick checks. They're like, no, no, I'm just doing one thing at a time. But I mean, obviously, I got to just do a quick check of that inbox and a quick check of the phone. And it puts you in a state of continual reduced cognitive capacity.

24:41It's like you're taking a, you know, reverse neurotropic drug. Like a drug that actually makes you slower and dumber, you know, while you're doing your work. But our brain isn't, it wasn't evolved for prioritizing intense focus. So, you know, when we glance at something, that's able to actually take over a mechanism. There was no selective pressure to sort of help us very quickly get our attention back. So, you have to really fight that. And for example, when doing deep work, say I have zero distractions. Ten seconds glancing at something means this is a failed session. That's fighting evolution.

25:10That's fighting the way our brains actually wired.

25:12James Altucher:So what's your story? Who are you? Why'd you get interested in this? Yeah, well, two ways. One was after I wrote So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I said, hey, if you want to love your working life, get really good. People had an obvious follow-up question, which was, okay, how do I get really good at things? Let's say I buy this premise and passion will follow skill. How do I get really good at things? And in some sense, deep work is the best answer I have. But second, I needed to be as good as possible if I was going going to try to succeed in my day job. I'm trying to get tenure. I needed the produce at a high level.

25:46So I was very interested in trying to understand what matters and what doesn't in my own sort of quintessential knowledge work type career. And so I started writing more and more and clarifying this topic and eventually turned into a book.

25:58James Altucher:And so your quote unquote day job, as you say, is you're a professor of computer science. What's your research at Georgetown? So I'm on the theory side. I work on the theory of distributed algorithms. So I don't really touch computers much more whiteboards, if that makes sense. So what do you enjoy more? Kind of, it's almost like you have two lives. So you're, you're a professor of distributed algorithms, which requires obviously deep work and hours of thinking and concentration and improving theorems and publishing papers and so on. And then you're, you know, I'm on your email list. So you send out emails a couple of times a week.

26:29James Altucher:You, you, you know, you've written these books that are widely read and kind of the motivational community, which do you enjoy more or is one distracting to the Neither. Well, I mean, first of all, I would describe the writing section of my life as also very deep work centric. So, you know, I don't, as I mentioned, I'm not on social media. I don't make myself generally available. I mean, what I do is once a week, I write a blog post. And then when I'm working on books, I usually get up early and I'm thinking and writing books. It's actually a very deep existence, my approach to writing. I don't do any of the audience engagement stuff or almost none of the audience engagement stuff that's all conventional wisdom now.

27:06And it turns out it doesn't really matter. So that's good.

27:09James Altucher:Why is that? Because so I write quite a bit and I do some audience engagement and I find it to be an okay way to kind of build audience. Like if someone wants to, you know, if I'll go on other people's podcasts, for instance, you're going on my podcast, this is a form of audience engagement for you. So some things actually are effective. You kind of have to pick your targets. Well, it's not that it's not effective, but for an individual author, and your situation is going to be different because you could sort of explain what you're doing as more of a media company. I think if you... A company using social media, the help market makes sense because everyone else is on it.

27:45So why not take advantage of it? But as an individual author, the general rule of thumb I can discover is you can get... You'll convert 1 % to 2 % of your audience maybe into book sales, right? So for someone like me, and I don't mind talking about numbers, my blog will have maybe like 100 ,000 unique visitors a month. And that'll translate to 1 to 2 ,000 pre-order sales of a book, which is nice. And I've talked to some more prominent authors that have larger audiences and it scales just nicely. People have five times that audience, they get translates to six or 7 ,000 pre-orders. That's fine, but that doesn't really have a mat, it doesn't massively move the needle.

28:25So in other words, just the mathematics aren't there for me. If I spend a lot of time fracturing my attention and audience engagement, at the other end, it might be 500 sales, might be 1 ,000 sales, and that's not worth it. In other words, that's not enough ROI for fracturing my attention because that's going to make my life harder. I'm not going to get as good. I'm not going to produce books that are as good. I'm not going to think as deeply.

28:43James Altucher:And I guess that's related to Neil Stevenson's point of I could either, he says, in your book, he says, I can either be responding to tweets or responding to emails, which talks to maybe like 30 people, or I could write an entire other book. Yeah. Yeah, he said, there's two artifacts I could leave behind. A bunch of email conversations I had with individuals or one book that'll be read by hundreds of thousands of people for years to come. And he said, I want the book, I think is a better use of my time. And so he says, don't invite me to conferences. His website's funny. It says, okay, you can try to invite me to speak, but I am going to charge you like an outrageous fee and have annoying demands.

