Cal Newport's Blog, page 21

Benjamin Franklin on the Balance Between Solitude and Company

In response to yesterday’s post about quiet creativity, a reader asked the following question in the comments:

“Here’s my question: How can digital minimalism and deep work be adapted for extroverted people who want to do deep work and lead a digital minimalist life — but also satiate a voracious appetite for human interaction?”

A few other commenters subsequently emphasized this question, which I think is a good one and worth discussion. We can find some insights into this issue in the journals of a young Benjamin Franklin. In August 25, 1726, a twenty-year-old Franklin was more than a month into sea voyage from London back to Philadelphia when he recorded the following entry:

“I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude, and I know ’tis a common boast in the mouths of those that affect to be thought wise, that they are never less alone than when alone. I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind; but were these thinking people obliged to be always alone, I am apt to think they would quickly find their very being insupportable to them.”

There’s a healthy dose of Aristotelean moderation in this observation. Time alone with your thoughts is necessary: it refreshes your mind and enables insights. Too much time alone, however, quickly becomes “insupportable.”

This is, I believe, a reasonable answer to my reader’s question. Embrace your extroversion, but not 100% of the time. A quiet walk in the woods, or a summer spent staring at the rolling Atlantic, will serve its purpose, but such seclusion need not become a total way of life.

From the Archives: On Quiet Creativity

I’ve been writing posts for calnewport.com since July, 2007. This was soon after I finished all of my coursework and qualifiers for my doctorate at MIT, which I had tackled concurrently with writing and publishing my first two books. Which is all to say that by the summer of 2007 it suddenly seemed like I had a lot of free time on my hands. My solution to this state of affairs? This blog.

In recent days, in a fit of nostalgia, I’ve begun browsing my voluminous archive. I thought it might fun to every once and while briefly revisit a post from the past that I particularly enjoyed.

I’ll  start with an entry from January, 2014. It’s titled: “On Quiet Creativity,” and it opens with me talking about hiking the trails near Georgetown’s campus (see above), working on a thorny proof.

Here’s the thesis I extracted from the experience:

“When I talk about my purposefully disconnected life, a common retort is that I’m missing out on the creative possibilities born of the frequent exposure to new people and ideas delivered through social media and related technologies.

But here’s the thing, for the most part, this is not how high-level creative work is accomplished. It’s not, in other words, lack of input that stymies creative breakthroughs.

…

What does stands in the way of creative breakthroughs — I’m increasingly convinced — is lack of time spent walking quietly with your thoughts, working and re-working your understanding of a concept in search of new layers of meaning.”

A few reflections on this post:

When I wrote those words back in 2014, I was getting lots of pushback about the fact that I didn’t use social media. It really did baffle and concern people. Today, my abstention is considered reasonable. It’s amazing how much our society has shifted on this issue.
I still really believe in the idea of quiet creativity. Gathering inputs is the easy part. It’s the long thinking, and rethinking, then thinking again that’s really needed if you want to produce industrial strength insights.
I believe (but am not positive), that this is the paper that resulted from the long thinking walks described in that post. It ended up published in October of that year.

Thoughts On Notebooks

I’ve been using Moleskine notebooks since 2004, when I bought my first at the MIT bookstore. As I discuss in Digital Minimalism, high quality paper notebooks like Moleskines have historically played an important role in self-development because they provide a method to structure your interior life.

Thoughts, concerns, ideas, aspirations: these flow constantly through our consciousness. Ink on paper puts a stake in the ground that you can cling to amidst this turmoil, enabling you to build some scaffolding on which to organize these musings, while the persistent nature of the medium allows you to witness an evolution of this structure as you fill more pages over time.

This hard work of self-reflection is slow. It generates no “likes” and it doesn’t instantaneously banish boredom. No one else will read your notes and applaud your virtue or wit, and your future self will likely cringe at what you record now.

But without these efforts you’re adrift: pushed by whims, manipulated by attention economy contraptions, taking one step backwards for each step forward in your attempts to build a deep life.

I was prompted to write this post after someone pointed me toward the distressing fact that Moleskine started a social network called myMoleskine. It allows people to publicly share their notes and follow other Moleskine users. A development for which I have only one official reaction: Sigh.

From Mammoths to Time Management

In 1973, the BBC aired a 13-part documentary television series called The Ascent of Man. It was written and hosted by the polymath intellectual Jacob Bronowski, and following the lead of the BBC’s 1968 hit series, Civilization, it featured poetic commentary set against dramatic visuals.

Which is all to say, I was excited to recently come across a copy of the series’s companion book: a handsome large-format hardcover that largely replicates the commentary from the television show and is thick with full-color photos. (I’ve always loved sweeping science histories. I’m concurrently reading, off and on, a vintage copy of Richard Leakey’s 1978 book, People of the Lake, and Niall Ferguson’s latest, The Square and the Tower.)

