7 Lessons To Build A Life You Love - Season 5 Wrap
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with authors and academics and entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and what strategies and tools and principles we can learn from them to help us build a life that we love. Now we have reached the end of season five already, absolutely mental. This podcast has now been going on for the last year and a half, which feels like an absurdly long time, but also feels like just yesterday that we had the idea for the podcast and then

had our first few guests and kind of started getting the ball rolling and figuring out how to make a podcast, how to do multicam edits, how to do shorts for social media, all of that fun stuff. But the main benefit of the podcast is I feel like through having all of these conversations, which you guys have been very kindly listening to and watching and commenting on and everything, I've learned so much about myself and so much that I've applied to my own life and my own business as well. Now, one of the things that I've been really focusing on for this particular season of the podcast is health and relationships. I think on the work front,

Most of what I read and consume and listen to and watch anyway is business and work related. But I...

chronically under invest in my health and in relationships and in consuming content and learning about those sorts of things. And so in particular, I took a lot of lessons away from the episode that we did with John and Julie Gottman, who are like one of the most famous people in the world when it comes to relationship advice. And that's been super helpful. And I've already started applying some of the stuff from that episode to my relationship. And then similarly, in improving the relationship that I have with myself, the episode that I did with psychologist Dr. Aria felt more of a therapy session than it did a podcast episode.

and I took away so much from that. And actually Dr. Ari and I had a kind of private coaching session afterwards, which we might release because we filmed it at some point if you guys are potentially interested, but that was also super valuable.

in kind of helping me feel more self-confidence and more self-love as well. Now, this episode is going to be our usual end of season roundup where we're going to play seven different clips from seven different episodes of the podcast for this last season. And these are specific actionable takeaways that you can take from some of the episodes. I'd also like to say a massive thank you at this point to everyone who has signed up to the podcast, who has subscribed on YouTube or on Spotify or iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. This season, we hit

200,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel, which is absolutely insane. And it's been really nice and heartwarming getting comments via email and the YouTube comments and even on your Telegram community, hearing how much some of you guys have enjoyed the podcast and the actionable takeaways you've taken from it.

it. On that note, if you would like to join our Telegram community, it's completely free. There'll be a link down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. And that's where we post behind the scenes stuff from the podcast. And if I have a guest coming on and curating questions from the audience, the Telegram community is where we go to get those questions. Anyway, that's enough talking from me. Let's now roll the seven lessons for the roundup of season five of the podcast. I hope you enjoy them.

At the moment, according to YouTube analytics, 81% of you who are watching this on YouTube have not yet hit the subscribe button. And so if you're, for example, in the now 81% of people who are watching this on YouTube, but who are not subscribed to the channel, I would love it if you could do so. And it'd be awesome to get that number down to 50%. And it would be cool to get like 50-50 sub non-sub ratio, just for fun. Are there optimizations that

healthy people without gut problems can make to improve like productivity performance that kind of thing yeah for sure so if your gut is not quite working optimally then that can even though you might not have any specific symptoms it can still have an impact on your mental health and your mental performance right so your gut is such an integral part of your whole body system and ecosystem and inevitably if it's not happy it's going to be screaming at your brain all the time and that is noisy and difficult for your brain to cope with and that can lead to things like brain fog and struggling with focus and concentration for example

Similarly, if your gut isn't happy but you don't really know from other symptoms but you're getting loads of bugs, infections, viruses all the time, you notice you're really susceptible, that's a good time to start looking at your gut health. And I think, I guess for this audience, what's really important to recognise is this connection between your gut and your brain and how they are constantly communicating with each other for better or worse. So there is a very strong line of communication between your gut and your brain which we refer to as the gut-brain axis.

And again, they are chemically connected through neurotransmitters that are produced in the gut. They are hormonally connected by the HPA axis and they are physically connected by the vagus nerve. And the chattiest organ between your brain and your gut is your gut. Your gut is constantly telling your brain all sorts of different things and throwing messages up that it's got to deal with. And people might think, oh, it's your brain, your gut's not really doing anything, but actually your brain is busy and it's communicating and it's a lot through those microbes that live in your colon.

