This Easy Stoic Habit Will Revolutionize Your Life | Cal Newport

this what I think happens if your only definition is more is better than less and then you give people the opportunity to visibly do work at every moment of their life those two things don't play well together and I think that's why we get this burnout epidemic that just starts in the early 2000s and it just goes goes goes goes goes and then the pandemic sort of pushes people over the edge and they're saying enough right so what's the relationship between productivity and walks because I feel like people who are truly productive not people who sit at their desk and pound at things all day but I think I feel like people who have big scientific breakthroughs artists people who have theories about the world whatever there seems to be a an undeniable relationship with walks yeah well it it they they come up all the time and there's there's a a good neurological reason for it um but first like where walks become important is once you realize what's important is like we were talking about before actually having the valuable idea like figuring out something good it's not just writing which we can use with like scarecrow like just doing stuff right you actually have to think right um walks are really common historically for big thinkers we think like that it's not exactly nailed down but we think what's going on is that the the motor neurons involved in Walking actually act as a bit of a dampener on certain circuits in your brain right so part of your brain now gets into these uh autonomous motion Loops which acts as a dampener on essentially neural noise so more distracting thoughts or asides you're thinking about this or that so when you're sitting still sometimes the problem is um there's not enough dampening going on in your brain and so it's hard to sustain your focus when you're walking it puts on some cognitive blinders you have an easier time holding your focus on a interior abstract idea so it's it's you know it's it's Jerry rigging your brain to be better at this thing that's pretty artificial for humans to do which is to hold abstract ideas in our Mind's Eye and uh you know this is not what we evolved to do we're happy we're certainly not evolved to just sit down for long periods of time either but we are evolved to cover long distances and look for things and explore places and taking information while we're walking and process right yeah so all we're doing different now in the modern world is uh we're just turning the eye inward so instead of taking in information across the Savannah and kind of processing all this information instead we're walking on the Riverwalk and boss drop um we can just turn that eye inner and put it on internal things but yeah it's the same idea so so walking yeah super common that's why I mean I do all of my best thinking all of my best thinking walking me too yeah yeah Nisha said only ideas have had while walking have any worth Nisha walked a lot yeah uh kirkgard would walk just all like hours a day I mean Aristotle's school is named after his movements his walking right and so yeah there there is it's almost Inseparable scientific discovery philosophical uh philosophical discourse and walking even though the the irony is when we think of the philosophers we think of them standing in the Lum or in the school like we see them stationary but in fact they were always in motion yeah you yeah you read uh yeah you read the the dial various dialogues right thean dialogues and yeah they're walking it's Socrates with fadus and they're walking by the river as they're talking right that's what it unfolds you know who uh the champion Walker in the Arts right now is David Sedaris oh doesn't he walk around and pick up track he does he will but these walks he does are Epic like crazy walks like when he in Manhattan he'll like walk from the battery like all the way up to like the upper west he'll just walk the whole island or whatever he'll walk 10 15 miles no he he uh he got an award from the queen because he would just take these walks and then he started picking up trash while he was on the walks which I also do uh like uh I live on this dirt road and so I'll I'll sort of walk it over and over again and it's like there's another nail you know or whatever sometimes it's it's not it's even worse than that but but yeah there's something about you're doing this thing so there's not really any expectations that you should be working or that you should have the Breakthrough and perhaps that's where it comes from too like Archimedes in the bath or whatever it's when you're when you've turned it's still operating in the background CU you can't turn it off the the thing that's working on the problem but when you stop being so willful about it something unlocks and it's very powerful and it comes to yeah yes do you also get I get this in my town people think you're Ecentric like you probably get it worse here you know like I live in a little town outside of DC but I walk these same Loops through my neighborhood and they're like oh there goes I mean they know it now because we're a small enough town uh but people like why do you walk so much I like why I do for a living I think the the the way that it is intersected with my life is you know it's like okay so you got to get on the phone with someone for this thing and uh I'll send you the invite and then I don't look at the invite until you know I'm about to get on and it's like oh this is like a zoom call with 15 people I'm already walking so then now I have to make up this excuse for why uh it's loud where I am or that I'm not at my computer like oh I'm out in the country and so you know I'm trying to get I'm trying to get reception exactly but but it's like I can't I already didn't want to do this