PROFESSOR Explains Why & How You Should QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA | Cal Newport & Lewis Howes

the things that actually we've evolved to crave the feel sort of accepted and connected and impactful and so it's this irony that you're doing this because you want to feel accepted and connected to people but by doing this all the time you're actually feeling less connected and less accepted welcome everyone back to the school of greens podcast we've got Cal Newport in the house good to see you my man Louis my pleasure very excited about this 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 a 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 no one knows how to focus for more than two seconds yeah well 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 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 right way we're looking at the screens then also email culture within work so it was the sort of supply and demand focuses 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 gonna have a huge advantage sort of a sort of disproportionate advantage yeah you're gonna be like the wealthy of of value it says 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 that go into something piece of work to make it magical is so much harder to do yeah but it's very valuable very valuable but is 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 so like I should try to make more time to do it but it's really more like a skill mmm 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 gonna be very good at it even if you put aside at the time and you lock away all your devices and you Here I am I'm in the cave I'm gonna write my book if you haven't been practicing it it's not gonna 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 there's a lot of different elements to how you do it the training focus training focus how do you what's the 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 until 8 9 10 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 right there's there's general fitness and then the actual training the skill still yeah so so cognitive fitness means among other things your brain needs to be comfortable with being bored right I mean if it's been trained that every time you get a little bit bored to go to those tiny treat the stimuli you get this Pavlovian connection where it's board I mean stimuli boredom you 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 I'm exciting it's not exciting your brains gonna say no way like I've learned it right when I'm bored I get the tree so I'm not going to sit here and stare at the blank page per couple hours so so in that sense if you're constantly doing this it's like junk food eating and if you're an athlete right is that your fitness is going to be bad it tastes good in the moment 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 specific things you can do this sort of acute training and it's 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 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 you know your concentration drifts which it will do you come back to the come 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 loose you do this a lot for yourself you'll take walks yeah and you'll start thinking when I gave him an example of like yeah the last three days what was it yeah well well so I ride in my head so like when I'm trying to figure out a chapter or an essay or something like this I really work out the structure and then actually worked out a lot of the wording and that's mainly practiced and in my day job I'm a theoretical computer scientist I do proofs so I do a lot of that in my head so you roam you and that's literally moving the sort of variables of the equations in my hometown I'm considered an eccentric because I'm always Waterloo's yeah and people are how people talk to my wife like where was your husband going like I saw them twice you look back you loop back around but you know I like wandering and something about walking it shuts off some non cerebral parts of your mind that 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 I'll just don't have social media yeah about what about texting and email yeah do you because you don't have social media you never had an account it's never had an account and you and I were born around the same time and you're a year older than me and we were in college you know I guess your last year of college my junior year was one Facebook came out yeah I think yeah 2004 2004 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 in your college but you never signed up for an account and you've never had that social media I never had it I mean I think what happened was sort of accidental but yeah Facebook was the first well Friendster had been around but MySpace yeah myspace was kind of new that Friendster was sort of out 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 is a contemporary of ours and so it's just like yeah who's this who's this other kid who's who's his website is so popular I had and also my memory is see I've 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 I was like I don't wanna 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 the sort of objective distance or then I could kind of observe as it changed you know how its role in people's lives changed over time right yeah and the stress that people have I think that stat is like almost 50 minutes a day people are on Facebook or social media or 50 minutes as Facebook products Facebook product so Instagram I mean messenger yeah whatsapp now I guess then what's that yeah crazy isn't it yeah almost an hour day of your life yeah just for those services crazy okay so you wander around did you do this everyday you take a walk I made the pins on the day it's interesting because when I was 1 11 10 10 11 years ago I had a mentor every day he would take a walk for lunch yeah and just brainstorm he was an he was an inventor yeah and you 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 the crucial bunch so 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 you know a new phase of life become an adult any of these type of questions you have to grapple with your own thoughts you have to process your experiences you have to try to make sense of it right that require asking tough questions that's the tough questions you know what are you upset about that you've done what are you happy about and that involves you you can't be you can't do this while you're an 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 mmm it's 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 that seriously all hands on deck right yeah if you don't then take some time to just think about what