Sick. You're very good at this. Thanks. Not my first time. You've got the whole like, wow. So what can I do, for example, as a proxy for people listening to this? My poo is fine once a day, you know, medium brown color, not overly smelly, I think. But everyone likes the smell of their poo apparently. But

Obviously, I want to kind of maximize my performance and my focus. And actually, one question we get so often from our audience is people struggling to focus. And I think often people are like, I struggle to focus with my schoolwork or with my whatever web design side hustle. I must have ADHD as like,

An immediate option, but I wonder if there's gut stuff we can do before we get to that point. Yeah, definitely. I mean, your gut health is, so because your gut is constantly communicating with your brain, again, if your gut is not happy, things are communicating differently. But also you could just not be producing enough serotonin for various different reasons, or your gut might not be sending the right signals up

your brain so you might have if we looked at your microbiome and it's certainly not necessary to do that we can do this in clinic without testing but if we looked at your microbiome we might find that you've just not got enough of these bacteria that are doing this particular important job with brain connection stuff

So what we would suggest then is to really optimize the gut. And you know, what happens, Ali, as you know, is when people are busy and they're working too hard and they're doing a side hustle and everything else is high pressure or they've got a family and everything else, people tend to make their diet quite small and not necessarily in terms of volume, but

the types of foods that they're eating. So they might end up eating the same types of foods on repeat. What I see is people, there's kind of two camps here, the people who do like the meal prep stuff and they eat the same foods five days a week and they think they're being super healthy, eating sweet potato and broccoli every day. Or you have the people who are just living meal to meal prep, you know, itsu, wherever they're going every day, the same sorts of things, but just various different places and nothing's particularly planned or thought through. And inevitably, both of those ways of eating have an impact on your gut health, whether you feel it in your gut or not.

So that way of eating limits the types of fibres that your gut bacteria are being fed. And the most important thing for your gut health is that you're eating 30 different plants a week. So trying to eat loads of variety of different types of plants. That includes fruit and veg, but also nuts and whole grains, different types of grains. We're super fixated in this country on like oats and wheat. But actually, there's so many different types of grains that our gut really benefits from.

So, when you're busy and you're struggling and you're eating meal to meal or you're eating the same foods on repeat, what happens is your gut health, your gut sort of function might not change, but your gut health is inevitably not optimised. And that's when you can have these problems with lack of concentration, focus, energy, getting bugs all the time, that kind of stuff.

And really interestingly, your gut bacteria communicate with your hypothalamus, so that bit of your brain that controls things like cortisol production. So really early in your life, your gut bacteria dictate where your sort of HPA axis is set, so how much cortisol you release under given circumstances.

And we all need some cortisol, right? But we don't want loads and loads of cortisol because we've got loads of anxiety and stress all the time. We can really struggle to concentrate and to focus. So we can use our gut bacteria to try and reduce that and make things a little bit better in that department. We can use them and harness their powers to get more serotonin, which helps us with better sleep and concentration and focus and all those important things, those happy hormones.

And we can also just try and calm down those messages from our gut to our brain, which are distracting our brain all the time. And your gut bacteria are going to be saying, we need more plants. And you're going to be not reading that properly and giving them more sushi. And that's not quite what they want. Wow. So it sounds like you're saying, and please correct me if this is an oversimplification, that changing up what you eat can have a massive impact on your

productivity, performance, happiness. Absolutely. Because all of those things are linked, gut, brain, everything. Yeah, fundamentally. I mean, and proven in amazing research and science. Yeah. What kind of research has been done on this? I guess I'm thinking healthy people rather than people with...

official gut problems? Yeah, so the amazing work of John Kryan is a really good place to start looking at this stuff if people are interested. And he's written an amazing book called The Psychobiotic Revolution. So psychobiotics are these gut bacteria that communicate with our brain. So they're the ones that we're particularly interested in when we develop the height smart probiotic, for example.

So work that's been done in that area to start with in rodent models, they used a model of an autistic mouse and a model of a non-autistic mouse, a sociable mouse, and they took the microbiome. So they took a sample and gave the microbiome of the autistic mouse to the sociable mouse and the sociable mouse starts to show autistic traits. And when they swap them over, the autistic mouse starts to become a sociable mouse just because its gut microbiome has changed.

So that was the early work that they did trying to understand how much our gut microbiome is impacting our mental health, our mental performance, how our brain is working. So similar studies to that have then been replicated in humans, in other places. And to be clear, that autistic spectrum disorder stuff in humans is so complex and we can't replicate that exactly in humans as yet. But there's certainly something going on there, which is what we generally learn from rodent studies.

