so I invented earlier in the year what we called the Deep life stack which was a step-by-step way to cultivate more depth in your life and I think now that I've had some time to think about it it has some problems but let's start with what that original stack was for those who are watching instead of just listening I will draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my screen here again for those who are not watching but just listing everything I'm doing here is beautiful uh I'm drawing layers these are the layers of stack I'm putting five of them on top of each other now there's a couple different small variations of the stack we talked about earlier in the year but they're all basically more or less in this shape all right I'm now going to write inside each of these layers at the bottom the first layer of the stack the bottom layer we had discipline this was somewhat controversial but this is when I argued you actually have to start by injecting some regular discipline into your life because it changes your self identity as someone who can do hard things that are important even if you don't want to then we had values nothing like drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting values was when you then next moving up the stack from discipline is where you got clear on what was important to you in your life then you went to service fixing in your life how you could serve other people who are around you or important to you from there then came organiz ization this going to be a long word for a small box you have to get control over what's happening in your life organize your obligations organize your time if you're going to have any hope of actually really aiming your energy in a good direction and then finally you had Vision which is where you get to the fun stuff this is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more remarkable it is when you get to this final stack in the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we like to romanticize like changing your job or moving to a a farm somewhere in the country there's a couple different variations of the stack but they are all more or less something like this the idea was you moved up this stack in order starting with discipline moving all the way up to Vision all right so what was uh what was the problem with this um it's missing some things so here's what I discovered it's missing uh explicit mentions of some things that are foundationally important I learned from you my readers and listeners for cultivating depth physical growth intellectual growth these were things that we used to talk about on the show when we had the old bucket-based Paradigm for the Deep life keeping your body healthy keeping your mind engaged this was not explicitly called out in this particular formulation what about craft or learning to do things well this idea of how do you learn to take on something difficult deliberately practice it and get better at it this is key to almost any direction for depth but doesn't have its own place in this stack uh there is also some push back on a lack of ambition here that when we get to Vision we were talking about overhauling parts of your life but when people think about the Deep life zoomed out there's also this notion of some sort of larger scale Legacy leaving type of initiative that's at a scale that was too big for this and finally and this was I thought something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack is there's two different related initiatives that are mixed together in this particular stack formulation there's the initiative where you're getting your life together okay if you don't have your life together in a control of things it's hard to do anything values driven or interesting and there's the initiative of trying to do really cool things that Mark a life as deep in this stack they're mixed together discipline that's sort of getting your life together values is part of cultivating a vision of the depth organization is about getting your life together vision is more about how to cultivate depth and some of the feedback I was getting from my own experimentation is these are maybe two separate Endeavors get your crap together okay I'm done with that now we'll turn our attention to how do we aim this somewhere depth so these were all things that came up when I was looking at the original Deep life stack so we're going to try to fix that with our new version 2.0 maybe I'll even type that let's see here I'm gonna actually write on the screen here oh my Jesse I have no idea how notability works oh I see you know where I've been thrown by by the way this is not interesting but I switched my note taking software to what good notes I think it's called you switch it off of notability I was using to teach my lectures and then it developed some bug where when it was projecting on the screen and I was typing into it it would uh continually jump up and down where it was on the screen so I likeed the program but it had this weird bug in projections I had the switch huh all right here we go I'm typing on the screen the Deep light deep life Stacy the def life stack version 2.0 all right so what are we going to do here to fix all of those mistake not mistakes but we'll call them shortcomings that we were missing in the prior stack and let me uh highlight this to show you how good I am look at thato I highlighted the word the Deep life stack it looks good yeah that look good as professional operation here all right so how are we going to update the Deep life stack our systematic plan for escaping the shallows to take in mind those flaws we had with the original version I'm I'm going to break it into two stages so in the the first stage call a stage one this oh man that's not how you spell stage stage one is where you learn to become a capable human being we're going to make this its own stage so we're going to say become a