I wanted to briefly share an interesting nugget I came across early in Bronowski’s book about the consequences of our ancestors’ shift toward an omnivorous diet:

“Meat is a more concentrated protein than plant, and eating meat cuts down the bulk and the time spent in eating by two-thirds. The consequences for the evolution of man were far-reaching. He had more time free, and could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals) which could not be tackled by hungry brute force. Evidently that helped to promote (by natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire.”

The science on human evolution has taken astounding leaps since the 1970s, so I have no idea whether or not paleo-anthropologists still think it was the rewards of big game hunting that selected for the breaking of the stimulus and response loop in our brains. But I do know, based on some recent interviews I conducted with neuroscientists for a new book I’m working on, that this development — which gave us the ability to plan — is both largely overlooked, and remarkably central to basically everything great and terrible our species has done since.

More than anything, however, I like the neat just-so story implied by this passage: from our want of mammoths we eventually ended up bound by the tyranny of time management.

Newton’s Productive School Break

In 1666, Cambridge University closed its doors to help stop the spread of the black plague. This sent a precocious 23 year-old student named Issac Newton back to Woolshtrope Manor, a family estate located 60 miles northwest of the school.  Newton’s main diversion: a thick, largely empty, 1000-page commonplace notebook that he’d inherited from his stepfather.

Newton decided to fill in its pages with his answers to an increasingly difficult series of mathematical questions he devised for himself. In doing so, he invented calculus.

Not bad for a school break.

If you’re interested in learning more about Newton’s miraculous year:

Check out this history, published recently by Jonathan Kujawa on 3 Quarks Daily (if you don’t know this website, ask any science geek you know to explain it to you). This was the article that inspired this post.
You can browse Newton’s notebook online via Cambridge’s digital library.
You can find nice images of Woolsthorpe Manor and its grounds here, and watch a short video about Newton’s work at Woolsthorpe here.

Carl Jung’s Fantastical Retreat

I open Deep Work with the story of a stone tower that Carl Jung built on the shores of the upper lake of Zurich, near the small town of Bollingen. Jung would retreat to an inner sanctum inside the tower, modeled after meditation rooms he had seen on a tour of British controlled India, to think deeply about his breakthrough work on psychiatry and the collective unconscious.

It always struck me that Jung’s Bollingen Tower, as he called it, seemed almost purposefully fantastical, as if Jung was using its form to induce states of deeper creativity. The other day, while reading Anthony Steven’s insightful guide, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, I learned my instinct was right. As Stevens explains:

“The fantasies and rituals common to childhood assumed a heightened intensity for [Jung], and they influenced the rest of his life. For example, his adult delight in studying alone in a tower he built for himself at Bollingen on the upper lake of Zurich was anticipated by a childhood ritual in which he kept a carved manikin in a pencil box hidden away on a beam in the vicarage attic. From time to time, he visited the manikin and presented him with scrolls written in a secret language to provide him with a library in the fastness of his attic retreat.”

I really enjoy stories of deep thinkers who build elaborate work environments to help extract more creativity and quality from their brain, it’s a classic example of the deep life in action.

For more case studies like Jung’s tower, see these two posts, which look at elaborate work spaces designed by J. K. Rowling, Neal Stephenson, Michael Pollan, David McCollough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Hans Zimmer, and Gustav Mahler. Also relevant is my post on how virtual reality might bring these same style of brain-boosting environments to a much wider audience.

Building a Career that Matters

A reader recently asked me the following question:

“You talk about developing rare and valuable skills specially those which the market values, but at what point do find yourself doing something meaningful? Yes, society would value you and compensate you, but at what costs. I know many people that are highly skilled, but hate their job/life. Is there an equilibrium in which you can develop rare and value skills while still being happy/proud about what you do?”

This question is important. In fact, it’s so important that I dedicated the fourth and final rule of my book So Good They Can’t Ignore You to this topic. Since it’s been nearly eight years since that book came out, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief summary of the answer I provided back then.

I started this rule noting that for many people, having a “unifying mission” to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction. To illustrate this point, I then told the story of Pardis Sabeti, a brilliant biology professor at Harvard who uses advanced algorithms to help find cures to deadly viral diseases.

“As I spent time with Pardis,” I wrote, “I recognized that her happiness comes form the fact that she built her career on a clear and compelling mission — something that not only gives meaning to her work but provides the energy needed to embrace life beyond the lab.”  The question I then tackled is how one finds the type of mission that sustains Pardis Sabeti.