you've heard you're gonna get a fraction of the value out of it because it's two different things 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 were actually alone they'd be more happy yeah no 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 crossing he went to London for the first time and so he was really thinking about a lot of alone time solitude yeah so he so I found that in his journals and he was talking about how like well the great sages talked 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 this 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 them in solitary confinement but if you get rid of every moment of solitude it can be sort of just as bad as something yeah so what do you recommend for someone who's on social media all day email all day they never have any downtime because right when they get home they turn the TV on they're stimulating constantly yeah and you recommend hey take a 30 minute walk yeah they start with that do something without your phone once a day yeah that's the easiest way just to get comfortable when you walk the dog or whatever go to the drugstore just leave the phone at home mmm see so many people walking looking down their phone no everywhere you go yeah at the grocery store at the gym yeah it's it's funny because two years ago maybe 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 or no night you're mm I got us 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 to in terms all human history right before that never had a device I mean maybe a gameboy every once in a while or something or whatever baby 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 I'm leaving my phone at home so I went to Hawaii for I think was four or five days you know 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 each register you 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 out I stopped at a gas station like we used to do in 1995 or whatever and I was like wow this is actually really scary but I remember on day 2 I was at the beach and I was thinking to myself I was laying in the ocean I'm 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 it's just like it's safe in my home yeah it's not on the beach there's no way that y'all need to check anything I'm gonna post anything and I remember at the end of this four or five days I felt so much peace and calm yes zero anxiety was almost like I didn't want to go back home to the phone and that that's just getting back to our baseline that's the baseline you know we underestimate how artificial it is to have a constant companion a digital constant companion I mean it's incredibly artificial nowhere in our evolutionary past were we in a context where we had sort of the sort of constant connection to other people and ideas and policin and so you faced all the worst-case scenarios right the stuff that makes people worried about not not having their phone with them what if I need to look something up what if I what if I get lost what if I hurt yeah yeah that calls someone yeah yeah except for this is the way we all live their lives is how we used to live yeah and I was fine yeah so so in the book I talk about I find these stories it's a it's a sub-genre online of people who like lose their phones or have their phones stolen and then decide I'm not gonna 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 it transforms their life and 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 like they're late for a meeting with their boss and the clean check-in she was taught as one young almost talking about she had a laptop out in the cab and was hoping that as it passed the Starbucks I got my Wi-Fi right okay so that's stressful but but that's one of the things I push back on is so I mean you had your phone on you for for 15 years but actually more recently as 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 smart phones yeah right it was just like you're texting and you're calling yeah and then there was social media there was you know Wi-Fi there was everything else social media is what changed it so she not just social media it was the Facebook IPO right so so if you go back to the the beginning of the consumer facing smartphone era so like the iPhone in 2007 you know I went back and talked to the original development lead for the first iPhone yeah 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 they want to make the experience beautiful and so for him it was plain music music was incredibly Gordon big yeah and everyone was listening to iPods right and so the the iPhone had a touchscreen he was like look I can make the experience a plane music even more beautiful and he was offended by the interfaces on cell phones at that time well I think phone calls are important I want to make that a beautiful experience I want to put in one device she'd have to have an iPod and a phone both in your pocket and that was from like 2007 to 2012 that was smart phones 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 this stage of just we're trying to grow and seeing we actually have to get our 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 calm is pretty static right I mean you would go check your friends relationship status but if you checked it in the morning that was probably not going to change that day it's not something you would you spend all day looking at right and so they completely re-engineered the experience to be not about posting and reading other people's post 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 or people approving of me or people thinking of me and that's what changed our relationship with the phones from this job's Ian's vision 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 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 it was cool or interesting and oh you have cute kids or 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 I need Ada likes except for when you're hunting the likes then 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 meaning for create something meaningful like the things that actually we've evolved to crave to feel sort of accepted and connected and impactful and so it's this irony that you're doing this because you 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 the 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 and 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 so if you take all the friction out you just hit 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 right 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 mm I mean there's no shortcut I mean if a friend has a baby you could send them like congrats three exclamation points what you really should do is go over there and say here I'm