Cal Newport's Blog, page 10

Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius

Last month, Adam Weiss, a fourth-year chemistry PhD student at the University of Chicago, published a column in the journal Nature. In the piece, Weiss talked about how he had recently hit “a rut” in his polymer chemistry research. “Although I had been productive early in my graduate career,” he wrote, “my long hours and hard work were no longer translating into success in the laboratory.”

It didn’t take much self-reflection for Weiss to identify the problem: his phone. He recognized that he increasingly colonized his “quiet time” with digital distractions. As a result, his work felt “chaotic and disorganized.” Throwing more hours at the problem didn’t help: “I was working more than ever, but getting less done.”

So Weiss tried something drastic. He ditched his smartphone during work hours, relying instead on an old fashioned feature phone without an internet connection. He decided email and Slack messages would have to wait until he returned from the lab. For music, he used an iPod.

Weiss suffered from some withdrawal symptoms (“[I was] staring at my iPod throughout the day and hoping for a rush of dopamine that no longer came”), but these eventually passed. With time, his comfort with deep thinking returned. As he explained:

“I started reading papers during long experiments, and began a habit of writing in my down time. These practices have already yielded success: I am currently preparing a review article for submission with my adviser, and I’ve written this column and other personal reflective works.”

Liberated from the incessant drip of context-shifting diversion, Weiss’s anxiety diminished while his productivity and creativity improved, generating “an abundance of new scientific ideas.”

I was struck by two observations about this story…

The first is optimistic. Witnessing Weiss’s dramatic transformation provides hope for the countless others who find themselves stumbling through a maze of disorganized, emotional thoughts, set against a background hum of unspecified anxiety. Something as simple as disconnection can yield profound results.

The second is pessimistic. The rareness of Weiss’s dramatic transformation underscores the vastness of the creative, energetic, innovative, impact-inducing cognitive potential in the world that’s currently being suppressed by these ubiquitous slabs of glowing glass. This is the question that haunts me: How much genius are we losing to the compulsive need to scroll just a little bit more?

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John McPhee’s Slow Productivity

Earlier this week, the writer John McPhee turned 91. One of the nice things about McPhee’s birthday, in addition to it providing an occasion to celebrate his incomparable output, is that it usually leads to one of my favorite writerly quotes spreading around the internet.

By any reasonable standard, McPhee is productive. He’s published 29 books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards. He’s also been penning distinctive articles for The New Yorker since 1965. And yet, he rarely writes more than 500 words a day.

When asked about this paradox, McPhee famously quipped:

“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it.  But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”

This is a perfect summary of slow productivity. Being frantically busy in the present moment has very little to do with whether or not in the future you’ll look back at your career with pride about what you’ve accomplished.

(If you’re looking for another way to honor McPhee this week, I recommend reading his very first article for The New Yorker, a profile of Princeton basketball star, and future senator, Bill Bradley.)

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The Books I Read in February 2022

Each month I strive to read five books, from a variety of genres and levels of seriousness. By popular request, I try to list the books I read here in my newsletter. Below are the books I read in February 2022.

[Note: I recently realized that I forgot to write a post about my books for January 2022. Whoops! Fortunately, you can watch me discuss my January reads in this clip taken from my podcast.]

The Loop 
Jacob Ward

Science journalist Jacob Ward warns about a future in which AI technology forms a tight cybernetic feedback loop with the biases ingrained into the human brain, pushing our day-to-day existence in frightening directions. It’s sort of like a version of The Terminator in which Danny Kahneman plays a starring role. As longtime readers and listeners of mine know, a big theme in my techno-criticism is the under-appreciated degree to which technologies exert powerful, unintended consequences on our personhood and culture, so Ward’s warning hits a sweet spot with me.

Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck

I stumbled across this 1937 classic on the shelf of my personal library and realized, with a start, that I had never really read any Steinbeck. I figured this narrow but deep tale of Lennie and George’s search for work would be a good place to start. Steinbeck deploys a standard third person omniscient narrative style that avoids all the flash of the modernists, and then postmodernists, that soon after took over the literary scene. But in his hands, it’s enough. I still think about the ending.