capable human being and we're going to isolate this let's do this stage do everything involved in this stage first before we move on to what we'll call stage two surprisingly enough which is then cultivate depth so we're not going to mix these together anymore let's get our act together let's become a capable human being or what jao will it come uh called in his book The Code imminently qualified human I like that Joo talks about becoming an imminently qualified human well we're going to talk about becoming an imminently capable human being this is going to have its own collection of four stack layers once you're done with that stage two four more stack layers cultivate depth on top of that Foundation all right so this is the first place we're changing things all right so let's actually draw our four Stacks our four stack layers over here for becoming a more capable human being so we're going to have four here and then four for cultivating depth you do stage one first then you do stage two all right so we're going to start as before with discipline but now again this is coming from uh feedback we are going to specify the three places where we're going to pursue discipline as the foundational layer of the deep life stack and that's going to be Body Mind heart so as before what does it mean discipline we're going to have you select some Keystone habits habits you return to every single day habits that you track whether or not you actually accomplish them they should not be trivial but they should also be tractable unlike before I'm going to tell you specifically what the three categories are you should have three habits and they should follow these three categories body you need a fitness habit something about making your body more healthy this could be exercise this could be involving food and drink the second category is mind this is going to be making your mind sharper you have an instrument here but you have to train it how to think so we need to lay down a foundational habit probably built around reading it's going to be our best bet here where this becomes a regular part of your life that you're tracking and then Heart by this I mean other people there's something you're doing on a regular basis and it could just be calling or texting or emailing a different friend or family member every single day it could be checking in with you know your partner your kids every day and having a conversation with them Body Mind heart Keystone habit for each as we iterate through the stack you can make those challenges harder and harder so if you're just getting started with this your body habit might be pretty simple it's this 20-minute walk that you do to the a coffee store and back each morning followed by 20 push-ups it might be simple but you're doing it every day as we iterate over time that's going to get more and more potentially uh aggressive in its ambition it could eventually end up uh a really rigorous workout routine for example all right we go from here now straight up to control this is what we used to call organization same idea control your time control your obligations I want to do this right away lay down this Foundation of discipline I'm practicing doing things that are important to me that aren't urgent very next thing you do let's get control of our obligations let's get control of our time this is where you're going to deploy things like my multiscale planning methodology it's where you're going to uh deploy things such as full capture David Allen Style full capture every obligation is written down in a trusted system not just in your head your time block planning your days those are based on weekly plans which are based on quarterly plans no open Loops nothing you're just keeping track of in your head you have a plan for your time you have your obligations captured you have a plan for executing the obligations that need to be done is a big part about becoming a capable human I only have so much energy and time to deploy each day I want to do so with intention so I'm moving this right up front in the Deep life stack right after you got a taste of discipline you're getting your crap together on top of this I'm then going to put craft just learning how to do something really well this again is going to be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the deep life is going to be quality you learning how to do something really well Andor you learning how to really appreciate someone else doing something really well but in Embrace of craftsmanship and quality so craft is where you're going to begin practicing two things one getting better and you could jump right in with a work related skill here as you go through this stack let me choose a skill that I am going to deliberately and systematically improve on but maybe it's going to be a hobby you know I think some of the the more uh bro oriented really big podcasters that are out there have gotten some flat because they all seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly anachronistic or arbitrary Hobbies such as bow hunting why is Joe Rogan and Joo willink and uh all these people bow hunting and it seems so random but you know what there's a logic behind that which is learning to do something really well teaches you how what it takes to do things really well you can then translate that to other things that come up that are more important in other words learning uh even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow but systematically building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need mentally speaking to say okay now when there's something else I want to learn to help transform my career there's something else I want to learn to make a big impact over here you know what that feels like and what that takes so when it comes to this craft stack uh when you first get there you're going to learn a skill it could be a hobby it could be professional