Focus Is the New IQ, and Almost No One Has It | Cal Newport

This is episode number 770 with New York Times bestselling author, Cal Newport. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howe as a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today, now let the class begin. Socrates said the secret of happiness you see is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. Welcome to this interview I'm super excited because we have Cal Newport in the house who is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and writes the study hacks blog focused on academic and career success. His work has been published in over 20 languages and he's been featured in many publications including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post and economist and he's never had a social media account. That's right he's a New York Times bestseller he's a thriving author and never had a social media account to promote his work and in this interview we talk about the three powerful benefits of getting out in nature to explore our thoughts the healing powers of this. Also how to build stronger connections in person rather than only online. We discuss how our phones and social media can be a big escape from life in a mentally unhealthy way. The power of social media detoxing and what you can do for 30 days to get started and we discuss the true definition of minimalism in some myths people have about the lifestyle. Now this is going to be an interesting one because if you're an entrepreneur who uses social media all the time you may think this might go against the grain of you growing your business but Cal gives some practical strategic advice on how to be on social media less and make more very powerful and be happier. Make sure to share this with your friends LewisHouse.com/770 and tag myself at Lewis House while you're listening you can't tag Cal because he doesn't have an Instagram account but make sure to let me know and I'll pass the information over to Cal. All right guys I'm excited about this once all about how do we use social media responsibly how do we take a digital detox and a digital minimalism approach to life so we can do deeper more meaningful more valuable work that resonates with the world with the one and only Cal Newport. All right welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast very excited about this we've got Cal Newport in the house get to see a man. Lewis my pleasure. Excited you had a book come out a few years ago when did that come out? 2016 2016 called Deep Work and it argues that focus is the new IQ in the modern workplace because we have so much social media distracting us and focus is something that is kind of like a lost commodity I guess it's something that is a lost art you know one knows how to focus for more than two seconds yeah well there there's two forces going on so focus is becoming more valuable sort of unrelated to this other tech just because our economy is increasingly shifting towards high-level knowledge work right we sort of outsource or automate the low-level knowledge work of the stuff that really requires some creativity or some thinking or original thought that's getting more important in our economy right so if you can focus it really helps you produce this type of value but at the same time sort of unrelated to that trend we're getting worse at concentrating because we have this going on all the time right we're looking at the screen to then also email culture within work so it was the sort of supply and demand focus is becoming more valuable at the exact same time that is becoming more rare and so the book was about hey if you're one of the few people that cultivates this thing you're going to have a huge advantage sort of a sort of disproportionate advantage yeah you're going to be like the wealthy of value yeah because there's only so many few people that are actually able to focus and and write a book that's got deep work in it and make a movie or do something that takes a year two years three years yeah the time and energy to go into something one piece of work to make it magical is so much harder to do yeah but it's very valuable very valuable but it's practiced as well and so the book was sort of about we've forgotten how valuable focus is and we've forgotten what it takes to be good at it what's it take to be good at focus well I mean people think about it like a habit right like flossing their teeth everyone thinks like I know how to focus the problem is I'm just not doing it enough like I should try to make more time to do it but it's really more like a skill like if you practice it's like playing a guitar right you practice it you can be better at if you don't practice it you're not going to be very good at it even if you put aside the time and you lock away all your devices and you here I am I'm in the cave I'm going to write my book if you haven't been practicing it it's not going to go very well right and so there's sort of essentially like cognitive athletics you can actually go in there and train this capability and you kind of have to and there's a lot of different elements to how you do it the training focus training focus how do what's for someone who's obsessed with social media yeah who checks email 20 times a day who always feels like they're behind yeah and they're working till eight nine ten o'clock at night because they haven't done focused work during the day yeah what are some steps that they could start with yeah well it's sort of like with athletics there's general fitness and then the actual training the skill skill yeah so so cognitive fitness means among other things your brain needs to be comfortable with being bored I mean if it's been trained that every time you get a little bit bored you go a shiny treat like the stimuli you get this Pavlovian connection where it's bored on means stimuli bored on means stimuli so then when it comes time to actually focus which is boring in the technical sense right because there's not a lot of different stimuli exciting it's not exciting your brain is going to say no way like I've learned it right when I'm bored I get the treat so I'm not going to sit here and and stare at the the blank page for a couple hours so in that sense if you're constantly doing this it's like junk food eating if you're an athlete right is your fitness is going to be bad it tastes good in the moment it tastes good in the moment but then you you get on the field right you feel like crap you feel like crap right yeah yeah and then there's the training right there there's specific things you can do this sort of acute training and so like one of the things I write about is something called productive meditation which is essentially cognitive pull ups like it's really hard but it it gives you big results and the idea there is you go for a walk and you try to hold one professional thought in your head and you try to make progress on that thought while you're walking and just like in mindfulness meditation when you notice that your concentration drops which it will do you come back to the back to it right you bring it back bring it back it's really hard at first but if you keep practicing this like I want to just think about one thought try to make progress on something in my head as I walk you get better and better at it and and the results can actually be pretty radical I do this for a month and you find your ability to sit down and go laser really if you do this a lot for yourself you'll take walks yeah and you'll start thinking about I dig in an example of like the last few days what was yeah well so I write in my head so like when I'm trying to figure out a chapter or an essay or something like this I really I work out the structure and then I actually work out a lot of the wording and that's mainly practiced and in my day job I'm a theoretical computer scientist so I do proofs so I do a lot of that in my head so you rowing and that's literally moving the sort of variables of the equations you know in my hometown I'm considering a centric because I'm always walking the loops yeah and people are people talking to my wife like where was your husband going like I saw him twice he looked back he looked back around but you know I like wandering and something about walking it shuts off some non-cerebral parts of your mind it makes it easier to take the thinking aspect and really focus it do you take your phone with you when you're walking sometimes yeah but I'll just don't have social media yeah what about what about texting an email yeah do you because you don't have social media you've never had an account never had an account and you and I were born around the same time you were a year older than me and we were in college you know I guess your last year of college my junior year was when Facebook came out yeah I think 2004 2004 yeah yeah yeah I went back and looked up the timeline yeah to the four