I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. All right. So I'm here in my deep work HQ joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, happy new year. Happy new year. This is the fifth calendar year in which the deep questions podcast has broadcast. That's impressive. So there we go. This has been a longer term part of my life than I guess I realized. It's starting to go back now. We've been at it for a while.
I like to start each show as I have been recently doing the brag corner. I always try to find something to brag about the new book, Slow Productivity. We're starting to, you know, it's been a little while since the book came out. So we're starting to run out of things, but we got the next big idea club. This is the.
The subscription book box that was started by Gladwell and Adam Grant and Dan Pink and Susan Cain. They named Slow Productivity as one of their best books of 2024. Their 24 best books of 2024. There was something else. It wasn't the Pulitzer Prize. Nobel Prize? It didn't win the Nobel Prize. There was something else. It was selected for that, and then it was selected for something else. I don't know.
Good stuff. So, you know, definitely check it out. All right. So we got a good show. You know, we're back in action. We're in the new year. We're rolling. with the sort of course correction, self-improvement theme. We got a great deep dive today that ties back to the holiday period we just ended, which I think you'll enjoy. Then we got a bunch of good questions from our listeners and in the...
Final segment, because it's our first episode of 2025, the first episode of January 2025, we'll do the books I read in December. Remember, Thriller December. You'll hear about the thrillers I read during last December. A couple of notes about fans. They're very curious about the thrillers. And also they've been emailing me asking about what your next book after the deep life book is going to be. I haven't figured that one out yet. I think eruption two.
A sequel to Michael Crichton and James Patterson's book, Eruption, that just goes back and explains who the characters are because I could not follow. All right, enough nonsense. Let's get started with our deep dive. So this Christmas was just passed. Really, for the first time, I found myself watching multiple Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies.
This all transpired because I came across an interesting article written by the New York Times cultural critic Amanda Hess. The article was titled How I Aged into the Bad Christmas Movie. It was an interesting discussion which piqued my interest, so I decided to go watch some of these movies.
over the break. And what I want to argue today is that in watching these movies, I identified an unexpected but interesting connection to one of the major ideas we talk about on the show, an idea that is very relevant to the New Year season where we are right now. So let's start with this article. I'll pull it up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. Here is the article from The New York Times, How I Aged Into the Bad Christmas Movie.
written by Amanda Hess. So I want to start for those who are like I was until recently uninitiated with these movies. What are they about? So I'm going to read from this article up here on the screen. This is Amanda Hess's. summary of the typical Hallmark Christmas movie. So quote, the protagonist will be a pastry chef or a gift wrap shop owner or a candy cane company CEO. She will acquire an Alaskan inn.
or she will inherit a Scottish castle, or her flight will be diverted to a Christmas-themed town. By the way, Jesse, I watched both the Scottish castle movie and the flight being diverted to the Christmas-themed town. I saw both those movies. She will become a recent widower. She will meet a recent widower. I feel a lot more dark if early in the movie she becomes a widower. She will meet a recent widower or a handsome woodworker or a charming earl.
His home will be aggressively bedecked with Christmas lights and decorative bowls of frosted pine cones. He will wear a scarf. He will wear another scarf. At one point, he will gift the protagonist a seasonally appropriate necklace.
Together, they will be forced to put on a strudel fest or locate a missing antique nutcracker. In the end, she will abandon her professional ambitions in order to join him in his small town. Or, in a more recent plot reversal, he will foregar his small town life to join her in the big city.
It will snow and they will kiss. So that's kind of the plot of most of these movies. A few observations with my cinematic hat on. The production values are not great. I think at their worst, they look very bad. And at their best, it's sort of. network TV show quality. They're shooting fast and quick, like a Clint Eastwood movie. The writing is very bad in these movies, I will say that. No one's really caring much about the dialogue.
Acting also tends to be very bad as well. No one really seems to care about this. The Netflix movies, they try to be more funny. They're like more ironic and then the Hallmark movies are much more earnest. And a lot of the Hallmark movies are on Netflix. It's kind of confusing. All right, so why are these movies popular? Well, again, I'm going to go back to Amanda Hess explaining her conversion from someone cynical about these films into someone who grew to...
Grew to like them. All right, so here's what Amanda said. When I first discovered the existence of made-for-television Christmas movies maybe 15 years ago, they struck me as sentimental and anti-feminist. Recently... I have felt so pummeled by stress and responsibility that I have found it difficult to turn on a compelling new television show at the end of the day. I have no extra energy to expend familiarizing myself with unknown characters.
deciphering twists or even absorbing scenes of visual interest what i've been looking for instead is a totally uncompelling new television show one that expects nothing from me and that gives me little in return The Bad Christmas movie's beats are so consistent, its twists so predictable, its actors and props so loyally reused, it's easy to relax drowsily into its rhythms. The genre is formulaic, which makes for a kind of tradition.
Now it plays through the winter like a crackling fireplace in my living room. This is clearly a big part of the appeal. You watch for six weeks or so. It's traditional. It's escape. So, look, you wouldn't be able to keep this up for a full year because these movies aren't very good. But this idea she's saying that it's something that you look forward to in the season. It's supposed to be corny. It doesn't make much demands from you. That makes sense.
She then, Amanda then elaborated in a podcast I listened to, she did a daily episode. She talked about this article and she elaborated the, she was pummeled by stress and responsibility in part because a friend. Had gotten a potentially very scary medical diagnosis and they were sort of fearing the worst that it ended up OK, but it was a stressful time. So you can kind of set that context. All right. That's what these movies are. That is why Amanda Hess came around to them.
What I want to add today is that I think there is another reason for the appeal of these movies, especially to people of our generation, that is not only relevant to us but underscores one of the big lessons we talk about on this show. So what is this hidden lesson in these movies? Well, look, there's this funny SNL skit. I remembered it vaguely and I found it earlier today. It was from five years ago that made fun of Hallmark movies and it set up.
It was a dating game where it was sort of the female protagonist and dating the sort of classic characters from these movies. And the dating game was titled A Winter Boyfriend for Holiday Christmas. And toward the end, the host...
named Emily Kringle, deliver sort of the joke line, the true reason for Christmas is husband. And I think that matches... A kind of common misunderstanding about these movies is that they're basically visual romance novels where the thrill is in imagining sort of finding true love and giving up everything for it.
This is sort of the original understanding that led Amanda Hess to think like, hey, these movies are anti-feminist. I want to argue for millennial viewers this is not why these movies are largely appealing. A lot of these viewers already – are married already have families it's not the the fantasy of the christmas tree lot owner that captures them the real value i think these movies have the real aspiration is in their portrayal of
Lifestyle-centric planning. So yes, Jesse, I brought this all back to my favorite deep life topic, lifestyle-centric planning. All right, so hear me out. The most common plot for these movies, think about this, is a lead that has a stressful job. They end up in a small town where they do not have the stresses of that job. They connect with the community, which tends to be like tightly knit around. They all are coming together around a holiday.