We've also got some great data showing things like increase in production of serotonin when we use particular probiotic species. There's great data showing that using particular probiotic species within treatment diets and things like that, so within treatment within studies, in controlled studies,

improves anxiety, depression, all of these kinds of symptoms. And wider nutrients within this world, if we think about things like omega-3s and B vitamins, they've been used in place of anxiety and depression medications, SSRIs, that kind of stuff. And they work as effectively in some people some of the time in studies. So we can use all of these things. And a similar work has been done with the two strains we use in the smart probiotic.

in terms of seeing whether they work as effectively as common anti-depression, anti-anxiety medications. And they do. So much so that there's health claims on them in Canada that people can say these are definitely shown to improve anxiety and depression. So there's great data. It's a young field of research, but it's super exciting. And it's very solid research just showing the magic that we can harness from our gut. If someone was being like, hey, Sophie, how do I

How do I change my diet such that it improves my brain function or improves my mood? What are the top recommendations here? Yeah, great question. So omega-3s are super, super important for our brain structure, as we've talked about, and they can also help to protect us from excess inflammation in the brain, which is linked to anxiety and depression and stuff like that. So either make sure you're having at least two portions of oily fish a week or take your omega-3 supplements.

B vitamins are incredibly important for our brain health. They produce, they make things like serotonin, melatonin, all of our, they make dopamine, GABA, all of these really important brain chemicals that we really need all the time. So B vitamins are really essential for brain function. And we've got some really interesting work showing that you can use B vitamins in

in controlled circumstances, in replacement of SSRIs, so anxiety and depression treatments, and they work in a very similar way in the right doses at the right moment for the right people. So B vitamins are super, super important for general brain function and brain health. And then we also think about things like antioxidants, and particularly the anthocyanins from blueberries are amazing for our brain health. So not just blueberries, but anthocyanins come in like red cabbage, other dark purple vegetables. And

There's some amazing data showing that if children are given a blueberry smoothie before an exam, they perform better in that exam than the children who haven't had a blueberry smoothie. And then when we swap them over and the level of the exam stays the same and the first children are given the blueberry smoothie, not given the blueberry smoothie, second children are, the children who had the blueberry smoothie always perform better than the children who didn't have the blueberry smoothie.

So what we think is happening there is it's getting better blood to your brain. And that is meaning that you can have a better mental performance in a very short period of time. So it's having that direct impact on your brain health in that moment. That thing that you just said, I imagine there are some people listening to this thinking, oh, my fucking God, that sounds incredible. And just as many probably thinking, oh, my fucking God, that sounds like the worst thing in the world. This guy's a psychopath. I mean, most people do the same thing, but with music.

right? So let's take Hamilton, for example. I eat biographies for breakfast. I'm obsessed, right? Like I literally wrote a rap album about the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger after I listened to Hamilton for the first time. Hamilton, the musical, it's about two hours, 40 minutes long. It is the best biography of Hamilton in my opinion, right? It's dramatized, but like you

You can't take away from the beat and the lyrics and everything else. When you listen to music, it's exactly like listening to a book, especially if you pay attention to the lyrics. By the way, one really cool thing is if you start listening to a lot of audio books, you will notice and remember all the lyrics from all the songs you listen to. Most people who I am friends with, they listen to the beat or the melody and they don't necessarily recall or understand the lyrics. They need to look at the lyrics on their phone to really intake them. For me, both happen because I've trained that part of my brain. But if you already do this for music, why do you do it with music? Because it enriches your life.

It makes you happy. Well, Brandon Sanderson's, you know, The Way of Kings enriches my life. I'm sorry, even more than music. And so again, it doesn't matter if it's fantasy or fiction or philosophy or sci-fi. I listen because it makes me happy. It's beautiful. It's enjoyable. I'm living inside this world. And the joy that you get from a book, if you read a book,

is so much deeper than the joy you get from watching a movie or watching a TV series. And so I don't watch TV. I don't watch movies. I just consume books, but I do it with my ears. Do you, like, presumably on the few occasions where you do watch TV, movies, YouTube videos, do you speed those up as well? Or do you sort of slow it down and watch it as the director intended or some shit like that? I cannot deal with the speed of movies and TV shows at this point. So I use an app on my computer called...

video speed controller. You can increment the speed by 0.1 increments. And when my friends don't notice, I up it by 20%. But if I was watching by myself, I'd watch it by 5x speed. YouTube on my computer automatically plays at 3x speed for everything. And again, okay, we talked about working out right before this. When I was younger, lifting 145 pounds was difficult. Now,

I can bench press that however long you want me to. And so you build the muscle, right? If you build the muscle and you can bench press like 225 easy, there's no reason to set the resistance to 145. Set it to 225. And so the trick is just practice listening faster. And here's the key.