call yeah and if you told me that to do this call I had to sit at my desk for 30 minutes and not move or be outside I'd want to do it even less you know and so so I do almost all my phone calls walking so sometimes that can be weird in a small town cuz people like oh hey I want to talk and I'm like you know uh but but yeah I try I try to I try to move um also yeah the only one that cause problems for me is like if you're doing like therapy or whatever if you do it over the phone and it's like I don't know if I should be talking about this like out the thing but I also again don't just want to sit there for no reason for an hour and so yeah I think I think being active and moving it's first off it's just better than being sedentary for phally and then psychologically and mentally there's just something very power we have we're write a book about this Ran So we have three elements of what we're going to call the artist life right now right we've discussed three elements right so um one is the the work expectations are tomorrow doesn't matter but this month does right um two you can be done by 3 yes and start at 9: yeah uh and then the the the third one is you can spend a lot of time walking yes like that to me my heart singing right like that's all I want a great life want yeah yeah now I do it a little differently because I'm a uh I'm a Believer in seasonality okay right so different seasons being different than others this is like an old Professor thing right um and so it'll look different for me where this semester might be my teaching semester so I largely now just teach in one semester yeah so you know a lot of these days I'm going on the campus and I'm meeting with students and it's like it's it's a academic life but then there'll be like a another semester when I'm going to campus one day a week and I'm at my studio writing and then the Summers we disappear right and we go up to New England and then it's like I'm completely off the grid and like the only thing I'm doing is bookwriting maybe like some New Yorker work but probably just book writing so I I I lean in the seasonality so sometimes that's the answer is like well I still want to be a professor right so um sometime it's not all going to be I'm done at 3 or I'm walking a lot because some days I'm in the classroom and have a meeting with the dean so why not make that this season of the year and this and then I'm bigger time scills too like I'm doing book publicity now um this is not if I had to operate like this yeah this is the worst it's the worst it's just the I mean it's fun for like a while because I get to see people but it's like the worst because it's not the this is the fun part the worst is like my my email right now there must be seven different teams yeah that all are just like we need this can you do this can you get back to me on this or it starts to feel like it's probably for you a glimpse of what regular life is for a lot of people I think if you were like a higher level executive that like a lot of people needed things from it probably feels like book to all the time yeah yeah no I the seasonality thing is interesting and it it's it's probably a throwback to uh an older way of life you know it's like politicians you know the Washington would clear out during the summer because it was a malarial swamp or whatever right or or yeah school you know has always sort of been in the seasons but but but people used to do things that way whereas now and I find myself doing it I I am much more of a like what does my ideal day look like and I just going to do that all the time I I but there is probably something unrealistic and unnatural about doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again and not having uh large chunks of time where you're doing it differently and you're forced to reexamine and question and try a new way and a new place and so I am I am trying especially as my kids are getting older and now hey yeah this is the season we're in school so if I had some idea that like uh I don't do meetings on Friday and I'm work I'm going to stay at home well well that was great when they were two yeah cuz they were around but now they're gone all day so I might as well I might as well so so yeah re I think the rhythms of oh this is baseball season and then the rhythms of this is you know this is the winter and not only are the hours shorter but we're all sick all the time so the hell with your plans you know what I mean the season of accepting that that instead of having a routine you have a series of routines you rotate either seasonally or day-to-day or different day days of the week through which one makes the most sense so I had a couple weeks ago a New York Times oped on this idea like on seasonality and one of the things I was arguing is this is so valuable the humans right because it's the way we lived until evolutionary speaking like a blink ago this is when we're farming this is when we hunt the Buffalo this and I went back to all that yeah it's all over the place I also I wrote a long New Yorker piece about this last year too where I looked at what do we know about hunter gatherers and like what work look like for them um it's it's important enough that it's worth sacrifices as well yeah so like here's something I'm considering uh because I still I'm not my podcast is not with a network we still sell ads you know directly with an agency and you sell ads as you know like a year in advance B you fill out the year ahead so I'm thinking about for the next year talking you know you know my agency I hope they're not listening but saying um I still work with them they're great yeah they're great but I'm thinking about saying let's not sell 52 weeks right in fact let's take uh why don't we sell like 45 or 46 weeks and I am going because I'm