I also want you to appreciate other people who do skilled work because that helps motivate you to get better I write about this a lot in my book coming out in March slow productivity this idea of being exposed to people doing really good work makes you want to do really good work so as part of your first time through this craft layer I am going to recommend that you build up an appreciation of some sort of craft so I'll put two arrows here get better and then we'll say appreciate better all right so then our final building block we're going to put for the first stage simplification final step to get ready to cultivate depth we got to clear out the dead weight so this is where you go through now that you have some discipline you're in control of your time you have an appreciation for and Trust in craft is the way forward now you can say let's start slashing some of these obligations Let's uh let's change the way you know what we're doing at work and I'm going to put all my chips onto this over here and no longer get involved in this or I'm going to simplify or shift laterally to something that's more focused or more accountable it is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your technological life it's the first time you can step back and say okay I'm starting to get my feet under me why am I on Tik Tok all the time why am I on Instagram what tools do I really need here maybe I should do some digital minimalism work backwards from what's important to me use those to select values you can start simplifying out your habits like the single most important technos simplification small step you could take at this step would be let's do phone foyer method when I'm at home the phone's plugged in if I need to look something up I can go to the phone and look at it it's not with me when I'm in front of the TV it's not with me when I'm trying to read it's not with me at the table and I'm trying to eat dinner I do not have the option of just looking at that so you can begin to simplify these parts of your life as well all of this sets the stage for stage two which is now let's start cultivating depth on top of this foundation so we're going to have four boxes over here as well this is where the fun stuff happens this is where the stuff that catches people people's attention happens you do the first stage people are going to say yeah you got your act together yeah they got their act together stage two is where people say wow this person is interesting all right so I'm going to put as the let me draw Arrows by the way so we see the order here beautifully drawn arrows Bob Ross does Happy Trees I do crappy arrows all right so first first uh stack layer over here in stage two now we get to the values you figure out your code what you're all about you figure out the rituals that connect you on a regular basis to these things you care about this is where uh if you're religious or interested in being religious is you really lean into that it's where you really recognize that Faith Traditions actually depend on action for you to gain Insight you can't just figure out in advance is this religion right you do the religion and say how does it make me feel all that happens here now this feels really late but again I I I'm convinced that when you come to these higher order decisions in your life from a foundation of capability it's more meaningful and it's more effective so I I I push this later people often say let's just start with this but if if you have no foundation in a code or rituals or a faith-based tradition it's hard to start there you're throwing darts at a board you don't even know what you're capable of or or or have the the capacity to follow in a disciplined way what's required to actually gain Insight so let's become capable first now we're getting to the bigger stuff so values now comes next this is followed by service you need to be a leader you need to serve other people community without it you're nothing now you're ready to actually be a leader before you weren't capable enough you could kind of be a leader but you're going to drop the ball and people weren you weren't going to have a big effect on people you weren't going to move the needle now you're an exceptionally capable person let's put that to work serve other people non-trivial sacrific on behalf of other people that are important to you family Friends Community larger uh Civic Society at large you can move up these layers as far as you want make this a key one thing a tier one thing now that you're starting to work at in your life then we get transformation the crazy thing is of all of these Stacks this is what the one place most people think when they think about cultivating a Deeper Life is this one stack Transformations where you make the big values based changes you get a Clear Vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle preferably there's some element of remarkability in these Visions it's where you change your job it's where you move to the countryside it's where you become the surfing structure in tolino on the west coast of Vancouver Island it's where the big kind of cool stuff happens but look at how many layers how many layers we had to go through I even have a laser pointer I can show you right woo all the way up all the way up before we move to Vancouver Island before we we quit our job because you're not ready for that yet when you're not capable if you try to make a big change God knows what's going to happen and if you are capable but you're not have a a of your values if you're not sacrificing behalf of other people fing that deeply social leadership itch that all humans have then your transformation is going to be shallow it's going to be selfish it's not until this point that you're finally ready for that and then we can add the final thing which is legacy and that's where you begin thinking about what's the impact I want to leave on the