47: Deep Work

Newport on the show. Cal is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age. As a professor, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work. His most recent book, Deep Work, which we'll be talking about today, argues that focus is the new IQ in the knowledge economy, and the individuals who cultivate their ability

to concentrate without distraction will thrive. Thanks for being on the show today, Cal, sir Scott, thanks for having me on. Oh that's an interesting idea, the new IQ in the knowledge economy. By that, do you mean the new capital of what's the important twenty first century skill. Is that what you mean by that? Yeah, something like that. The skill that's going to differentiate you know, who thrives and who doesn't a twenty first economy is going to be

increasingly the ability to focus without distraction. So what is the difference between deep work and shallow work? So deep work is when you're focusing without distraction for a long amount of time on a cognitively demanding task, so you're giving something your full attention for an extended period of time.

Shallow work is basically anything else. So you you know, in your book you give it even more nuanced definition than that where you describe deep work as involving hard to replicate skills, and you also make this so you may and this is going to be really important for our discussion today, is actually unpacking precisely how you define it. So in deep work you talk about cognitively demanding and hard to replicate versus non cognitively demanding and easy to

replicate as kind of a difference. Yeah, So replicatability is important, especially for understanding the value produced by the work. So if the effort you're doing is something that would be easily replicatable, by someone who doesn't have a lot of specialized training in what you do. That also would push

it into the shallow work category. So for it to be deep work, you really want to be applying your hard won skills doing something that you can do because you built up those skills, and then you want to be applying those skills in a state of unbroken concentration. Right. I like that, And the way that you define that really does afford a lot of potential for creativity in

a lot of sense. What you're saying is, you know, maximize your individual potentials through this process of deep work, allows you to maximize your uniqueness in this world as well. So I thought that it left a lot of latitude

for that. But what thought was really interesting is how you make connections between your work and delivered practice, because I actually see a difference between your theory and deliberate practice as well as flow, and I thought it would be useful to your listeners, to us as well to kind of unpack the stuff. So how do you see

the similarity between deep work and deliberate practice? First of all, yeah, well, well there's certainly not equivalent, and I think you're right though not Yeah, you're the right to point that out. So deep work is a much more general category. So you know, what unifies deep work is this notion that something's getting your full attention and that you're it's not easily replicatable. So deliberate practice is an activity that requires

deep work. So to enter a state of deliberate practice, you do have to give something your full, unbroken concentration. The sort of the literal neuroscience of mastering the new skill doesn't work if you have a lot of noise in the circuits. But there's other type of activities that would also qualify as deep work which aren't deliberate practice. So entering a flow state, for example, is something that

deep work can help facilitate. But there is a big argument out there between you know, honors Ericson and others about whether their flow is compatible with deliberate practice. So I see deep work as being a much more general category, and it supports things like rapid acquisition of skills in a deliberate sense. It also supports entering a flow state as you apply your skills in a very sort of creative and skilled manner, and it can cover other types

of activities as well. Good so it's kind of like this overall umbrella of work that minimizes distractions so that you can get things done in a meaningful way. I do like that, so let's be you know, I'm really glad, first of all, that you're aware of these debates in my field of positive psychology between flow versus deliberate practice, and they really are unresolved debates, and I thought maybe

you would have some insights on this. So first of all, your theory when you include hard to replicate as part of deep work, that immediately takes it away from it being equivalent to doort practice, because Ericsson has been quoted saying dort practice is superior reproducible performance. So first of all, those are different. You know, something that it has to cut as be very reproducible as opposed to hard to replicate.

So there's a tension there between deep work practice. I like your resolution of that saying that that DOLT practice is just a subset or a type of it. And then with flow doesn't tend to be cognitively demanding, so when you're in the flow state, you actually don't feel at least you don't feel as though your cognition is very being is being taxed very much. It feels effortless. Yeah, well, I think there's a couple relevant points there, So these

distinctions are important. So, for example, when we're saying deep work is hard to replicate, more precisely, what I mean by that is it would be hard to replicate for someone off the street who is untrained in your particular field. So, for example, if you look at the deliberate training of let's say a professional athlete, there's a lot of replication

involved in the particular skill they might be training. It might be a baseball player who's really trying to work at getting the handslower at a swing, so there's replication involved, But to be able to actually swing at that level with that skill to just the average athletic person who had no particular baseball train up to that point would

