The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Unmistakable Classic: How to Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

In this unmistakable classic we revisit our interview with Georgetown professor and author Cal Newport who talks to us about how to be so good they can't ignore you.

How Cal Has Blended a Traditional and Untraditional Path
A Look at the Early Creation Process of Cal's Study Guides
Lessons from the MIT Theory of Computation Group
The Importance of Focus and Resisting Distractions
What it Takes to Develop Career Capital (Rare and Valuable Skills)
How Skills Give You More Leverage Than a Set Career Path
The Arbitrary Advice of Following Your Passion – And Why It's Flawed
Why You have to Become Really Good at Something to Love Your Work
Traits That Lead People to Absolutely Love What They Do
Making the Transition Match Theory to Capital Theory
The Philosophy of Deep Work and Becoming a Master of Your Craft
Why Cal Newport has No Social Media Accounts
The Importance of Developing Taste in Your Work
Looking at the Mission Behind Somebody's Work
The Framework of Little Bets to Make Progress with Your Ideas
Why Publishers are Like Investors When it Comes to Your Book Deal
Finding the Threads that Persist in Your Body of Work

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Duration:: 1h 6m
Broadcast on:: 13 Jun 2014
Audio Format:: other

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Examining those cases that are scarily close to home, the award-winning podcast They Walk Among Us explores both lesser known crimes committed by seemingly ordinary people, along with diving deep into those cases splashed across the headlines. They Walk Among Us has been praised by the Guardian who called the show a cult hit, the financial times referred to it as sharply written, and the new statesman labelled it the mysterious true crime podcast that'll keep you up at night. Listen to They Walk Among Us on a cast, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcast everywhere, acast.com. Cal, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Hey, thanks, reading. Looking forward to it. Yeah, absolutely. So, Cal, I want to ask you my very first question, which I usually ask everybody, and that is, can you kind of tell us a bit about yourself, your background, your story, and how that has brought you to doing all the work that you do today? Well, I have a traditional side of my tail on the untraditional side, and they work together. So, the traditional side is a typical academic path. I went to college, I studied computer science. I graduated in 2004, I went to graduate school, I got my PhD in computer science, I did my two-year postdoc, and now I'm a professor at Georgetown in computer science. So, a very traditional academic path. The untraditional flip side of that is that I've been a writer for a long time as well. I started writing at college for the newspaper and the humor magazine. While still in college, I sold my first book, which was a student advice guide. I didn't like the student advice guides on the shelf, so I wrote my own, and I continued to write books throughout grad school and my postdoc up to this point. So, I have these two intertwined, yet somewhat separate lives going on, that sort of very traditional academic and the somewhat less traditional life as an author and blogger. So, a couple of questions from that. This is something that's always interesting to me, is how your previous background, both in computer science and the non-traditional path, influence how you approach all the work you do today from both sides. I know you've had, like you said, the traditional path of computer science to PhD, and you've been writing for a very long time, and I'm curious how that influences your worldview and how you show up in the world today and how it affects the work that you do on both sides of the coin. Well, they keep intertwining in an interesting way. So, I was writing advice guides. These are my first books, which meant you had to step back and say, "I'm going to take a goal like how to get good grades in college," and I'll study it. Let me talk to students with good grades. Let me actually try strategies myself, see what works and see what doesn't. So, that was my mindset as a writer, but that means when you're in the other parts of your life, that's the way you're going to think about it as well. So, as a student in college and grad schools, post-doc, I had this advice guide writer mindset, like, "Well, okay, we'll wait a second. I forget conventional wisdom. What goal am I trying to accomplish here? What strategies am I using? Why do I think those would work? What might I use instead?" Which really changed my traditional career because I didn't just unquestioningly pursue different strategies and goals. I was thinking, "You know, what makes sense here?" And then the computer science, the traditional academic life keeps coming back to my writing. So, I spent many years at MIT in the theory of computation group. That's where I got my Ph.D. And that's a group that's famous for what I call going deep, the big prize ability in the theory group in the computer science lab at MIT is your ability just to give laser focus on a problem and just stare at it and move it in your head and come through with an answer, right? This ability to resist distraction, to go deep, to concentrate, to prove something hard was really valued. Well, that's come through in my popular writing now. A lot of what I talk about is sort of the importance of focusing on something, resisting distraction, doing one thing well. So, it's been this interesting back and forth. The writing helps my academic career. The idea is for my academic career come back and affect my writing on other topics. So, it's a great synergy. Uh-huh. So, let me ask you this. I mean, I think it's interesting you brought up the idea of traditional and non-traditional blending together. And I think that that is going to become the norm quite soon. I think we're moving to a place where traditional and non-traditional blending for many people. And my guess is, even people listening to this show, a lot of them come from traditional backgrounds and they're finding themselves on a non-traditional path or trying to get on a non-traditional path. And I'm curious, you know, when we look at our own lives, how do we sort of blend the traditional and the non-traditional in a way that is effective? Yeah, well, I think one way to think about things, it's a little bit maybe unique to our times. And so, you know, I write a lot about this notion of what really matters is career capital. Uh-huh. This idea, when you can do something well that's rare and valuable, you can imagine abstractly that you have more of this substance I call career capital. And the substance you can then invest to get cool things in your life, right? To the more career capital you have, the more control you have of your life. You want a lot of time affluence. You invest career capital to get it. You want autonomy. You invest career capital to get it. You want more connection to people. You want more creativity in your work. All of this are products that you acquire with career capital. The better you are, things that are rare and valuable. The more things you can get in your life. But that model is one that really breaks down these boundaries between, well, here's a traditional job where these are the steps you do, or here's a completely untraditional job, and these are the steps you do. It says, well, no, you're crafting a life that you like by building skills and using them as leverage. And some of that might be kind of traditional. Some of it might be kind of untraditional. That doesn't really matter. You're not saying this is what I do for a living. You're not saying this is, you're saying, no, I'm building up skills. And I'm using them as leverage. I'm using them as capital to craft my life in a cool way. And there could be incredibly traditional elements of that. And there could also be incredibly non-traditional elements. Or if you're someone like me, those two could mix together quite fluidly. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Well, I'm glad you're about the concept of career capital, because obviously that was something that really, I think you spend a lot of time emphasizing in the book. So let's do this. I mean, I think that when I look at the work that you do and having gone through the book, I think what you provide is a framework for how to thrive in our lives and our careers. And I'd love to start basically breaking down that framework for people and really kind of get into the details of it. Really starting with this concept of why following your passion is bad advice. I have my ideas around this, but I know that you've talked about it in the book and it's a large part of your work, because as telling you even before we hit record here, there's plenty of people even on our show who have given that advice. Yeah, it's very popular advice. It's actually relatively recent advice. We really don't hear people talking about this until the '90s. It's also somewhat arbitrary piece of advice, and most importantly, it doesn't work very well. So to be clear, I agree with the goal of ending up passionate about what you do for a living. That is my goal. That's the goal of my book. That's what I write about. It's what I want in my own life. But I think the specific strategy of identifying a pre-existing passion and then pursuing that as your main strategy for ending up loving your work is a flawed strategy. It places way too much emphasis on the match between what you do in some mythical intrinsic trait, some intrinsic preference somewhere in your DNA that says this is the one thing you're meant to do. It places way too much emphasis on that match and not nearly enough emphasis on what the evidence says really matters for loving your work, which is first building up skills. And then once you have those skills, investing them, investing that career capital to craft your career into something you like. If you study people who love what they do, that's almost always their path, right? Until they're really good at something they're working life, then it really get great. And if you focus on the match, you're going to be giving people a red herring. You're putting their attention in the wrong place. You're hurting their chances of ending up loving what they do. Yeah. No doubt. It's interesting as I remember reading through that section on passion and I'm thinking, yeah, I'm incredibly passionate about surfing, but I'm not Kelly Slater. And I will tell you, the handful of times that I've had to work with surf-related clients, even on their social media thinking, hey, this is a cool way to blend these two paths, I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I mean, it's interesting that way. So, which just emphasizes this idea that really what makes people love their work are these particular general traits, like autonomy and impact, creativity, sense of competency. This leads people to love what they do. So the question is, how do you get those in your working life? Well, you have to have rare and valuable skills to offer in return. And that's really what matters. The fact that you've matched what you're doing to a topic that you have a strong preexisting interest to, there's nothing wrong with it, but you really shouldn't expect to get much benefit just from that fact. Just the fact that you really like surfing and you took a particular consulting job related to surfing, you should not expect that you're going to love that consulting job. It's really these traits you get after you get good at things that matter. So that's where I put my emphasis, right? How much career capital do I have? How can I get more? Am I investing the capital I have smartly? Those questions are way more important than what was I put on this earth to do? Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Well, I mean, I think as we were talking about here, like there's certain things, I think that a lot of us couldn't have planned these paths, right? Like Steve Jobs couldn't have sat down and planned to start Apple. And I've always told people there's no way I could have planned to start Blogcast FM. It was the byproduct of a lot of sort of disparate events in my life that somehow came together. Yeah. Which is what's interesting to me about the fact that follow your passion is such a popular piece of advice because it's very easy to validate. All you have to do is go find some people who love what they do and say what's your story. So I did that in researching this book, lots of different people, lots of different field. And it was something like eight or nine out of ten had no idea in advance what they wanted to do. Right. They had no idea when they got started that they would end up doing what they love to do today. So it's a simple idea to test. And if you test it, you see, oh, no one's doing this. Right. This is not the way that 90% of people end up loving what they do. And yet we keep it our primary piece of career advice, which is somewhat puzzling. Mm-hmm. Let's do this. I think that this whole concept of rare and valuable skills in career capital and a bit more depth, you know, one of the things that Chris Gillible often talks about is this concept of convergence. Right. Like finding the thing that, you know, it's weird because sometimes he talks about passion. But I think convergence is really where these, you know, rare and valuable skill comes in because that's how you get paid. And I think, you know, one of the places where people often get trapped is figuring out what those rare and valuable skills are, you know, like I said, I would have never predicted in a million years, my one skill was to learn how to extract information out of people. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think that's true. And I think convergence even by itself, so, which I think of as the sort of classical Venn diagram, you see a lot now, you know, what you really like to do and what people are willing to pay you to do. And you find that intersection and even that concept, I think, needs to be complicated a little bit because the point is the circle of what people are willing to pay you to do is a small little point until you've put in quite a bit of work to build up rare and valuable skills. So if you want to imagine, you know, that Venn diagram of those two things overlapping, what's missing is the three, four, five years of actually expanding that circle of, Hey, here's things people will actually pay me to do to be large enough to actually have a meaningful overlap with something you'd like. So again, any, any approach that really focuses on, you know, you can be loving what you do tomorrow. If you just make the choice properly, if you do the right introspection and you find the right mix of things, I'm skeptical of because the evidence says passion really does grow over time. And so we really do need to move away from crews of use that say you could be loving your job tomorrow. All that matters is you know how to choose the right job. I want to move past match theory and move towards capital theory, which says passion is a product is built over time. It's the, the outcome of a sort of consistent effort over time that try to get more of it in your life. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I can, I was thinking, I said, you know, I didn't start out being passionate about interviewing people and having conversations. It's something that I noticed as I've gotten better at it, I'm much more interested in doing it. Yeah, you're probably much more, your job to you worked on Blockcast FM today, I'm assuming is probably sort of significantly more interesting and fulfilling and something you love than it was on, you know, day 15 of doing it. Oh, yeah. No doubt. Well, you know, so I want to talk about two things. You know, this is, this is, I think this makes a perfect sort of set up to talk about what you call the craftsman mindset, right? Because in a lot of ways, everybody who's listening to this is a creative entrepreneur who is really at the end of the day, becoming masters of their craft. And I want to talk about two things. One, you know, what are the things that we can do on a day to day basis to, to really achieve mastery in our craft? And as we're cultivating that career capital, look for opportunities to invest that career capital, like you talk about, to get opportunities and to translate that career capital into opportunities. Well, in order to actually to build your craft, to build more career capital, one way to think about it is you look at the potential activities you could do in a given day, for example. And for each of these activities, one thing you can do is think about, you know, how hard would this be for someone else to replicate? Someone else who's, you know, intelligent and no stuff, but just kind of off the street, right? Not like an expert in this field. And look for the things that would be very hard for someone else to replicate, the things that are really maybe drawing upon skill that you've developed. Those type of activities, that's where the majority of your time should be. Now, I call that sort of the philosophy of deep work, that the problem of the sort of last 10, 15 years, the rise of