and it was like a big deal when it came out in my college yeah and we were some of the first people to have it I'm sure you were as well yeah college but you never signed up for an account and you've never had social media never had it I mean I think what happened it was sort of accidental but yeah Facebook was the first well friends there had been around but my space yeah my space was kind of new then friends there was sort of a dating I think more so Facebook came around people were excited about it and I wasn't interested in signing up and I don't quite know why I think in part because you know I had had a failed tech company in the first boom and you know Zuckerberg's a contemporary of ours and so it's just like yeah who's this who's this other kid whose website is so popular and also my memory is so you have always hated listing things right if you tell me what's your what's your three favorite books or something like that I just can't do it I'm really bad at like listing favorites and that's what Facebook was in 2004 what's your favorite movie favorite movie favorite book favorite songs is like I was like I don't want to think about that it doesn't sort of accidental I didn't sign up for that but then once you didn't enter that path I had this sort of objective distance where then I could kind of observe as it changed you know how its role and people's lives changed over time right yeah and the stress that people have I think that status like almost 50 minutes a day people are on Facebook or social media or 50 minutes is yeah Facebook products Facebook products so Instagram and Facebook mainly yeah messenger. Yeah, they own WhatsApp now. I guess they own WhatsApp. Yeah, crazy, isn't it? Yeah. Almost an hour day of your life. Yeah. Just for those services. Crazy. Okay. So you wander around, do you do this every day, you take a walk? I mean, it depends on the day. It's interesting because when I was 11, 10, 11 years ago, I had a mentor every day, he would take a walk for lunch. Yeah. And just brainstorm. He was an inventor. Yeah. And he always had creative ideas and he said, my best ideas come from walking. Yeah. And I think we lose the art of getting out in nature and having space to be bored. Yeah. And when we are bored, that's when some of our best ideas come to us. It's crucial. It's crucial. But very few of us have the courage to be alone. Well, it's scary for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, so being alone with your own thoughts, right? It's scary, but it does three things. One, it's self-insight. So if you want to develop as a human, figure out what you're about, grow into a new phase of life, become an adult, any of these type of questions, you have to grapple with your own thoughts, you have the process, your experiences, you have to try to make sense of it, right? That requires a tough question. Ask the tough questions. And you know, what are you upset about that you've done? What are you happy about? And that involves you. You can't do this while you're in input processing mode. So if there's something in your ear or something in your hand, you can't be doing this type of reflection. And so, so you don't, you don't develop, professional insight requires it, right? Creativity requires you to actually take in all this input that you've been receiving. You got to think about it. So like someone listening to this podcast right now is in input processing mode. So their brain is in a very particular mode, which is I am now receiving input that comes from another human mind, which is a very special mode. Our brain takes it seriously all hands on that, right? If you don't then take some time to just think about what you've heard, you're going to get a fraction of the value out of it, because it's two different things. And then finally, there's like a maintenance aspect to it. So, you know, it's a big deal to be processing input from another brain, because again, we take that very seriously. If you're doing it all the time, so every time you have a down moment, you're looking at social media, for example, which is, you know, all input from other brains, you don't get the downtime that your brain needs just to do all the things it expects to have time to do, and this causes issues. And so I think this sort of low grade hum of anxiety that so many people feel today, a lot of that is actually lack of solitude. Really, yeah. So if more people are actually alone, they'd be more happy. Yeah, not all the time, right? So I give this quote from the book. I found that in Ben Franklin's journals, when he did his first transatlantic cross, when he went to London for the first time. And so he was really thinking about a lot of alone time. Solitude, yeah. So I found that in his journals, and he was talking about how like, well, the great sages talk about the value of solitude. But I suspect that if you made the great sages be alone long enough, they would start to regret it, right? Like you can't be, you can't have too much solitude. That's just as bad. I think he kind of hit that on the nose. And so if you're alone, all the time is terrible. Like the worst thing you can do to someone's put him in solitary confinement. But if you get rid of every moment of solitude, it can be sort of just as bad and something's. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you recommend for someone who's on social media all day, email, text all day, they never have any downtime because when they get home, they turn the TV on, they're stimulating constantly. Yeah. And you recommend, hey, take a 30 minute walk. Yeah. Just start with that. Do something without your phone once a day. Yeah. That's the easiest way just to get comfortable. When you walk a dog or you're whatever going to the drugstore, just leave the phone at home. Mm-hmm. See so many people walking, looking down at their phone everywhere you go, at the grocery store, at the gym. Yeah. It's funny because two years ago, maybe it was two and a half years ago, I had a realization that for 15 years, I had my phone on me every single day for 15 years. Yeah. Since I was 19, I don't know, 19. You're 2000. I got my first cell phone. Yeah. I was a junior in high school. And I realized there was not a day that had gone by that I didn't have my phone on me. Yeah, at some point in the day. Yeah. And I thought to myself, that was wrong. I was like, this is horrible. What a radical change, too, in terms of all human history, right? Before that never had a device on me, maybe a gameboy ever once in a while or something or whatever it may be, but now 15 years of my life, I had this on me. And so two years ago, I made the commitment, I said, I'm going to Hawaii alone and I'll leave my phone at home. So I went to Hawaii for, I think it was four or five days. Yeah. And the first day it was terrifying because I rented a car and I forgot like my confirmation number and I forgot which car rental service I got it from. Yeah. So I'm going to ease rental service. They do have my confirmation, right? I finally get the car and now I need directions. I'm like, how do I get to my hotel? Yeah. I start asking people, where's this at? I stopped at a gas station, like we used to do in 1995 or whatever. Yeah. And I was like, wow, this is actually really scary. But I remember on day two, I was at the beach and I was thinking to myself, I was laying in the ocean, it was just like looking up at the sky and hearing like the birds and the nature and I had zero anxiety because I wasn't worried about where my phone was. Yep. Which was like, it's safe in my home. Yeah, it's not on the beach. No one's going to, I don't need to check anything. I don't need to post anything. And I remember at the end of this four or five days, I felt so much peace and calm and zero anxiety. It was almost like I didn't want to go back home to the phone. And that's just getting back to our baseline, baseline. That's the baseline. We underestimate how artificial it is to have a constant companion, a digital constant companion. I mean, it's incredibly artificial. No where in our evolutionary past, where we in a context where we had sort of this sort of constant connection to other people and ideas and plots. And so you faced all the worst-case scenarios, right? The stuff that makes people worried about not having their phone with them. What if I need to look something up? What if I get lost? What if I get hurt? Yeah, I call someone. Yeah, except for this is the way we all lived our lives. So we used to live? Yeah. And I was fine. Yeah, so in the book I talk about, I find these stories. It's a sub-genre online of people who like, lose their phones or have their phone stolen and then decide, I'm not going to replace it right away. Wow. And then they write about the experience. You can find all these stories online. And they often have a very similar transform or lie. There's these inconveniences. But they're