be very hard to be hard to replicate. So it's training where you're taking your current sc ill and then you are trying to push your current skills, so it'd be hard to replicate for someone who didn't have your particular training up to that point. This is a particularly important distinction for trying to force a distinction between sort of deep activities and the type of activities that increasingly fill a lot of the knowledge worker's life, so communication, email,

sort of social media. There's a lot of belief out there that well, this is really important, and this is this is really valuable, and so deep work sort of distinguishes itself and says, well, you know, partially, what we're trying to get at here is activities that some any sixteen year old the smartphone couldn't do. Right where you're actually trying to apply your training or improve you're already high level of training, not something that basically anyone could do.

Then with the flow state and congly demanding. I mean again, there's a there's a really important distinction here, which I'm glad we're talking about it, which feels like versus what it actually is. Is that what you're gonna say, Yes, exactly, I know, we tell it's it's such an important distinction. Yeah, your field has a much more precise vocabulary for it than I than I'm using properly, so I should be

careful about it. But well, well, I'll tell you we far from understand exactly how to objectively measure effort expenditure. I mean, that's objectively measuring that is you know, people have tried various different metrics, even from dopamine. You know, production, We're far from really like nailing that, you know. Yeah,

and flow states really mess up. I'm sure a lot of these scales because they have this effortless feel, but I guess they would satisfy the definition of cognitive demanding that I'm thinking of, which is actually your brain is fully engaged on, you know, a single branding task, that it's something that's requiring you to actually apply a lot of skill, require a lot of concentration, even if the

subjective experience of the activity is effortless. Sure, and I like how you talk about you know, when you are engaging something that's challenging, it does ultimately feel more satisfying. It does feel like it's kind of like what it's like eating junk food, right versus you know, you exert the self control to noddy the junk food, but ultimately, in the long run you feel better about yourself. Yeah. Yeah, So it's why is deep work so satisfying? It's Yeah,

it's the sort of multi part explanation. I mean, sometimes it gets you into a flow state, which can just be sort of intrinsically enjoyable in the moment, but then if it's more of a sort of difficult deliberate you're trying to improve a skill and it's not that fun, you get this more deeper satisfaction in the long run, the higher level satisfaction of you know, I feel good about myself for having spent the effort required to sort

of get better at this or master this. So there's sort of different different reasons to come up for why this type of deep activity can be satisfying for people good. So deep work really is this unbrill term that involves lots of different tools, and you can bring out different tools at different stages of the process of what you're working on. So the tools one is like resisting distraction. Another is deliberate practice, which is a very specific kind

of intentional practice. The flow state, hopefully, you know, comes as a as a natural Hopefully you don't want to intentionally pull. It's hard to intentionally pull flow from the toolkit, but hopefully it comes about naturally once you engage in it. And then I would add on to that what we talked about in your comment thread, deliberate creation, and I think that's that does fit nicely within your deep work framework.

There's not a tension there, right, So it's you know, if deliberate practice is intentionally trying to increase your skill through repetition of something in a deliberate, effortful way that

reduces distractions. I would define deliberate creation as a one of the tools in the tools in the tooket where you deliberately intentionally try to generate multiple possibilities for what something could be and try to really reflect and think on which ones you want to select to continue and trial and error at this point in your work, and which not to. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean I think that that captures well sort of the cycle

of the creation of things of value. So if we take my work as an example, as I'm a professor, I write math papers, right, you have these different phases. There's this this phase in which I'm trying to deliberately master new techniques, new knowledge, trying to understand new papers, trying to understand new mathematics. This is a very sort of deliberate practice style effort. It is very difficult in

the moment. In other words, you don't necessarily look forward to doing it, though you do get a long term satisfaction. Then there's a sort of deliberate creativity type phase, and this is where I'm trying to solve a particular problem and I'm bringing to bear all the different ideas and expertises that I've internalized. I like to spend time in the woods on foot, for example, when I'm trying to

crack a proof. And then there's this sort of deliberate you call it production process where now I'm trying to maybe take the proof I've solved and try to write a compelling academic paper and maybe you might even fall into a flow state there or not, but that's also going to require a lot of concentration to try to sort of craft the paper in a way with that