bringing you I'm bringing you a box full of flakes this is you know it's snacks and food and towels it turns out towels are really useful yeah this is something about this covering 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 another person feeling like you're connected the congrats with the three exclamation points stop bad let's not giving you what you need and it's not like a deep work of building relationship yeah it's the small attention that's not as meaningful just showing up even a phone call is better than it's a lot better than just a like or Congrats it's taking the 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 because they're like so used to someone just saying it quick yeah I'll send even a minute video message of just acknowledging them for what I appreciate about them are 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 it's more attention it's more time it's it's it's a more piece of quality I guess communication right but showing up is really the key in person if you can but someone's not in their city then it might be harder so do you feel like our our quality of our life is diminishing because of social media or because of the lack of our attention to deeper work in our work in our relationships this is what I've been hearing right so I wrote deep work which was really about tech and his impact on the professional world and what I kept hearing when I was on the road was reader saying yeah but what about tech in our personal lives mmm right there's something going on here so attacking 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 yeah we're really bad at knowledge work right so that was sort of that was deep work right so a lot of the readers say yeah but something is going on in our personal lives with tech it's sort of arguably more important yeah and so you look into this and you see there is this unease maybe around two years ago people really started the 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 like I hate what I'm doing when I'm on my phone rates not like cigarettes or something or like most people who smoke without a I just wish I I wish I wasn't smoking there's something good there is right I mean there there's good things happening their issue is autonomy so people were feeling like I'm 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 this more than its healthy I am 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 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 he's 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's something useful that someone is doing on Facebook stop criticizing learn checkmate right like we've we've won and what I was finding is that's not really the grounds on which is argument is it occurring it's not as this useless or useful it is in my in control of this and using it for good means or is it in control of me anything 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 and you're 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 splat me guilty for this to you but you split the take 20 hours right split that between some like the strong you know interaction with people self-reflection and let's say some like skill building or creation yeah or working out with or nature and multiply that by what like five or six weeks even and it's a vastly different outcome and I think about nothing 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 a completely different life completely different 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 yeah just look at the amount of time you spend on social media yeah or your email or on nonsense but this is why people are getting upset about social media guinness 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 you're looking at baby pictures of your niece or something it's not bad but they're upset about is that it's keeping them from getting after it mmm-hmm in these other aspects so like this isn't bad but not learning the language not learning the skill not getting healthy not taking or taking on 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 so there's all of this stuff over here that instinctually I know like if I'm doing this is 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 and Northern California could be really expensive it's not like I'm curing cancer over here and I'm making sacrifices over there it's they tweaked this so that I would use it mmm 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 yeah what's the thing that people aren't willing to look at within themselves that makes them so distracted you and having those conversations a lot lately or 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 were you 30 days you step away 30 days you stuck away and it's kind of the core sort of suggestion in the book like 30 days you step away from all social media also some media you know all optional technologies in your personal life so I can't get you out of answering your boss's email as an online news social media games streaming media YouTube right almost everything you do in your personal life with tech from TV as well it's a movie well yeah so different different people had different rules for that like one of the rules I like just as people said no streaming media by yourself so like yeah I can watch a movie with with like a friend or not just embed but I can't just you know watching the or whatever yeah what everyone does knows the idea was that you do this 30 days then when it's over you rebuild your digital life from scratch right so it's like Mary Kondo you clear out the whole closet yes right and what brings you joy and yeah you figure it out and then you 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 Wow that it was terrifying that it was that taken this away that first day was really terrifying for me 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 axe an escape from hard things they don't want to deal with like what look at me 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 what's my purpose I really living up to my potential am I really happy with like the type of person you know yeah ma'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 in your leisure activities but it's actually really important things we do like things you do in your time outside of work that is requires skill something you can get better at something that maybe connects you to other people as you do it so it could be like athletics for a lot of people like even even like to pick up a basketball game or something like this but also skilled hobbies community or church group engagement like these type of things do we always use to fill our time with yeah 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 yeah it's