Cal Newport's Blog, page 7

On Teenage Luddites

Back in 2019, when I was on tour for my book, Digital Minimalism, I chatted with more than a few parents. I was surprised by how many told me a similar story: their teenage children had become fed up with the shallowness of online life and decided, all on their own, to deactivate their social media accounts, and in some cases, abandon their smartphones altogether.

Ever since then, when an interviewer asks me about youth and technology addiction, I tend to adopt an optimistic tone.  “We’re approaching a moment in which not using these apps will be seen as the authentic, counter-cultural move,” I’ll explain. “We don’t need to convince teenagers to stop using their phones, we just need them to discover on their own just how uncool these online media conglomerates, with their creepy geek overlords, really are.”

According to a recent New York Times article that many of my readers sent me, we might finally be seeing evidence that this shift is beginning to pick up speed. The piece, written by Alex Vadukul, and titled “‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes,” chronicles a group of Brooklyn high school students who formed what they call the Luddite Club, an informal organization dedicated to promoting “a lifestyle of self-literation from social media and technology.”

The article opens on a meeting of the Luddite Club being held on a dirt mound in a tucked-away corner of Prospect Park. According to Vadukul, some of the members drew in sketchpads or worked on watercolor painting. Books were common, with one particularly precocious teen reading “The Consolation of Philosophy,” while another was — honest-to-God — whittling a stick. Kurt Vonnegut is popular in the club. As is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

The group’s founder, a 17-year-old named Logan Lane, said she had a hard time recruiting members. But the word seems to be spreading. The crew gathering in Prospect Park had heard of three different nearby high schools that were rumored to be starting their own chapters.  Lane showed up to her interview with Vadukul wearing quilted jeans she had sewed herself. She explained that once she was freed from her phone, she had started learning what life as a teenager in the city used to be like. She took to borrowing books from the library to read in the park. For a while, she fell in with a crew that taught her how to graffiti subway cars. Her parents were upset they didn’t always know where she was at night.

Here’s my carefully considered response to all of this: Yes. Very much, yes.

This is exactly what teenagers in Brooklyn should be doing: Reading books they don’t understand, getting into trouble, trying on intellectual identities without worrying about widespread scrutiny, sewing their own jeans, and yes, if they want, whittling sticks. How long did we really think young people would be willing to give up all of this wonderful mess in exchange for monotonously boosting the value of Meta stock?

There was, however, one passage in particular that gave me the most hope that a shift in teenagers’ relationships with their phones might actually be imminent. “My parents are so addicted,” said Lane. “My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like [being offline], because I get to feel a little superior to them.”

Zuckerberg is screwed.

The post On Teenage Luddites appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Teenage Luddites

Back in 2019, when I was on tour for my book, Digital Minimalism, I chatted with more than a few parents. I was surprised by how many told me a similar story: their teenage children had become fed up with the shallowness of online life and decided, all on their own, to deactivate their social media accounts, and in some cases, abandon their smartphones altogether.

Ever since then, when an interviewer asks me about youth and technology addiction, I tend to adopt an optimistic tone.  “We’re approaching a moment in which not using these apps will be seen as the authentic, counter-cultural move,” I’ll explain. “We don’t need to convince teenagers to stop using their phones, we just need them to discover on their own just how uncool these online media conglomerates, with their creepy geek overlords, really are.”

According to a recent New York Times article that many of my readers sent me, we might finally be seeing evidence that this shift is beginning to pick up speed. The piece, written by Alex Vadukul, and titled “‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes,” chronicles a group of Brooklyn high school students who formed what they call the Luddite Club, an informal organization dedicated to promoting “a lifestyle of self-literation from social media and technology.”

The article opens on a meeting of the Luddite Club being held on a dirt mound in a tucked-away corner of Prospect Park. According to Vadukul, some of the members drew in sketchpads or worked on watercolor painting. Books were common, with one particularly precocious teen reading “The Consolation of Philosophy,” while another was — honest-to-God — whittling a stick. Kurt Vonnegut is popular in the club. As is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

The group’s founder, a 17-year-old named Logan Lane, said she had a hard time recruiting members. But the word seems to be spreading. The crew gathering in Prospect Park had heard of three different nearby high schools that were rumored to be starting their own chapters.  Lane showed up to her interview with Vadukul wearing quilted jeans she had sewed herself. She explained that once she was freed from her phone, she had started learning what life as a teenager in the city used to be like. She took to borrowing books from the library to read in the park. For a while, she fell in with a crew that taught her how to graffiti subway cars. Her parents were upset they didn’t always know where she was at night.