My answer spans four chapters, but here’s the main idea: it’s very difficult to identify a truly impactful and satisfying mission until you master useful skills. As I argued, cribbing a term from the systems biologist Stuart Kauffman, the really interesting missions, like Pardis Sabeti using cutting-edge algorithm theory to cure old diseases, are usually found in the adjacent possible — the space just beyond the cutting-edge of the relevant skills.

The conclusion is that if you want to do something truly useful with your professional life, don’t start by figuring out your “mission.” Instead, identify some potentially useful-looking skills, then push yourself to the cutting edge with a single-minded intensity. It’s only then, once you’ve mastered the foundational abilities, that you’ll be able to find that spot in the adjacent possible where the meaningful mission lurks, waiting for its champion.

Bill Gates’s Prescient Internet Prediction

I recently stumbled across a 1993 John Seabrook profile of Bill Gates from The New Yorker. It initially caught my attention because of its opening, which provides a nice snapshot of the early days of email. On a whim, Seabrook, who has never met Gates, sends him an email (from a CompuServe account). Eighteen minutes later, Gates replies.

Simpler times.

But I ended up more struck by a passage found deeper in the piece. “Microsoft’s ambition is to supply the standard operating-system software for the information-highway machine,” Seabrook notes. Because this was before broadband consumer internet was even on the radar, Microsoft assumed this machine would depend on the existing cable TV infrastructure, and therefore be sold as box that plugged in like a VCR.

Seabrook traveled to Redmond to see prototype devices demonstrating this vision, and reported the following:

“I heard a lot about ‘intelligent agents,’ which will at first be animated characters that occasionally appear in the corner of your TV screen and inform you, for example, that President Aristide is on ‘Meet the Press,’ because they know you’re interested in Haitian politics, but will eventually be out there on the information highway, filtering the torrent of information roaring along it, picking out books or articles or movies for you, or receiving messages from individuals.”

Microsoft was prophetic in this planning. Today, we do interact with powerful machine learning algorithms that strive to learn more about us from our behavior and use this to deliver us more of what it thinks we want to see from the internet. This modern experience, however, is not delivered through machines connected to our TVs, but instead by social media platforms browsed with our phones.

These small details aside, Bill Gate’s early 1990 vision of how the “internet highway” would evolve was remarkably accurate. Which makes it all the more surprising that Microsoft fell so far behind in the consumer internet sector.

On Craft and the Human Condition

In Deep Work, I tell the story of Ric Furrer, a general blacksmith who runs a forge in Door County, Wisconsin: a rural idyll near Lake Michigan’s Sturgeon Bay. He works in a converted barn whose doors he often keeps open to the surrounding farm fields to vent the heat, his hammer blows echoing for miles. He makes a living with architectural metal work, but he’s known for his rare mastery of ancient weapon forging techniques. I came across him in a 2012 Nova episode in which he recreates a viking sword using crucible steel (see above).

In Deep Work, I write the following:

“Ric Furrer is a master craftsman whose work requires him to spend most of his day in a state of depth — even a small slip in concentration can ruin dozens of hours of effort. He’s also who clearly finds great meaning in his profession. This connection between deep work and a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen.”

As I then elaborate, there’s something about mastery that resonates with the human condition. When we observe someone successfully apply a hard-won skill — an athlete, a writer, a leader, an adventurer, a musician —  we become rapt, our admiration unmistakable. We also, crucially, tend to feel a moment of inspiration in which we experience a compulsion to pursue something noteworthy ourselves.

I take such intuitions seriously, as they tend to point us toward the things we deeply need. The conclusion here being that the incremental but upward road to mastery — whether it’s in some professional endeavor or hobby — is fundamental. A quick tap on a glowing screen can conveniently banish boredom in the moment. To instead redirect that instinct toward your equivalent of Furrer’s blacksmith hammer, however, can be transcendent.

The Astonishing Spread of the Victorian Internet

As someone who studies technology and culture, I’ve noticed that we’re perpetually caught off guard when an unusually useful new innovation spreads rapidly. We tend to quickly claim that this latest fast adoption is unprecedented.

Historically speaking, however, these quick expansions might be more common than you realize. I was recently re-reading one of my favorite history of technology titles, Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. In it, Standage summarizes the astonishing rapidity with which the American telegraph network grew.

In 1846, he notes, the only telegraph in the country was the 40-mile experimental line that Samuel Morse strung between Washington, DC and Baltimore in a bid to secure congressional funding. By 1848, there were 2000 miles in the country. By 1850, there were 12,000 miles operated by twenty different companies. By 1852, there were 23,000 miles with another 10,000 under construction — a 600 times increase in six years.

There’s not a sweeping conclusion to draw from this anecdote, beyond the idea that American technophilia is far from new.