29:22So that's what he puts on it. he started using social media, but then felt the need to write a whole essay about why he's bad at social media. Don't expect him to be on social media. It seems like he probably could have just not used it in the first place. But yeah, he's my idol. He gives up some advantages in order to have much more massive advantages in another part of his life.

29:42James Altucher:Boy, you know, I say yes, like far too much to, I try to say no as much as possible. Even wrote a book called The Power of no, but I end up saying yes to probably a few too many conferences to speak at. I need to, and then here's what, here's the problem I have. I say yes. And then a week before I'm supposed to speak, I regret it. And I write them at the last minute and maybe 50 % of cases say backing out, which is really bad. It's the worst. I have that exact same effect. It's like, oh no, I actually have to, I have to go to Arizona. It's going to take forever and I have to give this talk. Yeah.

30:15I'm with you. So I try to say no. Yeah.

30:17James Altucher:I have to speak at a conference in Arizona, actually in a few months. Yeah. So it's just a little bit too inconvenient to make the flights work as you press with more time than you think. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, I have this philosophy in the book, which I think is relevant, which is I think when it comes to like tools, for example, in your life in the digital age, that most people are adopting what I call the any benefit mindset, which says, hey, if this tool has any possible benefit or if there's any possible interesting thing I might miss out on if I don't use it, that's justification for me to use the tool.

30:51And I think that's the dominant mindset right now, especially in the space of digital communication tools and social media. It's like, oh, there might be some benefit here. Let me try it. Which is actually sort of unprecedented in the history of skilled labor. This notion that you would ever just have a philosophy of tool adoption that was, well, this might be useful. Let me spend time and attention on it. Just doesn't make sense. You would never find a skilled artisan or a farmer or anyone else who does something that's skilled and demanding just sort of buying tools or trying out tools because why not?

31:20In almost every other field of skilled labor, there's a huge level of discernment and a huge threshold a tool has to pass before it can actually get access to your time and attention. And so one of the things I argue is we should have that same mindset in the digital age. I don't care that there's some benefit I might get from Twitter. If I can't find a huge demonstrable advantage it would give to the things that matter most to me, it hasn't earned my time and attention.

31:40James Altucher:So prioritizing it, which I think a lot of people don't do, they think that, oh, they can multitask or they could just hustle harder. I mean, there's this whole mythology around, oh, if I work 100 hours a week and really hustle and grind, I'm going to be successful. And I think that's just not true. I think you make the point that if you kind of narrow in on the right activities during the right amounts of time, there's more time for leisure and enjoying life and success. Yeah, that's why I introduced this term, shallow work to help clarify this idea. Deep work is when you're focusing on something hard, something that's producing as much value you can.

32:18And let's let shallow work be the anthonyme, basically every other activity. And the right way to think about it is that if you have a job, deep work is what's going to get you promoted, while shallow work is what's going to prevent you from getting fired. Or if you run your own company, shallow work is what might keep you out of bankruptcy this month, but it's deep work that's going to triple your revenue. And so the right way to think about things is that shallow work can't be completely avoided, but you want to be skeptical of it. You want to be as efficient as possible and you want to reduce it as much as you can.

32:48You want to get down just to the core things, be hyper-efficient, and it's the deep work that's actually going to help you make progress. It's actually going to help you get ahead and that's what you really want to be doing a lot of. So you can't just say, I'm busy and say that's good hustling and I'm successful. You have to say, what am I busy with? And if you're busy with shallow work, if you're in an email inbox for 100 hours a week, then you're like, oh, something's wrong going on here. Like, I shouldn't feel proud. I should feel proud about how much deep work I did. That's what's going to push the needle.

33:14And shallow work is just something, it's like keeping the lights on as logistics. You know, okay, I got to do it, but I don't want it to take up too much time. And if I'm spending a lot of time on it, that should be a warning bell, not a foundation for celebration. If I'm spending 100 hours a week on shallow work, I shouldn't pat myself on the back. I should sign off the alarm bells and say, oh, something's wrong here.

33:33James Altucher:I read this story about Anatoly Karpov, who was the world chess champion in the late 70s, early 80s. And he basically, someone asked him, how often per day do you study chess? Thinking it would be like 12 hours a day because he's the best player in the world. And he said maximum three hours a day. And the rest of the time, like he was taking language lessons, he was relaxing, he was playing tennis, you know, deep work versus for him, his version of shallow work. Do you think there's a maximum of how many hours a day someone can actually do deep work? Yeah, well, what we know from the research is that deep work at the highest levels of intensity, like what you would experience if you're Khabarov doing chess practice or if you're a professional musician, you know, trying to learn a new piece, it's about four hours.