The holiday itself gives them exposure to sort of escapism and fantasy. The town is beautifully lit up and they just sort of appreciate the – The way it looks, they appreciate the people in the town. The pace is slower. The days are unpredictable. There's adventure going on. They're hunting down an antique nutcracker trying to put on the strudel fest.
The escapism in here, therefore, is not, hey, maybe I can find a husband who owns a Christmas tree farm, but instead the idea that you might be able to reduce your work hours, spend more time outside. walk down the street through the snow to the coffee shop that has the quirky owner who knows you and get lost that evening in some like town tradition or they like light up the tree in a way that is really over the top attractive.
So one way to recast these movies then is the struggle between two approaches to trying to cultivate a meaningful life. The protagonist at the beginning of these movies. are often implicitly deploying what here on this show we call the grand goal strategy, which is where you pursue a single big and impressive goal that you hope will make everything in your life good.
So in the movies, as it is for many people, that ambitious goal is usually some sort of focused, impressive professional goal. They're trying to get the CEO slot there, whatever it is. It's the big city job ambition. By the end, the protagonist has found happiness deploying something more like the lifestyle-centric approach in which it's not a singular goal that's going to make their life better.
But they're identifying the properties of an ideal lifestyle and then finding ways to move closer to it. And then so often what they are discovering is that this new life that is presented to them in the town, which is usually called like Jingle Bell City or something. This new life hits a lot of beats of a lifestyle that's more attractive. So it's no one thing about the new lifestyle. It's they realize a lifestyle that day-to-day resonates, has more value.
than the pursuit and accomplishment of a single grand goal. So let's recap then lifestyle-centric planning. Since these movies are implicitly endorsing it, let's recap how this actually works. To do lifestyle-centric planning, you begin by imagining a typical day, like what it's like, its rhythms. It's not specific. I'm in this town. I have this job. But what's it like? Are you walking to the coffee store? Are you going through?
a trail walk through the woods are you in a busy city and you're it's like this really active scene you kind of get a sense of like what are the rhythms how does this resonate You use specific imagery that also resonates. You imagine yourself in this scene or that scene. You're really playing with these internal resonance, trying to imagine sort of like a day in an ideal lifestyle. You then identify and isolate the properties.
that make these images, that make these scenes resonate. So what is it about the sort of day I've constructed in my head that makes it resonate so much for me? You can then survey your full landscape of opportunities and obstacles to figure out what's your best bet for moving towards those properties in your life. And it's here where like really interesting options come up.
obstacles I have and opportunities I have, how can I move closer to these particular properties? You're able to explore a wider range of options. Would you do this with my job? I move this work to this work. We move here. I start doing this. If I move this over here, if we – you begin to –
Come up with these interesting configurations, which you probably never would have thought of from scratch. It's not necessarily like, oh, here's the obvious big thing to do. But it ends up in the end having the effect of. making your lifestyle overall more congruent with things that actually resonate. So I think that's one of the true messages of these movies. Lifestyle-centric planning. They're happy because...
In the end, they better aligned their lifestyle with stuff that matters. And I've realized that the pursuit of the singular grand goal wasn't making them happy. And so we're seeing, I think millennials in particular, because they're at that stage of life, we're saying, huh, there's something here. And so that's where I think we have our hidden value of these movies.
So, yes, you know, somehow in the end, as I always do, I've made the leap from Hallmark movies to lifestyle-centric planning, like one of my favorite topics. And as I always argue, all this stuff comes back to the modern digital landscape, the modern digital environment one way or the other. And one of the reasons why lifestyle-centric planning is so important is because in our current digital environment, work has become more abstract.
It's moving symbols around on a screen, so it's much less able to sort of directly provide us a sense of concrete meaning. Work can follow us everywhere. So these sort of modern symbolic knowledge jobs now have the way of sort of infusing more and more of our life and therefore bleaching from those parts of our lives are things that are meaningful. So this helps create a meaning crisis. So we have that going on.
We also have all of this sort of electronic distraction that subverts our deeper instincts for meaning. So we sort of feel connection and wonder and all this type of stuff. We get a very... attenuated form of this through social media in our forum. I'm kind of like talking to people on Twitter or I'm seeing these TikToks that are kind of...
pressing the button of like, whoa, that was kind of cool to see. And it subverts those instincts just enough that the drive doesn't push us to actually like change our lives in meaningful ways to get there. So the modern digital environment did help set up this sort of meeting crisis.
that we have right now it also opens up new opportunities that abstract work that persists as sort of you're just on a screen moving symbols can be pretty portable it can give you a lot of autonomy it's something you can that's compatible with a much greater variety of day-to-day lifestyles than maybe work would have been 40 years ago where it's like where's your office building you need to be within 10 miles and that's just what your day is going to be so
All of this comes back to the modern digital environment, but that's the lesson I think is there. So I've connected Hallmark movies to email and social media because I always find a way to do that. So I would say my work here is done. So I don't know. Have you ever seen these movies, Jesse?
Yeah, a long time ago though. A long time ago. Yeah. I watched several. I would say my – I think the best example this year of this year's crop that kind of hit my theory and just the best production values was Christmas Island. which has a no-nonsense plot, a very ambitious young pilot. And this doesn't quite track if you look at the plot line. This very ambitious young pilot, she's...
Wants to be a very successful pilot, but she's flying just the regional routes and gets hired to be a pilot of a private plane for like a rich couple. Now, for some reason, the first flight she's given on the private plane is L.A. to Switzerland. So she's been doing regional flights and now she's flying from LA to Switzerland, whatever. As things go, the flight gets diverted to Christmas Island, which is like a small island off the coast of Canada that's really into Christmas.
And the air traffic controller that was sort of snippy with her while she was in the air also for some reason lives on Christmas Island. Classic movie, you know, ends up falling in love with like Christmas and becoming less blah, blah, blah. But I liked it. It had good scenes of the island and they had a really good decorated downtown. It often comes like how Christmassy they can decorate the sets. So that was a good one. I watched another one where they were in Ireland maybe or Scotland.
and scott wolf it was scott scott wolf and lucy was her name but who were both in party of five are like the siblings and they find out their mom i guess owns a castle or something but They have a newspaper clip. These are things I noticed. They have a newspaper clip of the mom being born. It was like 1963.
Right. Mom, you know, Duke has a baby or something. They show that clip because I guess the actress liked the idea of like whatever age that was she wanted to be. The problem is Scott Wolf is playing her son and Scott Wolf was born in like 1967.