I'm proud of. So you know, all of these different processes, all of which fall into the umbrella of deep work, go into in this example in the end producing something of real value, something that could actually is rare and viable that the marketplace would value. So deep work supports, as you're pointing out, multiple different types of deep efforts that all kind of work together. So this umbrella skill that I've trained myself to be better at concentrating to

be better at resisting distraction. This is why I'm starting to say that focus is the new IQ, because all these core activities that surround the production of rare and valuable output all seem to draw upon a skill set of I'm comfortable and concentration. I'm comfortable being free of distraction. I'm comfortable giving a lot of attention to a single thing. You know, rare and valuable. Is exactly how creativity researchers define creativity, a creative outcome as novel and useful or

novel and meaningful. So yeah, you're literally defining both of us. Really, bottom line that we really want to help people with just becoming it from maybe different places, is to increase people's creativity. But we call it, we call it different things. You know, you call it productivity, output, success, you know, I just like, over and over again, call it creativity. But maybe I'm one trick pony, but but yeah, that's exactly how I think of creativity as well. Yeah, yeah,

very cool. Okay, So you talk a lot about the skillful management of attention and I like that, And from a neuroscience point of view, we find that the executive attention network is really important, not just for cognitive control, but for cognitive flexibility, it's a related but separable. Executive

function is your ability to change your attention. And so that means you also give room in your deep work framework for moments where you want to pull your attention back a little bit from the task that's immediately in front of you and maybe look at something that's related

to hope jog insights are not right. Yeah, So having that type of control over your attention that you can be let's say, reading a source and then see something relevant and to shift your attention to that and then bring it back to what you're looking at before, and to be comfortable doing that is a key skill. I mean, what underlies it is this when it comes to the executive attention network in the brain, is the ability to develop this competency in having agency in what you're paying

attention to and how you're paying attention to it. And this is why I express so much worry about a lot of digital tools that have been entered into sort of the information ecosystem, because a lot of these tools are designed to basically hijack that network, to capture your

attention to build an addiction. And this is why I'm very wary about which information tools I let into my life, and I can be somewhat curmudgingly about how people actually curate their digital tool set, because to take care of your ability to focus, to switch your attention, to control your attention in the knowledge economy, I think it's the same as being an athlete who takes care of your body, and it's got to be a sort of a foundational

activity if you're going to have any sort of success. Yeah, you really have to protect your yourself literally, yeah, yeah, you can't eat. I mean, if I'm a professional athlete, it wouldn't fly if I said when I'm training, I train hard. But when I'm not training, I drink a lot and I eat a lot of junk food, because you've got to take care of your body. And I think the same is true for sort of high creativity

knowledge work fields. This notion of like, when I'm not working, I'm constantly letting these tools on my phone capture my attention, and I'm doing this I'm on the tablet while it's cognitive junk food. I mean, there is some parallels here in some sense that if you're not treating your brain or attention with respect, outside of work, you maybe shouldn't expect to be able to get full capacity out of it the next day when you want to sit down

and really be deep or deliberate about something. Well, you know, you talk about the importance of choosing your leisure time very carefully, and I think that relates to what you just said. But it also I mean, can't you build in junk food every now and then, Like do you have to live such a life free of all pleasures. Yeah, you can build it in, but you should treat it like you would treat junk food. In other words, for example, I often will flip the standard idea that you should

occasionally take breaks from digital distractions. I like to flip that idea, and so you should occasionally schedule time to spend time with sort of distracting digital media. So I put a side an hour tonight where I'm gonna sort of click on the ad, you know, the sponsored stories with the compelling headlines, and go on BuzzFeed and do my social media. I put a side an hour for that. But hey, you know what, the other three hours of the night, I'm letting my mind be focused on what

I'm doing. I'm being president of what I'm doing, same way that I might say, you know, I'm going to have some oreos tomorrow night, and I'm excited about it as opposed to I essentially I am always eating oreos.

That makes a lot of sense. And how do you incorporate the finding from the creativity literature that some of the those who like make the history books, like the most accomplished creative people in every generation, tend to have the greatest versatility of interests or broad they have very broad interests. How do you fit that within your framework? Well, I mean a lot of times the people, at least sort of in my anecdotal experience, So maybe this will

tie with the with the actual research liters. The people who tend to have real innovative insights in their field are people who are very comfortable sort of persistently and aggressively in taking and internalizing knowledge. So they can come to a field and can very aggressively get up the speed on the literature, understand it deeply, start looking for new connections, and say, ah, you know, I see an insight.