not as many as they thought. And maybe they'll be like one really bad thing that happens in a month. They're late for a meeting with their boss. They couldn't check in. She was talking to one young woman, talking about she had her laptop out in the cab and was hoping that as it passed the Starbucks, she could give it up. Why not, Wi-Fi? Yeah, right. Okay, so that's stressful. But that's one of the things I push back on. So I mean, you had your phone on you for 15 years. But actually, more recently is when we shifted towards not just having a phone on us, but looking at it all the time, that's like six or seven years old. Yeah, because the first, I don't know, eight years, there was no smartphones. Yeah. Right. It was just like, you're texting and you're calling. Yeah. And then there was social media, there was Wi-Fi, there was everything else. Social media is what changed it. Social media. And not just social media, it was the Facebook IPO. So if you go back to the beginning of the consumer-facing smartphone era, so like the iPhone in 2007, I went back and talked to the original development lead for the first iPhone. And what he confirmed is there was nothing about this tech that meant for you to look at it all the time. Right? Steve Jobs was a minimalist. Right. His whole thing was, I want to take something that's really important to you. And then I want to make the experience beautiful. And so for him, it was plain music. Music was incredibly important. You poured it big. Yeah. And everyone was listening to iPods. Right. And so the iPhone had a touch screen. And he was like, look, I can make the experience of playing music even more beautiful. And he was offended by the interfaces on cell phones at that time. Wow. He's like, phone calls are important. I want to make that a beautiful experience. I want to put him in one device. So you don't have to have an iPod in a phone both in your pocket. And that was from like 2007 and 2012. That was smartphones. It was this beautiful tool that you brought out occasionally to do specific things. Like, I want to listen to a song. I want to call my mom. I want to look up directions. Right. Around 2011, 2012, the social media companies were now past the stage of just trying to grow and saying we actually have to get a revenue up because it was the Facebook IPO in particular. Right. How are we going to get people to engage much more on our services? Because the Facebook dot com is pretty static. Right. I mean, you would go check your friend's relationship status. But if you checked it in the morning, it was probably not going to change that day. It's not something you would spend all day looking at. Right. And so they completely re-engineered the experience to be not about posting and reading other people's posts, but instead about social approval indicators. Wow. And then we got the likes and the retweets and the favorites and the photo auto tags. So now every time you hit this app, you could see some indications are people approving of me or people thinking of me. And that's what changed our relationship with the phones from this jobs the envision of this is a beautiful object that does a few things really well into I have to look at this when I'm walking the dog. I have to look at this. You know, when I'm in the bathroom, I have to look at this when I'm in the line. There was nothing fundamental about the tech that said we need to be looking at this all the time. Wow. That was essentially a business model that was proved very effective. Very effective. Very addictive. Yeah. And this you know, as that expands and grows, the more likes you get, it's almost like you feel less worthy of yourself. It's like you have less self worth because you constantly need to be reminded that you're light or what you posted was cool or interesting. All you have cute kids or a cute dog. And so we have to constantly remind ourselves like, yes, I am worthy. I am enough. Look, it keeps growing. Yeah. Let me post more to remind myself that I need the I need it the likes, except for when you're hunting the likes than what you're not doing is actually sacrificing your time and energy to be with a close friend or family or community or create something meaningful create something meaningful, like the things that actually we've evolved to crave, to feel sort of accept. and connected and impactful. And so it's this irony that you're doing this because you're like, I want to feel accepted and connected to people. But by doing this all the time, you're actually feeling less connected and less accepted because our social brain, it doesn't really know what to make of like a number next to a thumbs up icon. It knows about this. It knows like I'm sitting across from someone and I'm looking at someone I'm seeing facial expressions and I've made time to be here and we're interacting. It knows about that. That's connection. But without some sort of sacrifice, like I had to go and be and spend my time with someone. If you take all the friction out, you just hit the happy birthday or like or something like that, it's not a strong connection. So how do we build stronger connections? Well, I mean, when it comes to social life, we kind of know, we've known for a long time what makes people feel connected. It's strong relationships with sacrifice and time and attention for taking on responsibility on behalf of family, close friends, and community. I mean, there's no shortcut. I mean, if a friend has a baby, you could send 'em like congrats three exclamation points. Well, what you really should do is go over there and say, "Here, I'm bringing you a box full of like, this is, you know, it's snacks and food and towels." It turns out towels are really useful when you have babies. Yeah, this is something of this government, right? But and that, and that's hard and it just took an hour of your time, right? But that leaves you feeling connected. That leaves that other person feeling like you're connected. The congrats with the three exclamation points. It's not bad. That's not given you what you need. And it's not like a deep work of building relationship. It's the small attention that's not as meaningful as showing up. Even a phone call is better than slot better, than just a like or congrats. It's taking a time. I try to go even a step further with people that I'm really connected to and send them just a video message. Yeah, and they're always in shock 'cause they're like so used to someone just saying a quick text, and I'll send even a minute video message of just acknowledging them for what I appreciate about them or congratulating. They're just always like, wow, yeah, so thankful a video. It probably hits you instinctually. Something about it when you do it. It probably feels, something about it feels more real. Absolutely, yeah. It's more attention, it's more time. It's more peace of quality, I guess communication, right? But showing up is really the key in person if you can, but if someone's not in their city, then it might be harder. So do you feel like our quality of our life is diminishing because of social media or because of the lack of our attention to deeper work and our work and our relationships? This is what I've been hearing, right? So I wrote Deep Work, which was really about tech and its impact on the professional world. And what I kept hearing when I was on the road was readers saying, yeah, but what about tech and our personal lives? There's something going on here. So you start with tech and the work life, meaning, like the distractions like email and Slack and how that's keeping people away from doing highly concentrated work and how this is probably a mistake. Yeah, just doing meetings all day and communicating, but not actually creating work. It was really bad at knowledge work, right? So that was Deep Work, right? So a lot of the readers say, yeah, but something is going on in our personal lives with tech that is sort of arguably more important. And so you look into this and you see there is this unease maybe around two years ago, people really started this shift from this sort of self-deprecating mode to like, wait a second. There is a problem, but if you talk to people, it's not utility, right? So it's not that they say, this is useless. I hate what I'm doing when I'm on my phone, right? It's not like cigarettes or something. We're like, most people who smoke would say, I just wish I wish I wasn't smoking or something good the next time. There is, right? I mean, there's good things happening. The issue is autonomy. So people were feeling like, I am losing control over my life. And that's why I'm upset, not that this is always bad, but it's that I'm doing this more than I should. I'm doing this more than it's useful. I'm doing this is more than it's healthy. I'm doing this to the exclusion of things that I know are much more meaningful. I feel manipulated, like how I feel, my emotions that