So like for this to actually work, she would have had to been five years old when she had Scott Wolf. I think that's more Scott Wolf trying to play 20 years younger than the mom trying to play too young. Anyways, I don't think I'll be watching a lot of these movies now that are in the new year. But I think that's what's going on. Lifestyle-centric planning captured in a movie. I did see the red one on Amazon Prime with The Rock. Who is that movie for? A PG-13 Santa movie.
Who is it for? That's a good question. It's like a Santa movie with cursing. Oh, because they're usually PG? Yeah, because, you know, it seems like it's aimed more like a teenage crowd, but teenagers don't want to watch a Santa movie. I mean, was it good?
It was entertaining. Yeah, I'm glad I watched it. All right, I might watch it. I watched Carry On. That was another good new one. Jason Bateman. Oh, that was horrible. I couldn't see it. You didn't like it? Yeah. I mean, let's say the plot didn't completely check out.
Didn't completely check out. You liked that movie? It was fun. I didn't completely understand the plan. But it was good. It was fun. They spent some money on that. They filmed at the airport. Have you seen the new Dylan movie? Not yet. Yeah. I do want to see that though. A complete unknown. It won't hold a candle in an Oscar competition perspective probably. A complete unknown will probably struggle to beat out for best picture Christmas Island.
Which I think is going to make a big push. All right, enough of that. We got cool questions. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. So here we are. It's the new year, 2025. And you're probably thinking. How am I going to make this year different? What am I going to do to move closer to my ideal lifestyle?
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is a no questions has to be from policy. It's totally risk free. If you don't like it, give it away to a salting friend and they'll give you your money back. No questions asked. That's drink element dot com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First question is from Michael. I just finished reading Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. Johnson talks about the commonplace book, a notebook to record interesting ideas.
The idea is that you can revisit this book to examine incomplete ideas. Does Cal keep a commonplace book? And if so, what form does it take? I like Steven. Actually, I was trading emails with him not that long ago. Cool writer, one of the original idea writers who came up in the 90s and early 2000s and written a lot of cool books. Okay, so Stephen, if I remember, was really early to these ideas.
of using technology to help manage partial ideas. He was big on a tool called DevonThink that you could enter in ideas and would help make connections. I think that's now since been more subsumed by the Zettelkasten specific techniques that are all about.
He's storing ideas even when you don't know what to do with them in a way that like connections can be formed and excavated and the tool can work with your ideas to help you come up with new connections. He was really excited about that right now. A lot of other people are excited about that as well. I don't tend to do that. So I don't keep any sort of digital equivalent of a commonplace book, at least with that type of rigor. My problem is not coming up with an idea.
When it comes to writing, it's having too many ideas, right? It takes a long time to write something. There's only so many things I can write. And the limiting factor is almost always time to write for me. not scarcity of ideas. So I actually tend to just use my brain as a commonplace book. Informally speaking, I read lots of stuff. I talk to lots of people. I listen to lots of stuff. What I look for.
for ideas is something that becomes insistent it kind of sticks around in my mind i'm using my brain as its own informal filter The idea really sticks around in my mind and it keeps coming back and I'm like, yeah, I like that. Oh, I just heard this new thing that supports what I was thinking about before. Oh, listen to that interview over there. My idea would be very relevant there. If an idea has really stuck around.
Then that's usually when I'll write about it. Now, once I'm writing on an idea, like, okay, I'm going to do an article on this. I'm going to write a book chapter on this. Then I start collecting information systematically. I typically just put that right into the Scrivener project I'm using.
For that particular writing objective. So I don't have a separate system. I'm writing an article. The research folder of the Scrivener project for that article is where I'll start throwing any sort of ideas I have any sort of links. Clips, movies. So once I'm specifically working on something, I do collect everything, but not in a highly structured way. I just throw them all into some folder. So I lean more into my mind's informal ability to sort through ideas. I lean into that quite a bit.
And don't really use outside structures to help me structure my information. Steven Johnson. He had an op-ed in the New York Times this morning. Oh, he did? Yeah. There we go. All right. Who have we got next? Next question is from Mark. I'm looking for some advice on a weekly template. I'm a high school teacher and need to set aside time for prep. I'm also learning web design with a view of starting a side business. I train in the gym three times per week and run two times per week.
I train in the gym in the mornings before school. At the moment, I get some school prep done at school, but most in the evenings. I would like to use the mornings more for cognitive work. Well, let's just remember real quick what's meant by a weekly template. We talked about this. Earlier in the fall in an episode. So a weekly template is where you've set aside certain times of the week to sort of work on certain things on a regular basis. So when you make your weekly plan for a week.
You apply the template first. Oh, yeah. Monday mornings, I always work on this. I always go to the gym in the afternoons. On Thursdays, afternoons is when I work on this. So when you're making your weekly plan, you start with that template, then you can fill in the rest. You get some regularity to your work. And I always argue if you have stuff you're going to do on a regular basis.
Have a weekly template, and then that can change season to season. I change my weekly template every semester because depending on my teaching schedule, the... times the days and times I want to do certain work is going to change. So I'll often like I'm constructing a weekly template now for the upcoming spring winter semester. Okay. The good thing about designing a weekly template.
is that it forces you to use terminology from earlier in the show to face the productivity dragon. That's the situation I think Mark is in. Mark says, I want to learn web design. I want to start a side business. I want to train at the gym. I want to run, and I have a bunch of prep to do. Setting up a weekly template for all those regular occurring activities will help you figure out, is it even possible? Like, time is time.
So you might as well go through this exercise of where am I going to actually make this happen? And if you're hitting up against hard constraints, like I really don't have enough time. I mean, so much of my day is spent in the classroom and then. Prepping takes a lot of time and I'm not just seeing enough time unless I wake up at like four in the morning. That's an important signal. Time is time and you don't have it. Some sort of change has to be made.
And maybe that change is dropping something from this ambition or it's alternation or it's finding a way to like mix cardio with strength training in a more intense way or whatever it is, right? It might look different or be more effective about prep. The time is time, and that signal is going to force you to be sort of innovative. So I don't – I can't tell you a specific template because I don't know your exact details of your schedule. But I think coming up with the template is important.
Because it's a way for you to actually just move your time around like chess pieces. If you are just going to take each day as it came, say, what do I want to work on today? Just imagine. How much less you would get that you have such a lower probability of actually fitting these various things into your life. So the weekly template we can see in examples like this is like really important for figuring out the puzzle that is your week and is really can be really important.