distraction culture is that we're spending less and less time on the actual things that we can do that other people can't do that well. We're spending less and less time on those sort of hard, you know, deep attention requiring activities that actually are our craft, value that we're creating new in the world. And we're spending more and more time basically just sort of moving information around, responding to emails, you know, passing links back and forth on Twitter or something like that. So the model that I follow or that I like for making your work into craft is that the bulk of your time should be on these deep activities, the things that's hard for other people to replicate, your effort should be, you know, focused there, improving your ability even more, doing things that are more and more valuable, basically maximizing the amount of new value you're creating for the world. And spend much less time on the things that are not really creating much new value, but maybe just moving it around. That's actually, that's a really interesting way of looking at it and we've never heard it put that way. So let's do this. Do you mind if we take that and sort of frame it in the context of a tactical example? Let's use writing and blogging as sort of a perfect place, because I mean, that's kind of, you know, one of the things you talk about in the book is this whole idea of the lifestyle, the design vlogger and the passive income stories and all of that. And a lot of people hearing this have probably been exposed to those kinds of stories as well. And you know, like we said earlier, we can kind of blame Tim Ferriss for some of this, but I'd love for you to talk about exactly what you just mentioned in the context of that, because I think that that's where people are going to really relate and understand how to apply it in their own lives. Yeah. So if you think about writing, for example, whether it be for blogs or books, right? The deep activity there is actually writing. And not just writing for the sake of writing, but actually stretching yourself, right? I want this to be good. I'm pushing this post, I'm pushing this book chapter, I'm pushing myself here to sort of incorporate better dialogue, better integration of narrative, better integration of outside facts. There's all sorts of things you do as a writer to sort of push yourself. And this type of approach would say that should be the bulk of your time. So if you take someone like me, for example, I've never had a social media account of any type. I've never had a Facebook profile, I've never had a Twitter profile. My website's been pretty bad looking, finally, finally having a professional designer do it and not have it be something I hacked together while a grad student. But you know what? I put all of that time that I spent writing just on the writing, you know, always trying to push myself to become a better writer. I would take on specific challenges in between books. Okay, I want to improve this particular aspect of my writing. And I would take on commissions, article commissions, just to push those skills. And that's where I put basically 99% of my time as a writer into that deep activity. And so I don't spend a lot of time doing other types of promotion. I'm not really accessible on Twitter. I mean, I know you had to go through my publicist to find me. But that's a perfect example of sort of this mindset of craftsmanship and depth. But ultimately what matters is how well do you do the thing you do best? And almost always, it's better to put more time back into that than to put it on sort of surrounding activities that are pretty easily replicatable. Well, you know, I'll tell you what I have found with the surrounding activities, right? I mean, because it's not like I can sit down and I can interview somebody every hour of every day. But what I realized with the surrounding activities is they give you this false sense of productivity and this false sense of achievement. Oh, yeah. I mean, so I call that shallow work when I'm just doing my own sort of internal thinking. And I'm very afraid of shallow work. That's part of the reason why I've never joined social networks is because I don't trust myself. It's so attractive. The stuff you can do shallowy on there, it just it hits all of the buttons. Semi-personalized, intermittently reinforced input, right? I mean, that's what a Facebook wall is. And man, we're wired for that. At any moment, there could be someone saying something about me. It's like putting a gambling addict in a casino and locking the doors amongst the students. There are people saying stuff about you right now, Cal, while we're having this conversation because I put up a Facebook status of it saying I'm interviewing Cal Newport this morning. So it's not that I think the technologies are bad. I don't trust myself. But I think that's, you know, that's a big worry. It's something I think a lot about. It's very easy to get in the shallow work as an academic. I think this comes up a lot because, you know, what a perfect example. You get a few years to try being a professor and then you have this tenure process, which basically says, hey, did you create real value in the last five years? Did you have like a new idea that the world finds important? If so, you can keep your job otherwise you're fired. That really focuses you in a great way. It really gets you thinking critically about false productivity versus, you know, real deep work actually creating new value because essentially, you know, you lose your job if you go for the former instead of the latter. So I don't know. I think about that a lot, but I sort of expect that we're going to hear more about it and more and more fields because it's going to be one of the defining issues, probably, of knowledge work. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Well, I want to go back to something you said when we were talking about writing. You said, you know, like you look at ways to push yourself and you identify a particular aspect or a component of your writing where you want to stretch yourself and push your boundaries. I mean, for me, that thing, I think the entire theme of this year has been transparency and telling the stories that are, you know, you think maybe this will be career suicide and those have turned out to be really amazing, you know, ways to transform my writing. And I think I finally found my voice as a result. But what I'm curious about is how people, one, identify a particular aspect and then to put that whole practice of stretching and pushing their boundaries into, you know, into a practical, you know, to put it into practice in their life and their work. I mean, an idea surrounding this has been helpful to me. Came out of a sort of famous interview that Ira Glass did about creative life, building a creative life. So he did this sort of famous interview. You can find it online. And what was important for me about that interview is that he said, first of all, it's hard work and you have, it takes a long time to get good and we've sort of heard that. But what he added to it was this notion that what's important is that you have good taste and that you develop good taste. In other ways, you're able to look at stuff in your field and really know what's good and what's not and see that, okay, my stuff's okay, but this stuff's much better. And being able to do that is, like, the foundation on which you can actually transform effort into progress. So I've taken that to mean that, you know, if you write, for example, you have to spend a huge amount of time reading and talking to other writers because if you don't have good taste, if you haven't developed your ability to recognize why these people are better than you, it's very hard to push yourself. You can write a thousand blog posts without getting any better at writing, but you can write ten blog posts and get much better at writing, it just depends what you're actually trying to accomplish. And so for me, I spend a lot of time reading people who are much better writers than me, trying to understand why they're better writers than me, trying to understand what I like about their writing and then trying, often embarrassingly at first, to replicate it. So it's like you build your taste, if you can build good taste in what you do, then you can start making your stuff better. What's interesting, you know, I mean, I would say taste drives a lot of how I select guests for broadcast FM as well, and part of that is something that I've cultivated over time. The way I choose people now is really different than it was in the beginning, and the beginning was like anybody who wants to be on the show is fair game. Right, and