Cathedral of the Wild
Boyd Varty

The memoir of Boyd Varty, who is my age, but unlike me, grew up in the wilds of South Africa on the pioneering Londolozi Game Reserve. I picked up this book after hearing Varty’s recent appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast and I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s just a partial list of some of the things Varty experienced in his childhood: being attacked by a crocodile; having a deadly poisonous black mamba slither over him; learning the art of lion tracking; having Nelson Mandela retreat to his house to rest and recover after being released from prison. I hope HBO has already purchased the rights to the Londolozi story: it’s the definition of epic.

Voices in the Ocean
Susan Casey

I’m a big fan of Susan Casey, who has perfected a style of nature journalism that’s built around a narrative of personal adventures. (I recommend you start with The Devil’s Teeth.) Casey’s latest is about dolphins, and in particular, their troubled relationship with humans. True to the Casey formula, she soon finds herself in pseudo-danger, journeying to the infamous, organized crime-protected Japanese dolphin-hunting grounds featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, and making her way to some seedy bars in the Solomon Islands to investigate a failed Dolphin export scheme. Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is what happened to Casey after she published it: moved by the experience, she quit her high-stress job as an immensely successful magazine executive to live in Maui and pursue a slower life more connected to the ocean. I would love to read a book about that!

Living with a SEAL
Jesse Itzler

I found this book in a Little Free Library walking around my hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland. It’s the story of what happened when musician and entrepreneur Jesse Itzler (husband to Spanx founder, Sara Blakely) hires David Goggins, an ex-Navy SEAL known for his heroically grueling fitness exploits, to live with him and train him for a month. My muscles are sore just thinking about all the crazy workouts Goggins makes Itzler undertake. The book was light and fun, but it makes a lot more sense if, like me, you first read Goggin’s mega-bestselling memoir, Can’t Hurt Me.

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Brandon Sanderson’s Advice for Doing Hard Things

A reader recently sent me a video of a keynote speech, delivered in 2020 by the popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. The title of the presentation was “The Common Lies Writers Tell You,” but its real message was more general.

Sanderson starts (perhaps channeling a young Cal Newport) by pushing back on our common instinct to tell kids “you can do anything you want to” or “follow your dreams.” He argues that these aphorisms inflict a disservice on impressionable minds as they obfuscate the complexity, and frustration, and nuance involved in actually pursuing remarkable goals.

He retorts that the following claim is much more realistic:

“I can do hard things. Doing hard things has intrinsic value, and they will make me a better person, even if I end up failing.”

Sanderson then proceeds to details three tips, drawn from his experience as a successful novelist, to help structure any attempt to tackle hard things. I found his advice both interesting and refreshingly blunt, so I thought it might be useful to summarize his three tips here, annotated with some of my own thoughts…

Tip #1: Make Better Goals

After winning a story writing contest in high school, Sanderson decided to pursue the goal of becoming a professional novelist. He ended up writing thirteen novels in a row before he sold one. Looking back, he describes this as a bad goal as it was something he could not directly impact through his actions. A better focus would have been on completing a certain number of novels, each one better than the last, regardless of whether or not they sold or made him famous.

“Make goals that you have control over,” he explains.

Readers of Deep Work might recognize a similar theme in my discussion of the 4DX methodology, and its emphasis, in particular, on tracking lead instead of lag indicators. Your goal, for example, shouldn’t be to get your next academic paper accepted into a better journal, as it doesn’t specify a concrete action you can schedule and execute. A better approach might be to focus on banking 15 hours of deep work on your paper per week: this you can control, and it’s likely to influence your overall objective.

Tip #2: Learn How You Work

Sanderson notes that he dislikes the common narrative that claims “real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write,” and that if you find yourself procrastinating, then you’re not a writer. He thinks this is nonsense.