difficult I think you said in your Ted Ted video that you like read a book every night and you relax like kind of rocking chair and you're like oh man yeah and I read a newspaper at the table with my kids in the morning like that so that's something that was like my dad my dad would read a newspaper yeah either in the morning but afterward 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 yeah and then I would see him lost every night he would just like fall asleep in his like chair reading the newspaper or a book and just like pass out and I'm like man you just look so restful yeah yeah yeah I know I'd be a good farmer under years ago right if I could just sit on a porch and Whittle again it sounds superficial but but I get into it like we go all the way back to Aristotle writing the nikuman teen 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 that you have activities that you do that you do just because you appreciate quality right and if you if you have that it's kind of a buffer against various ups and downs right if you're 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 we in between times the in-between times so maybe you're having a hard time you know in life at the moment having this sort of anchor but there's things I do that I just appreciate them for the their intrinsic quality is like deeply human 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 more rewarding more rewarding it's this algorithmically optimized content you've been reduced to a data to bowl of nineteen thousand 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 these isolated nuggets that and it's just optimized so that you'll want to keep it's the same as processed food yeah same way you want more more of a game you're never satisfied but if you move away from a real food culture to eat McDonald's like you're 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 yeah 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 some of that to do more arts and crafts music other buffer type experiences that anxiety would go down yes really yeah I think it would definitely go down so so for young people so Generation Z which is the the first generation to have sort of ubiquitous access to smartphone social media as they enter their young adolescents this generation that's where anxiety anxiety related disorder were literally off the charts so the demographers that measure different traits of generations and see how traits change or generation generation have never seen something change that severely so it was off their charts looking at anxiety and anxiety related disorders and the the turning point from this was if you were born just late enough to have social media and smartphones like when you enter junior high when you were like 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 anxiety related disorders and it was like 5x more students coming in than they ever used to got 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 right 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 you know sacrificed for you you'll sacrifice for me I'm going to be involved on you do activity that has intrinsic quality right 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 and then in your professional life you look to make impact like you do these things it's it's not a secret formula this is what we've always needed is to nutriments of human flourish and so this is the issue with the phone is they and again like the the the social media companies wanted all to be about utility it's not useless to be on Facebook that's not the issue it's that this has become so compulsive that is taken us away from these things that we absolutely need to Fleur so you take those all away and you just do this instead you're gonna be anxious maybe a dumber you're gonna get Dumber and you're gonna 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 probably not doing what I should be doing with my life and you feel guilty you feel guilt until you escape the guilt wave Wow like 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 it's I talk to psychologists about this it's a different type of addiction right so smoking is a substance addiction so there's actually chemicals that can thicken 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 stopped using it phone addiction psychologists tend to categorize as a moderate behavioral addiction mm-hmm which means okay if I take away your phone like it might be difficult but you're not gonna have the same type of withdrawal you would have if you were like an alcoholic and you're 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 gonna eat probably way too many potato chips right but if I don't you're not gonna sneak on a meal the night right they go by it so that's where we are with probably with the phones is that if we have it with us we're gonna use it more than we think is healthy on the phone okay so let's let's make the scenario there's a lot of entrepreneurs at lists and 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 people that their business is mostly online yeah 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 so I definitely recognized in the professional context there's certain thing to social media enables that's really powerful I mean there's a reason for example why Facebook is worth 500 billion dollars because let's say you're trying to advertise it's crazy this thing can pinpoint exactly 1 to 2 I mean I see why they're there they're making lots of money and I understand why people use it to advertise I also understand having some sort of presence and social medias useful and sort industries and so what I typically advise is if you think social media is very important for your business treat it as something important like actually you actually get after it and understand where am I 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 then use it like a professional so there's no reason for it to be on your phone really yeah doesn't don't emails on your phone right I don't use email my phone really Wow yeah I deleted this you only open the computer to do the work yeah an email yeah another phone you're not checking or being notified so do the same oh so so once you've identified X Y & Z and social medias a big ROI do it like the pros like I interviewed some sort of social media brand managers for major companies in the book 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 of CBS yeah 22 minutes which I do all right so like a lot of season 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 medias 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 you know if a friend of mine was running a business and we were out to dinner and he's doing QuickBooks