Here’s my carefully considered response to all of this: Yes. Very much, yes.

This is exactly what teenagers in Brooklyn should be doing: Reading books they don’t understand, getting into trouble, trying on intellectual identities without worrying about widespread scrutiny, sewing their own jeans, and yes, if they want, whittling sticks. How long did we really think young people would be willing to give up all of this wonderful mess in exchange for monotonously boosting the value of Meta stock?

There was, however, one passage in particular that gave me the most hope that a shift in teenagers’ relationships with their phones might actually be imminent. “My parents are so addicted,” said Lane. “My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like [being offline], because I get to feel a little superior to them.”

Zuckerberg is screwed.

The post On Teenage Luddites first appeared on Cal Newport.

Ann Patchett on Scheduling Creativity

In a recent interview for the BBC podcast Spark & Fire, the novelist Ann Patchett discusses some of the difficulties that come along with finding success as a writer.

“It used to be a novel lived very nicely in my head as a constant companion,” she explains. “As time goes on and I now have this other thing which is my career, and all the things that people want me to do, that is very distracting to day dreaming and working in your head.”

As a result, Patchett finds herself needing to specifically put aside time just to think. As she elaborates:

“Sometimes I sit down in my office on my mediation cushion. Not to meditate, but just to sit as if meditating. I start the timer, I light a candle, I sit down on my little green poof and I say to myself: ‘Now you have twenty minutes to think about your novel. Namaste.'”

She goes on to say that she finds it “pathetic” that she has to “block out time for thinking.” Patchett is not alone in this dismay:  many authors share a similar despair. (I remember my friend Ryan Holiday once putting it this way in an interview: “The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing.”)

It occurred to me, however, as I listened to this interview, that Patchett’s concerns provide a warning that applies well beyond the rarified world of professional authors. Creative insight of any type — be it business strategy, an ad campaign, or computer code — requires cognitive space to emerge. It doesn’t take much daily activity before original thought is starved of the neuronal nutriments required to grow.

Modern knowledge work, if anything, is a shallow distraction generation machine. A professional schedule riven with email, Slack, and calendar invites is one that cannot also support whatever form of inspired thought moves the needle in your particular field.

And yet, how many of us are serious about blocking off and protecting significant amounts of time to do nothing but think? To act, in other words, like Ann Patchett on her green meditation poof? It is perhaps pathetic that we’ve come to a point where something as natural as creativity requires artificial support, but it is where we are. We should start acknowledging this reality.

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Speaking of podcasts, it was brought to my attention recently that I should provide more updates here about what I’m up to on my own podcast, Deep Questions with Cal Newport. On Monday’s episode (#225), I talked about my recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, and then chat with a New York Times bestselling thriller writer about the reality of her profession.

Author photo credit: Heidi Ross

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What Happened When Zapier Cancelled Meetings for a Week? (Hint: Not Much)

Several readers pointed me toward a recent NPR Marketplace segement about a fully-remote tech company called Zapier that tried an interesting experiment last summer: they cancelled all meetings for a week.

“When I heard from leadership that we were going to experiment with a week with no Zoom meetings, all I felt was excited anticipation,” explained Ellie Huizenga, a content strategiest at Zapier.

“Did that mean that you could just go into your Outlook or your Google Calendar or whatever you use and just zap all your meetings?,” asked Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace, with thinly-veiled jealously.

“Kind of, Yeah,” replied Huizenga, before elaborating:

“Our leadership team sent a Slack message giving details about how the week was going to look for the entire company. Once that announcement came from leadership, Caitlin, my manager, reached out and let me know that she was canceling our one-on-one, canceling our team meeting for that week, and then she also encouraged me to look at the other meetings that were on my Google Calendar and confirm if we could do them [asynchronously] instead of on Zoom.”

Zapier was concerned about the rising volume of appointments filling their employees’ schedules. Huizenga, in her content strategy role, spent up to ten hours a week on Zoom. Managers at the company had it much worse, with many reporting that they spent more than half of their work week participating in video conferences. Zapier wanted to find out how critical these real-time, pre-scheduled collaboration sessions really were. It was in this context that what became known as Getting Stuff Done (GSD) week was conceived.