not going to podcast in July and I'll just batch the production and sell all your R well I could do that too but then that's also more like this what I mean by sa I was because I was thinking about this I was like well what would happen if I just said we're going to take six weeks off or two months off uh no batching just like the shows on Hiatus there I was like okay what does happen well it's less money yeah but I like this might be a fair trade though no I do like that because so I I signal to it's a signal as well to myself right of like hey wait a second I this is so important to me to un willing to we're giving up money to do this and then it becomes a brand signal like hey I actually take the time you know there's a whole way to make well I'm I'm struggling with this right now like this has like been a very very crazy week for me I think we did like eight interviews and then I have a bunch next week and and then I have meetings I I have a bunch of stuff so you're batching ahead with interviews I didn't think I was but I was like why is this so crazy and then I realized the reason it's so crazy first off it's it's something that's outside of my control which is it's South by Southwest in in in Austin so a bunch of people are here so that like they were just like this is the only time they could do it in person but then I realized really what's happening is I'm going out of town for like 10 days for my kids spring break so what happened is I took 10 days off the calendar so it just moved that stuff this way or that way and so so you yeah you or or like we we went out of town for a month this summer and it was great but then I was like why was it not as relaxing as I thought it would be and it's cuz I didn't just continue on with my normal schedule and then there was a month Gap and then I continued on with my normal schedule it was all the things that had to happen while I was not doing the things for a month basically just made the preceding month and the uh proceeding month more stressful than it need to be and it might have been a wash right and so so yeah the idea of like no no no no like I I it's more like the Rapture like I just go to the thing and I disappear and then maybe I'll come back so that's that's real I'm inventing this term now but real seasonality versus fake seasonality it's fake seasonality if during this period I'm doing less work but that all that work all still got done yes we just moved it or whatever real seasonality is we know Ryan disappears like for this month yeah like can't go outside it's raining that's reason real season we've known that for a year in advance like just we've been as we've been booking the schedule we just you know book around it you know I figured this out with as an academic so if you had a research institution as a professor the university does not pay your salary in the summer they pay you 10 month salary like your contract can you pick your paychecks to like my mom was a teacher they could be they were like do you want 12 months of paychecks or do you want 10 months of paychecks but it's the same salary so so no one does that because what you do instead if you're a researcher is you you put in uh what's called Summer salary into your research grants so you fill in those two months now it's like the National Science Foundation or darp us paying it uh because you're like yeah I should be working on Research in the summer um and so that's what people do right so now you're taking your your summer salary comes in you know from a grant or something like this and then what people think is like okay but I still want to take vacations or this or that but I am on the hook to keep working so they have to do fake seasonality right and then at some point I figured out you don't have to do that yeah like what if you just say I'm not taking summer salary from a grant as far as the university is concerned you're not their employee in those two months like there can't you don't yeah there's nothing for you to do they can't ask you to do anything like you're gone or whatever and I figured out at some point like oh why not just you know I write books like wouldn't that be a good use of part of a book Advance is to cover the summer and like this was a and and that was real seasonal versus fake I was doing fake before which is summers are more flexible uh because I don't have to teach and we can go travel and like do things but also like I'm all I'm working and I have to write these reports or this or that when I went to real seasonality like no I'm I'm taking a sacrifice I'm losing money but I owe no one nothing to No One during this time it really changed the the charact that's why I want to make the podcast be protected in the summer as well so just we know in we just know in advance like I I completely shut down yeah I think your tricky part is going to be audiences are not seasonal I mean I you are on TV shows right and that you're like whatever but but if if a thing is more like a daily or a weekly habit breaking that habit is hard so yeah but here's my thought on I thought about that so this is why podcasting I think's okay yeah cuz podcasting doesn't it's it's a push not pull right so like why do I listen to like T's podcast like it I like it and I see it come up in my list of new episodes and I listen to it all right you go away for 6 weeks you know it's not showing up in their list you come back it just shows up again they're already subscribed to the show right and when it comes back again like oh yeah I like listen to Cal show right like it's it's not that hard for them to get the Habit back

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 32,205

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: LU1-0EA67nE

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024