I bet right now, when you listen to other interviewers, you probably have an excellent sense of, oh, they're not very good, oh, they're great, and what makes them great, which probably means you're getting huge returns out of the type of guests you bring on and the type of interviews you do because you actually know what you're striving for. And so that's why you're getting better and better and are so good at what you do now. Well, you know, it's funny because I jokingly have been telling people, I said, you know, I see an entire industry go in a direction, and my instinct is to go in the opposite direction. It's like go as far to the edges you can go and find the people that we wouldn't find on other podcasts, you know, and that's led to a really diverse set of perspectives, and I think that's another point, as far as developing taste, you know, I had Robert Green here, and he always told me this, and I mentioned this a thousand times because I feel like it's still so relevant is the importance of a diversity of inputs into our life when, you know, the temptation is to basically surround yourself with nothing but social media and lifestyle design blogs. Yeah, I mean, if you, the killer combination, I think, is that you have the good filter, right? The good taste. You can recognize something good when you see it, and then you couple that with a huge amount of inputs. I think that's where real innovation and real creative ideas come out of that combination. Well, let's do this. Let's shift gears a little bit, and let's sort of talk about kind of, you know, what happens once you get to this point of being so good they can't ignore you. You know, you got, because, you know, another component of this that you talk about a lot is, you know, missions behind your work and little bets, and I can tell you, the mission component of what people do, I've realized, is probably one of the common threads between everybody I've had here who's really successful, they're really clear on what the mission is, and you know, we can blame Simon Sinek for this to some degree, but they're very clear on why they do the things they do, and I'm curious how we kind of find that and cultivate that in our own work. Yeah, this turns out to be, you know, a very powerful factor. If you study people who love what they do, there's various themes to come up, and one of the common themes is mission. So not everyone who loves what they do has a mission for their working life, but those who do have a mission tend to love what they do. So I spend some time studying this phenomenon, and I think the high level point, the important point about really good organizing missions for your working life could be a source of passion is they almost always require that you build career capital first, that if you study people who say, "This is what my working life is about," and they're successful added and happy, they almost always started by getting good, building expertise first, and it turns out there's a lot of reasons why basically real innovation, real original ideas require relevant expertise as a precondition, and that's important because there's a lot of people who want mission for their working life, but are trying to identify it before they've built up any particular expertise, and it's almost like trying to make a scientific breakthrough before you've actually learned the science. It's almost definitely not going to happen. On the other hand, if you actually put in the time to build expertise and are one of the few people who get there and then say, "Now I'm going to look around and look for something new to do with this expertise," you have a pretty good chance of coming up with something that's really exciting and passion producing. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, as I'm listening to you say that, and as I was reading through the book, I was thinking about sort of, you know, Chris Gullible's World Domination Summit and even our upcoming event, the Instigator Experience, and, you know, I've said this before, I said it, you know, the Instigator Experience is a byproduct of a lot of little bets, like, you know, the idea, "Hey, what if we interviewed three people at the same time we did it via teleseminar?" And it turns out to be a hit, you know, like, "Okay, well, how can we, let's try that one more time?" And if it works, then you think about, "Okay, how can you outdo that?" But I also realize, you know, in a lot of ways, I couldn't pull off the Instigator Experience without having done 400 interviews, and I wouldn't have even known who the right guest was. It's not like the idea hadn't entered my mind years ago. And I think part of it is that I've built a lot of social and career capital with the people that I'm bringing together as speakers and all that. And, you know, I think about kind of how many little bets it took to get there. Yeah, so you're heading on two good points there. So the first is right, you're confirming what I just said, that you have to be good at something before you can really find these sort of great ideas. So you became very good at doing the style of interview. That was to precondition for you start to have actionable, interesting ideas like this conference. Now, the second point that I think is good that you mentioned was, "Okay, once you are really good at something, how do you find these good ideas built on your expertise?" And that strategy you keep mentioning little bets is a great one. And that came up often in my research that it's a pretty common pattern. Someone gets good at something. So they have expertise, and then they ask, "Okay, how can I use this expertise to sort of find an original idea, something, you know, Kris Grubro approved, right, sort of a world domination, a kind of cool idea?" Little bets is a common strategy that the people I interviewed used. They said, "Well, let me try something. Something that, you know, takes more than a day but not more than a few months and get feedback from the world about it. How did it go? How did it work?" So you try in different interview formats, once you actually had the expertise to actually get guessed and do good interviews, is a classic example of a little bet. And often this is what happens. People get good and they start trying these different things, and it gives them really good feedback from the world about what's interesting and what's not. And out of there emerges this eventually a really cool idea that injects a lot of passion into their working life. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I mean, the entire story of Blockcast FM is little bets. I mean, this all started as a blog post, which I've mentioned before, so I don't want to belabor that point. But yeah, everything I do, that whole concept has been instrumental in the way I approach my work because I think that, you know, people always think, you know, "Hey, you have to have these huge ideas." And I've hit this, beat this like a dead horse only because I feel like so many people get caught up in big ideas. Big ideas are often cause them to stall. And I've said your small ideas matter just as much, if not more, than your big ones. Yeah, and this turns out to be almost always the case. I mean, am I writing? This has always been the case. I don't just sit back and say, "What's my next book going to be about?" Almost always. It comes out of, "Well, okay, originally there was a blog post that caught some attention and then I started writing some more blog posts and then this caught some more and then I went and gave some talks and then I met this person," you know, just these experiments that emerges. Same thing in academia. I learned a little while ago that you can't, no matter how much you want to have an original, you know, scientific idea, no one just sits there and stares at the wall until it comes to them. Instead, they write lots of papers. This is what people did. The best Nobel Prize winning, most productive, most innovative researchers, what do they have in common? They write lots of papers. Every one of those is a little bet. And no one cares about 99% of them, but they're out there experimenting so much more, shipping and again and again and again, that of course they're going to be the people who eventually figure out, "Oh my God, if we just combine this technique with this concept, we can solve this problem over here." They're in the position to do that because they've tried out and exposed themselves to 50 techniques and they know about 20 different open problems and they've tried 25 different connections before then. So this notion that you take experiments, you ship again and again instead of trying to sit back until you're ready to take the big swing, I think is a really powerful idea. Mark something uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from uncommon goods. The busy holiday season is here and uncommon goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand-pick gifts for everyone on your list all in one spot. Gifts that spark joy, wonder delight and that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. 