Here’s Huizenga, in a blog post about the experiment published on the Zapier website, summarizing some of the ways she compensated for a lack of meetings during GSD week:

“Instead of my weekly 1:1, I consolidated questions for my manager and sent them to her in a direct message on Slack.

Instead of a project check-in, all team members shared their updates in the relevant Asana tasks.

Instead of a one-off strategy call, stakeholders shared their thoughts (and comments) in a Coda doc.

Instead of a project kickoff call, our project manager sent a Slack message that shared the project charter, timeline, and next steps.”

According to a post-experiment survey conducted by Zapier’s “People Ops” team, these types of alternatives ended up working well. As they reported:

80% of respondents would want to do another GSD week in the future.

80% of respondents achieved their goal(s) for the week.

89% of respondents found communication to be about as effective during GSD week as during a typical week.

This last data point is the most important. One of the most consistent things I’ve learned studying the impact of digital communication technology on the workplace is that it’s easy for convenient habits — “I’ll shoot you a meeting invite” — to become ubiquitous. Just because certain behaviors are common, however, doesn’t mean that they are, to borrow a phrase from the Zapier experiment, the best way to get stuff done.

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A Humble Request: a reporter from the Financial Times is interested in hearing stories from people who have attempted the types of techniques I discuss in Deep Work and A World Without Email in their own teams or companies. If you have a case study to share about your experiences combatting the hyperactive hive mind, you can send her an email directly at  courtney.weaver@ft.com (If you do send her a message, however, please consider cc’ing me at author@calnewport.com as well: I love to hear these tales! I always learn a lot.)

The post What Happened When Zapier Cancelled Meetings for a Week? (Hint: Not Much) first appeared on Cal Newport.

Did Early Humans Use To-Do Lists?

Early in my latest article for The New Yorker I take a closer look at the recent protests waged by Apple employees in response to CEO Tim Cook’s announcement that they had to return to their desks in Cupertino. On the surface, the employees were concerned about losing what they like about remote work. In an open letter addressed to Cook, they cited worries about time lost to commuting as well the difficulty of achieving “deep thought” in a crowded office.

As I write in my article, however, protests of this type might actually be a proxy for a deeper unease:

“Knowledge workers were already exhausted by their jobs before the pandemic arrived: too much e-mail, too many meetings, too much to do—all being relentlessly delivered through ubiquitous glowing screens. We used to believe that these depredations were somehow fundamental to office work in the twenty-first century, but the pandemic called this assumption into question. If an activity as entrenched as coming to an office every day could be overturned essentially overnight, what other aspects of our professional lives could be reimagined?”

If burnt-out employees lose their bid for permanent telecommuting, “the last highly visible, virus-prompted workplace experiment,” the window to push for more serious transformation — the types of changes that can save knowledge work from its current drowning into a sea of distracted busyness — might slam shut.

But as I conclude: “The tragedy of this moment…is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand.” We learned through experience that working from home is not enough on its own to cure most of what makes office jobs unnecessarily exhausting, and few believe that four-day work weeks or, dare I say it, quiet quitting are somehow sufficient either. We need bolder notions.

This then brings me to the central provocation of my article: What if a good way to chart the future of work is to look to its deep past?

I go on to investigate what the anthropology literature teaches us about what “work” meant for most of our species’ 300,000 year history. My conjecture is that in identifying places where our current activities most differ from how we toiled in our Paleolithic past, we might identify specific sources of discomfort with our current ways of working. How does, in other words, the modern necessity of juggling full email inboxes or managing crowded to-do lists conflict with a brain adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for hunting and gathering in small, close-knit tribes? And once we find these points of friction, what can we do to reduce them?

All of this, of course, is messy and imprecise, but it’s also really fun to think and write about. You’ll have to read the full article to learn all the details of what I uncover during my deep dive into the deep history of work, but the short version of my conclusions should sound familiar to fans of a slower productivity mindset: do fewer things, working at a varied pace, focusing on quality.

Such a deliberate approach might sound unachievable in our moment of hyper-connected busyness, but it might just be, for lack of a better word, much more natural than how we approach ours jobs today.

The post Did Early Humans Use To-Do Lists? first appeared on Cal Newport.