world even after I'm Gone the sort of bigger picture orienting mission for your life this is so big I would say you could probably go all the way through the stack and stop at transformation the first time through and you might go through this stack a few times iterating tweaking and improving each of these layers before you really get into Legacy you don't have to get there right away in fact you probably aren't ready to get there right away because you haven't done all this other cool stuff yet so how do all these pieces come together well you actually move through this stack and give yourself one to three weeks for each of these layers to get that part of your life going and making sure it's going well and you move your way through the stack you could end the transformation if you want it First Legacy can come later then live with this for six months to a year then come back and iterate all right let's go back through the stack how are things going with discipline I want to upcharge this I want more aggressive physical discipline I want to do better with my relationships what's going with control well it was going well but I left finances out of there I want to fix that up so you iterate six months to a year you iterate through go through each layer give it time to improve what's happening there you iterate every 6 to 12 months and improve on each of these layers again and again each time you make it through the transformation maybe you're thinking about a different thing you want to transform in your life after you've done this 5 years in a row you may have had several major Transformations you've also tightened up all these other things and now your life is really humming and now the idea that you're just going to go to a cubicle and check email all day and then be on Tik Tok all evening might seem laughable and maybe you're ready to even really jump into this Legacy stack at this point and start to have some really exciting long-term Visions about what you're going to leave in the world so this is the Deep life stack 2.0 stage one become a more capable human stage two cultivate death then iterate and repeat iterate and repeat as mentioned it seems very far away at first from the the approximate concerns of I'm distracted by my screens but if you don't have a shining destination to aim towards that's more interesting than the glow coming off those pieces of glass those pieces of glass are going to win and so we have to talk about our lives if we're going to talk about our technology the way most people think about uh learning these type of Master getting mastered these type of uh different topics is that everyone has a fundamental limit determined by their brain so the common mental model says for this one individual here maybe when they are thinking about you know hey I want to really Master some element of music they can do that put some earphones on them in my picture here like this is great I'm capable of doing it but maybe this same person when they say okay what I really want to master is uh mathematics so I can do like mathematics proofs in our common mental model we might say oh that's just beyond this person's brain so they can't do that right so we have this notion of the complexity of what you have mastered is just a direct reflection of how smart you are oh this academic has a really PhD in literature has a really subtle understanding of these books that I don't even know how to approach they're smarter than me I understand music uh that makes me smarter than this 22-year-old whose like main interest is YouTubers right that's the way we think about it um this model is wrong so this idea that your brain is determining the level of complexity of stuff that you're able to comfortably Mas completely misunderstands how learning happen so what I want to do here is present to you the reality and I'm going to present to you the reality here in two parts that we can think of as the good news and the bad news the good news and the bad news about how people actually learn complicated things now the good news is most people are cognitively capable of learning things that are pretty high up on that imagined hierarchy of complexity that you can learn complicated literature you can learn mathematical things you can learn an appreciation of complicated sport or music most people can learn most things now is there a a brain power difference that comes into play here well there's stuff that shows up I mean I think certainly by adulthood you get a sense people have different RPMs going on with their brains um I tend to believe that a lot of this is less genetic than it is just what you did as a child if you're you know a heavy reader as a child for example your brain has just been trained to be stronger much in the same way if you're Arnold Schwarzenegger and your dad made you do push-ups and squats before you would eat be given a meal you're going to be stronger by the age of 19 than someone else right uh so I tend to think the RPMs you have going is as much nurture as it is nature but yeah there are some differences but that differences where is this going to affect learning complicated things the upper end which is not going to be relevant the most people it's like almost anyone can learn calculus yeah maybe not everyone however is going to be a Fields Award winner but most people don't care they're not trying to become Fields Award winners you might also see it in some speed differences and how fast you make progress towards learning things there are some some some epsilons there depending on uh how used to that your brain is but again for most people no one knows exactly at what rate you mastered something so it doesn't really matter so I think for the most part I'm going to argue most people can learn most things so you can learn almost anything part two of the reality and this is the bad news you can learn almost anything but you