As a reality check. I mean, I'm just starting that now. I mean, we're recording this on the January 2nd. And so like a week until the semester starts. So I'm working on my weekly template now. Monday, Wednesday teaching. And so I'll work around like I'm doing Monday, Wednesday teaching. I'm probably going to use the space in between the classes as office hours. Like I'm trying to like piece together and then like what day we're going to podcast and versus like what days.
I often like to have a meeting afternoon on my weekly template on campus meeting afternoon. Like I'm still trying to figure out where that's all going to fit. In terms of Mike, in terms of the question, in terms of. cognitive work in the mornings and going to the gym in the mornings do you think that working on the afternoon would be better and doing all the stuff in the morning or i think more people should work out in the afternoon yeah i think for most people the natural rhythm
All things being equal, cognitive work in the morning, exercise is a transition from work to non-work. That might not be logistically possible. For everyone, but just from like a physiological standpoint, I would say for probably the majority of people, that's best. Get up. I mean you could stretch or do some things in the morning, but take advantage of like that first rush of coffee and have good thoughts.
And then like serious exercise, use that to transition. I mean, that's what I try to do. I think that that works well for a lot of people. Some people really do swear by like the early morning run, but cognitive work in the afternoon is hard for a lot of people. I mean, when you hear about writers who are night owls, the reality is typically what they mean is not four o'clock, but, you know, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. or something like that, where they find this like completely blank bit of time.
But for most people, afternoon is hard, early evening. I sometimes do early evening writing sessions. I call them happy hour sessions because it falls like in the time that you normally have happy hour at a bar. And it sometimes works. I'll often come here to the HQ so it's like a definitive break from home. It feels different. I work. I'm done. I come home. And I'll use that sometimes.
But it's always a stretch. It's always much harder than just coming over in the morning and writing. What do we got? Next question is from Gonzalo. Are the five books you read every month separate from the reading you do for book and article research? Yeah, it's a good question. If I finish a book, I read a book in its entirety, I will count it on my list of books read. So you will see, you'll notice, the astute listener will notice that in my monthly...
Book collection, you can often pull out like, oh, I think these books were being read for something he's working on. It'll be kind of one off. You'll see a couple books on similar themes that I read like one after another. But when I'm researching a book or an article.
Oftentimes I'm not reading an entire book. I'm reading certain chapters of a book or I'm skimming a book or trying to get out of it what's important. And that's a lot of research and those don't get counted. So yeah, I will count the book if I finish it, regardless of the cause.
But when it comes to research, there's a lot less finishing the books than you might imagine. You get very good at like this chapter is what's important of this book. Let me read these 10 articles. Oh, I remember reading this book 10 years ago. And this section is the section that's relevant to what I'm doing. Like I'll give you an example for the Deep Life book I'm working on now. The first part of the book and especially the first chapter, the first part of the book.
I'm drawing some from the history of monasticism. I'm actually sort of using the history of monasticism. We've talked about this on the show before. I'm using that as an analogy for understanding. preparing for the deep life. The idea being in the history of monasticism, just very, very briefly, you see very early on, you know, Christian monasticism was kicked off. Its precursors were the so-called desert fathers.
The hermits essentially that went out into the desert and led aesthetic lives. I'm going to just be in a cave and eschew everything and have these religious experiences. And what they discovered is, okay, this just like throw everything out and just go out there and be aesthetic and try not to die and you'll eventually have religious experience. It wasn't very replicatable. So the monastic system was built up where they said, okay, we have to have structure.
We have to kind of help people prepare, the monks prepare to have these religious experiences with some structure. Here's how we run our days and here's our rules. And we have these short-term goals and structures to help get you ready for the big. encounter with divinity as opposed to just like, let's just go for it. And I have this whole analogy in the first part of the book is this is the same when it comes to overhauling your life and the overhauling a deep life. Don't just...
Do the equivalent of going to the desert. Don't just make the big changes. You actually need short-term goals and structure that get you ready, that prepare you for making that big change. And so the first part of the book is about like preparing yourself and practicing to get ready for big changes. Okay. I wanted to pull.
from Jamie Kreener's book, The Distracted Mind, which is this great book. She's a medievalist. I think she might be at Emory. I might have that wrong, but a medievalist that studies monks and wrote this good book. I think I blurbed it. So I had read it years ago.
And I said, this book is – she's a great medievalist. It's got a great sort of history about monks and how they think about distraction. But I didn't read that whole book. I read selected chapters that really had what I needed. Like that book didn't show up.
I wrote this in July. That book did not show up on my July books I read, but I got really good information out of it. So a lot of research for books and articles is like that. You've heard of a book, you've read it a long time ago, and you're pulling out what you need. On the other hand, there are some books, I think, was it last month or the month before? Or is it this month? Let me see. What books are we reading this month? I don't know. I can't remember when I read what.
But there's been a couple of these memoirs I've been reading recently. Like Xena Hertz's, the, what was that book called? Not The Intellectual Life, that's Search LNGs, but whatever. Lost in Thought, I think her book was called. And that was like a memoir of an intellectual life. I reread Rich Roll's memoir recently, and that might be in the January books maybe. I don't remember what these things are, but I finished. You'll see there's like a bunch of memoirs that are coming up soon.
And that's because I was preemptively like I'm reading these various memoirs that have particular properties because I might want to pull something from them for my book. So what I'm trying to say, my peak inside the writing process here is. A lot of times when researching stuff, you're not reading full books. And then sometimes you are. And I only report them when I do. And is that research done during deep work hours? Yeah. I mean, I worked on that.
And most of that monk riding was when we were up in the mountains. And at the house that had the riding shed, that like really cool riding shed. Again, in the morning were my deep work hours. I would go down to that writing show with my coffee and I was like reading that book. I have very strong connections with that book and that place really. But that I was largely reading in deep work hours. Like I would be there with my laptop.
And I would read a chapter and underline it and then pull from it and write a little bit and read. Like it was really intertwined with the writing. Other books, if I'm like lost in thought, that book, that was just reading during my normal reading hours. Yeah. Good question. I haven't really thought so systematically about how and when I read. So that's cool. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Heath.
I'm a third-year mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech and have failed integral calculus twice. I spend over 30 hours in the library every week trying to study and never seem to get the results that one would expect from that effort. I bought how to become a straight A student, but would appreciate an overview of the best strategies to learn high level math. All right. Integral calculus. I was just reading about that in that math class book.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Had to remember multivariate integration. Okay. So, Heath, when I see you say I spend over 30 hours in the library every week trying to study. That's meaningless to me. And I think the fact that that's meaningless is important because this really is one of the key messages I had for students in books like How to Become a Straight-A Student.