So it's not necessarily surprising to me that you see this sort of renaissance man type hunger in the most innovative or creative people out there to turn their attention to a field and then with great intensity sort of pursue it and master to some degree, and then turn and do it nothing else. It's maybe a chicken and egg issue here, but it's a type of brain that is very comfortable, you know, acquiring internalizing knowledge quickly is going to be a brain that's very successful in making

creative insights good. So curiosity need not be at odds with deep practice or deep work, right. So, yeah, you're probably a very you like me, we're probably both like extraordinary curious about and we're intellectually curious, right, Like, that's what motivates you to do probably most of the deep work that you do, right, So they're not incompatible at all. And you know sometimes people put these they pit these things against each other, and it kind of bothers me

when they do that. Yeah, I mean the tension there is often is often somewhat you know, it's often somewhat invented. I mean where the message I try to give to people is that where depth is going to help you is depth is what's going to help you master the thing you're interested in. Depth is what's going to help you take that master read and create new insights out of it. Death is what's going to help you take those insights and create you know, beautiful products or outcomes

or results you know from those insights. Basically, all of the phases of the cycle that produces things that have an impact on the world, have an impact of the economy, all draw upon depths. So you can be incredibly curious, But to be incredibly curious while living a deep life is a much more satisfying thing than to be incredibly curious. And to then answer that with a lot of very cursory jumping around. And I'm clicking this link, and I'm looking at this, and I heard a Ted talk on this.

I just looked at this. I mean, there's some notion of giving the superficial curiosity versus deep curiosity. We can invent all of these new terms. Yeah, I think we need to write another book here. Yeah. No, absolutely, In my opinion, that's what's so great about disagreements, or maybe called superficial disagreements versus deep disagreements. Now I'm going to see everything in the world like that. But you know,

you wrote this blog post. I read what you read and I was like, well, that's really interesting, and I find that through conversations with people disagree with me, I warn't a lot more. Yeah, I know, I think it's

it's definitely very productive. I mean when it comes to that blog post, for example, I mean what I deal a lot with sort of my readers or my audience is that the stage of deliberately building the skills and expertise on which you know, true innovation and sort of satisfying accomplishment is made is really overlooked in our culture. And hammer I have to hammer it home again and again and again. You're not going to have the world

changing idea right out of college. And I said, when you're nineteen, you're not going to change your field by having some sort of hack you came up with. There's a lot of this life hacking type ideas out there that people are taking in. And so I'm always driving build the habit of depths and deliberate and mastering the field and understanding the skills and building skill and building value. And in some sense, once you have that, then the

cool stuff gets to happen. But the people I work with often don't get there, you know, I mean, the people I work with my audience. They want to jump straight to that. Can't I just think up a really create of idea that well, just it's going to change. It's just going to change the world. Can't I drop out of college and start a nonprofit and the idea will just be so creative that we're we're really going to change the world, and I'll find meaning right away

out of it. And it misses the piece of Now you've got to get to the cutting edge before you can figure out what the new configurations are right beyond it, what the new innovation is, what the new things are they're going to create impact. So that's why I'm always beating this drum of hard work of building skills is harder than people think, especially student It's harder than you think. It's hard to build the skills. It takes a lot more time, and so probably to a fault, I beat

that drum with my readers. Yeah. But yeah, like you note, with your particular audience, it's not beating the drum endlessly helpful to them, right. So yeah, Well, because it's so hard, I mean, in that whole sort of cycle of creating things of value, I think the part that takes up the most time and is the most difficult and the most rare, is actually the acquisition of the raw materials, the internalization of the knowledge and skills that allows you know,

elite level creativity and accomplishment. And it really is a sort of a and huge investment to try to get there. And I don't know that we talk about it enough. I don't think our culture talks about enough to sort of respect and satisfaction that can come from sort of the deliberate acquisition of skills and building of craft and billd of talent. We used to talk about this in past cultures a little bit more fluidly, and I think

now we tend to, especially in the American cultural narrative. Now, we tend to like stories, for example, natural talent and the prodigy, and that if it doesn't come easy to you, you're not a math person. If it doesn't come easy to you, like you're not meant to do that. And there's the natural athlete and the natural mathematician. And we sort of miss that long, satisfying process of building the expertise on which I'm then going to build something that matters. Well,