Larry June’s Slow Productivity

In August, a reporter from Rolling Stone sat down to interview the San Francisco-based rapper Larry June before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

June is known for his status as an independent artist. After an early deal with Warner Brothers fizzled, June went on to produce and release almost all of his subsequent work without support from a major label. He’s also known for his productivity. June has released 10 albums since 2018, with his most recent, last summer’s Spaceships on the Blade, reaching number 39 on the Billboard 200. In addition to these projects, June has released 5 collaborative albums, 4 EPs, 5 Mixtapes, and made appearances as a guest artist on singles from artists like Post Malone.

It’s this latter reputation, as an artist who ships original work at a fast pace, that makes what June admitted to the Rolling Stone reporter so surprising:

“Since we’re on Rolling Stone, I’ve go to let y’all know, that for everybody that wants to feature: I only rap three hours a day. You know what I’m saying? I only rap three hours a day. I get in the studio at 6 o’clock and I’m done around 9 o’clock in the morning…I don’t really like rapping too long. It gives me anxiety. I feel energy, I’m in the studio, I knock it done right there.”

As the music producer who originally sent me this clip emphasized, this slow but steady pace is unusual in the industry. “Rappers are notorious for claiming to live in the studio, brag about never sleeping, working 12-16 hrs a day,” he told me. But as June elaborates to the reporter, his technique works because of the miracle of compounding achievement:

“It might take me 3 hours to do one song, I might like just do the intro…and then the next day [record some more]….the thing though is consistency…If I do only 3 hours a day, every day, for 365 days, I just did outstanding numbers.”

Don’t underestimate the power of this productivity arithmetic. During 2020 alone, when June found himself isolated at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, recording each day, free from distraction, in his basement recording booth, he finished six different projects.

In this interview clip, we find a classic example of slow productivity. Spending 16 hours in the studio feels “productive” in an exhausting, performative sense. Retreating to your basement for only a few hours each morning seems somehow diminished by comparison. But as June’s success unambiguously illustrates, accomplishment is often best measured on the scale of years not days, and when you zoom out to this grander level, the advantages of a focused slowness become hard to ignore.

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On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition

By his last year at Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, 26-years old at the time, knew he didn’t want to pursue a medical career, so he went to the dean with a proposition. He planned to write a nonfiction book about patient care, he explained, and wanted to know if he could use his final semester to hang around the hospital gathering research for his project. “Why should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?”, Crichton remembers asking.

The dean replied paternalistically with a warning that writing a book might be more difficult than Crichton expected. It was at this point that the young medical student revealed that he had already published four books while at Harvard (under a pen name), and had multiple other writing projects in progress, including his first medical thriller, A Case of Need, that would soon win him an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, and his first fully-developed techno-thriller, The Andromeda Strain, which would become a breakout bestseller.

I came across this story in a New York Times profile of Crichton written in 1970, a year after he finished medical school.  What struck me about this profile was less its origin story heroics, and more its revelation of the sheer busyness of Crichton at this early point in his ascent. While nominally still a postdoc at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, when the profile was published, Crichton’s energy was clearly radiating in many different directions. He had just published Five Patients, the non-fiction book he had proposed to his med school dean (who had, as it turned out, ultimately agreed to Crichton’s plan),  was about to release an experimental novel about drug dealing that he had co-authored with his brother, and had, since that fateful meeting a year earlier, finished two other pseudonymous potboiler thrillers.

Perhaps most notably, he was also finishing the manuscript for The Terminal Man, his follow-up to The Andromeda Strain. As the Times reports, Crichton had become a “one-man operation” dedicated to this project: in addition to the book, he was simultaneously writing a screenplay adaptation and was determined to direct any resulting movie. To support this latter goal he began spending a couple days every week in Hollywood as part of what he called “a skills-building gambit.” The Times described the 27-year-old’s career as “hyperactive.” This might be an understatement.

It’s interesting to compare Crichton’s rise to that of John Grisham, one of the few novelists of the late 20th century to rival Crichton’s publishing success. Grisham’s ascent began with his second novel, The Firm, which attracted significant interest from publishers after Paramount, based on a bootleg copy of the manuscript, snapped up the film rights for $600,000. The book went on to eventually sell 7,000,000 copies.