well like I was like well why are you why are you making quick Vic invoices like I don't doubt that maybe QuickBooks is useful for your business but this is weird that you're using on your phone all the time I was dinner right yeah it's not just enough the if he came back and said but my business needs QuickBooks that's how I invoice my clients or whatever say that's true but like do you need to be writing up invoices on the toilet right and a dinner and movies yeah so so so it's why when I talk to professionals like if you need social media use it like if you use it professionally user like a professional and should have very little to do with yeah your personal life what are the mega non-negotiables for you everyday within screen time and your phone that's a good question well I I don't really need that many non-negotiables because it's never there yes 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 and you'll look up you know I'm looking up like whatever the address of where I'm going or something like this maps maps are gonna call my ways see how the kids are doing there's something like that but because I've never been exposed to the constant companion model it just is never something that I worry about and then online I had trained myself not the web surf really so I don't have a cycle of sites that to go through now in part I can do this because I have a lot of autonomy and my job is as a professor and a writer it's not like 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 surfer my workday it's like I'm doing this for two hours and this like I want to be trying to work every single minute don't work you like it be done and then a home and then when I'm home you know I have three kids running around some present dad that's what I want to do Wow yeah you're just hanging out throwing a baseball the backyard yeah ever getting dirty whatever that might be yeah we literally do that yeah Wow just like the old days I remember after work my dad would come home he'd be in his suit he roll his sleeves up he'd get two minutes and we'd go play catch in the backyard yeah for 20 30 minutes it was so powerful in the summer in Ohio just like the smell the grass just like throwing catch you know yeah simple little things that it's build connection and as a memory it's a memory and its physical and tangible and you're taking responsibility for relationship my oldest is only six but we're working on swings Wow has been better all right should be doing t-ball soon you teach at t-ball that summer really are you coaching I'm not the coach I'm nothing coach maybe I should be if you go now it's interesting when you go as a parent to see I guess t-ball and I'm sure doing more activities with your kids as they get older yeah do you see all other parents just on their phone the whole time there's a lot of that really yeah and playgrounds - really I mean this is one of the sources I think of the pushback that I've been picking up on the last couple of years on our digital lives is that our generation like so the people like us who were exposed the social media generation right we got it when we were like in college it's the first adopters exactly right is we're starting to have families and so it's interesting a lot of the the unease is coming from like new moms and dads Wow right because now suddenly you have to confront like it's pretty clear that this thing in front of me here is very important and something did I want to dedicate to and take responsibility and then why am I looking at this right well my kids are the most important yeah and so that's 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 you know you know 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 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 reckon them say okay you're only gonna be scheduled online for these hours and daily that working professional would ya put put put fences around it okay yeah so take it off your phone and put fences around how and win scary yeah yeah take it off your phone and then and have how and when you know which is a lot so a lot of the digital minimalist right like a lot of the people who go through this process like of that 1,600 probably 50% added some social media back into their life after the 30 days she had 1600 people go through this process okay they would send the reports of the reports I got about 50% we're saying okay I can't think of any huge wins I mean out of social media because the whole minimalism game is just about focus on the big wins and ignore the rest 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 really I'm not getting a big win and I'm a minimalist I'm gonna focus my attention on the things that really matters okay fifty percent had big wins right what do you mean they had big wins there's a value something they really valued for which let's say a particular social media tool was a big boost right so like for what well like oh the business or the career either right so there might be it might be a personal thing right like this is the way 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 because of the the time changes of 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 even their awareness for their creativity they have to be official artists these don't have to see other people's work that's why they all used to live in Greenwich Village because that's where the gallery's writing and now online gallery yeah so 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 Sunday's on my desktop the dy acts 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 passwords not saved you know it's in a post-it know 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 the 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 they have this extra element which is unique to the digital world which is how and when am I going to use to things that I kept in the closet interesting yeah so in the book digital minimalism do you have a guideline for how people can do this for 30 days is there a process for yeah so the process is you you figure out okay what am I gonna 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 you have 30 days so what are you supposed to do during those 30 days like why is this not just like a meri condo weekend right yeah like what about our declutter yeah yeah well there's two reasons so so one it takes about 7 to 10 days is just the sort of detox from the the need that compulsively use the phone until 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 thirty 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 in your life should I come back may I should I put Instagram back into my life you can now run that against here's the things 