let's talk about that. You brought up the T word dun dund talent. It's better than bringing up the G word gens. People freak out even more if you say that genes play a role in anything, people like freak out. Can we have an honest discussion here about this, like, you know, I find your point very relevant important. Angela Duckworth in her new book Grit I don't know if you've read that book, so she says that talent can distract us from the importance of effort. So that's very

consistent with what you're saying. But can't too much of a talk about effort distract us from appreciating talent as well. You know, it doesn't work. It doesn't work both ways. Yeah, it's an interesting point, and I've talked to Angela about this before actually, because no, I think your point is good. I think you have to worry about it from both ends.

I mean, I I've often been an Angelus camp of talent can distract from effort, because you know, I work a lot with students, for example, and you see the harm that comes when there's just this successive search for I'm just going to find the thing I'm meant to do, and then once I know it's the thing I'm meant to do, I can put into the effort, I can

go after it. And I just paralyze as young people in particular, right, because there's this idea that you're meant to do something, and you'll feel it like the first time you're exposed to it. You'll feel it, you'll have this sort of shiver up your spine, and then you'll you'll have no problem putting in the effort going forward.

And it's more complex, right, I mean there's this interplay between you're building skill and then you feel you feel more competent about it, and then you uncover where in that area that maybe your talents lie. And it is a very complicated mix. And so yeah, I fall on that side of the equation. Sure, And so angel and I wrote this paper which I'll share with you, saying that expertire high levels of world what we call world class expertise equals talent times effort. I read this paper, Yeah,

oh awesome. And the thing the thing about you know, if you define talent is just simple, like let's like demystify talent for a second and not make it such a magical, mysterious thing. If we just define it as the kind of bang for buck that you get out of a particular training regimen given equal amount of effort.

Then you clearly see differences in talent, right, You clearly see you give people the same tasks or same work to do, and they apply they all equally apply your deep work techniques, and they still differ in the performance.

I think it's disingenuous to say. And I've never seen you say this, by the way, so I'm not criticizing you at all, but I think it would be disingenious for someone to, like a marketer or someone to say, it's all about deep work, and if you don't have high levels of performance, as Johnny over there, it's because you're not following my book slavishly enough, you're not reading

my book. And so I want to have an open, honest discussion about the importance of skills, but I don't want to sweep under the rug the importance of other variables as well. And that just might be the scientist in me. Maybe I should just like STFU, shut the f of and just you know, like talk about only the parts of science that are directly applicable to helping

someone improve. But as a scientist, I want to lay on the table all the truth, even those that might not help you improve, just you have, like I just delived my life by the view that self knowledge is never wrong, you know, is always a good path to learning in life. I don't know, what are you thinking about all this? Yeah, and I read that article. I I like that article a lot. And really there's there's two components. As you just pointed out, you have two variables.

You have to hold one steady to really get to it independent variable. And that's what confuses the whole discussion is that your definition of talent, which I like, has these two variables in it, which is a sort of natural propensity to do this type of learning versus also techniques use training regimen or techniques used to actually do the learning, and they both have a massive impact on

the rate at which new skills are learned. But what I like about your formulation right now is just said, Okay, let's run the thought experiment where we hold very constant not just effort, but training regiment that you've been you've both spent this many weeks with hondors and are and have just the right deliberate expert training routine. Now that by itself is going to give you probably a talent quotion in a lot of things. I don't know if it's true. Actually, I mean to let me run this

by you. That Let's say you had you hold that steady. What's left is some sort of inborn propensity for the rate at which you acquire new skill. So my question is, and actually, as a legitimate question, I've been trying to a good straight answer to this from from your community. Let's say you you take two individuals and one of them has a sort of significantly higher natural propensity for learning this particular type of material at a high rate, okay,

and someone else has a lower natural propensity. There if we can measure this somehow, you know, the question I'm trying to get at is if you take the person with the higher natural ability and they have just not great training regimen, and then you take the person with the lower ability, but they have a really well trained, very sort of knowledge based training regiment. They really understand what's important in their field and how to be delivered

and how to expand it. Where are those curves going to intersect? And you know, I asked you know who, I asked this question of David Epstein, who I know, you know? And yeah, so I if I remember his answer, he thinks that you would see the natural ability curve once you raise that, it's it's going to surpass at