Some of us are able to read at a thousand words per minute. Like there are people who can do this, right? A college professor in the United States typically will read about 330, 350 words per minute. No one goes, how dare you read that quickly? It's the same thing. It's just that the upper level that is accessible to most people and listening is a lot easier to reach. And here's why. We've been listening for hundreds of thousands of years. We've only been reading for like a thousand years.

We evolved to be really good at storytelling and paying attention and at processing with our ears. It's a hack, you know, the idea of writing characters and then decoding them. It's an amazing hack, but it's a hack. It's not what humans evolved to learn how to do. If you learn, and here's the thing, right? Reading is a highly computational behavior for the brain to do.

Typically about 97% of your brain function is actually working on decoding and only 3% can focus on comprehension. But if you listen, like 3% is focusing on decoding, 97% focuses on comprehension. So computers are designed for computing. They're really good at computing. And so if you could outsource the computational work of reading to a computer, that's the best. Except AI was not good enough to read like a human until...

just about now. And so now you can do that. Just think about it this way, right? How many of us do long-division math in our head? Nobody. You pull up your iPhone, you do it on your phone. It makes sense to do the same thing with reading. Do you listen to podcasts very much? I didn't used to, and the quality of podcasts significantly increased over the last 10 months. So now I do. My favorite is How to Take Over the World by Ben Wilson. What is that? I haven't come across that. Oh my God, it's amazing.

Okay, so I came across this podcast. The first episode I listened to was The Life of Julius Caesar. And then I listened to Napoleon's biography by him. And then he recently put out the biography of Brigham Young.

And what he'll do is he'll read like five primary sources and he'll produce like a two to three hour biography podcast. He's got a great voice. And then he'll also find the overarching concepts from all their lives. For example, they all eat fast. They all attack fast. They're all really good at communication and it's fascinating. And so, you know, I love the idea of taking over the world, not in the same violent way that people used to, but there's a lot that you can learn.

So I'm obsessed with Hamilton. I'm also obsessed with Napoleon and, you know, same thing for Julius Caesar. And so the more you study people, the more interesting it is. And so that, the reason why I didn't like podcasts historically is, you know, you got one person interviewing another person, another person editing, basically three human hours went into one minute of you consuming. But if I fly from like California to New York and I listened to the

book Obama wrote before he became president. That book is eight hours long. I listened at 2x speed, 3x speed. By the time I landed, I finished that book. It's like I sat next to Obama the entire time, but he spent an hour thinking about every single minute of what he was going to say.

And so books used to be a more dense source of information. Podcasts recently have improved dramatically. The other thing that happened to me is I now read enough books that it's actually difficult for me to find new things in books. But the lead time from something being discovered

to appearing in a podcast is faster than the lead time for something being discovered to be published in a book. And so when I was in college, I knew I was in the right classes when I started not being able to Wikipedia the concepts about photovoltaics engineering that we were learning in class. And I could only learn that from the professors directly. And so what I did is I took all these classes and then I would email professors at Stanford and MIT and Harvard to like ask them additional questions. It's now become the case that for most topics, you can learn more cutting edge stuff from podcasts. So that's really cool. Hmm.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's a good way of thinking about it. The way I think about audiobooks versus podcasts is...

audiobooks are really good if I want to get just a broad, general blitz about a particular topic. But one thing I like about podcasts is that usually, for example, if Tim Ferriss is interviewing Morgan Housel about the psychology of money, the book is good. But in a way, him asking questions to the thing will spark other things in my mind. Even though I've read the book, I still find the interview valuable. Or when Cal Newport is interviewing Tim Ferriss about something, I'm very familiar with both of their work. And so the way they talk about it adds a meta level of

awareness to the topic. But there's no point in me listening to a podcast about nuclear because I know nothing about the topic. And so to get the foundational groundwork, the books are sick. And then at that point, I can understand what the experts are talking about. And then the other thing I would say is amazing about books is if you listen to fantasy or sci-fi, world building, it's really difficult to build a world and have it be...

congruent and consistent. And actually there's a lot of strategy in doing that. And so you get a lot of emotional rewards by listening to a fantasy or sci-fi audio book that someone has spent a lot of time thinking about.