can't learn everything so I think what is obscured when you encounter people who have a Mastery of something really complicated what is obscured is that it took them a really long time to get to that place we jump ahead and just imagine them a month ago just picked up the math textbook and was like ooh this just makes sense to me and then everyone kind of Applause and they're really good at math and they're obviously smarter than you no there's a long process that we're going to unfold here in a second of how they build up to that expert knowledge the reason why this means you can't learn everything is that it takes time time is finite so there's only going to be so many complicated things you can learn because you only have so much time to put into it and it takes a lot of time to actually get there so this is the big mental model shift I want to start us making right now is thinking about learning uh the complexity of what you learned shifting this away from brain power and towards time investment more time means more complexity can be learned less time means less complexity can be learned brain power is sort of orthogonal to all of this so let's fill in this mental model I'm going to draw another picture here that I think captures well what the process really looks like when you're trying to learn something hard so for those who are listening instead of watching what you'll see I'm drawing here is a bunch of stair steps and we can put some goal at the top so you know I don't know put a music note at the top you're trying to master have a good understanding of jazz music or something like this the way you actually progress towards hard understanding is up stairs level by level now here's what's important when you're at a given level of understanding so like let's say you're right here your brain is only capable when you're moving up your level of understanding of making a relatively small step at a time that's why these steps are small we have multiple steps to get from down here where you know in this example nothing about jazz music many steps until you get up here to being able to talk really uh intelligently about it so it's from your current level you move up to the next level now how these steps are actually made so how does this actually happen here and here and here deliberate practice carefully designed exercises that push your understanding to the next level in a way that takes you out of what you're already comfortable with there has to be some strain into that so in order for this step to be successfully had at each of these levels you have to stretch past where you're comfortable right it's kind of the practice aspect of Del practice it it's not fun I'm not I'm not comfortable I don't really understand this thing and I'm stretching myself to try to understand it and the activity you're doing is carefully designed this is the right Next Level to actually move up to that's the deliberate act uh the deliberate piece of deliberate practice so when you see someone like wow this person has a lot of expert knowledge of complicated things in their past they have done these stairsteps now there's various cultural or professional structures that help drive you through these stair steps right so if you're an academic I mean I'm an academic one of the things I do is theoretical computer science I write mathematical proofs related to algorithms and computability and complexity if you encounter a paper I wrote you might say I don't understand any of this I can't imagine just like sitting down and learning all of this but what you have to realize for me is that that process started when I was about 16 years old and the education process as you move up the ranks um High School to Advanced High School to undergrad to grad school into young Professor Dom is it's designed to push you step by step by step with literal test you know okay you're now taking AP Computer Science right I took that when I was young um that you're taking literal test in order to master that test you had to gain new knowledge it pushes you to the next level and then after AP Compu computer science because I was good at this stuff I started taking some college courses in computer science that had okay that's pushing me a little bit farther now I'm go to college and I can take the more advanced courses it's pushing you farther I get the MIT and now these courses are much harder uh but I've gone up 17 steps before I got to taking you know theory of computation with Mike zipser step by step by step and by the time you encounter me at the age of like 35 like H you you know all this stuff like yeah it was a really long climb up the steps really long climb up the the staircase same thing when someone has this why how does this guy know so much about music well probably he was exposed to it early on his Dad or Mom really got them into it and step by step they got knowledge so if you want to cultivate expert knowledge now in your life you have to replicate all of these steps your goal is on what is the next step of understanding I can take not how far am I from the top it's a consistent stair step upwards this requires patience because the ladder up is long and it requires expert help because choosing the right activities that move you to a new level and are tractable but not trivial this is the key dichotomy for deliberate practice to be effective tractable but not trivial you can accomplish this next step but it can't be super easy because you're not actually stretching that could require expert help and that can be found by actually working with real experts that can be found in courses that can be learned uh found in books um it can be found in choosing careful goals for what you want to do next and then seeking out help anywhere you can online iners courses to get to that next step and accomplish that goal so just the careful choices of goals can get you there but it's