some point, you know, not at the far tale. I think his point would be, it's probably going to pass the curve of the person who has the really good training regimen did in some sense you'd get a really big return on the natural ability. But what's your cake on this? In other words, I want to fully understand your question? Do you mind like asking me the question again? Maybe refra So we have two curves that we're we're looking at here, right, the talent, Yeah, so the talent

one where? And what what is actually the curve there is? That is that rate? That's a good question. So let's put let's put the y access like value produced phys a measured skill like how successful they are the dependent measure. It's like the dependent measure. Yeah. And then so one curve we could we could plot would be the what where way to put? One curve you could plot is the person with low natural ability for mastering this type

of or average ability for mastering type of skill. Let's make the X axis out of though effectiveness of training regime. So you sort of have this increase, right, and then your other plot is going to be the same Y axis. But now let's make the X axis natural ability for

learning this type of man. So if you for a fixed bad training regiment, so at the far left of this plot, that's going to be it'll be higher than the first plot, right, because when they're both doing when they both have bad regiments, the natural ability is going to have higher value. So that, well, let me give you some data that I think YE speaks to. This does makes sense? Yeah, in other words, like who would you rather be right? Like the first so you would

let me answer that question. Because one of Angela's grad students, I remember the day he ran into my office so excited that he found this finding. I mean, I'm not sure be published it yet, but it's a really important finding. So he found that if you have a really high IQ and low grit, you'll still turn out pretty okay. Actually in academics, you know, like if you're in school and to higher your IQ in a sense, the less you actually have to put in the effort to learn

the material. However, he found that there were multiple paths

to the same outcome. And this is this is a point that I try to make over and over again, is that you know, we we should stop pitting these different traits against each other because if we look at individual level, and we see we look at the distribution of your traits within a person, not comparing people to each other, we find that people can compensate for lower values of other traits with other traits that they have, and you miss that entirely if you just compare working

between people. So you need a within person variation perspective. So he found that people who had lower IQs, like even average IQs, but were like two standard deviations above on GRIT reached the same exact academic outcomes as those with two stand viation's higher IQ but lower GRIT. So people can reach the same exact outcome with a different

configuration of traits. And I think that's a good way of kind of viewing the world as opposed to making these grand pronouncements, Like you know, I cringe when I see things like grit is beats everything else, or then

I see IQ beats everything else. It's like, well, you are a person and your dynamic system of motivational processes, a self regulatory processes, cognitive traits, not just IQ cognitive traits, but like learning strategies which you would put under your framework of deep deep work, and the extent to which you can harness these learning strategies, the extent you can

compensate for lower levels of IQ. So I actually think it would be really cool to do a study where we have people and measure their level of deep work practices and see the extent to which that kind of mindset and habits compensates for lower levels of ability. Yeah. Yeah,

so it's interesting findings. But you know, another way to think about it is, you know, within the context of an individual's own life, the only one of those factors that they have control over is going to be the behavioral aspects, right, I mean, they're not going to be able to make a massive impact to some sort of natural trait. So in other words, there's some justification for focusing in the sort of deliverance of advice to people on you know, you're going to have to put in hours.

They're very deliberate and deep and careful, because what you're doing is you're taking whatever the base point is and you're trying to add the highest that you can to it. So in other words, you're helping that individual get to a peak level, you know, for themselves. Because if you take the high IQ person and then you give an incredibly high level of persistence and great work efforts, then you start to get to the really elite level producers,

really elite level academics. It's they have the brain power, They got a lot of horsepower there, but they also have these crazy sort of deliberate work ethics where like they'll disappear like Adam does for days at a time or Yeah, and I have actually another point. I think I was just going to say that where I think I'm on your side a lot is that I think we undervalue the value of what the bang for your

bucking get from these deep practice regimens. So, you know, I think that like brain power doesn't have to be the limiting factor in what you can achieve in life, is how I would frame it. It It doesn't have to be a limiting factor. We could still say people differ in that brain power, but we can still say it doesn't have to actually limit you, yeah, right much in the way that you know, if you want to become an Olympic athlete. Whether you're going to be an Olympic

athlete was probably whether that's possible, it's been predetermined. There's just how tall are you, Do you have the right sort of leg muscles, the type of stuff David writes about. But if you want to be in really good shape, that's accessible to you, and you know, in some sense, I think this is true in sort of knowledge careers.