The term study is meaningless. It can mean all sorts of things, many things which aren't very useful at all when it comes to learning information. Studying is not a self-evident activity that you either do or don't do. And a lot of students get into similar trouble like you get into.
by quote-unquote studying for hour after hour, but what they're really doing is actually very ineffective when it comes to cementing in their mind understanding of knowledge. So a lot of people just have this mindset of like, I spent a ton of time in the library the weekend before the exam. And that this is like penance. The pain of being in the library for 30 hours should transmute into a better grade.
But your exam doesn't care like how painful your weekend was or how many hours you spent in the library. It cares how much you understand the material. And so all that really matters is activity that cements.
your understanding of the material. And as it turns out, the activities that best cement understanding the material don't tend to be extremely time-consuming. The very best students don't tend to be the students who quote-unquote study the most, but they can be unpleasant because they're demanding.
So for example, in your case, integral calculus, I write about this in the book, How to Become a Straight-A Student. I also wrote a blog post you can find on my blog from way back when. It's titled something like how I got the highest grade in my discrete mathematics course. And I wrote this.
Not long after I graduated from college, I remembered getting the highest grade in my discrete math class, which was 50 or 60 students. My number one tool for studying in that class was a big stack of white printer paper. And what I would do, I had written down, and this method is in how to become a straight A student. I had for every topic we covered sort of sample problems taken from lectures and or problem sets. And I would copy.
one of the problems without the answer onto a sheet of white paper and then solve it on that paper while solving it, annotating it as if I was lecturing to a class. All right, so next we're going to do this. Well, hey, if we're doing this.
Integration, what we're looking for here is the antiderivative. And notice when doing the antiderivative here that we can sort of ignore those terms because those would be constant, et cetera, et cetera. If I could do that, I could get the answer right, show the proof.
get to the right answer without looking at my notes, explaining my steps, so I'm clearly indicating to myself I understand it. That topic's done. I don't come back to it. If I struggle, I go back and review it and try again later. Once I can actually... teach from scratch, sample problems from every topic I need to know, then I know it and I'm ready to take the class. And that got me the highest grade in my math class.
Now, the problem you might be having if you try this approach is that you might find that you're not able to answer many of the questions because what a lot of people do, and this is a huge problem I think with undergraduate education in general. A lot of people don't attend lectures or sort of tune out in lectures and then sort of implicitly hope that in the two days before the exam that they can not only study but teach themselves all the material from scratch.
This is going to be the trap that I think really captures people. If I had to guess, the problem with your 30 hours is partially that what you're doing is ineffective. You're probably reading notes silently to yourself as opposed to trying to recreate problems from scratch. And partially, you're spending most of that time trying to teach yourself the material.
But the material is hard to teach. That's why they pay us professors the big bucks. It's not obvious how to teach yourself this stuff. So the other thing you have to do is the 48-hour rule.
And again, this comes from how to become a straight-A student. But the idea is this. You go to lecture. You pay attention in lecture. You take notes. In a math class, you want to capture every sample problem, every step to the solution, and annotate those steps to the best of your ability. When you don't understand something.
This step in this integration problem, I don't understand how they did that. You put a question mark and you circle it. Now the clock is ticking. You got 48 hours to replace that question mark with understanding. deferring it till the day before the exam. You got 48 hours to fill in that question mark right then. You have 40 hours from right then.
Now you have various circles of time, sort of concentric circles of time to stretch out that you can work with here. So the very tightest circle is right away, raise your hand. Hey, I don't understand what you just did. The next tightest circle is right after class.
Go up to the professor. Hey, I don't understand what was happening here and here. Can you explain this to me? The next tightest circle would be office hours. Like when is the next time that there's office hours with either a TA or the professor?
Also, in between those circles is like talking to a friend or looking at the textbook to try to figure it out. So typically why we call it the 48 hours rules is that you're no more than 48 hours away from all of those circles being done, that you're no more than 40 hours away from probably the next office hours.
And all these other things can happen quicker. So by that point, you should have resolved those question marks. Now, when you do this, when it comes time to quote unquote study for the exam. You already at some point understood all of the techniques. You actually went through the mental effort of crocking the technique already. There's nothing you're learning from scratch for the first time. You might have to review it.
But there's a huge difference between remembering something you actually did the mental activity of learning than there is actually learning it from scratch. The effort to learn from scratch is intense. So you want to spread that out over the semester so you're not doing too much of it at once.
And so study now you're reviewing. And then when you're reviewing, you want to use the white paper method of just I'm recreating things from scratch. If I can, I understand that. If I can't, I don't go back and review again. That's how you study for math class. It's all about. distributing the understanding of the material as you learn it, and then you're reviewing being all what we call active recall, as that's the most effective way to actually cement knowledge. So if you can...
Absolutely pass integral calculus. Integrals are not actually that complicated, but I think what's happening is you're kind of teaching yourself this. You're probably trying to teach yourself this material from scratch, like a couple days before the exam. All right. Who do we got?
What do we got next? We have our corner. Hey, slow productivity corner question. We like to have one question every week that is related to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accompliment Without Burnout. We mainly do this corner because we have theme music, which we're going to hear right now.
All right, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? It's from Dylan. In addition to your books, do you have any book recommendations for contemplating a deep life or to embrace slow productivity? What I often recommend, like if you're... interested broadly in the deep life or more specifically in more of a slow productivity approach, find real stories that resonate. And usually this means memoir.
Look for memoir that resonates because what happens is the written form, when you're reading a nonfiction book like a memoir, the written form can put you inside. the head and experience of someone else. You get to sort of step into another life. And when you're in that life, you've stepped into someone else's shoes, you really get a visceral sense of what resonates and what doesn't.
And it's really informative. There's a lot of self-discovery to be made. There's a lot of motivation or inspiration to be made about what's important to you, what's not important to you, what about this life is important to me, what's not. So I'm a big believer of finding memoirs where the life of the person...
being lived in the memoir speaks to you in some way. And it might not be when I say memoir, I use that broadly. I mean, it could be a book that is specifically a memoir, but sometimes it could be like a nonfiction book where it's a certain.
part of a person's life and they're doing some adventure or something like that. But that's anything that's actually about someone's life that resonates. I often think that's the right way to better understand yourself and what you're looking for, what the possibilities are for pursuing it.
as opposed to just straight-up advice. The obvious exception, of course, would be my books, which you need to buy many, many copies of. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. Oh, wait. Should we hear the music one more time? Do we play ourselves out with the music?
We do it half the time. I think in 2025, we should commit to playing ourselves out of the slow productivity corner by hearing the music one more time. Are we going to have a slow productivity for the whole year? That's a good question.
At least for the next couple months. I want to get to the one-year mark of the book. How about that? Oh, that's fair. That's only three months. The book came out in March. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to keep the corner alive until we get to the one-year anniversary of the book. And in 2025, in the three months that are between now and that anniversary, we're going to play the music twice. So let's hear it one more time.