patience and this careful expert guided design of how you move that's how people get smarter and smarter or seemingly smarter and smarter it just takes time and it takes care so is this worth it well I think the answer is yes the brain is what distinguishes humans our brains distinguish us from other animals we have this ability that you know Aristotle talks about in the nian ethics we have this ability that no one else has to contemplate deeply to aim our brain at abstract ends dogs don't do this cats don't do this parakeet don't do this humans can't so Aristotle would say this is perhap the ultimate Theology of The Human Experience the thing that we are wired to do ultimately is to use our brain in these exalted ways because that's what defines us as human so we want to push our humanness it is a key element of life you're missing if there are not things in your life that you you know that are hard that are complicated and you can do very well to have that in your life in some sense in an Aristotelian sense is to be more human so what I recommend especially for younger people is here's what you want almost to be aiming towards right away something in your professional life that's complicated that you do well better than anyone else you know at your company or organization right out the bat what is a complicated skill here uh really good at programming these type of Data Systems we're an sap company like being able to build Advanced models using statistical analysis uh a type of art you know you're you're a graphic designer for a video game company and pushing whatever the latest is and doing some sort of 3D modeling something that is really complicated and valuable that you know well just set that standard right right away in your personal life you should have the same everyone should have one thing that they're working towards just being really good with they really understand movies I really understand wine not like a casual I kind of read about this but I got a Somalia certificate not just like I go to the theaters but you know I could write and I do sometimes contribute reviews commun online Publications about movies there is something deeply satisfying in feeling the Mastery of complicated things it's uniquely human I think a lot of people avoid it a lot of people do not have this in their life and uh and it it leads to this distinction well there people who do that stuff and and I don't know how to do that stuff and either that leads you to feel down on yourself unjustifiably or it makes you real reactionary and angry he think they're so smart neither is great neither is healthy from a mental health perspective we all should be trying to master at least some complicated things now this could take years you're going to see progress along the way but you want to get really good at something hard it could take Years start right now you will get benefits along the way you'll get better and better but don't don't pull yourself up short oh I I know a little bit more about this than just the average person that's great keep pushing you want to push some knowledge to this connoisseur level it really is I think a key part of the deep life because it unlocks in you an understanding of what your brain is capable of the final question is where are you going to get the time where are you going to find the time to have one or two of these projects you're working on and honestly and look this is a show about technology and how it impacts our lives this might be uh non-s surprising but this is where you're going to find the time stop spending time on the phone if you have nothing in your life that you feel you're a real expert on I'm going to guess without knowing for sure that your screen time statistics aren't great that you're getting that that uh that dopamine push towards the screen where there's going to be something funny or outrageous or distracting or whatever on there and this is eating up Time After Time After Time put that phone into the foyer phone foyer method new year is a great time to do this the phone is plugged in in my kitchen or the foyer if I need it I can go there to look something up but it's not with me as a default it's not with me at the couch it's not with me at the dinner table it's not with me God forbid in the bathroom now your brain gets some Freedom it wants something to do let's give it something to do we're moving up the next stair level on this work skill we're moving up the next stair level on this personal life skill this really will that's why I wish it for everyone in the new year new year is really going to change the way you feel about yourself your efficacy your ability to actually do uh important useful things with your brain so you can't you you can learn anything you just can't learn everything so choose a few things that are worth learning and trick a lot of people into thinking that you're smarter than you actually are because the more complicated the stuff goes the more they're going to just think that you're a big brain and I think it's worth it so there you go Jesse I think too many people think they're stupider than they are because of this image of you know for some people this quote unquote comes easy there is no coming easy it's the exact same as muscles yeah you some people faster than others but it takes a really long time a lot of cycles of cutting and building to look like a superhero it just takes time what's something you work on in your personal life movies I've been I'm working on uh movie knowledge I want to get to and I'm working on this systematically um I want to get to the level where I can contribute reviews oh I feel like you'll be able to do that don't you think like good reviews you know like really understand uh really understand the the art and form of Cinema like what's going on I also another way of looking at it is I don't want to be surprised by the good reviews like