somehow these algorithms are changing how I feel. And so the argument is, I'm losing my autonomy as a human being. That's what was making people concerned. Now, the social media companies for a long time, because I've been a long sort of public critic of some of social media, they would always push back with the utility argument. They would say, wait a second, here is something useful that someone is doing on Facebook. Stop criticizing, checkmate, right? Like we've won. And what I was finding is that's not really the grounds on which this argument is occurring. It's not as useless or useful. It is, am I in control of this and using it for good means or is it in control of me? I think more people feel like, okay, it's shifted, and now it's in control of me. - Especially when you, now on the iPhone, you can track to see how many hours you spent on an app or social media account, you know, like, wow, I just spent 20 hours this week on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Just like, what could you have done with all that time? - Split the dealty for this too. - But you split the take 20 hours, right? Split that between some like strong interaction with people, self-reflection, and let's say some like skill building or creation. - Yeah, or working out or nature. - And multiply that by what, like, five or six weeks even. And it's a vastly different outcome. And the thing about the compounding return, right? Now you take those 20 hours and you repurpose it week after week, and now you're growing off a bigger and bigger base, and you go three or four years down the line, it's completely different life. - Completely different. And people who complain about wanting to write a book but never have the time or wanting to learn a new language or a new skill, just look at the amount of time you spend on social media or your email or nonsense. - But this is why people are getting upset about social media. Again, it's not that they think it's what they're actually doing is evil or like what they do when they're on these screens is, you know, looking at baby pictures of your niece or something, it's not bad. But what they're upset about is that it's keeping them from getting after it in these other aspects. So like this isn't bad, but not learning the language, not learning the skill, not getting healthy, not taking responsibility, right? Like becoming a figure in my community, right? That people respect, like these things that we actually crave, that's what people are picking up on. Is there's all of this stuff over here that instinctually I know like if I'm doing this it's key to flourishing as a human. And I'm just distracting myself with this so much that there's nothing left over for me to do that. And the fact that why am I so distracted on this is because they tweaked it so that I would do this a lot. It's so that the real estate prices in Northern California can be really expensive. It's not like I'm carrying cancer over here and I'm making sacrifices over there. It's they tweaked this so that I would use it 20 hours a week. - And you said before we jumped on here about, you know, the deeper conversation of what's the void we're trying to fill. What's the thing that people aren't willing to look at within themselves that makes them so distracted? - Yeah. - And having those conversations a lot lately. - But this is a lot of what surprised me, right? When I was working on the book is that I did this experiment where I put out a call to my readers and said, I'm experimenting with this idea of a digital declutter where you 30 days you step away. 30 days you step away. And this kind of the core sort of suggested in the book, like 30 days you step away from all social media. - All social media. - All, all optional technologies in your personal life. So I can't get you out of answering your boss's email, but online news, social media, games, streaming media, YouTube, right? Almost everything you do in your personal life with tech. - TV as well. - It's a movies and TV. - Well, yeah. So different people had different rules for that. Like one of the rules I liked is people said, no streaming media by yourself. So like, yeah, I can watch a movie with like a friend or whatever it is, but I can't just, when you're watching the office or whatever. Which is what everyone does. And the idea was that you do this 30 days and when it's over, you rebuild your digital life from scratch, right? So it's like Mary Condo, you clear out the whole closet. - Yes. - And what brings you joy and you figure it out and then you rebuild it from scratch, right? But I kept getting these reports from people, especially younger people who did not have an adult life before social media that it was terrifying. That taking this away that first day was really terrifying for him. And I had underestimated the degree to which for a lot of people that this is a serious escape. It's not just like this is dumb. I spend too much time on nonsense. Like it's actually an escape from hard things they don't want to deal with. - Like what? - Well, it can be a lot of things, right? I mean, for some people, there's actually hard questions about their life. Like what am I, what am I supposed to be doing? Am I really living up to my potential? Am I really happy with like the type of person, you know, yeah, am I just what going out party too much of this or that? And this stops them from having to confront that. And it's incredibly, you know, it's incredibly uncomfortable to confront. And for other people, just they don't have high quality analog leisure options in their life. Which is another thing I learned about it, it seems sort of superficial like leisure activities. But it's actually really important to have things you do. Like things you do in your time outside of work that is require skill, something you can get better at, something that maybe connects you to other people as you do it. It could be like athletics for a lot of people, like even like to pick up basketball game or something like this, but also skilled hobbies, community or church group engagement. Like these type of things that we always used to fill our time with outside of work are really important, but it takes some practice and it's harder, right? And so getting back into that, if you've never been there before, is difficult. - I think you said in your Ted video that you like read a book every night and you relax like kind of rocking chair and you're like an old man. And I read a newspaper at the table with my kids in the morning like that's how it goes. - That was like my dad, my dad would read the newspaper after either in the morning but after work, you'd come home and just read the newspaper, just sitting in the room with us. While we were watching TV or playing video games, he was reading the newspaper. And then I would see him most every night, he would just like fall asleep in his like chair, reading the newspaper or, can just like pass out and I'm like, man, you just look so restful. Yeah, I know, I'd be a good farmer 100 years ago. I could just sit on a porch and whittle something. Again, it sounds superficial, but I get into it. We go all the way back to Aristotle, right, in the nicotine ethics. And you see that it's crucial to have activities you do just for the intrinsic quality. That's crucial for making it through the inevitable ups and downs in life, right? You have activities that you do that you do just because you appreciate quality, right? If you have that, it's kind of a buffer against various ups and downs, right? If you're really good at cooking or playing music, if you're a musician, even amateur, you can really just appreciate a good piece of music, or if you're a knitter or something like that, and just constructing something good. It all seems superficial, but it's actually a really important buffer. And the in-between times. The in-between times, and maybe you're having a hard time in life at the moment, having this sort of anchor up, but there's things I do that I just appreciate them for the their intrinsic quality, is like deeply human. And we take it for granted, but having the screen, I mean, you can avoid all of this, because it's easier in the moment. And more rewarding. More rewarding is this algorithmically optimized content. You've been reduced to a data-tube bowl of 19,000 data points. Statistical algorithms are processing, and they're feeding you. Like, look at this nugget, look at that nugget. It's reduced you to a statistical gadget. It feeds you these isolated nuggets. And it's just optimized so that you want to keep, it's the same as processed food. Yeah. You want more and more of it, you've never satisfied. You've never satisfied. But if you move away from a real food culture to eat McDonald's, you're not going to be happy in the long term. Wow. Yeah. So this void that we're trying to fill, you're saying that when we have hobbies or other things that we can do that add value to us, the buffer times, as opposed to going on the phone to try to fill the void, that what would that do for us emotionally, mentally? You also talked about how a lot of professors, or maybe what is it, the therapists on college campuses or professors in mental health are saying that mental health is rising. It's off the charts. Because of social media anxiety. Yeah. So do you think if we were able to eliminate someone that to do more arts and crafts, music, other buffer type experiences, that anxiety would go down? Yes. Really? Yeah. It would definitely go down. So for young people, so Generation Z, which is the first generation to have sort of ubiquitous access to smartphone social media as they entered their young adolescence, this generation, that's where anxiety and anxiety related disorders were literally off the charts. So the demographers that measure different traits of generations and see how traits change from generation to generation had never seen something change that severely. So it was off their charts and looking at anxiety and anxiety related disorders and the turning point from this was, if you were born just late enough to have social media and smartphones like when you entered junior high. When you were like 10. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is off the charts. I had been hearing this informally from mental health experts on college campuses where they would tell me like it was crazy. It was overnight. They used to have the standard array of mental health issues, sort of a cross section of what you would expect, like country as a whole. And then it just shifted overnight. It was all anxiety and anxiety related disorders. And it was like 5x more students coming in than they ever used to go up before. And they would say it was the students who started arriving on campus with smartphones. It was like that year. Because we're not wired for it. So what do we need to flourish as human beings? You take on responsibility for friends, close family, close friends. Community, take on responsibility, committed them. I'm going to sacrifice for you. You'll sacrifice for me. I'm going to be involved. You do activity that has intrinsic quality. So you go out there to, I want to do things with my time that itself is high quality. And there's value in just doing that. And then in your professional life, you look to make impact. You do these things. It's not a secret formula. This is what we've always needed. It's the nutrients of human flourish. Right. And so this is the issue with the phone. And again, like the social media companies wanted all the V about utility. It's not useless to be on Facebook, but it's not the issue. It's that this has become so compulsive that it's taken us away from these things that we absolutely need to flourish. So you take those all away and you just do this instead. You're going to be anxious. Maybe a dumber. You're going to get dumber. You're going to, it's going to impede professional progress. And, and then life gets really hard. And then you need this more and more to escape. I mean, when things become dangerous in our life is when you start using them to escape harder things, you don't want to confront. And so then it becomes a cycle. So then you know, like I'm not, I'm probably not doing what I should be doing with my life. And then you feel guilty. You feel yourself. And so you escape the guilt by, wow, by going back to this. And it's a cycle. What's more addictive social media or smoking? Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. I talk to psychologists about this. It's a different type of addiction. Smoking is a substance addiction. So there's actually chemicals that can, that can, nicotine can get through the blood brain barrier. And it can mess around directly with your neurons. So that's really strong. And when you have a substance addiction, you can feel strong physical withdrawal symptoms, for example. If you stop using it, phone addiction psychologists tend to categorize as a moderate behavioral addiction. Which means, okay, if I take away your phone, like it might be difficult, but you're not going to have the same type of withdrawal you would have if you were like an alcoholic and you were being taken away from alcohol. But moderate behavioral addictions lead you to using something much more than you know is healthy if you have access to it. So it's just like if I put the bowl of potato chips. In front of you every day, you're going to eat probably way too many potato chips. But if I don't, you're not going to sneak out of the middle of the night to go buy it. So that's where we are with probably with the phones is that if we have it with us, we're going to use it more than we think is healthy. On the phone. Okay, so let's make the scenario. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen. A lot of people that have products and services and companies and trying to build their brands and get exposure and build a following. What would you say to the people that their business is mostly online? And is evolved around building communities on social networking platforms? How would you suggest they manage their time on social media? Can they eliminate social media all in all or let someone else run it for them? Yeah, what's your recommendation? I mean, all those are possible, right? So I definitely recognize in the professional context, there's certain thing that social media enables. That's really powerful. I mean, there's a reason, for example, why Facebook is worth $500 billion because let's say you're trying to advertise. It's crazy. This thing can pinpoint exact human beings that you want to try to sell to you. I mean, I see why they're making lots of money and I understand why people would use it to advertise. I also understand having some sort of presence in social media is useful in certain industries. And so what I typically advise is if you think social media is very important for your business, treated as something important. Like, actually get after it and understand, where am I really getting value? What activities really matter? Do they really matter? Make sure you're not telling yourself a story, right? Treat it like any other tool. Then once you've really figured out, okay, these are the ways that social media is helping me professionally than use it like a professional. So there's no reason for it to be on your phone. Really? Yeah, doesn't-- The email's on your phone, right? I don't use email, my phone. Really? Wow. Yeah. I deleted the email. You just only open the computer to do the work on email. Yeah. And on your phone, you're not checking or being notified. So do the same. So once you've identified X, Y, and Z and social media's big ROI, do it like the pro. So I interviewed some sort of social media brand managers for major companies in the book. Like, okay, how do the professionals use it? It's on their desktop. They've got tools. They've got schedules. They've got systems. They often have staff that helps them. And it's a completely different interaction than I'm in line with CVS. Right, all right. I'm on the toilet. I'm on the toilet. Yeah. 20-ish of minutes, which I do all the time. Right, it's like a lot of people here. A lot of people sort of tell themselves the story. They allow the sort of professional use to completely change what's happening in life outside of work. And so those are the two things that happen. So sometimes people just generically see professional social media's like, I don't want to think about it more than just in general being on here and using a lot is beneficial. I think we got to think about it sharper than that. And then, too, they let it infect over. But like, if a friend of mine was running a business and we were out the dinner and he's doing quick books, I was like, why are you making quick, thick invoices? Like, I don't doubt that maybe quick books is useful for your business. But this is weird that you're using it on your phone all the time. As dinner, right? Yeah, it's not just enough. If he came back and said, but my business needs quick books, that's how I invoice my clients or whatever. I say, that's true. But like, do you need to be writing up invoices on the toilet? And a dinner and at the movies. Yeah, so when I talk to professionals, I'm like, if you need social media, use it like, if you're using it professionally, use it like a professional. And it should have very little to do with your personal life. What are the non-negotiables for you every day with screen time and your phone? That's a good question. Well, I don't really need that many non-negotiables because it's never there. So I don't have social media accounts. So I'm free from that reengineering. So when you don't have that reengineering towards the compulsive use model, the phone just goes back to the way it was in 2007. So it's like, great, I need to look up, I'm