“I love writing,” he says, “but [even] I have a hard time sitting down and writing.”

Sanderson argues you should instead experiment to figure out what combination of motivation, and circumstances, and accountability work best for your particular personality. He responds well to tracking a daily word count in a spreadsheet. Others, he notes, thrive under the social pressures of a writing group, while others lean on deadlines to induce work. The key is recognizing that the urge to avoid hard things is human, and should be expected. It’s part of the process.

A big idea from Digital Minimalism, which complements this tip well, is that significantly reducing the role of screens in your life will significantly reduce the friction you experience toward doing hard things. If you’ve trained your mind that at the slightest hint of boredom it will receive a shiny, dopamine-flavored treat in the form of a rapid cycle of swiping and scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, then good luck convincing yourself to sit down and tackle something meaningful but difficult.

Tip #3: Break It Down

Sanderson’s final piece of advice is to break large goals down into manageable pieces. He notes, for example, that the novel he’s currently writing is longer than the entire Hunger Games series combined. This is “a really big book,” he exclaims, before saying he can only tackle an endeavor of this size “word by word.”

He goes on to reveal that he wishes that he had been given a more detailed roadmap when he first set out to be a writer. The experienced novelists that he asked for advice would just tell him to “write.” Better advice, he noted, would have been to setup a practice regime, centered on writing a certain number of complete manuscripts, each of expanding size and ambition, all aimed at developing his chops to the point that he’d be ready to produce something sellable.

A related idea I talk about a lot on my podcast is the importance of creating accurate roadmaps toward these types of goals. Talk to people who have succeed before and have them walk you step-by-step through their story, allowing you to learn what really matters and what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting out to do something impressive is creating a story around what activities you want to be important, instead of what actually makes a difference.

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Nathan Chen Didn’t Bring His Phone to the Olympics

Last week, the American figure skater Nathan Chen, a favorite to win gold in the 2022 Olympics, lived up to expectations. In a four-minute free skate performance that included five quadruple jumps, and a joyous dance break, he earned the medal that had eluded him four years earlier in Pyeongchang.

Many of you sent me articles about Chen. You were less interested in what he did than in what he didn’t do: bring his phone to the competition. As the Wall Street Journal (among others) reported, Chen arrived at the 2022 Olympics without his phone so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.

Most of us, of course, are not Olympic athletes struggling to live up to impossible expectations. There is, however, still a lesson to be learned from Chen’s disconnection. A life spent subservient to that small glowing screen is not a life where you’re living up to your potential.

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Life of Focus is Now Open

A quick administrative note…

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Scott Young, is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, February 11th, 2022. Check it out here:

https://www.life-of-focus-course.com

This course aims to help you achieve greater levels of depth in your work and life. It’s split into three, one-month challenges. Each challenge contains a guided effort to help you establish and test new routines and skills, supported by specific lessons to help you deal with the inevitable issues you’ll face. The challenges include:

Establishing deep work hours. We all know we could get a lot more done with less stress if we had more time for deep work, but actually achieving this regularly can be tricky. The first month focuses on finding and making the subtle changes you need to get in more deep work — without burning yourself out.Conducting a digital declutter. Technology can be great, but it can also make us miserable. When we’re given access to endless distraction, it’s hard to engage in meaningful hobbies or enjoy deeper interactions with our friends and family. This month helps you cultivate a more deliberate attitude to the digital tools in your personal life.Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages you in something meaningful — not just passively consumption.

Life of Focus, which we debuted last year, is arguably the most popular course we run. It’s also the course in whcih students have reported some of the strongest results we’ve ever encountered. This is because Life of Focus is action oriented. You don’t  just consume information, it requires you to make lasting changes. 

Anyway: registration is open now until Friday. If you want to find out more, click below.

https://www.life-of-focus-course.com

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On the Structured Pursuit of Depth

Early in the pandemic, driven by the dislocation that characterized the moment, I began writing about a topic I quickly came to call “the deep life.” Though the name was new, the underlying idea was not, as few impulses are more ancient than the pursuit of a richer existence.