If you want to be an effective, high level performer who produces things that are valuable and therefore it gets a lot of automy over your career, you can do that almost certainly, regardless of the sort of the variations maybe where you start now, if you want to be famous in your field, if you want to be one of the an elite level performer who sort of changes the world, and maybe there's other types of there's other

types of factors that are involved. But what I'm talking about is like the old story of you don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun your friends. This is really cool. I mean this a unique opportunity to talk to a computer. I stayed compeer science as an undergrad as well, so it's cool to like, let's think like a computer. Science is for a second here, So you know the touring test, right, can you distinguish

a human from a not human? But what if there was like a touring Let's just do the experiment of like a touring test versus can you tell the difference between someone who is naturally talented versus someone who reached the goal through deep work? Like I just thought of this, but let's just like think of this. Let's think this through.

Would there be any practical difference between the two. So let's say we have someone who has a lower IQ who wasn't naturally intelligent, but they went through all your deep practice routines to learn the software of what an intelligent how an intelligent person thinks on a regular basis habitually to the point where their thoughts are no longer indistinguishable from the naturally high IQ person who didn't have to deliberately learn how to become intelligent, but has those

thoughts naturally at the end of the day, Like, is there a difference between the two? And given it from an artificial intelligence point of view, what is the difference between the two? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, there shouldn't be a difference between the two. I think the interesting question is would there be right? I mean, in other words, would people win this test? And it's

a difficult question. I've long had a bias towards the answer that people would do a lot better at this deep work test than I think most people assume. Right. In other words, I've seen a lot of this around myself and my own life, where these transformations happen basically through training and time that to the outside world you see striations. I mean, so think about the academic process of becoming an academic, right, the grad students always feel

like the senior grad students are smarter than them. The senior grad students feel like the systemt professors are smarter them. The assistant professors think the full professors are. How do they have these insights? Why? What's the difference in that striation? It's also years of training, right, In other words, like once you've once you've been training as a grad student for a few years, you get sharper at the field.

You know more about it, you can speak with more authority, You're more cognitively flexible because you've internalized more concepts to reconfigure. The difference was not that you got smarter, but that you've actually trained more or I take myself as an example. You know, I was never a math person just because that's what I just sort of self labeled. Math wasn't something I studied a lot, and now I do mathematics

at a high level for a living. The difference was I took some years in there where I just very deliberately practice and tried to improve my math skills. So I think in the extremes there's definitely gonna be differences. But my bias is that people would do a lot

better on this hypothetical test. Then most in our culture might assume that there's a lot when it comes to these more nebulous cognitive, semi social, semi cognitive type positions like I'm a thinker, I'm a professor, I'm a writer, that there's a lot that really is trained for sure, and we have this bia. I wrote this article recently and heard a business review with Shia say showing that people of a bias towards talent as being the explanation

of great pieces. And if you tell people's story of where they got to where they are today through talent versus striving, we are much more likely to pick the talented person even though their performance is exactly the same, exactly the same level of performance. So this, what you're talking about, has real implications for our kind of unconscious biases and making hiring decisions as well. Right, Yeah, And

I'm curious what the cultural component is of this. I mean, in other words, I don't know if you have evidence around this that's useful. But is this something that differs between different cultures? Like it is the unique question? I mean, anecdotally, I've always observed the US culture to be one that loves the notion of natural talent, love it. But isn't that funny that we also love the pull yourself out by your bootstraps narrative as well? Yeah, it's interesting we

have this division. There's the hard workers, you know, like it's okay to pull your up from the bootstraps and get a company going that's successful. But but you know, our mathematicians and our athletes, and you know, our poets, like they all better be Mozart or you know, we're not in it. You know, we like Bryce Harper, not Daniel Murphy. Right, Yeah, we're deeply conflicted. Yeah, I guess we are. I guess we are. So it's a weird culture,

you know. I mean again, a lot of this ideas came onto my radars really dealing with undergraduates, and you probably see something similar. But it's really at that level that you first see the sort of concrete impacts of a sort of cultural understanding of natural talent and pre existing passion and fit theory, this notion that the core to satisfaction is all just in the matching of activities to pre existing skills, and the reality is of course