It’s here, however, that Grisham’s path diverges from Crichton. As I’ve written about before, instead of embracing a haphazard collection of overlapping projects, Grisham instead built a simplified routine centered on the singular goal of producing one book per year. He typically starts writing on January 1st, working three hours a day, five days a week, in an outbuilding on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. He aims to finish the first draft of that year’s book by March and have the manuscript completely done by July.  Grisham will conduct a limited publicity tour surrounding the book’s fall release, but otherwise devotes all of his remaining time and energy to non-professional activities, like the youth baseball league he started in 1996. When his longtime assistant retired, Grisham didn’t bother hiring a replacement as there wouldn’t be enough for them to do. The only professional acquaintances who might call were his editor and agent, but they we familiar with his routine, and rarely bothered him.

In Crichton and Grisham we see two different models of ambition. The first model, exemplified by Crichton, is what I call Type 1. It craves activity and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. The other model, exemplified by Grisham, is what I call Type 2. It craves simplicity and autonomy, and sees success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations. Medical school wasn’t sufficiently stimulating for Crichton. Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham. They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways when it respectively arrived.

As best I can tell, different people are wired for different ambition types. The key seems to be to recognize what type best matches you before success begins to exert significant force on your career. A Type 1 personality stuck in a outbuilding on a farm, quietly writing day after day, will quickly become bored. A Type 2 personality working on a screenplay at the same time as two books while filling weeks with Hollywood meetings will be crushed with anxious unease.

Ambition type mismatch, of course, is a lucky problem to have, as it means that you must be doing something right. But this doesn’t diminish its importance for those that it does impact. It didn’t take me long, for example, to realize I’m more Grisham than Crichton (in terms of personality, not, alas, cumulative book sales). This has likely saved me from untold volumes of unhappy anxiety. If you haven’t yet, now might be a good time to figure out what type you are.

The post On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition first appeared on Cal Newport.

Professio sano in vitam sanam (on balancing work and life)

A reader recently pointed me toward a long and thoughtful reflection on academic life written by Stephen Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In a section titled “Learning Balance,” he talks about his work habits in the early 1970s, when his first son was born. “I was not around much to help, for during that time I was working seventy to eighty hours per week,” he writes.

This type of absentee fatherhood was common in this era, but fortunately for Stearns and his children, his wife wasn’t having it. As Stearns recalls, she sat him down, and gave him the following ultimatum:

“I want you to promise not to work nights or weekends: you need to be sharing the parenting, and your child needs a father.  If you don’t agree, I will divorce you.”

Stearns listened. “For the next twenty years I did not work nights or weekends, and I spent thousands of delightful hours with our sons while they were growing up,” he recalls.  “She was very wise, and I am grateful to her.”

What’s particularly interesting about this story is what didn’t end up happening. Even though Stearns was now working less than the norm among his peers, he continued to thrive professionally. Toiling within the constraints of a fixed schedule turned out to amplify his effectiveness. Here’s how he describes it:

“When I was at work, I worked.  And when I was with my family, I concentrated on them. The change in focus cleared and refreshed my mind so that when I went to work, I was efficient…Five to eight hours per day of clear thinking and concentrated work five days per week produces more impressive results than the coffee, chit-chat, and various displacement activities that often fill the time of many of those who think they are working seventy or eighty hours a week.”

Stearns describes his approach as embracing professio sano in vitam sanam: a healthy profession in a healthy life. Here on this newsletter, of course, we’ve long used a different name for this same strategy: fixed-schedule productivity. 

I’ve embraced this slow philosophy for most of my professional career. As with Stearns, I too have become a believer in how much can be accomplished in normal 40-hour weeks; if you’re willing to really work when you’re working, and then be done when you’re done. It’s nice, however, to see someone so much more eminent than me also find success with this fixed-schedule approach.

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During the pandemic, I setup a modest deep work hideaway in some office space I lease on the main street of the town where I live in the outskirts of Washington, DC. This is where I record my podcast, Deep Questions, meet with other writers and professors, and, in general, escape when I need a change of scenery to focus my efforts. By popular demand, I’ve posted a video that includes a tour of the space. If you’ve been curious what my “Deep Work HQ” actually looks like, check it out.

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On Vampires and Method Writing

In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to generate fantastical inspiration.

