This is it: In conversation with Cal Newport

I got in touch with Cal Newport and asked him questions about deep work, self-help, and strategies for being more productive at work and at school.

“Follow your passion” is so entrenched in (our) GenX’s psyche that we fall for it every, single, time. Literally. It began 20 years ago, when this catchphrase came into vogue. See this, a Google Ngram viewer that captures its rise. Surprisingly, at the same time, the usage of “a secure career” significantly decreased. Again, see this. Simply put, follow your passion is bad advice, says Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

When Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle,” people think he meant “follow your passion.” In this talk, Newport debunks this myth. He says, “The specific strategy of identifying a pre-existing passion and then following it is a bad strategy.” Why, you ask. Two reasons.

First, follow your passion “presupposes” that you have a pre-existing passion which you can identify and follow, a thing we conveniently choose to accept as fact, but fail to realize is actually a myth. Tell me about the last (or even first) paper you read from which you concluded the above. Second, we’ve somehow developed this notion that if you merge your “passion” and career, you’ll live a fulfilling life, a life in which you’re chilling on the beach, sipping a Margarita, reading a book, and playing Candy Crush on your iPad.

For specifically these two reasons, this misconstrued piece of advice is flawed. Look at Steve Jobs himself, who was not even half as passionate about tech as you might think he would’ve been, back when Apple was in a garage. In fact, in Newport’s words, “Steve Jobs ended up quite passionate about what he did for a living tells us that it’s not how you get started that matters, but what you do once you get going.” Jobs was no tech-driven and design-inspired geek. He turned into one when Apple actually took off. Which is another way to say that Jobs didn’t have a pre-existing passion. He became passionate as he got going. Sounds unusual but convincing, right?

Newport is a productive professor, both in spirit and letter. On one hand, he’s written 5 books on winning at college, succeeding in the workplace, and doing deep work. On the other, he’s conducted extensive research in distributed algorithms. His blog, Study Hacks, deeply resonated with me, and I ended up applying his innumerable strategies and tips to my journey in College. I highly recommend reading his blog and buying his books.

Newport’s work was so inspiring that I got on the phone with him and asked some burning questions about winning at College and getting the most out of your work life. First, I inquired about the latest insights in his core thesis, “deep work.” He mentioned that the “ability to concentrate without distraction” is becoming more and more valuable and the people who do practice deep work almost have an “unfair advantage” over those who don’t. I also learned that Newport had actually identified this pattern way before smartphones even came into the picture.

Now, you might think that deep work is just one of the countless self-help strategies that haven’t worked for you, right? Wrong. Newport’s approach to tons of self-help models is simple. One, learn about self-help strategies as potential models. Two, gather your own evidence to figure out what will work for you. Three, talk to people who you admire and whose lifestyle and career resonate with you. And four, don’t let a book be the whole answer, but an interesting proposal for you to explore. In short, Newport suggests self-experimentation to all the self-help literature existing out there.

But all this self-help stuff will not necessarily help me rise above mediocrity, right? After all, if it actually worked, a lot of people wouldn’t have been mediocre in the first place. You might be thinking this now. However, Cal Newport’s one-word answer might help you filter out the essence of all the “self-help stuff” about success at work: Craftsmanship.

He talks about how you should approach every skill, every activity as a craftsman. Just like a craftsman approaches his craft, you should approach your activity with the two key filters in mind: one, what truly valuable thing will I create and two, is that thing rare or not. Newport debunks the myth of “being busy” and says that busyness has no value in the workplace. If you answer your emails, do your thing, and just execute what you’re told to, you might not be able to scale up. Instead, what you need to know is how to make a boat out of a piece of wood. That’s when “interesting things” begin to happen.

But I also want to explore the world, right? If I’m just doing a particular craft, won’t I be just a uni-directional personality? Short answer: no. Long answer: There’s a difference between what Newport calls “obligatory exploration” and “optional exploration,” an Aristotelian-like distinction. The idea is to give yourself “margin” to do deep work by cutting down on obligatory exploration and increasing optional exploration. The point is that nobody cares whether you did 10 different clubs in high school or college. What matters is whether you did that one club better than everybody else. But that will only happen when you minimize your obligations and maximize your optionalities. To be a star in your major or at your workplace, you need to give yourself flexibility and time. Newport brilliantly puts it: Do less. Do better.

At this point, I assume you’ve read about Cal Newport and have also visited his blog. And if you’re like most people, you’ve probably subscribed to his mailing list. But as always, after you excitedly open those first 2 emails, you never go back to reading the blog (or even opening those emails). Strikes a chord? “So, how do you persist,” I asked Newport. He gave me two clear strategies. One, “be very choosy about what you choose to do.” In other words, be reluctant to adopt and implement a self-help strategy. This links back to my first question about dealing with the ocean of self-help literature that has flooded the internet. If you’re reluctant to start and picky about any strategy, it only shows that your mind is thinking this through. In contrast, if you just start with any self-help strategy but then end up procrastinating, it’s your mind’s way of telling you that you haven’t thought this through. The second strategy he mentioned was to keep a work-progress journal. Every day, write down just one or two sentences about what you intended to accomplish and whether you actually accomplished it. Just the fact that you keep this log will tell your mind to persist with the new habit you’ve picked up.

Newport has extensively written about deep work and about mastering the technique to perform better at school and at work. His work is truly inspirational and actually applicable. He does not have an overly-motivated ideation process and an underly-motivated execution plan; instead, he proposes extremely effective tips and strategies, which, if you implement, will significantly boost your productivity and efficiency. In essence, do less, but do better.