more complicated. It's not at one extreme or the other, but you know, that's where I see. I first saw a lot of these issues played out actually with students who would switch their major in their junior year. Again and again, they would come to me in their junior and so this is kind of wait, why are you

switching your major in your junior year? And it turned out what happened is upper level courses are harder, and so they would take these courses and they'd be more difficult to say, I'm not enjoying this, like this is hard, I'm kind of going to look hard at this. This must not be something I'm good at, this must not be my passion. I better switch before I run out

of time to like what I'm supposed to do. And so this is where I first was exposed to sort of the concrete impacts of the culture that's built around the idea that all that matters is there is something you're meant to do. If you can just find it, everything else will be taken care of, really clever, And we can also look at the inverse of that. Plenty of naturally gifted individuals choose what they want to choose because they learn so easily, and they still are wholly

unsatisfied at the end of the day. There's a lot of cases of that as well, right, Yeah, yeah, definitely, and it works both ways. And I think that you're illustrating that your point of yeah, yeah, no, and I think that's definitely true. You know, the book I wrote before, Deep Work, which is which is probably one that would also get us into a discussion. Yeah, I would basically say the advice to follow your passion is causing more

harm than good. Sure, that was the premise of the premise of the book, and part of the feedback coming back was well, wait a second, though, like some people do have these sort of natural you know, something would be more well suited for them than others. They have a natural propensity for this type of skill versus bad and it's not all just the same. And in some sense the reaction was, yeah, that's true, but that's not

really a place where people are struggling. I mean, in other words, like people are pretty good as if they have like a real strong attraction to a particular type of work or effort, they're pretty good at sort of gravitating towards that. Where the damage is being done is where you give them the narrative that then once you do that, you will immediately find sort of motivation, satisfaction, and passion in your work that you get a skip in some such the hard part of where you actually

have to get good. Because I remember reading I was reading your book when I was writing the passion chapter for that book, Where to Create, And I like the idea that you shouldn't be following it. But I think it also is okay to be one with your passion in the sense that you know, the harmonious passion literature shows that the more that you could healthfully integrate an activity into your identity in a way that makes you feel good about yourself the more likely you are to

want to exert effort in that activity. So there's interesting feedback loops. I think between exerting the effort and becoming better with that effort, and then once to increase that effort, it also becoming more and more a part of who you are at a deep identity level. So something I want to Maybe we could end on this note because I think it was quite poetic. You said, quote, any pursuit, be it physical or cognitive, that supports high levels of

skill can also generate a sense of sacredness. So this is really interesting. You know, when you talk about importance of meaning, finding, fulfillment, happiness in life through deep work, you also refer to a deep life. So your principles don't only have to apply to your work. It can also apply to your relationships and other things in life that are meaningful you Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So can you unpack more what you mean by sacredness?

Because I thought it was really interesting. Yeah. So when that quote was actually it was drawing from a book that was written by two philosophers. Actually, so the head of the philosophy department at Harvard and Emeritis professor from Berkeley was called all things shining, and they were in essence, they were studying the negative impact of the lack or

loss of sacredness from sort of everyday life. Do not have things we could look towards that had some sort of value beyond ourselves, And their conclusion was we can get that back through craftsmanship. In other words, to be to be skilled at a craft exposes yourself to a world of values that are cited outside of the self. It's not just you determine what do I like what

do I not like. They use the example of a wheelwright and said, the properties that makes a piece of pine well suited for the wheel that you're trying to skull exist outside of you, and those properties are what makes that would good, whether or not you want them to be or not, and that there's actually great satisfaction therefore, that's found in craft because it opens you to a world of sacredness you value and thing to sit it

outside of just your own decision. So it's part of the in my usage, the philosophical argument for why a deep life can actually be more meaningful because it's a life dedicated to craftsmanship and once you're actually trying to hone a craft and apply that craft to create things

of value. You find more value in your life itself because you're moving away from just sort of a constant back and forth chattering with sort of the internet seer out there, and you're putting your energy on trying to actually rest something of value from a world of chaos. And so there's something deep there, there's something meaningful there. So deep life is not just about you're going to get the next promotion. It's also just a much more

satisfying life to live. Thanks Kel, I really really like that, and that's a great note to end on. So thank you so much for this chat today. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barr Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provooking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com. Y