I'd love to talk a little bit about the new book, The Love Prescription, Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection and Joy. I've started reading that on my Kindle and I've got the physical copy arriving in the next couple of days. But it's interesting because one of the claims in the book, or at least in the blurb, is that there is a formula for a good relationship. And almost the vibe that I got was that, hey, if you follow the formula and just do these seven things across these seven days or however long it takes, you're going to get a good relationship.

you will just almost magically improve the quality of your relationship. So I wonder if you can just kind of riff on that a little bit. Like, what is this formula for love? Sure. So one of the things is being nice to one another. So, you know, giving your partner compliments, you know,

Catching your partner doing something right and communicating that, communicating respect and affection in words, letting your partner know how attractive they are to you and how irresistible they seem at times. You know, that kind of positivity is very, very critical. Another one is...

Turning toward turns out to be a very powerful thing in a relationship. So, you know, in our apartment lab where we saw 130 newlywed couples and followed them for six years,

We discovered that a lot of time when they're just kind of hanging out in this apartment lab, one person will try to get the other person's attention or share something humorous or, you know, some interesting story that they've heard or are reading about. And then they try to connect. They make a bid for connection. And then the cameras in the lab always swung to the other person to see the response of

And there were one of three responses, turning toward, which was really acknowledging the connection. One person might say, oh, what a beautiful boat that is going by. And if the other person said, yeah, that was turning toward. If they didn't respond at all, that was turning away. Or if they responded irritably, will you be quiet? I'm trying to read. That was turning against.

So when we found couples, the 17 couples who divorced one another after six years after the wedding, when we look back six years earlier, they had turned toward these bids only 33% of the time, whereas the couples who were still together six years earlier had turned toward the bids 86% of the time.

You know, huge difference. And we also discovered that turning toward is like an emotional bank account that you build. When you really connect with your partner, when your partner wants to connect with you, then during conflict, you have more of a sense of humor.

about yourself and about one another. You can laugh together and you can be affectionate even when you disagree and it reduces physiological arousal. So turning toward is another one that's very, very powerful. And when people become aware of that as a tool of connecting, then the relationship improves quite dramatically.

Right. So in this book, what we're doing is each day we're giving couples little thing to do, little 10 minute thing to do every single day. Like one day we'll be giving compliments, you know, really expressing fondness and admiration. A second day will be look for what your partner is doing right now.

And not just wrong, right. And point it out and say thank you to your partner. You know, third is listening, you know, talking about your needs with one another. What do you need? And we emphasize you should bring up your needs as a positive need rather than a negative need. And what that means is that you ask for what you do want.

not what you don't like or you resent. Don't bring that up because that's going to sound like criticism. Instead, flip it on its head and say, I would love it if you clean the dishes three times a week. That would be such a big help to me.

That's a positive. So people present, you know, on I forget which day, they talk about one need they have with their partner that can allow their partner to shine for them. It's not a criticism. It's the opposite, right? Another one is honoring each other's dreams. So talk about what

Maybe deeply held dream you have for something you want to do, something you want to experience, something you want to feel, whatever it is. Share that with your partner and really listen to what your partner says about that question too.

So what we hope to see if people practice this every day for seven days is that from before they started it to the end of the week, they'll see a little bit of change. Maybe a little something feels different. And they can talk about which one of those little prescriptions really made a difference for them.

Now, it doesn't mean everything gets fixed in seven days and then you can go back to being whoever you were before. No. It's instead that you're learning how to do something a little different that deepens the friendship, deepens emotional intimacy, which of course opens up to you know what, you know, more sexual intimacy, and helps you when you have to talk about conflict.

Continue those practices, especially the ones you found the best for you and your partner. And you'll see over time, you know, the relationship is doing this over time. Big change.

All right, we're just going to take a quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is very excitingly Huel. I have been a paying customer of Huel since 2017. So it's been about six years now that I've been using Huel fairly regularly. I started eating Huel in my fifth year of medical school. And I've been using Huel regularly ever since because, you know, I like to be productive. I've, you know, my calendar is full with a lot of things. And often I am

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Also, Huel is ridiculously reasonably priced. Like a meal for 400 calories comes out to £1.68 per meal, which is super, super cheap compared to what the alternative would be if you were ordering takeout, for example. Anyway, if you like the idea of getting these cheap and healthy and nutritionally complete meals in your diet, then head over to huel.com forward slash deep dive. And if you use that URL, huel.com forward slash deep dive, they will send you a free t-shirt, which are quite nice, and also a free kind of shaker bottle type thing with your first order. So thank you so much Huel for sponsoring this episode.