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 missing out on it because this is what I really care about I really care about these five things and this is what I want to do with my time it's 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 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 healthy than I normally a.m. I mean right I mean I was a little bit uncomfortable my books tend to be more a little bit more like idea books that has practical things but like I'm an academic right right right we don't do the research you know three days but it's what works and and you know people want there to be I could ask the question a lot like but can you give me instead like some tips like five things I can do or whatever I was like I can but just delete your accounts but you gotta do the 30 like it something about this 30-day is this declutter it does work and coming up short of that try and kind of do it piecemeal it doesn't seem to be as effective and so I was like alright I'm putting it in I'm gonna marry conduit I can have a process you know I love it that's the feedback I'm getting so so I tell people is like you can do things to get in shape the prepare for the 30 days but yeah and I really feel like when you do this 30-day challenge I had another friend baratunde a thirsty Thurston who did this a couple years ago and he wrote a whole article I think I'm like Fast Company about like what he learned about himself in 30 days and I wrote about him and dick yeah because he stepped away from Twitter I think it's took away from like aberrant wasn't just would maybe everything but then he went back to it all and now is he back like well I don't know I just remember at the time I wrote the article I went and and looked at how much he was yeah is that the way for 30 days yeah a month or something yeah and they did like a whole article about what he learned about himself for what do you I think he was able to do the deep work finally yeah on certain projects or yeah connect with friends more you have to have the time right that 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 it doesn't get it done like you you you have to have that space yeah I mean it's the same honestly I think what's going on here we've seen in health and fitness right we got highly palatable processed foods yeah get it out of your system yeah and everyone got you know yeah and we we tried tips just you know the banal stuff right like eat less move more like I gotta get rid of a dog the food pyramid yeah what works it's the people who have like a whole philosophy yeah right they're vegan they're paleo or whatever but they've got a whole philosophy based in something they 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 on values that allows you to make like consistent decisions about what you do mm-hmm it's interesting my CEO who manages my business he doesn't have social media he has a Facebook account because he got out in 2004 one of our college but he never uses it I don't even know if he knows his password he's not on Instagram Twitter than nothing he's probably the most productive person I know you know he's got a daughter you know 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 kinda he's my inspiration because I'm probably on it too much promoting you know my show or whatever it may be and but I realized after this conversation like I could just be on the desktop for an hour a day yeah doing what I need to do on social media know what some professional health probably do yeah with with some systems some software some team you know around that you know I've been doing that more and more but I still feel like there's a couple things I hold on to yeah for whatever reason and maybe I get to reflect more of like what's the void I'm trying to to fill yeah well there's worse than 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 now 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 yeah gotta be uncomfortable sometimes I love this you know 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 sweatshirt every week yeah if 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 him in the car when there's a movie she's knitting she's always knitting yeah and it brings her a lot of peace yeah it helps like her mind I'm sure she's probably thinking a lot during those times yeah 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 hand working yeah because what different chasers maybe three species is feel like chimpanzees gorillas and humans like what one of the things that differentiates us is that we can plan so we can have an intention and we can manifest it in the world it's crazy right so I can think about you know a spear and I can take the rocks I can do two different rings and create it right and that really helps us succeed so we're wired to be very fulfilled when we take an idea and manifest it in the fiscal 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 manifested 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 could start once we could start doing that and so like someone I really admire is I don't know if you've if you've if you've met Nick Offerman he plays Ron Swanson yeah yeah but she's got this somewhere around here in a little worker right doesn't the shop around here yeah and he spends it's got to be the most healthy way probably to be in Hollywood cream star but he's there all the time and it's a serious shop you know like a like a light industrial air house type things and he's a really serious I was a little good like Jim Carrey 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 he has this huge warehouse in I think New York City and in LA yeah it just goes and paints something new every single day yeah he's an unbelievable painter yeah and he just has all these colors and just painting whatever he wants and I actually have his paintings because I was so inspired by it but here's a guy who was probably he's been wrapped up in the Hollywood scene for a long time but to have like a craft that you can get focusing on yeah 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 my own life really like what well so I'm getting back into my guitar playing really the same thing right you this you have inflexible metal strings and it is a wood and you're sort of trying to manipulate this real world thing to make it somehow sound good yeah yeah that's good yeah a big thing I like to do a salsa dance yeah I love salsa dancing I play a little guitar as well and I just started singing lessons a couple months ago that's great yeah so I'm trying to just use more of my body yep to manifest like my skills yes and things that I'm not that good at you know yes things are trying to get better but you can