All right. She said we have a call this week, Jesse. Yes, we do. All right. Let's hear it. Okay. Hey, Cal. This is Trevor. I'm a digital product manager. And earlier this year, I left my full-time position and started my own business. I'm offering... consulting and fractional product management. Where I'm struggling is applying multi-scale planning to the growth of my own business. Previously as an employee, I've gotten...
pretty good at applying the principles and prioritizing and time blocking toward our company goals. And even now, I feel like I'm doing a decent job applying that to my client work and helping them achieve theirs. Last week, I spent a day trying to work on multi-scale for my own business. And while I was able to develop the values which I want to develop my lifestyle, you know, career plan around.
Putting together that career strategic plan, I kept banging my head against the wall. So I'm curious if you could share more details in terms of what... kinds of things are in your career strategic plan because it's that middle piece between the values and principles. into the weekly and daily planning that I'm struggling with in terms of growing my own business and career capital now as a solopreneur. Thanks as always.
All right. So in multi-scale planning, we have three levels. There's that strategic plan, which is maybe covering the next season. Then you have weekly planning and then you have daily planning. So the caller today is talking about that biggest scale, thinking through that more strategic plan that's maybe existing at the scope of something like season. And it sounds like if I'm understanding it properly, he's not sure what to put in there.
He's like, what is – what are my strategic goals? What am I working on more specifically if you're writing this plan right now for the winter and the spring? What am I trying to get done by June? Where do I want to steer this ship? Well, I think there's two things that are relevant here that hopefully are helpful. One, it's okay for this to seem relatively underspecified if you're doing something new. In particular, it is sometimes not even clear what the potential opportunities to pursue are.
what you should put the pedal down on and what you should put the brake pedal down on. Sometimes this is not even clear yet. When something is relatively new, you're still feeling out your client base and what's working and what the opportunities are. So it's completely fine. I feel like I don't have this crystal clear. We need to try to this is our goal for the next four months is to try to.
to introduce this product or move this, you might actually be very sensically gathering data on this new setup and trying to just look for your moments, look for your spots. So that's completely fine to be underspecified, especially... when something is new and you're still feeling yourself around. So your strategic plan, let's say for this upcoming semester or season for something new, like you're talking about might really be, seem very mundane. You know, it's continuing to.
polish your client management setup and to get your, some sort of logistical pieces that you're using to. to bill or deliver assets. And it's like, get those cleaned up and operating smoother. It might seem very mundane and that's fine. That doesn't mean your ambitions are mundane. It means you're waiting to choose your spot to make a bigger, make a bigger move.
The other thing I would say when it comes to these plans, the key is working backwards, especially when you're doing something like you're doing, which really is a lifestyle play. Fractional project management, for example, clearly you're looking for autonomy. You're looking for more flexibility. You really want to have this clarity about the properties of the ideal lifestyle that you're aiming towards. And you can keep coming back to that and asking the question.
What's going to move me closer towards those? What's going to move me farther away? And this can lead you to some objectives that you might not otherwise come up with if you're just trying to say, like, what's good for this business or what's a big idea I can pursue?
So one of the analyses you might be doing the new year, for example, is you have these properties identified that you're looking for in your ideal lifestyle and be saying, is there any big disconnects right now? Is there like one of these properties? I'm really far away from or one that I seem to be moving farther away from. What changes could I imagine that could stop that erosion or move me closer to it? So when you're specifically working backwards from properties of ideal lifestyle.
specific changes can emerge that wouldn't normally show up if you were just taking an approach of, hey, what's something good to do with my business or what's the natural next step to take with this, right? So those are my two answers. If you're doing something new, it's okay to don't feel underspecified. That's okay. Sometimes you're just trying to like get the lights on and the invoice is sent out.
And once you really get to know what you're doing, then the opportunities will become clear six months, a year down the line. And number two, work backwards from the properties of ideal lifestyle and just keep asking the question, am I on track towards getting closer to these and in the places where I'm not?
do I yet see a change I could make that would correct that? And the answer might be not yet, but at least I have it in the top of my mind. Or the answer might be, you know what? I could do this completely unexpected thing. It makes no sense financially, makes no sense strategically, but from the point of view of like, it's really important to me that I can, you know, ski every day, makes a lot of sense.
When I'm working backwards for my lifestyle image, this change I'm making makes a lot of sense. So those are the two things I would say keep in mind. All right, well, we have a case study here. This is where people send in a description of how they've applied the type of advice we talked about on the show into their own life.
So we can see the advice we discuss in action. If you have a case study, you can send it to jesse at calnewport.com. All right, today's case study comes from Holden. Holden says, long-time listener, first-time writer. I am 28 years old and a gardener by trade. Out of high school, I fell for the follow your passion narrative. At the time, I was not ready to pursue a degree and elected to move across the country and pursue my dream of working in the mountain bike.
I graduated from a certification program related to the mountain bike industry, got my foot in the door, and accomplished what dreams I had for the industry by the time I was 22. I shortly became embittered by the industry and realized that regardless of one's passion, work eventually becomes just that. I left the bike industry at 23 and having established connections and friendships in a town that I love.
I took the best job available to me at the time. This was a landscape gardening job where I could leverage the trail building and construction skills that I had gained over the preceding years. In the five years since leaving the mountain bike industry, I started my own landscaping company and enjoyed some success at that. For the last year and a half or so, I began to feel unfulfilled in my business venture and unhappy with the path I was on and had set for myself the past decade.
The sense of unfulfillment as well as economic circumstances motivated me to begin to shutter my business and take a job with the local government as a gardener. I had fun in my early 20s, but am unfulfilled with where that has left me in my late 20s. I found that I enjoyed being a business owner entrepreneur, but did not like my future in the particular industry I was in. I began doing lifestyle-centric career planning for a few months ago.
I've taken your advice and started a single-purpose notebook to jot down anything that resonates with me as it pertains to my ideal lifestyle. These things then inform my lifestyle-centric career plan. I have found the career path that I have been on since high school is not in alignment with where I want to be in life. I am called the more intellectual pursuits and work in which my mind as opposed to my body is the main tool I use to produce value. I am unsure how to make this transition.
or begin this transition towards a knowledge-based professional life, I do feel ready to pursue a degree now, but have trouble determining what I may study, as I have an embarrassment of intellectual interest. I also cannot shake the small cow on my shoulder telling me that I'm falling for the trap of grand goals, but I really enjoy studying for studying and knowledge's sake and do believe a degree would set me up better for professional life where my mind is the main producer of value.