34:16About four hours. There's a little bit of give into it. But there's an important caveat that when most of us in the knowledge sector are doing deep work, it's not at that level of intensity. So we actually can get away with doing a lot more because what really happens is I'll typically, like yesterday, eight hours of deep work, most of it on foot and a lot of it actually in the woods. I was working on a proof the whole day. If you actually went inside my brain and were measuring it, I wasn't at a sort of chess grandmaster level of intensity for that full eight hours. It was more up and down, like diving deep on this approach.

34:46Oh, it doesn't quite work. Okay, take a mental breather, mental breather. Okay, attack back in. So highest level intensity is four hours. But knowledge work, deep work, you could do a whole day easy once you get a little bit more used to it.

34:58James Altucher:You have something in deep work about kind of embracing boredom. Can you describe that concept a little more? I actually didn't quite understand it. So one of the issues with, I guess I'd say obstacles, with getting good with deep work, so being comfortable, focusing intensely for a long period of time, one of the major obstacles people have is that their brains have developed an addiction to novel stimuli. So the brain has developed an addiction that at the slightest hint of boredom, it craves and demands some sort of novel stimuli, which nowadays a smartphone can deliver basically at any point or any location you might be.

35:33So a lot of people had basically, this is their standard operating procedure. As soon as there's a little bit of line to wait in, as soon as there's a little bit of wait for their friend to arrive at the restaurant, as soon as the microwave is running for the burrito to finish cooking, it's, you know, phones out, let me get some novel stimuli. If you have this addiction, when it comes time the next day to sit down in your carefully isolated writer's shed and give something your full attention, your brain is not going to cooperate because deep work by definition is boring in the sense that it doesn't give you a lot of different stimuli.

36:04You're focusing on one thing. If your brain is addicted to novel stimuli, it's not going to play ball. No, I'm not going to keep my attention on this thing. Where's my stimuli? You know, like there could be a tweet out there about me. For God's sakes, we got to go look at that. People are saying something about me. We go, what if someone liked my Facebook post? We got to go see it. My audience awaits. So you actually have to break that addiction, just like you'd have to break your addiction to smoking if you decided I want to be a triathlete. And how do you do it? Well, the best way to summarize it is embrace boredom.

36:31You just have to get used to many points during your average day, being bored, craving stimuli, and just being okay, standing in that line and being bored for a little while.

36:57James Altucher:So what's next for you? what's the next book? Yeah, I'm not quite sure. But actually, something that has caught my attention a lot recently is the standard work practices and knowledge work. And in particular, this approach to work where everyone has an email address associated with their name. And in a lot of knowledge work organizations, you just sort of rock and roll, send the messages back and forth. And that's kind of how everything's done. And so the business is just driven by this sort of ad hoc, on-demand communication all day long. Like the fish in water, right now we just think this is what it means to work in the knowledge age.

37:31You have a Slack channel or an email inbox and you just communicate with people. But I've been solidifying this hypothesis that this is actually probably like a very early stage and naive approach to knowledge work. Knowledge work is very new and that we're going to see a revolution towards sort of much more specialized, much more productive and fulfilling workflows that the age of just everyone having an email address, their name at company.com through which everything flows is going to come to an end. So I'm working on solidifying that idea and peeking a little bit into what this future might look like.

38:02James Altucher:You know, earlier we were mentioning how, you know, people kind of too quickly try to figure out or get disappointed in the idea of what's my passion. And I guess replacing the word passion with the word goal, when do you think this idea, oh, I have to have a goal in life or I have to like have goals, period? period, you know, like people have 10 year, 20 year, five year goals that they think that if they're not on track all the time, then they're a failure. What's the history of goal making? Like when did people start thinking, oh, I need a goal in life? Because clearly 200 years ago, people didn't have goals.

38:36James Altucher:Like they just wanted to live. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I actually have looked some into it. I don't have a great answer other than, as you said, different periods looked at these type of issues quite differently. Like if you go back to the ancient Greeks, they didn't talk about concrete goals. They talked about sort of pursuit of excellence, this Erete notion, the excellence in sort of reaching human potential and flourishing as Aristotle writes about, which was more of like a process focus that you're trying to flourish in life. It's not, okay, I want to whatever, lift the heavy stone this weight by this age.

39:09Certainly in a lot of Eastern philosophies, the notion does not exist like that. If you look in Taoism, for example, this notion of like, I have a concrete goal I'm going after is sort of antithetical to many of the core ideas. It seems like in the American setting, it picked up. And I'm not even quite sure exactly when it picked up to the way it did. I mean, if you really study, let's say the founding fathers error in the history of the country, their things were much more about causes than I would say goals, right? If you study their writing, it was not so much, I want to accomplish this, this, and this.

39:43It's more like I want to support this cause or I want to dedicate my life to this seem more common. So I don't know if this is like a Dale Carnegie type transition. Are we talking early 20th century? But it is helpful. I think you're absolutely right to note that it's a very specific idea in a very specific moment. We shouldn't think of it as synonymous with what it means to live a good life.