The instinct when talking about this topic is to resort to the lyrical: tell motivating stories, or present scenes that spark inspiration. This instinct makes sense because the deep life is nuanced and too complicated to be fully reduced to practical suggestions or a step-by-step program.

And yet, this is exactly what I attempted.

Less than a month after my original post on the topic, I introduced a “30-day plan” in which you focus on four main areas in your life, identifying for each: one habit to “amplify” and one behavior to “reduce.” I even presented a sample table to demonstrate the plan in action:

Later that spring, on my podcast, I elaborated this idea into something I called the “deep life bucket strategy,” which presented a two-stage process for systematically overhauling your life.

Then, over that summer, Scott Young and I completed a new online course called Life of Focus (which, I should probably mention, opens again next week to new students), that included a major module on engineering more depth into your regular routine.

To explain my contrarian shift toward the pragmatic in my treatment of this topic, I should first note that I agree that the deep life cannot be fully reduced to a system. But I’ve also come to believe that systems still have a role to play in this context, as they can help you understand this goal better than simply being exposed to sources of inspiration. This idea is familiar in theological circles. Many religions believe that although the concept of God cannot fully be understood by the human mind, certain ritual practices, such as daily prayers, can spark intimations of the divine that are otherwise unavailable to written accounts.

Something similar (though less grandiose) is at play with systematic attempts to pursue the deep life. Identifying buckets, or amplifying habits, cannot by themselves fully access the life well-lived. But they do require you to take focused action toward this objective, and it’s in this action–including the missteps and surprises–that you gain access to a richer comprehension of what this goal means to you and what you need to achieve it.

The deep life cannot be reduced to concrete steps. But without concrete steps, you’ll never get closer to it.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Watch Me Answer Your Questions

In the summer of 2020, I launched the Deep Questions podcast. The premise was simple: I answer your questions about all the different topics we talk about here and in my books. The show has been a success, with over 4.5 million downloads and counting. But the one common complaint I keep hearing is that the monolithic podcast format makes it difficult to save or share my responses to individual questions.

I finally have a solution to that problem. Starting today, my team will be releasing standalone videos of each question I answer on my show. We’ll also be releasing videos of my “deep dive” monologues and recordings of the full episodes. You can find these videos here.

Looking ahead to the near future: Right now, the videos are hosted on YouTube. Later this winter, we’ll be launching a standalone portal that will organize the videos in an easy-to-navigate, Netflix-style carousel format, enabling you to avoid the distractions of the YouTube interface altogether. I’ll update you when the portal is live.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Books I Read in December 2021

Each month I strive to read five books, from a variety of genres and levels of seriousness. By popular request, I’ve listed below the titles I completed in December 2021 (for more detailed thoughts on these books see Episode 163 of my podcast):

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe
Chris Taylor

After completing Joseph McBride’s epic biography of Steven Spielberg in November, I decided I needed to know more about his longtime friend, George Lucas. Though this book frequently digresses into discussions of the cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise, it also contains one of the most thoroughly-researched biographies of Lucas currently available. Bottom line: George Lucas, like Spielberg, had three things going for him: (1) he was very talented (did you know he was Francis Ford Coppola’s first choice to direct Apocalypse Now?); (2) his timing was perfect; and (3) he was relentlessly driven and ambitious.

In Praise of Slowness
Carl Honore

This book, published in 2004, provides a journalistic account of the various offshoots of the “slow food” movement that originally began in Rome in the 1980s. I read it as part of the research for my recent New Yorker article on “slow productivity”, and was struck by the extent to which the issues that seem pressing today about busyness and overload were already a problem fifteen years earlier. Nothing is new.

The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry

After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can’t help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry’s best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life. If you’ve never heard of Berry, let me offer you the following three enticements to find out more: (1) he still farms his land in rural Kentucky with mules and horses; (2) he doesn’t own a computer; (3) the audio version of this essay collection is narrated by Nick Offerman.