looking up like whatever the address of where I'm going or something like this. It's maps, you see. Yeah, I get maps are going to call my ways. You see how the kids are doing or something like that. But because I've never been exposed to the constant companion model, it's just, it's never something that I worry about. And then online, I've trained myself not the web surf. Really? So I don't have a cycle of sites that go through. Now, in part, I can do this because I have a lot of autonomy in my job. It says a professor and a writer. It's not like I know I never have to just be at an office to be there. I can decide what I'm gonna work on. And so because I have kids, I tend to tightly schedule my work day. And so I don't want time, the web surf during my work day. It's like, I'm doing this for two hours and this. Like I wanna be trying to work every single minute. - Good job. - I'm working, so I can be done and then I can be home. And then when I'm home, you know, I have three kids running around. - So that's just a present dad. That's what I wanna do. - Wow. - You're just hanging out, throwing a baseball in the backyard, you're never getting dirty, whatever it might be. - Yeah, we literally do that. - Wow. - It's like the old days. I remember after work, my dad would come home, he'd be in a suit, he'd roll his sleeves up, he'd get to two minutes and we'd go play catch in the backyard. - Yeah, for 20, 30 minutes. - It was so powerful in the summer and Ohio, just like the smell of the grass, just like throwing a catch, you know? - Yeah, simple little things that build connection and there's a memory. - It's a memory. And it's physical and it's tangible and you're taking responsibility for relationship. My oldest is only six, but we're working on swings. - Wow. - It has gained better. - All right. - It's gonna be doing T-Ball soon. - T-Did T-Ball last summer? - Really? - Are you coaching? - I'm not the coach. I'm not the coach maybe I should be. - But you go. Now it's interesting, when you go as a parent to see I guess T-Ball, and I'm sure you'll be doing more activities with your kids as they get older, do you see all other parents just on their phone the whole time? - There's a lot of that. - Really? - Yeah. - And playgrounds too? - Really. - This is one of the sources I think of the pushback that I've been picking up on in the last couple of years on our digital lives is that our generation, so people like us who were exposed, the social media generation, right? We got it when we were like in college. - It's one of the first adopters basically, right? - Is we're starting to have families. And so it's interesting, a lot of the unease is coming from like new moms and dads, right? Because now suddenly you have to confront, like it's pretty clear that this thing in front of me here is very important in something that I wanna dedicate to take responsibility and then why am I looking at this? - Right, well my kids are the most important. - Yeah, and so it's one of the source of the growing unease is that the social media generation, the first adopters is now getting old enough that it's not just we're in our 20s and we're going out and hanging out with friends and who cares, you know? And so I think that's part of the pushback. - So for people who are entrepreneurs that use social media to build their business, what do you recommend? Do you recommend them deleting for 30 days? Do you recommend them I'm saying, okay, you're only going to be scheduled online for these hours of day like a working professional would? - Yeah, put fences around it. - Okay. - Yeah, so take it off your phone and put fences around how and when. - Man, that's scary. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Take it off your phone. - And then have how and when? - How and when, yeah. - Which is a lot of the digital minimalist, right? Like a lot of the people who go through this process, like of that 1600, probably 50% added some social media back into their life after the 30 days. So you had 1600 people go through this process. - Yeah, okay. - They would send them reports. Other reports I got, about 50% were said, okay, I can't think of any huge wins I'm getting out of social media because the whole minimalism game is just about focus on the big wins and ignore the rest. And so the whole idea is you go through all this tech after the 30 days and say, if it's a big win, I'll bring it back in and if it's not, I'm happy to miss out. So about 50% when they did this calculus for social media are like, I'm not getting a big win. And I'm a minimalist, I'm going to focus my attention on the things that really matter. So that's, okay, 50% had big wins, right? - What do you mean they had big wins? - There is a value, something they really valued for which let's say a particular social media tool was a big boost, right? - For what? - For what? - Business or their career or whatever. - Either, right? So there might be, it might be a personal thing, right? Like this is the only way I connect with these people who are very important in my life. A lot of like soldiers deployed overseas have a very different relationship with some of these social media platforms because of the time changes and the difficulty of the synchronous communication. - Interesting. - That's really important for them. A lot of visual artists told me that Instagram is crucial. - For their business, for their awareness. - For their creativity, they have to be, if you're a visual artist, you have to see other people's work. That's why they all used to live in Greenwich Village because that's where the gallery is. - Wow, interesting. - And now, Instagram has been fantastic for visual artists because you don't have to live in one of three cities anymore. So about 50% had some value that social media really helped, but of that 50% probably 95 took it off their phone. And transformed it into, I use it like Sundays on my desktop to do X, right? The visual artists were like, I took my Instagram followers, I went down to 10 artists, I really admire. Sunday night, I go on my desktop. The password's not saved as, you know, it's an opposite of whatever. It takes about 20 minutes. I look at the things they posted that week. I'm getting all the value I need out of this tool without letting it turn me into a widget. So the how and when is sort of the secret sauce to minimalism. So it's not just the what? So they really cut down, right? It's like taking the junk out of your house, but then they have this extra element, which is unique to the digital world, which is how and when am I going to use the things that I kept in the closet? - Interesting. So in the book, digital minimalism, do you have a guideline for how people can do this for 30 days? Is there a process or? - Yeah, the process is you figure out, okay, what am I going to step away from? And for the things that I do need to keep, you actually write down the rules, right? So you see it. Here's my tech rules. They have 30 days. So what are you supposed to do during those 30 days? Like why is this not just like a Mary condo? - Right. - Weekend, right? - Yeah, like what? - Five hour declutter. - Yeah. Yeah, well, there's two reasons. So, so one, it takes about seven to 10 days, just the sort of detox from the need that compulsively use the phone. It tell you get rid of that feeling of compulsive use. It's very hard to make decisions about what's important or not. So the first week or two is you're just kind of getting away from it. But more importantly, as 30 days is enough time to actually do the hard self-reflection on these key questions. Like what am I all about? What do I care about? What do I want to do with my time? You can experiment and try things out. You can talk to mentors. You can go for walks, you read inspiring books. I mean, it takes quite a bit of self-work to figure out what do I really care about? And then once you know that, when you get to the end of 30 days, now you have a foundation to make your decisions. So now and you're like, should I come back or maybe should I put Instagram back into my life? You can now run that against. Here's the things I identified I really cared about. If it really helps one of these things, yes, I'm using it for a huge win. If it doesn't, I'm really secure and missing out on it because this is what I really care about. I really care about these five things that this is what I want to do with my time. This is what's important to my life. I want my energy to go to that. And now you can just make these tools back in the tools. And not this sort of constant companion-escape addiction. - Yeah, wow, man. This is powerful, powerful stuff. How many people do you think actually, after reading this book, will take on the 30-day challenge? - They seem to be doing it, really. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a 30-day challenge is a little bit more self-helpful than I normally am. I mean, right? I was a little bit uncomfortable. My book's to be more, a little bit more like idea books. It has practical things, but like I'm an academic, right? - Right, right. - We don't do 30 days. - Yeah, we don't do 30 days, but it's what works. And people want there to be, I could ask the question a lot, but can you give me instead like some tips, like five things I can do or whatever? I was like, I can. - Just delete your accounts. - But you gotta do the 30, like something about this 30 days, this declutter, it does work. And coming up short of that, trying to kind of do it piecemeal, it doesn't seem to be as effective. And so I was like, all right, I'm putting it in. I'm gonna marry Kondo and I'm gonna have a process, you know? - I love it. - But that's the feedback I'm getting. So that's why I tell people, I was like, you can do things to get in shape. The prepare for the 30 days, but. - Yeah, I really feel like when you do this 30 day challenge, I had another friend, Baratunde Thurston, Thurston who did this a couple of years ago, and he wrote a whole article, I think in like fast company about like, what he learned about himself in 30 days. - And I wrote about him in deep work. - Yeah, 'cause he stepped away from Twitter. I think he stepped away from like every, was it just Twitter or something? - Yeah, maybe everything. But then he went back to it all. - And now is he back like this? - Well, I don't know, I just remember at the time, I wrote the article I went and looked at how much he was. - Yeah, he stepped away for 30 days, or a month or something, yeah. And then he did like a whole article about what he learned about himself or what he, I think he was able to do the deep work finally on certain projects or connect with friends more. - Yeah, you have to have the time, right? It can't be a weekend closet clean. That's the interesting thing about it. If it's just like, okay, this weekend, I'm gonna just step back and figure out, you know, what do I want on my phone? I'm gonna delete apps and stuff like that. It doesn't get it done. Like you have to have that space. - Yeah. - I mean, I think it's the same. Honestly, I think what's going on here, we've seen in health and fitness, right? We got highly palatable process foods. - Yeah, get it out of your system. - Yeah, everyone got, you know, we have to be great at the gimmick. - Yeah. - And we tried tips, just, you know, the banal stuff, right? Like eat less, move more. - Like you're gonna get rid of it though. - The food pyramid, yeah, and what works is to people who have like a whole philosophy, right? They're vegan, they're paleo, they're whatever, but they've got a whole philosophy based on something to care about. And so that's why this book is not about tips. It was like, what's veganism for digital life, right? Like what's the philosophy? What's the philosophy that can be based in values that allows you to make like consistent decisions about what you do? - It's interesting, my COO who manages my business, he doesn't have social media. He has a Facebook account, 'cause he got on in 2004 when we were at college, but he never uses it. I don't even know if he knows his password. He's not an Instagram, Twitter, nothing. And he's probably the most productive person I know. He's got a daughter, you know, a year and a half daughter, and he's not anxious a lot. - Yeah. - He's calm, and he can think clearly. - Yeah. - And it's just kind of, he's my inspiration, because I'm probably on a too much promoting, you know, my show or whatever. whatever it may be, and but I realized after this conversation like I could just be on the desktop for an hour a day, doing what I need to do on social media, with some professional help probably too. Yeah, with some systems, some software, some team, you know, around that. And while I've been doing that more and more, but I still feel like there's a couple things I hold on to for whatever reason, and maybe I get to reflect more of like what's the void I'm trying to fill. Yeah. Or is it just an addiction now that it's just like, maybe there's no void, but it's just like you're just so used to it? That's the complicated thing, right? But you can't figure out the void unless you do the whole Nietzsche thing, right? You have to confront it. Right? Okay, I feel really uneasy because I don't have the thing I normally look at, that uneasiness is good because now you have to figure out why do I feel uneasy and how do I make this go away? And that's where actual development comes out of, you got to be uncomfortable sometimes. I love this. My mom, who lives a few blocks away, she has been knitting her whole life. And she still knits, I don't know, two, three hours a day. Yeah. There's a blanket, a huge blanket, a scarf, a sweatshirt every week. Yeah. That she finishes. And she always shows me like her masterpiece. Yeah. Like that's so cool that she focuses so much on her craft. And she has that as her buffer time. She's always knitting in the car when someone else is driving, she's knitting in the car. When there's a movie, she's knitting, she's always knitting. Yeah. And it brings her a lot of peace, it helps like her mind, I'm sure she's probably thinking a lot during those times, it's just like reflection time. And I just continue to think about what are all the things that we can be mastering with this buffer time. And it's primal, right? There's something primal, let's say about knitting or using your hands. Yeah. Because what differentiators make three species, it's like chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans. Like what, one of the things that differentiates us is that we can plan. We can have an intention and we can manifest it in the world. Crazy. So I can think about a spear and I can take the rocks and I can do the different things and create it, right? And that really helps us succeed. So we're wired to be very fulfilled when we can take an idea and manifest it in the physical concrete world. Which is why there's a type of fulfillment we get when you knit something or you carve something or whatever it is that you don't get on a screen because seeing our intention manifest it in the concrete world is something that's primal, it's something that we're wired to crave because that's what allowed us to stop being tiger food. Right. Once we can start, once we can start doing that. And so like someone I really admire is, I don't know if you've, if you've met Nick Offerman, who he plays Ron Swanson, but yeah, but he's got this somewhere around here in LA. He's got this shop around here. Yeah. And he spends, it's got to be the most healthy way probably to be in Hollywood. Amazing. But he's there all the time and it's a serious shop, like a light industrial warehouse type things. And he's a really serious. I also look at like Jim Carey, I don't know if you've seen his work. He had a video last year that was like the most viewed video on Vimeo. Okay. He's a master artist. Interesting. He has this huge warehouse in, I think New York City and in LA where he just goes and paints something new every single day and he's unbelievable painter. Yeah. And he just has all his colors and he's just painting whatever he wants. And I actually have one of his paintings because I was so inspired by it. But here's a guy who's probably, he's been wrapped up in the Hollywood scene for a long time, but to have like a craft that you can keep focusing on probably gives him a sense of peace as well. Yeah. Because we're wired for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to do that more in my own life. Really? Like what? Well, so I'm getting back into my guitar playing. Really? Same thing, right? You have inflexible metal strings in a piece of wood and you're sort of trying to manipulate this real world thing to make it sound good, yeah, good. That's good, man. A big thing I like to do is salsa dance. Yeah. I love salsa dancing. I play a little guitar as well and I just started singing lessons a couple of months ago. That's great. Yeah. So I'm trying to just do more of my body to manifest like my skills. Yes. And things that I'm not that good at, you know, things that I'm trying to get better at. But you can get better at and this seems to be it's skilled and you can get better at it and it's a demonstrable that you're getting better and it's rewarding. You know, like I'm better at this now than I was. And I think when we do these things like guitar or whatever it may be and we get better, that's when we build true confidence. We don't build confidence by getting more license on social media. It might be a false sense of confidence for a moment, but we haven't really built a skill that's valuable. Yeah. And I think that's the thing. There's like fake confidence when we're like growing online, but when we actually do something that we know is hard to work and we see the growth, that's when we have that intrinsic