All right, Holden, we see a pretty realistic case study here of lifestyle design in both its positives and negatives in action. I'm going to zoom in early on this story. where he talked about my, quote, dream of working in the mountain bike industry, end quote. That's like a classic passion trap type move, as Holden correctly identifies. The interest was in mountain biking.
And our mind tricks us into thinking, well, if I had a job related to this thing I like, that must be my dream. And as Holden quickly learned, a job is a job. What matters for a job are the properties of the job. Not the content, not like the subject of that job. So the fact that your job is related to mountain biking probably doesn't matter so much as like what are the properties of that job? Engagement, autonomy, connection, this mastery, et cetera, right?
Kind of a classic passion trap. All right, so he fell out of that, went into gardening where he could start his own business, use skills that he had built up. You have some rare and valuable skills. Now you have something you can put in the marketplace and you seem to do well with that. The government job. doing gardening, simplified probably his life, got rid of some autonomy, but simplified his life. Like I can just sort of do the work that I'm given.
And now he's doing lifestyle-centric career planning and realizing there's parts of his life. If he really sits and says, well, what is it that I'm looking for in my life? He feels like there's a lack. All right. So now there's the complicated piece because, yes, hold on. I do the small cow on your shoulder.
is has a point you want to be careful here being like okay maybe what i'm missing is intellectual work so let me just make a big swing and like go get a degree and and hope that this somehow leads to something that Something is better. I would be way more specific about this. I would really try to clarify what your ideal day looks like. Like, is it sitting in an office? Is it, you know.
writing poetry by the pond is it being outside but having like a lot of flexibility with your hands like it could be that the the government gardening job Is this very stable base on top of which you are a writer that you like teach yourself to be a writer, which doesn't involve you like quitting everything and spending years going back for a degree. Or maybe really it's like you're tired of working with your hands and it's like exhausting. And you say, I would be very happy to have like a...
A shed in my backyard that I convert into an office that I can go to and like work on a laptop in like five hours a day and it's like kind of engaging and I can be done and go mountain biking. Okay, great. That's a very specific other vision. You can start asking what's the quickest way to get there? What are skills I can learn?
effectively and efficiently that allow me to try to find a job that can do that. So I would get very specific about what you want your day to be like and then figure out what are your opportunities and obstacles. I'm concerned that you might just say, I'll just go get a degree and then maybe this will all work out. You should be way ahead on your planning than that. I want to know how to do this.
Because then I could do this type of work, which allows my data to unfold in this type of way, and that's what I'm really looking for. You need to sort out. What is this appeal of the intellectual? What does this really mean?
Is it really related to your actual day-to-day work? Is it related to what you do in your time outside of work? What are you actually looking for in work in terms of like how it feels and the autonomy or the financial remuneration? You need to keep thinking about your career capital.
you're starting from scratch with career capital is very hard to compete in the marketplace with people that have more, et cetera. So this is a time not to get caught up in like a, a singular move because it can be seducing. the move itself right you'll feel good if you do something big for a little while go back to school you'll feel good because you made a big change that's exciting there's opportunity then that goodness wears off
and you're still pursuing that change, and it doesn't necessarily lead you to somewhere better. So this is the time to do careful lifestyle-centric planning. Don't be seduced by any one particular change or move. That's a complicated case study there, Jesse. I love the reference of the little cow on the shoulder. That's what we're going to sell in our Shopify store. Little cows you place on your shoulder.
just chastises you for looking at Instagram and says, don't go to, don't get a master's degree. And don't make grand goals. Don't make grand goals. Stop looking at Instagram. Couldn't you be reading right now? That would sell well. That would sell well. All right, well, speaking of books, we've got a final segment coming up where I talk about the books I read in December. But first, another brief word from our sponsors. I want to talk about, in particular,
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As long-time listeners know, I try to read five books a month. Okay, so it's January 2nd when we're recording this, so we're going to be talking about the books from December 2024. Listeners know... I like in December because of the holidays as a way to kind of unwind from the fall to read thrillers. I love thrillers in particular techno thrillers. So I call December thriller December. And this December did not disappoint.
especially because i was dealing with these medical this injury i've been recovering from i was like the thrillers were like i went two ways with this i read a bunch of thrillers early on and then and these these are these books are all going to show up in the january list um
because I was just finishing them now, I turned to books that were like hardcore intellectual because I couldn't exercise. So I was like, well, what can I do still? I can still think. So like I read a bunch of math stuff, which we'll get into at the next book.
But I started December with a bunch of thrillers. All right. Here's the first thriller I read was Brad Meltzer's book Midnight Ride. So Brad is known – he's a Boston-based writer that's known for writing these sort of narrative nonfiction books.
He got famous with Bringing Down the House, which was about the MIT Blackjack Club that got made into the movie 21. But he also wrote the book The Accidental Billionaires about Mark Zuckerberg, which was in the… book on which the movie the social network was based so this was his style was he wrote these nonfiction books but he would write the nonfiction books in a novelistic style like with dialogue and interior thoughts
He kind of just guesses, so it's like this mix of fiction and nonfiction. Anyways, during the pandemic, he serialized in a Boston newspaper a thriller. It's like each week, like another chapter. It's kind of cool, like Dickens used to do. And then he collected into this book, The Midnight Ride. So this is like a national treasure style plot line. It takes place in Boston. It's a Harvard professor and a Tufts professor.
It has to do with the colonial periods. They're going to all these different historical sites in Boston to try to collect clues that are hidden in them. One of those types of books, and it was a lot of fun. It doesn't end at the end of this book. It's part of a longer series, so you're going to have to keep going. And I thought it was well done. I mean it's the style he was writing his nonfiction books in. So when it's purely fiction, he can just let it unfold.
In any crazy way he wants. And so there's some cool Boston history in there. Some good villains. I don't know. I think it was well done. Midnight Ride. Then I went and read one of the few Michael Crichton books that I haven't yet read. was Eaters of the Dead. Have you heard of this one? No. So, I mean, this was written in this period post-Adromeda Strain, but really before Crichton was like a huge writer. The Adromeda Strain was a big deal.
But he wasn't a huge writer right away after that. He was much more eclectic in his writing style. He was still doing some kind of cheaper thrillers under nom de guerre, like under fake names at this period. And he was also going all around.
stylistically uh he this is when he wrote like the great train robbery he was doing non-fiction he wrote a book about like a memoir of his travelings he wrote a biography of jasper johns and in that period that early experimental period he wrote the eaters of the dead which is it's a book about vikings it's told it's written like you've discovered a historical document the whole conceit is like this is a document
written by someone who is part of this trip with these Vikings. And this is like in the year 600 or something. And we've translated this from the Arabic and you're reading a historical document, right? Like that's the conceit. He actually built it off of a real document that talked about the travel of someone from like some court in the Middle East all the way towards Scandinavia. And then once they actually get.
to scandinavia it's basically beowulf there's like grindles in there so then he it becomes full-out fantastical so he kind of is in the style of like a real historical account that existed of traveling with vikings back then that turns into Beowulf and they're fighting monsters, whatever. And it's, you know, it's interesting. It's weird because it's like in the style of a translated seventh century travelogue. He wrote weird stuff back then. So it's okay.