in other words I want to be able to predict oh I I I know kind of what Anthony Lane's probably gonna say about this movie and not have to and I'm getting closer at that like I know David dim I know what you know David de is gonna write about this like getting closer to that um as opposed to like I don't know is this a good movie let's read the reviews oh they really love this movie you know so it's like I want to be able to be nons surprised buy the really good reviews and I want to be capable of hey I could provide a review for you know an online site and a big this is an insightful review we should probably put a movie and show site on the deeplife decom so yeah because there's a lot of times I'm I have like my own list but well we should keep track of all the books and we should keep track of like movie recommendations um because it' be a good place for people to go if they wanted something good to watch because often times um two movies I just watched was uh I had never remembered seeing kirasa with Seven Samurai also just watched Jeff uh gun Tim gun not Tim gun what what's the not the guy from the uh Movie Maker gun but I just forgot if it's James gun I think it's James gun the the director who did Guardians of the Galaxy was temporarily cancelled and now uh DC has brought him back to play the Kevin feige role for the DC extended Cinematic Universe I believe his name is James gun whereas Tim gun was the fashion designer from Project Runway I often mix up those two names I think it's James gun um yeah the suicide squad 2021 fantastic like Tarantino he's the CEO of DC Studios yeah watch The Suicide Squad 2021 Tarantino esque comic book movie completely plain with the B Movie format over-the-top violence but also um visually completely novel hyperactive camera throwing in actual deep themes an interesting characterization against this backdrop of craziness it is if as you had said the Tarantino make a comic book movie completely off-the-wall fantastic movie I really like that do you watch all your movies in the same like TV Etc with like surround sound or yeah I have a good TV yeah with surround sound yeah we we set that up during the the subwoofers and everything too we set that up during the pandemic um and I see a lot of movies I mean we're recording not the not the pullback the curtain but we're recording this before Christmas uh this week I'm seeing tonight I'm going to see Maestro with a friend of mine and then later in the week another friend of mine we're going to go see big screen Die Hard in honor of Christmas so how many movies do you watch a week that just depends to it depends on what's going on with like the evenings and child care and stuff like that and my schedule I like if I have a light schedule I like to take a day and do a lunchtime movie watching at home but so if I have freedom in my schedule I'll take a day and watch a movie over lunch that helps all right anyways um I talk about this by the way in the the new book slow productivity coming out in March I talk about my growing interest in movies and how uh for anyone who does creative work studying and building up a good appreciation for an unrelated creative field actually can really help what you're doing and I write about in slow productivity about studying films as helping my writing if you study if I study good writers it's too close to home and it's kind of a more of a stressful Workman like it's not inspiring it's more uh I should do more of that or it's more anxiety producing but you study art in another format you can come at that it's like I don't do that art so you can just appreciate it with open eyes and it gives you an injection of Creative Energy for what you're doing so I'm a big I talk about this a lot in not a lot but I do talk about in slow productivity studying an art that's not what you do will make you more inspired for what you do actually do how can I actually train those deep focused muscles to actually get tasks done in less time and actually Focus deeply thank you uh well soill I appreciate this it's a mix of a case study and a good question there's a nice case study there this goes back to what we were just talking about with students being terrible at being students and how if you're not terrible at being a student you have this huge Advantage here is another example sahill said I was not a good student I returned to work actually car caring about the mechanics of being a student and got a began getting foros perfect gpas and got a job at a Fang company Fang company these are the uh uh the big tech companies so Facebook Amazon Google and what's the in in Fang you would think Microsoft but that's an Netflix right Netflix okay yeah so see it works caring about how you work works by the way the same thing happens in the world at work as well it's a little bit less pronounced because the floor is higher so in the world of students of college students the floor on people's work habits is so low so low like I'm surprised that like you aren't walking in the walls low that if you're a little bit organized you have this huge relative Gap in the world of work the floor is higher right if you worked at a normal job like most college students work at their at their work you would get fired pretty quickly but the floor is not super high and a lot of people are just throwing Stress and Anxiety and just hours raising the floor um so again being systematic about how you organize yourself in the world of work it still opens up a gap with most people that you can get a big reward out of um let's get to the actual question though so sill want worries they not very comfortable with long periods of intense Focus so as a student he could just take a lot of time doing half Focus he's not going be able to do that in his job how do you get better at actually training your ability to concentrate for long periods of time so H I'm going to give you three pieces