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Or they're like, "What's the point?" But what I want to get from this sort of is one, how do you figure out, because people have hundreds of ideas, even small ones. So one, how do you figure out which ones are worth doing? Two, how do you get the most valuable feedback that you can from them? And three, how do you iterate on it so that the next time you go through it, you kind of improve on what you've done before? First of all, it helps to put in the place diligence, which I define in the way that Steve Martin defined a word when talking about his rise as a comedian. He said diligence is not about sticking to the same thing, it's about avoiding things that aren't it. So that's how I would start, that you have a particular direction in which you're putting down your chips, okay? It's in this type of writing. It's in doing this type of audio form interview. It's in this field of academia. And you stay within those confines for a long time, because you need that type of constraint in order to actually build capital, build skill. Okay, so now once you're within a constrained area, then, you know, when you're choosing things to do, use that same test I talked about before. Well, how easy would this be for someone else to replicate? Is this really leveraging an expertise I've already started building, something I'm known to be good at? Or is this just, anyone could do this, you had, you know, 25 hours to spend? And let that steer you towards things that are going to produce more value. And then beyond that, you just have to ship, you know, once something seems good, this is using my expertise, it's within this area that I've committed to for the next few years, then you get it done, and you ship, and you make completion, something that you're addicted to, something that you're always looking to get to. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, as I'm listening to say that, I think back to something my friend Paul Jarvis said, you know, when I asked her about kind of his whole process, I mean, he's the design and technical mastermind behind people like Daniel Laport and Marie Forleo. And he said, Ben, he's like, the way I look at it is I frame everything in my life as an experiment, because he said then when you frame everything as an experiment, he said failure becomes kind of impossible. And it's funny, right? Because you're an academic. My guess is that large amounts of failure are a part of your life on a daily basis. Yeah, we try to publish articles in venues that accept 10% of the articles. I mean, we fail all the time, even when we think we've succeeded, and that's not even counting all the proofs and techniques and algorithms that just never come together. So let me ask you this. I mean, I think that the nature of what you do probably allows you to develop a capacity for handling failure in a way that the average person doesn't. And I'm wondering how do we cultivate that? Because I think to do creative work, you have to have a tolerance for risk and failure that is unusually high. Well, I think having a vision for what you're doing, having these sort of meta rules around what you're doing helps. And I have this notion of, OK, I'm going to try to become this type of writer. And I sort of know how that happens, and I have a plan for it. I'm going to start writing short stories and try to get them published in these places. And I know most of them will get rejected, and I'll do the Stephen King thing and stick to rejections on a nail till the nail gets too full, and I'll put in a bigger nail. But I know that I'm going to stretch myself each time, and I'm getting feedback, and I see my writing's getting better, and then eventually I get, you know, I'm going to get personal notes on the rejection letters, and then they'll get published, and then I can start writing novels. Like, you have this vision that's not arbitrary, sort of an evidence-based vision, that this is how people get good and succeed in what I want to do. And I'm following that plan well. When you have that type of clarity about what you're doing, then, yeah, failure is part of the plan. If on the other hand, it's just sort of, hey, I'm going to go do national novel writing month, and maybe I'll just sort of write a novel in 30 days, and just, you know, oh, I hope that doesn't get rejected or something like that, just sort of random, sort of throwing something out their approach, then everything can be much more scary, because you don't know what is rejection mean. What am I doing? Is this stupid that I'm even trying this? You get all those worries. That's why I like this diligence notion, that it's like, this is what I'm doing. This is where I'm putting my chips down, and I'm going to spend a significant amount of the next part of my life working in this direction, and here's how I'm going to do it. That type of clarity, I think, helps with a lot of the otherwise somewhat crippling psychological roadblocks. Yeah, I love that. I mean, to me, I think that what I have found is that you're constantly sort of stepping outside of your comfort zone slightly, and then the boundary changes every single time you make that step. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just a constant, with people who end up doing really interesting creative work is that every project they take on, it's, okay, in which way am I stretching myself here? Okay, I haven't really done it. I'm using the writing example here. I haven't really done this type of writing, but I'm going to integrate more of that. And then you're really afraid of it, and it's hard, and it's uncomfortable, but then you're better at it by the time you finish, and so you're constantly a little bit uncomfortable. You're a little bit uncomfortable, but you're also constantly shipping, and you're uncomfortable in a very directed way, you know, because you have that taste, and you're stretching yourself in the ways that you know are going to make you better. That's all the sort of ingredients in that creative life, building value, building things that people care about types too. Yeah, yeah. No doubt. I mean, I think, you know, our conference is a perfect example of stretching, right? Like it's like, okay, this is outside of the comfort zone, but I know also once it's done, like what my comfort zone is will be a whole new ballgame. Yeah. There's going to be a few years from now, you're thought of doing an intimate conference of that size is going to be, oh man, how easy and refreshing that would be, you know, if you're heading off to your 3000 person summit, right? Well, I always, yeah, I jokingly tell people right now I feel like I'm starting, you know, planning a wedding and starting a religion at the same time. Yeah. And five years from now, you'll think of that as like your week in chore. Well, let's, let's shift gears a little bit, and let's actually talk about sort of your book writing process, the book deal, and some of this component of it, because I think that, you know, this is also relevant to a lot of creative entrepreneurs, as you and I were talking about before we kind of hit record here, you know, you're seeing people get book deals and record numbers and not all books are great, but I want to do two things here. I want to talk first about the book writing process, kind of one, identifying the seeds for a book and knowing when you're ready to write a book, because that's, I think that's one thing. People assume they're ready much earlier than they are, and that's when they find, they get a bit of a rude awakening, and then of course, sort of dissecting the process for writing a book, because you know, you're writing a book and writing an individual blog post to entirely different animals. Yeah, it is very different. I mean, among other things, if we're talking nonfiction, people give you money to do it, and they give you money to do it before you've written the book, which often people don't other, don't realize, you're getting an investment from a publisher when you write a nonfiction book. They say, okay, we like the idea, we like you, here's money, and then we're going to trust that you're going to come back with a good book. And that's, you know, that's a process that's hard to get someone to do. People don't like to give away money, so where I think people don't place enough emphasis is on the idea itself and why they're the right person to write it. You almost have to imagine like you're going on that TV show Shark Tank, right? I mean, you are going to have to make a really good pitch that like this book has a market, it's, there's other books kind of like it that did well, but nothing just like it and that you're the right person to write it. And I don't know if people necessarily always put enough attention into that piece. They move too quickly from, I have some idea that seems somewhat interesting. Let me move on to the next step. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, if you're sort of looking for threads in your work, I mean, clearly you've been at this for a long time before this book came out. I mean, like, if I'm going, you know, I'm, there's connections going off on my head now for the first time that are honestly like in four years, I didn't realize a lot of them in terms of finding common threads between our guests, common themes, you know, and that's why, you know, when my friend Christina said, you know, you know, you've got the potential to write a book that could be somewhat timeless, I said, I'm not interested in writing any other book then. I said, I'll come back to you in a year or two when I have something that I think is worth talking about. But if we're looking for threads in our own work, any suggestions on how we find those or mine, mine through our own work? So you're talking about, like, threads, for example, that might lead to a book that persists over, that might lead to, yeah, well, I mean, I can tell you what seems to matter when you sell a nonfiction book is that not just that the book is a good idea, but that you really are the right person to write that book. So when looking for mining a book idea out of your personal experience, it has to be something that really is informed by your personal experience. If it's generic advice that, you know, almost anyone could give, they don't see the reason to give you that book, might as well have a better known writer do the book. So in some sense, it has to be what you're selling is not just this idea, but the fact that from your personal experiences, you're the right person, you're the right person in the world right now to be expressing this idea, that it comes out of your expertise and your experience. So it has to be sort of personalized. So when thinking about the book ideas, I think starting from what is unique to me, what is it that I do in my business? What is it that personal experience that's unique about me? Those are the right types of questions to be asking. Okay, that's awesome because I think that'll open up a lot. Like I love those questions because they open up, you know, a lot of possibilities. There's so many different answers to those. So talk to me about sort of the tactical day-to-day writing process of your book, like what did that look like? Because I know that, you know, I mean, to put together the arc in narrative and to have it flow in a proper way, that takes some serious skill. Yeah, yeah, sure, well, writing's hard. This was my fourth book, so I've been through it a couple of times. You know, so I think the key elements of my process is, you know, I write a lot. I don't always describe to the right everyday philosophy, I usually call it right every week. In other words, when I lay out my week, I lay out, here's where I'm going to write. And it's a significant amount of time, right? So writing takes time. So that's a key thing. A second key thing is I plan on pencil and paper, right, and I don't, you know, it's not fiction or anything. This is advice, nonfiction, but I'll usually do my research and I'll work through the ideas on foot walking. I do a lot of my sort of writing, walking, and then I use notebooks I bring with me to start sketching how I want the chapter to flow, what makes sense, and then I walk and think some more and change those sketches. And I usually try to have a pretty good sense of what I want to say, how I'm going to say it and confidence that I'm saying it in a way that it's good and valuable and smart before I start typing. So there's quite a bit of work happens away from the computer in this process as well. Yeah, that somehow that doesn't surprise me and it's advice that I've heard from a lot of people. I mean, it kind of goes back to our point about this endless amount of information that is at our disposal and how it can be really distracting. I think that noise gets in the way of what we're truly thinking far too often. It does. And just not, you know, sometimes here's the problem when you write in sort of a advice space or nonfiction space is that there's a tendency to see what you're doing as like a to-do list item. And I always get distressed when like the blogger friends of mine or something who are working on a book will say like, okay, I got to shut down for the next month because, you know, I got to write my book manuscript. I'm just going to write every day at hours and get this done like it's a to-do list when I think there needs to be more of a sense of craftsmanship. You know, it's not just putting in your thousand words. It's about really finding a nice way to say what you want to say and really, you know, taking the time to say, let me bowl this chapter over or let me, I have, you know, notebooks full of outlines and I can't quite get it right and being excited about the structure you came up with. And then when you write, getting excited about the word choice and the rhythm and these sort of things, this doesn't get talked about a lot. But really, you know, professional writers, like the ones I admire and aspire towards the professional high-end like nonfiction writers put a huge amount of time into the craft of how they say things, how they structure things, the rhythm of their words. And you don't hear enough about that often. It gets way more simplified than like, you know, an exercise routine or something. You know, I just like get my thousand words in because I'm organized and I'm scheduled and I will power. We don't talk enough about the craft, but that's actually one of the most fulfilling parts about writing. Even if you're in our world and doing, you know, advice and not war and peace. Yeah, I love that. It's the first time you're right. It doesn't get talked about very often and it's funny because I'm in the camp of, you know, I do, I mean, I do spend a lot of time thinking about my ideas and, you know, I have my digital disconnects and that's where a lot of them start. But I also am, like, to me, I wake up in the morning and I write. At this point, it's as, you know, second nature is brushing my teeth. But I also realize I don't publish half of what I write. Like the stuff that I share is stuff that I've put a lot of thought into. Yeah, and blogging, for example, is a little bit different too because there's actually, you know, there's value and part of the value of blogging is why I do it probably why you do it too is that you can work through a lot of ideas and get feedback. I mean, it's an incredible tool. If you want to be a book writer, you should blog because you get not just practice, but like real time feedback on ideas, which is fantastic. But to me, that has even a different feel, right? Like you want it necessarily want to, if you, you don't want to craft the blog post like you might have a book chapter, but that's because a book chapter you want to be around, you know, it's just one of 15 in a book that's going to take you, that's different than it's a blog post. It's one of three that week or something. So I guess the, maybe one of the ways to say what I'm saying is that if you're working on a book, it should feel different than a blog in some systems. Those are two different things with two different goals. Let me ask you this. You know, once you have sort of this outline process, I mean, what is actually putting it together, like the assembly of it and the arc and narrative look like? I mean, is your process linear from that point forward or do you, do you write in a non-linear fashion and then go back and put it together? Because, you know, for the most part, I've heard the thing that at least freed me up to start working on bigger bodies of work was to take, take the non-linear approach to this. So are you talking non-linearity on the scale of like work on chapter 10 and then go back and go back and chapter 1? Precisely. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, there is a lot of, there is a lot of going back. I mean, for me, as I put a lot of work in the, at first trying to get the outline right, but it's really hard to know until you've really done all the research you've written the book exactly what's going to be best. So I see it as tentative. What's in the book proposal is my best idea at the time of what the structure of the book will look like. And the same thing when I'm writing a particular chapter, I do my best to outline it the way I want to write it. But then there's a lot of going back and forth and no, no, no, I'm going to say this this way and I need the, this wasn't the best way, I'm going to get rid of this piece and change this piece. And in the chapter, there's a lot of bouncing back and forth. And then as the chapter start to come together, then your overall outline starts to change because you realize I don't want to talk about that there here and we don't really need to make this point. So nonlinearity is a good way of thinking about it. You keep laying out these roadmaps and then you dive in and all the lines get messed up again and then you step back out and try to redraw the road map and you do that again and again. Well, you know, I guess for me as I was listening to describe that process, I thought, wow, I mean, and I've mentioned this analogy before in terms of how we treat advice in the online world. But even for this process, your outline becomes a compass more than a map, it seems like. That's a good way of thinking about it. Yeah. And then you get some updates as you go along about, oh, actually, I think the real direction I need to go from here is this. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I always say the view keeps changing with every step forward. So you see things that you didn't see before. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my hundredth mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 and what power there's still people paying two or three times that much. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch or whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of city details. Yeah, that's hundred percent true. Let's do this. Let's shift gears a little bit. We'll start wrapping things up here because I know we're almost at an hour. One of the questions that I, this is just out of personal interest and this is something I figured I want to talk to you because you're a college professor and we were having a brief discussion about it before is kind of how all of this is changing the world of education. I mean, you've got a firsthand view into a world that, in a lot of ways, education is in a state of disruption at this point and largely the people who listen to this show and people who are like me and people like Dale Stevens are responsible for that. And I would love to hear kind of what your thoughts are around, what are the implications of this for the future of education? Yeah, it definitely is in a state of disruption and I can tell you everyone within academia is just as interesting about this as the Dale Stevens of the world who are knocking down the gates from the outside too because it's our livelihood. You know, I think one of the, so there's this dissatisfaction often with education, especially higher education, you know, that there's so many schools and people aren't sure they're really getting their value out of these schools and I think there's going, there needs to be within traditional academia, there needs to be in some sense a hardening of the curriculum and maybe curriculum is not the right word, but school, if you're going to a university, a traditional university, especially an elite university, you get the sense that the student should be challenged more in certain ways, that it needs to be a strong, impossible experience and so in particular, this notion of intellectual depth, you know, the ability to go into something intellectual and complicated that's really deeply and to really be pushed, right? That's something that you can get out of a good university that is sort of hard to get on your own, right? This sit there with a professor who's an expert on Greek philosophy and to be brought along properly, it just can teach you a level of sort of depth and intensity of thinking that I think is very valuable, but that needs to be pushed for, you know, the idea that you have to do hard cognitive things without distraction, without, you know, looking at Facebook or looking at your phone or something like that, that should be more of a prize skill that you come out of university with, people come out of here saying I know how to actually go deep on something, go deep on something cognitively demanding, give it attention, not be distracted, I mean, you should come away with that. I think people should come out of university more with the ability to actually take value from great thinkers throughout history. And more and more, this is not the case, that you can leave the university and not really know how to pick up, say, Plato or Nietzsche or Freud or whatever, the great thinkers of their time and actually get real wisdom out of their books. And that's actually somewhat new and the whole history of sort of higher education, whatever the 500 year history is, educated people, part of what they got out of it was an ability to draw value out of the insights of humanity up to that point. And more and more, people can leave even a liberal education and not have that ability because it's hard to gain. So what I see for the sort of future of especially sort of liberal education is that it's not going to be for everyone, but the people for who it is for need to come out with more value. They need to come out with this ability to do real intellectual depth, this ability to do deep attention and to have a life of the mind that's not distracted and have the ability to draw from the whole world of ideas easily to actually read Plato for fun and profit and not just as an exercise in writing a paper that don't really know what it's about. So that's what I see, it's harder, it's more focused, it's more high valued and it's less general. Maybe there's different options for people educationally and the sort of standard option now is going to get narrower, it's going to get harder and it's going to produce more value for those who do it. It's funny, I think as I've mentioned to you, my business school experience kind of walked out and I'm like, wow, I don't know how to do a damn thing, how is that possible? Ten years of work and two degrees and I don't know how to do anything and I realize it's partially because of exactly what you're talking about, there's no depth in a lot of what they do. I gave a talk to some Pepperdine students a few months about a year ago and I said, look, I'm like if you guys do nothing other than show up for class and get good grades, you're a commodity. I think you're going to have to do a lot more than that. Yeah, and look, the Marines have this great marketing tool that basically, they know how to market by saying, yeah, you probably can't cut it. This really isn't for most people. You kind of feel like there should be more of that in elite education, right? It should be, hey, this is hard, right? I mean, we're going to, if you make it through here and get good grades and this stuff, you're really going to have a pretty sharp mind, you're really going to be pretty sharp on the things you studied. I mean, you really are going to be able to go deep. This is not a, you know, you come in, you're on Facebook, you do a little bit of work and get your A's. In some sense, by making it harder, by saying, this is not for everyone. I mean, this is pretty demanding. I think you're going to make it more appealing. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Well, Cal, I have one final question for you and, you know, this is something that I've closed all our interviews with and in a lot of ways, you've kind of answered it throughout our conversation, but I kind of want to bring it all together. You know, it's interesting because, you know, I looked at people throughout your book, you know, obviously having interviewed 400 of some of the most extraordinary and remarkable people I've ever discovered, one of the things that I've constantly been trying to identify and I jokingly call this the research for the book that I don't know that I'm going to write, is, you know, you've got such an interesting world at your fingertips, right, where, you know, we all have the same tools, we all have the same resources at our disposal, yet there's two groups of people that I see, those who become so good that know people can't ignore them and those who don't. And I'm wondering what you think it is that distinguishes those two groups, like what makes the Chris Gillabos, the world, the Chris Gillabos, and what makes the person who doesn't get to that level, the person who doesn't get to that level? I think focus plays a big role. Right. I mean, we all have the capability of leveraging these tools. We all have the ability of sort of doing interesting things, but it's not until we're really creating substantial new value in the world that interesting things start to happen. And I mean, this was the whole theme of my book was once people get good at something and create new value, their jobs get really cool. So focus on that more than finding the perfect job. And I think that's what, in some sense, different changes, if you take two people who both have ambitions to dominate, be world dominating, to do something interesting, do something creative, and one of them ends up actually having an impact and the other person ends up sort of suspending their wheels. I think it's that focus of their efforts that matters, that you have to actually create substantial new value for cool things to happen. And to do that is a process of focus and diligence. So it takes time, it takes time if you concentrate in your efforts in the same area and pushing yourself again and again for months and then years, that type of focus that you don't get caught up in another unrelated project or start another venture that seems to separate. I mean, look at Chris Grubrow with his country visiting plan, right? Talk about focus. That's like 10 years. I mean, I first met him, he was, the number was much smaller now he's done. That's an effort of like, I'm focusing my energy. Yeah, we can all do cool things, but his actually took a concentrated effort and a huge amount of attention to energy over like seven or eight years. So that's what I think matters. When your break happens, how it happens, a lot of luck is in that. But the precondition is this sort of consistent focus application of effort in sort of the same area. The more value you're producing the world, the sort of the bigger the odds that you're going to pull the triple cherries on the slant machine. I think that's just a brilliant way of summing it up. I love that you brought up sort of this consistent focus because I think that it's often overlooked. We often see people when they arrive and you talked about your big break. You know, the thing that I found when I talk to people about that moment is that they get the big break, but then they realize that the whole concept of the big break is just a complete myth because the real reward, even as Seth Godin said in the Icarus deception, is that you get to do the work that you wanted to do all along. Yeah. And if you talk to people who've had sort of big breaks, I mean, sometimes they come out of nowhere, but often they're sort of anti-climatic because they usually had this long ramp-up period where their value was really recognized and they were, so they're already happy. It was like, okay, I love it. Like I'm good at what I do, I'm respected for it, like, this is all great. And then, oh, by the way, you're, you know, this book of yours just sold a lot of copies or something like that. And that's, it becomes almost like, oh, that was like a nice little bonus, but the, by the time the break comes, they're already where they wanted to be and it's not really about the break anymore. It's about, hey, I'm producing real value and I'm respected for it and it's giving me autonomy and my life is giving me a mission. You know, that's what, that's what drives people. That's what creates passion. And if you're doing that, well, you're going to have these cool breaks along the way and they're fun, but it's really not what it's all about. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I always call it the domino effect that occurs in slow motion. Yeah. I think, or the Matthew effect, I think, is another way of thinking about it that sort of as you do things, as you get better at things, you start to get more and more good things easier, you know, so it's, it's, once you get really good, it's something you start to get really cool opportunities that kind of come along for free, opportunities you would have killed for when you first got started. And when they finally come, they took no effort, right? You spend all of your time when you have a new blog, you know, trying to get people to sort of link to you or something, but then once the blog is good and you've established it, you sort of can't even keep track of all the links that are happening, you know. It's funny how it works. So really, if you put your attention on building the skills, creating value, it's almost everything else follows from that. Yeah. Well, Cal, first off, let me say, you know, if you're not going to be able to do this, sorry, you've been absolutely phenomenal as I expected you would be and now I can see why I got so many requests to have you here on the show. I can't thank you enough for, for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners. And this has been really, really cool. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I mean, it was good conversation. I'm sure having some new insights myself have to go write these down. Today's episode of the unmistakable creative has been brought to you by FreshBooks, the simple accounting solution for business owners who want to skip the headaches of tax time, no more hunting receipts, digging for invoices, or going through records one at a time. For a limited time, you can try it free for 60 days. That's two whole months to see how much more efficient it will make your invoicing process. Visit getfreshbooks.com to learn more. And remember, when you get to the how did you hear about a section, enter unmistakable creative. And don't forget, when you support our sponsors, you support our show. You've been listening to the unmistakable creative podcast. Visit our website at unmistakablecreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives. If there's one thing that my family and friends know me for, it's being an amazing gift-giver. I owe it all to Celebrations Passport from 1800flowers.com. My one-stop shopping site that has amazing gifts for every occasion. With Celebrations Passport, I get free shipping on thousands of amazing gifts, and the more gifts I give, the more perks and rewards I earn. To learn more and take your gift-giving to the next level, visit 1800flowers.com/acast. That's 1800flowers.com/acast. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? What if you could turn that fear into creative fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called The Four Keys to Success in an AI world, and this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. We're talking about real differentiators here, like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and much more. Inside you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person, or simply someone who loves personal development. This isn't a story about tech taking over, it's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI. Picture this AI as your creative co-pilot, not just as a tool, but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills. The Four Keys ebook will show you exactly how to do that and view AI in a new way that empowers you instead of overshadows you. Transform your creative potential today. Get over to unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys. Use the number four K-E-Y-S that's unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys and download your free copy. [BLANK_AUDIO]

In this unmistakable classic we revisit our interview with Georgetown professor and author Cal Newport who talks to us about how to be so good they can't ignore you.

How Cal Has Blended a Traditional and Untraditional Path
A Look at the Early Creation Process of Cal's Study Guides
Lessons from the MIT Theory of Computation Group
The Importance of Focus and Resisting Distractions
What it Takes to Develop Career Capital (Rare and Valuable Skills)
How Skills Give You More Leverage Than a Set Career Path
The Arbitrary Advice of Following Your Passion – And Why It's Flawed
Why You have to Become Really Good at Something to Love Your Work
Traits That Lead People to Absolutely Love What They Do
Making the Transition Match Theory to Capital Theory
The Philosophy of Deep Work and Becoming a Master of Your Craft
Why Cal Newport has No Social Media Accounts
The Importance of Developing Taste in Your Work
Looking at the Mission Behind Somebody's Work
The Framework of Little Bets to Make Progress with Your Ideas
Why Publishers are Like Investors When it Comes to Your Book Deal
Finding the Threads that Persist in Your Body of Work

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