It was okay. Then following this theme, the third thriller I wrote was The Andromeda Evolution, a follow-up to Michael Crichton's breakout book, The Andromeda Strain, written after Michael Crichton died by Daniel Wilson.
That's a pretty good thriller. Pretty good straight-up thriller. Man, it gets a little crazy. It makes me respect early Crichton more. The Adronima Strain had some big... big high concept ideas in it but it still felt very grounded like you're reading like a cool new yorker piece this thing it gets pretty crazy it's an outer space like it gets pretty crazy like it's it's pretty high octane um
The biggest issue I had with it is that not everything is well motivated. There's this like mission to go investigate this thing. It's unclear why these people have to do it and why they have to go through the woods to do it and why they can't just drop them out.
There's some – we just need these people to be in the woods and so action can take place and it doesn't really – there's some lack of motivation. Crichton was fantastic at like everything is always motivating a Crichton book. You completely believe why someone is doing what they're doing.
They play a little fast and loose with this year, but it gets wild and it was fun. It was good. It was pretty good. The Andromeda evolution. All right. Then I read Leaving the Thriller Theme. I read Open. That's Andre Agassi's memoir.
uh, man, tough to be a professional athlete. He grew up in a situation where his dad was like, I'm going to make you into a tennis player. And it wasn't necessarily like the best childhood. And then he, builds these entourages where it's like very needy and i don't think i don't think i guess he even realizes this where he'll
He'll just glom onto these people and then give them these big speeches of like, you have to be in my life and my life means nothing without you. And he creates these like entourages of big trainers and stuff that just like follow him around. And it was interesting. Main issue is I'm dealing with.
some pain from an injury i'm recovering from and like augusty's whole life becomes pain after a while you have a professional athlete who plays well into their 30s so i was like that's a little close to home and it was um what's his face he wrote the book right Yeah, he wrote it with the Ghost Rider. Yeah. Yeah. It was the guy who wrote. Well, Harry's. Yeah, and Prince Harry's. Yeah. Yeah. Prince Harry's. Yeah, so it's a great, good Ghost Rider because he kind of takes on his voice.
It was a good story, though. You really learn about the world of professional tennis. I mean, it's a problem with all these sports memoirs is they sometimes have a hard time really capturing at that level what makes you so good. This book had the issue of there was a lot of just, I was feeling it today.
And so I beat Pete Sampras. And then other days, like I just wasn't feeling it that day. They often make it seem like in these books that winning at this level is like a matter of just you really extra commit. And then you turn it on in some sort of abstract sense. And I'm much more interested to give hints. No, no, no. It's like I guess he had the serve return that his dad had.
force into him that like this was his advantage or his quickness or it's like you know i really love when a a book gets to that what makes a great athlete great so if you look at levels of the game by contrast john mcfee's book about tennis us open That's much better at capturing like what made the tennis player good, like what they did, what the other player did, what that cat and mouse game was, like how this all worked. Like that was a much better book at capturing like what.
what makes you good at the sport. A lot of times you support memoirs don't get there. Well, you still have to be on the, in that level, right? Yeah. And then it's amongst the level where it gets distinguished. Yeah. So like at that level, like why? Yeah.
What did he have that even when he's like a little bit older and achy that like he could turn it on and beat so many of these other people? I just looked it up. He had eight majors. I didn't realize he had so many. Yeah. Yeah, he was good. He was good. I mean, the other problem about the book, it's not probably the book, but just about tennis.
Most of the time he's losing because most of the time you lose. So there's like these whole long sweats and you just lose, lose, lose, lose because it's so minor, the little edge you're required to win. You can just lose for a year.
Yeah, I guess in individual sports, you lose a lot. Like golf, you lose a lot. You just lose a lot, yeah. Yeah, like if you read a memoir of golf, like you lose most of the matches or tournaments, whatever they're called. Yeah, so he was good. But yeah, he won a bunch of majors. He was very good. He was not, the sense I got is like the, he's a great, but like the super greats were more, not organized, but like their life was much more structured around. He was more fast and loose.
Right. It's like Pete Sampras was more just regimented. Like his life was much more carefully built around what you need to do to do well at tennis. What do you need to do? with like your body and your recovery. And it was very like locked in. And August, he was sort of all over the place. And there's a part of this book where he's, he's taking meth. Did it talk about his hair? Yeah.
Yeah, his hair fell out early and then he would wear – he was wearing wigs and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. The final book I read in December is called The Future Was Now by Chris Noshawati. This is from – this genre of book that i like that there's a lot of similarity to it it's a movie book where it'll be about a movie or a group of movies and it's kind of basically oral histories right like we're just gonna like tell you a lot about like it's not
I discovered there's a whole genre of these I've been reading where we're going to talk about this movie year or this particular movie. And it's just like an oral history. Like here's what happened. They collect quotes from like a lot of other sources and pull it together. But I find them comforting.
The future was now is about the sci-fi movies from 1989. So there's like all of these like big sci-fi movies came out in the same year. This is like E.T. This is the year that Blade Runner came out. It's the year that... um conan the barbarian came out and tron came out and um so there's all these these big sci-fi like the idea of the big sci-fi movie
became a thing in this one year and so he kind of tells the stories of all these movies and how they came about or whatever so it's interesting you learn you hear about the directors what was happening and this was sort of the year that changed movies it was like oh we could these like big sci-fi movies can be like huge box office and
that it kind of helped kicked off that idea. So it was great. If you like movies and like these sort of oral history style movie books, this one was good. I listened to this one instead of read it and finished it. So it's good. All right. That's what I got. Those are my books from December. And at the end of January, I'll report what I read in January. As I mentioned, it's a lot more mathy. I was sort of punishing myself. I don't know. Trying to compensate.
For lack of physical activity with more intellectual activity. So more on that, but let's just say I can tell you now about how support vector machines and machine learning are really using. Kernels to help do multidimensional dot products to help figure out optimal margin algorithms in multidimensions without the computational power. I can talk to you about infinite dimension.
calculus and why you want to use this on vector representations of functions as a dual way of thinking about function calculus etc all stuff i learned after thriller december to try to compensate for my body not doing what i wanted to do you'll learn all about that in a few weeks but we'll be back next week with just a normal episode and until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go.
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