of advice one is interval training so you literally practice hard concentration using a timer so you take a piece of work you're going to do you set a timer maybe for 30 minutes and you say for that 30 minutes this is full out intense concentration if my mind wanders or I zone out I stop that timer I'll come back and try this again later so you have a clear indicator of success or failure success means I maintained full concentration for basically the whole period once you're comfortable with a given duration you up the time by 10 minutes so just straight up practicing hard concentration if you're roughly at a rate which is what I've observed when I've done this with students of increasing the duration roughly once every week or two you can in about two or three months significantly improve your comfort level with intense concentration so practice directly what you want to practice two uh reading that's your cognitive calisthenics right there reading hard books books have difficult information or complex theories you could read a complicated primary source like I'm going to you know read uh n concurrently with a secondary source about that primary source you can kind of go back and forth and have this framework we trying to understand the the primary source that you're trying to read uh reading is just direct exercise with sustained concentration on abstract symbolic Concepts big thinkers or big readers so that needs to be your training and then three you need to spend regular time completely away from distractions this gets your mind very comfortable with itself combine this with something interesting I would suggest hikes walking through nature long walks your phone is turned off and in the back of your backpack just for emergencies there's nothing in your ear it's just you and the world around you and the world between your ears it's just Comfort your mind gets more Comfort just being with its own self-generated thoughts and not just reacting the digital inputs that's a slower gear and it gets comfortable with that slower gear it gets more comfortable than when it comes time to do concentration on something hard because that's slower gear than what you get when you get a bunch of those uh distractions just combine that then with the digital hygiene you already said you're doing which is being careful about not having too much of algorithmically engineered distraction being sure not to have too much of that in your life that is your uh metaphorical equivalent of smoking cigarettes while you're training for the marathon it's counterproductive to what you want to do so continue to be very wary about I'm on my phone all the time I'm I'm looking at Tik Tok stay away from Tik Tok use the phone foyer method don't have your phone with you when you're at home have it at the foyer you can go there if you need it it's not a constant companion all the stuff we talk about keep up that digital hygiene as well um and it's practiced you will get better you will get better at deep thinking the more you practice at first you'll catch up to good deep thinkers around you then after a while you'll be notably deeper with your thinking than other people around you and you'll reap those Rewards right before we get to our final segment I want to do a quick case study I like to this is where someone sends in a brief summary of how they've used my advice this case study comes from Don Don says I just wanted to share details about the end result of deep work and time block planning practices that I learned from you I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's hidden brain at the time I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions my goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work your time block planner and podcast were regular reinforcers of best practices as a side note the book just received a starred review from kirkus and the review noted the book's meticulous research that meticulous research happened during deep work sessions and I can't thank you enough Jesse he also sent around the citation so the book which comes out in February is called the astrochimp America's first astronauts well Don I appreciate that case study um what that gets to and I think this is important is that we have to this the one of the whole points the book debard have to Value the intensity of concentration like intense concentration is itself an intrinsically valuable activity and it produces extrinsically much more valuable results than less concentrated Focus so just saying I want to make sure I write a thousand words or I spend three hours on my book is not the same as saying I want to spend three hours concentrated deeply on my book when you're doing highlevel knowledge creative output like creating a book you're you're doing this is alchemy right you're trying to have this brain take in information and congeal it into something that is more valuable than the information that came in the harder you concentrate the better this result is and so the the intensity of concentration should be a really key variable when we think about doing highle knowledge work but it's often not and we know it's not because in the same companies that we make our money off of people doing high level knowledge work we also say you should be on slack you should be contact Shifting the email back and forth you should be doing seven or eight meetings a day because that makes my life more convenient as a manager a complete disregard for the actual goal of trying to get intense concentration even though intense concentration is behind almost any major value production and knowledge work so I appreciate that case study done it's not just words it's not just hours it's not just task list it's concentration and the quality of the concentration that matters we should talk about that more hey if you like this video I think you'll really like this one as well check it out