confidence that supports us for a longer time. My Uber driver yesterday was telling me that he used to do music lessons, professional musicians. And he said, this was one of the shifts he saw that kind of got him out of that industry was that sort of younger people now aren't willing to practice. And he'd been doing this for a long time, right? I mean, it's not a random sample. It's people who are coming to get lessons and just a discomfort with a discomfort practicing. But when you're doing something like this, like learning how to play guitar, you probably remember when you first learned the guitar is like completely unyielding it. It's so hard, man. It's just like a year and a half to figure out like three songs. Just for like your fingers. Is it a comfortable, painful, but we used to be more comfortable doing these things because what else were you going to do? It was no other time. Yeah, we had a lot of free time. It was free time. What are you going to do? Like I won the play in a rock band, right? Girls like guys in rock bands, what I was told, right? So like I learned. I'm going to practice all afternoon. I'm going to put on the Hendrix and do, you know, pentatonic scales or whatever. But you know, if you're used to that as confidence, you know what scale is, you don't have to be world-class at something, but you know about, I was bad at this and then I did this deliberate effort. And now I'm not there. Yeah. And now you know what that is. The competent person, this was Matthew Crawford said something like the competent person who has a skill is sort of quiet and easy with themselves. The non-competent person is out there yelling into the void online, desperate to get. Well, someone validate. Wow. Well, someone validate me. But when you know how to do something really well, you're quiet and easy. What do you recommend as a parent to other parents on how they can train or teach or educate their kids to do the hard work growing up on certain skills or activities as opposed to take your iPhone and watch a movie and play games? Yeah. Well, modeling's important. So they see. Wow. They got to see what you're doing. See reading a book. See reading a book. See you doing playing guitar. See you doing hard things. Yeah. Those are people who do hard things that was important to me growing up for sure. Just being exposed to that and seeing that. It's just having that message. And then when I was growing up, the other rule was you always have to be doing an instrument. You always have to be doing a sport. Mm-hmm. And I was like, I guess pretty good actually. Yeah. Because those are both things that are what's more two things are very unyielding like trying to get a guitar to do something or trying to get a bat to hit fastball. Yeah. So hard. So hard. That's right. Yeah. So I wanted me to do piano when I was a kid, and I went to one lesson, and I just screamed and cried about it. And he was like, OK, you don't have to go anywhere. But I was in every sport. Yeah. So I was like obsessed with sports and all in. So scary. I mean, this is part of why it's so great is because I mean, it's hard. And you want to get better. It's demonstrable when you get better. And it's clear that you're better. And you're connected to other people. But you're learning with a group. You're getting coached. You're helping the team as you get better. I mean, having that model, like skills matter, we respect people who do something well. It's worthwhile learning how to do something hard. Hard things is what moves life forward. Hard things is the foundation of fulfillment. The more I think that that is sort of modeled and talked about, the better. Yeah. This is great, man. I love this. Make sure you guys get the book. Digital minimalism. I've got a couple of questions left for you. But a digital minimalism is out now choosing a focused life in a noisy world. You can't find them on social media, but you can go to your website, calnewport.com. Yeah. That's right. You can subscribe to your newsletter there. Yeah. You can learn more about you, not on social media, but on there and on your new, do you have a newsletter once a week? Yeah. Well, I blog. And it goes out to the newsletter. Yeah. I'm a blog nerd. Yeah. Blog nerd. Love it. Okay. This question is called the Three Truths. Whenever you wanted to be, it could be hundreds of years from now, it could be whenever. But at some point, you got to go. And you've got to take all of your work with you. It's all of your writing, your material, the content you've created. It's got to go with you when you die. Yeah. But you get to write down on a piece of paper, three things you know to be true about all of your experiences and leave that with the world. Your three lessons that you've learned that you would want to share back with the world. What would you say are your three truths? So this won't be worded elegantly because I'm thinking about this on the fly. Probably something about responsibility. So taking on responsibility, like for other people to do things of value, is in the end going to be more important than worrying about happiness in the moment. Doing hard things is sort of the foundation for a good life. Hard things are good. Like push yourself, push yourself to do hard things. Serve other people, family, close friends, community, I talk about these things. Yeah, serve other people. I mean, I guess all of these, if I'm thinking about it, all three of these things is, and this is probably common to a lot of wisdom tradition. So I'm not coming up with anything new, but all three of these things I guess are really about taking the focus away from yourself, what's happening to yourself, what do people think about you, how do you feel, sort of shifting the focus away from that? Take on responsibility, take on hard things, try to rise to it, do hard things, produce Thanks very much. valuable serve other people. It's supposed to worry too much about other people properly serving you. Are they liking the right things or saying the right things to you? Yeah, those are great, man. I love those. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Cal, for. Man, you set the example for what is really hard for a lot of people right now. People are so focused on likes and being on social media and doing the easy things and you constantly do the hard things and set that example. So I want to acknowledge you for going against the grain because it's not easy to do that and a lot of people are seduced with the easy out and feeling the void by getting likes and all these things. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for creating this type of work because it is the most rewarding things when we do the hard work and when we eliminate distractions and really connect to other people and other human beings. So I acknowledge you for that, my man. My final question is what is your definition of greatness? Rising to your potential. No, we all have a potential. Like what we could be doing and so fighting the rise for that, that's greatness versus stoning the towel early. There you have my friends. Big thank you to Cal, Newport, all about doing the deep, intimate work that creates more value in the world with that more focused attention. As opposed to being scatterbrained all over the place, never really building true relationships and true value in the world. Again, if you enjoy this, make sure to share with your friends. If you know someone who's always on social media and is struggling and overwhelmed and stressed or feels like they never get anything done or they don't have any time, make sure you send this to them. Be a friend, send this to them right now so they can get the inspiration to start detoxing some of these things from their life. Again, send them the link. LewisHouse.com/7700. I want to remind you how much you matter in the world, no matter how much stress you are facing right now, how uncertain you are about your career, your finances, your health or that relationship in or the uncertainty of finding the right person in your life, you matter. I want you to know how much you matter. I've been to too many dark places in my life where I didn't think I mattered and it's not worth it. It's not feeling that way, worth it. It's not supportive to a greater purpose for your life. So I want you to remember right now how much you do matter and how important you are to this world. I hope you continue to push through the challenges you face to lean on support in your life to find friends, mentors, lean on family members, find people who think like you who can support you as well. And put yourself out there, start giving back in other ways because whenever you feel like you don't matter, all you need to do is start helping someone else and remember how much of an impact you truly can make. You matter, my friends. I love you so very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. [BLANK_AUDIO]