In 1894, an Irish actor who was struggling to write a novel in his spare time traveled with his wife and young son to the remote Aberdeenshire coast of northeast Scotland. They stayed in The Kilmarnock Arms, an oak-paneled hotel in the center of Port Erroll, a small fishing village located near a desolate sandy beach. Most days, the actor would make the twenty-minute walk to Slains Castle (pictured above), a ruined 16th century fort situated dramatically on a seaside cliff. He was seeking inspiration for a character he was attempting to bring to life in his manuscript—a count who was hiding a horrific secret. The actor’s name was Bram Stoker, and the fictional count, of course, was to be called Dracula.

In London, Stoker had been acting alongside Henry Irving, a stage star of the era who was famous for his early embrace of what would later be known as method acting. Stoker decided to apply Irving’s approach to his novel writing. As detailed by The Guardian:

“According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of [Stoker]. He ‘seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,’ she later said. He ‘would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out’.”

Stoker returned to Aberdeenshire at least a dozen times in the years that followed, sometimes staying at the the Kilmarnock Arms and sometimes taking a cottage. “For Stoker, Aberdeenshire stood in for Transylvania,” explains a local historian quoted in the article. And he translated that inspiration into a memorable gothic tale.

I tell this story not because I think a method approach, in which you inhabit your characters and their behaviors, is the best way to write fiction. (If this were true, a lot more authors would take a swing at romance novels.) But instead because it’s an extreme example of a more general point that I’ve been emphasizing recently: when it comes to cognitive work, setting makes a difference.

Putting professors into stark and spacious modern offices is functional. But is it as conducive to deep thought as the fire-warmed study of the Oxford Don? Setting up your laptop on your kitchen table might technically give you access to everything you need to do your job. But will your mind end up in the same state produced by commuting to the marble-lobbied skyscraper in the city center?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the next big innovations in knowledge work will be less about technology and tools, and more about better understanding the psychology that goes into wringing value out of thought matter.

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Brandon Sanderson Built an Underground Lair in Suburban Utah

The pandemic got knowledge worker types suddenly thinking more seriously about their telecommuting setups. Once it became clear that we might be toiling hour after hour, day after day, in our own homes, that Ikea desk in the corner by the washing machine no longer seemed quite so adequate.

I enjoyed, during the early months of this period, sharing here on my newsletter case studies about some of the more unusual or interesting home office setups that my readers sent me. You’d be surprised, for example, by how many people relocated to tents in their backyard. One professional musician went so far as to build a cabin for practicing inside his apartment. I even wrote an article about the topic for The New Yorker.

As I recently discovered, however, the bestselling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson put us all to shame. His home office heroics began in 2008, when he and his wife bought a nondescript house in a nondescript Utah suburb. Sanderson noticed the adjacent lot was still undeveloped. As he explained in a recent Reddit comment:

“So I started to plan. And the next year, I bought that lot. When my wife asked what I wanted to do with it, I was quite decisive. I wanted an underground supervillain lair.“

It took Sanderson eleven years of planning, but as revealed in a series of stunning photographs that he shared on his newsletter, he finally built up both the resources and courage to start digging.

Here’s a photo of the hole he excavated. Keep in mind that this is in a normal-sized lot between two houses. Sanderson admitted that it took some wrangling to get the needed permissions from his town (“the city really has no idea what to do with someone like me”).

Here are the concrete walls being added to the lair. To keep the space epic, Sanderson insisted on twenty-foot ceilings.

After the lair was completed and covered back over, Sanderson built a garage and extended driveway on the lot so that it looked as if nothing unusual was going on in this space next to his house:

 

Though Sanderson posted these photo back when construction began several years ago, it wasn’t until last spring, when he allowed cameras from the CBS Morning Show to tape an interview in the lair, that we got our first look inside.

Here’s the secret stairway that leads down to the complex from inside his house. The stained glass windows depict covers of his popular books.

The nook where he’s sitting in this photo is where he plans to setup his writing desk. The more formidable tiled space in the background, surrounding the cylindrical saltwater fish tank, is meant for larger gatherings. He calls it his “Adventurer’s Club.”

Here’s the movie screening room he added that features three rows of reclining seats and a full-size screen.

“It’s…admittedly a little extravagant,” Sanderson writes. “[But] what else would you expect from a fantasy novelist?” No explanation is needed for me. As my readers know, when it comes to producing important work, I’m always happy to see someone go, well, deep.

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