When the Lion Feeds
Wilbur Smith

As my friends and family know, I’m a serious fan of genre fiction, with a particular interest in adventure yarns and techno-thrillers. Wilbur Smith helped define the former category in the twentieth century, so when he died this past November at the age of 88, having sold over 140 million books worldwide, I decided, as a tribute to his influence, to go back and read his very first novel. It tells the tale of Sean Courtney, the son of a cattle rancher in 19th century colonial South Africa, who finds himself cast out on his own after the death of his father. This is the first book in an ongoing series that Smith wrote following multiple generations of the Courtney family. It’s definitely a book of its time (it was first published in the 1960s), but it introduces plot and style conventions that echoed throughout many adventure titles that followed.

Hero On a Mission
Donald Miller

As we headed up the Catskills to celebrate Christmas with my family, I grabbed a galley copy of this book that Miller’s publisher had sent me (its official release date is actually today). Because I’m currently contemplating writing a book on my emerging concept of the deep life, I’m particularly interested at the moment in any book that attempts to structure the complex urge to cultivate a more meaningful existence. I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller’s discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they’re carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.

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What Happened When This Online Business Owner Quit Social Media?

A reader named Alexander recently pointed me toward an essay he wrote about his experiment avoiding social media for all of 2021. What caught my attention is the fact that Alexander runs an online business as a freelance copywriter. I frequently hear from people who are exhausted by the frenetic, anxiety-inducing churn of social media, but are concerned that without their participation on these services their professional lives will disintegrate. With this in mind, I thought it might be useful to share some highlights from Alexander’s detailed breakdown about what exactly happened to his livelihood when he stepped away from his social accounts for twelve months.

I’ll start with the punchline: Even though Alexander used to make regular use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote and grow his business, his year without these services did not bankrupt him. Indeed, as he reports, both his business and his email newsletter subscribers grew by 50% during this period. How did clients find him? Google searches, referrals, and repeat work.

Alexander also notes an increase in his productivity. “Social media became my mental crutch when faced with a hard task,” he writes, describing the period before his experiment. “When I couldn’t think of how to write the next sentence or headline, my default action was to open another tab and scroll social media.” When the option for these easy mental escapes was eliminated, he found himself producing better work:

“It’s safe to say that [my output during my year without social media] is far more writing than I’ve done in past years, despite the fact that I had more client work than ever. Also, I would venture to guess that my quality went up a bit. One of the downsides of social media is ease of publishing. There are no gatekeepers stopping me from publishing lazy work.”

Then there were the non-professional benefits generated by Alexander’s experiment:

“Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram caused me more anxiety and stress than I even realized. The constant opinionated noise and comparison on these platforms is hard to overstate.”

He was able to redirect this energy, previously dissipated through endless scrolling, into more meaningful leisure pursuits:

“I discovered (and rediscovered) some outdoor hobbies this year. It’s hard to know whether this is correlation or causation, but I joined a couple adventure races, played many tennis matches, and easily walked and ran at least 500 – 700 miles last year, averaging a little more than 10 miles per week.”

It would be dishonest to imply that social media has no professional benefits. Alexander admits, for example, that his success without these services was supported by the fact that he was already established. “This would have been a different experiment had I given up social media during my first year,” he writes.

But in the end, Alexander decides that he had no interest in returning to his past habit of constant social media engagement. In true digital minimalist style, he decided, after his experiment completed, to carefully reintroduce LinkedIn, which he’ll use as a publishing platform for his original articles, while remaining logged off from the other services that used to command his attention.

“The big takeaway of this year is that I love life without social media,” Alexander concludes. I can’t help but suspect that many others might feel the same, given a chance to experience what such a life is really like.

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Related note: if you decided to participate in my No Twitter Challenge, announced late last month, please send me updates to author@calnewport.com with “No Twitter Challenge” in the subject line. I want to hear how it goes for you!

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