40:03James Altucher:So in addition to your two excellent books, and also you've had other books about studying and how to be a successful college student, how to be a successful high school student. I think these are excellent reference books for all sorts of people. But what other books would you recommend about the notion of achieving excellence or deep work or all of these different topics? And I've always been a big advocate of biography as the best way into understanding these type of personal development, business success type notions. Take biographies of someone who, what they did and how they lived resonates with you.

40:36Find the best biography you can and then extract the lessons out of there. I mean, if you read, for example, The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt, fantastically written biography, you're going to see a playbook for deep work.

40:47James Altucher:Well, and Teddy Roosevelt was a big example, probably the oldest example for you in deep work. I mean, that guy went from his first book when he was like a teenager about birds to being president of the United States 25 years later. It's a good example of deep work. Yeah, it's like the whole underpinning of his success and all of his endeavors is that he had developed this ability that on a dime, he could turn his attention onto something and focus incredibly intensely. I retell this story from this biography where he was, him and some people from his ranch in the Dakotas during the winter were navigating a rowboat perilously through an ice-clogged river to hunt down, I think it was cattle thieves.

41:26They're coming after them to hunt down and get these cattle thieves going through this river and the ice, it's like an action scene. And Roosevelt's like, oh, here's some downtime. He puts a blanket over his head to block out the snow so that he can read Matthew Arnold's book that he had brought with him, trying to understand some sort of complex philosophy. That was Teddy Roosevelt. He could just focus with such intensity that he was able to produce, which I like to underline because again, when it comes to deep work, people think about it as, oh, it'd be nice to be less distracted and maybe I'd be a little bit more productive.

41:57And it's much, much more significant than that. It's orders of magnitude almost productions. It's Teddy Roosevelt, writing books while in law school, while running for office. I tell the story in my book about during the year where I wrote Deep Work, which is a year where my academic output should have gone down because I was now taking a lot of my time and spending it on something else. Because writing this book had me tune up my Deep Work habits because I was thinking about it all the time, I doubled my academic output that year as compared to any previous years. That's an example of the type of results you get from this.

42:32It really is more like a superpower. I mean, if you really cultivate this ability, you're not gonna be a little bit more productive. It's like massively more productive.

42:38James Altucher:Well, where's the role of disappointment in this? So quick example, you've recently achieved tenure at your job as a professor at Georgetown. Congratulations. What if you had not, for some reason, achieved tenure and suddenly you were disappointed? I imagine like you had spent 10 years of your life going for, you know, this position. What if you had not achieved it? Or what if you had not published the book you wanted to publish or whatever? How do you kind of take some of these deep work concepts to deal with disappointment? Yeah, it would have been disappointing. But maybe what this brings us back is to one other attribute of deep work, which we haven't really emphasized yet, which I think is just as important, which is it can be incredibly satisfying in itself.

43:22And so this is the safety valve you have in a deep life. Craftsmanship is hard, but human beings seem to be wired to really resonate with honing a craft and applying a craft. So that's the safety valve you have in a deep life is that even if what you're working on doesn't go your way, you know that what you want to do is get your head back down and you want to focus on things that are important and try to do them at a high level. It's sort of a deeply intrinsically satisfying experience. So that's what I would have to hope for is that, well, at least I built my life around craft. And so I can find satisfaction in today, even if the goal of the last five years wasn't achieved.

43:58James Altucher:So Mark Cuban has written about this a little bit. He basically says, you don't get good at what you're passionate at. You get passionate about what you're good at. So you become good at something. And this is what gives you pleasure and ultimately success because you'll feel the need to do this flow or deep work on it. Yeah. Passion follows skill. I mean, this was the premise of when I saw a Cuban speech on that, we actually got, tried to get in touch with him to say, hey, you should probably endorse this book because I think I just wrote a book about this idea that you just said. So I'm completely on board with him about that.

44:28James Altucher:So great. So Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. I really enjoyed the books. So many great inspirational and motivating stories in the books as well. Plus your kind of formulas for achieving deep work and excellence. I highly recommend them. Thanks so much for appearing on my podcast. This is really great. I've been a fan for a long time. Yeah, thanks, James. I enjoyed it. Excellent. Thanks, Cal. I'll talk to you soon. Cool.

45:06James Altucher:Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows. We're coming at you with everything we got. This is the mindset. Free. This is the mantra. Free. This is the... Mindset. Mindset. With movies like Pineapple Express, the entire Star Trek film franchise, and Gladiator and TV shows like Survivor, Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly Odd Parents and Ghosts. Pluto TV is always free. Huzzah! Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.