get better at and this gives me it's skilled and you can get better at it and it's demonstrable that you're getting better that'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 maybe and we get better that's when we build true confidence we don't build confidence by getting more likes on social media yeah it might be a false sense of confidence for a moment but we haven't really built a skill yeah 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 deep work and we see the growth that's when we have that intrinsic confidence yeah that supports us for a longer time well you know I might move a driver yesterday was telling me that he used to do music lessons professional musician off and he said this was one of the shifts he saw they kind of got him out of 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 as people who are coming to get lessons and just a discomfort with the discomfort practicing but but when you're doing something like this like learning how to play a guitar you probably remember when you first learn the guitar is like completely unyielding it oh it's so hard man just like a year and a half I like three songs just for like your fingers it's a get comfortable and yeah but we used to be more comfortable doing these things because what else were you gonna do there's no other time yeah well it's free time yes free time what are you gonna do like I won the play in a rock band right yeah girls like guys in rock bands and I was told right so a little afternoon I gotta practice all afternoon and I got to put on the Hendrix and do you know pentatonic scales or whatever but you know we could if you're used to that was confidence you know what skill is you have to be world-class at something but you know about I was bad at this and then I did this deliberate effort and I'll not oh yeah and now you know what that is right like the competent person is this was Matthew Crawford said something like the the competent person who has a skill is sort of quiet and easy and with themselves the non competent person is out there yelling into the void online desperate to get you know well someone validate Wow 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 yeah on certain skills or activities as opposed to you take your iPad and iPhone and watch a movie and play games yeah well modeling is important so they see wow they got to see what you're doing this is a reading book and see reading books you're doing playing guitar so you're doing hard things yeah so you doing hard things he knew respecting other 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 do an instrument you always have to be doing a sport mm-hmm and I was like has pretty good actually yes 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 the fastball yeah so hard so hard that's right yeah my dad tried to get me to do piano when I was a kid and I went to one lesson and I just like screamed and cried about it and he he was like okay you don't think anymore but I was in every sport yeah so I was like obsessed with sports and all that 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 like it's clear that you're better and you're connected to other people so you're learning with a group you're getting coached you're helping the team as you get better it's I mean that's having that 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 as 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 makes you guys get the book digital minimalism I've got a couple questions left for you but digital minimalism is out now choosing a focus life in a noisy world you can't find them on social media but you can go to your website Cal Newport comm right that's right you can subscribe to your newsletter there you can learn more about you not on social media but on there and your newsletter once a week yeah well I blog blog it goes out to the newsletter yeah yeah my blog nerd yeah blog nerd love it okay this is this question is called the three truths so I want you to imagine it's your final day on earth whenever you want it to be it could be hundreds of years from now give me whenever but at some point you got to go and you've got to take all your work with you it's all of your writing 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 that's interesting question so this won't be worded elegantly because I'm just I'm thinking about those on the fly probably something about responsibility mm-hmm so taking on taking on responsibility like for other people to do things of value is in the end gonna be more important than worrying about the happiness in the moment mmm doing hard things is sort of the foundation for a good life you know 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 and 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 comment a lot of Western 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 like yourself what's happening to yourself what do people think about you how do you feel sort of shifting the focus away from that yeah take on responsibility on hard things try to rise to it do hard things produce things that are valuable serve other people as opposed to worrying too much about or other people properly serving you right are they liking the right things or saying the right things to you sure yeah those are great man I love those I want to acknowledge you for a moment cow 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've constantly do the hard things and set that example so on technology for going against the grain but it's not easy to do that and a lot of people are seduced with the easy out filling the void by giving like some all these things so I appreciate an acknowledged e for creating these 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 know jus for that my man my final question is what is your definition of greatness rising to your potential you know we all have a potential like what we could be doing and so fighting the rise for that like that's greatness versus stoning the towel early yeah there you go hello man hey Thank You Man thank you brother yeah I'm sure [Music]

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: CAL NEWPORT, lewis howes, social media, minimalism, cal newport audiobook, lewis howes joe dispenza, social media addiction, social media marketing agency, social media detox, social media manager, minimalism audiobook, digital minimalism, deep work, digital detox, self help, personal development, success advice, cal newport interview, motivational speech, inspiration, motivation, self improvement, self development, how to quit social media, social media on society, success

Id: qlBV_CDvuYs

Length: 60min 41sec (3641 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019