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One of them will call for a break and say when they ask for a break when they'll come back to talk about the conversation, you know, that topic again. So they'll say something like, honey, I've got to take a break. I'll be back in an hour. Then let's talk again.

That way, they don't leave the other person feeling abandoned and not knowing if they're ever going to talk about it again. Then when the partners separate into separate quarters, they each do something that is self-soothing.

not think about the fight because if they think about it, they'll stay escalated, but do something else. Distract yourself. Read a magazine, a book, listen to music, meditation, go for a run, all kinds of things you can do to self-soothe. Take a bath and then come back at the designated time when you're calmer. And a way to tell if you're calmer is take your heart rate.

And if your heart rate is back down to normal, then you're good. If it's not back, go back to your partner anyway and ask for more time.

Give a second time, you'll return until you can talk calmly with one another and the conversation will look like you've just had a brain transplant. Your latest book, Someday Today, which is sick, is I guess on the surface a productivity book. And there are some people that are like, oh, productivity is for losers. Productivity is all about just like grinding yourself to the ground and not having any fun.

But you don't strike me as that kind of guy. So what I guess what's your broad approach to these goals and to productivity in general? I like to think that productivity is really dream oriented, that

Everyone should have a dream. And if they don't, they probably do. And they're not admitting to it. Or they do that terrible thing where they don't actually spend time thinking about themselves. One of the tragedies of the world is we spend all of our time thinking about our parents and our spouses and our children and our business and our clients and our customers. But it's very rare that someone sits down and just says, I'm going to think about me for a little while, how I got here. You know, where am I going? What are my goals?

As a storyteller, I'm obsessed with finding stories so I have something new to say on stage. So storytellers tend to be deeply curious about themselves. We're self-centered in what I say is a positive way, just meaning we afford ourselves time to think about us. So in terms of productivity, you first have to have the dream or a multitude of dreams. You have to have a horizon. That's what I like to think of it as. What's your horizon? What's the point on the horizon? But that point on the horizon can be, I've always wanted to have a backyard vegetable garden.

you know, or I was talking to a client the other day and I said, well, what's your horizon goal? And she said, I want to see the 50 greatest movies of all time. There's a list in the world. I have the list and I want to sit on my couch and watch the 50 greatest movies. She said, but that doesn't feel super productive. And I said, that sounds incredibly productive to me because it's your dream. So when people say productivity sort of grinds you down,

I think of productivity as it's the thing that you want to be doing that you should be doing more of. So let's maximize our life, the things we have to do in order to sustain life.

in order to get to the things we want to do. So we don't have to think of productivity in terms of work. We can, if you're one of those people who have enormous work dreams and money dreams and house dreams and vacation dreams, that's great. Like those are all valuable goals if that means something to you. But if your goal is to sit on the couch more and watch black and white movies with your husband and make sure you see all of them before you die, all the ones you're supposed to see,

That's a wonderful goal. Let's make sure we maximize your work time, your chore time. Let's take away all of those little black holes of your life that you're wasting and make sure that we use all that so you can get your ass on the couch more often with your husband watching black and white movies. I think that's the way to dispel that productivity nonsense, which is we have to grind ourselves. It's just dream oriented. Choose the right dream and then productivity will make total sense to you.

That's nice. I like that terminology. What's your horizon goal? And I guess we can have horizon goals for different areas of our life. If I imagine for my book, the horizon goal is, oh, actually more broadly, I'd like to be an author who writes books every few years because it seems kind of fun. And then I guess I can break that down into more concrete steps. Is that how you approach it? You figure out the horizon goal and you break it down? What's your process for this? Yeah, well, I like a horizon goal because I think that

If we're thinking about a dream or that thing on the horizon, I think when people define it very specifically, it's a mistake. I originally thought I was going to be a storyteller who told stories on stages in New York and Boston and maybe somewhere else in the world. And if I had made that horizon point sort of defined and specific, I would have only moved in that direction. I like thinking of horizons because...

It's sort of very wide. It's a distant point that you can't quite see. It's the acknowledgement that the road you're on, the path you're taking might not actually land you in the place you thought you would land, but you'll land in the vicinity. It's an approximation of the dream. You know, even with sort of a book, I start writing a novel. It always starts with a what if question. And I think I know what the end is going to be. It never has been the end.

I allow the book to sort of dictate where the final moment of this character is going to be. And I just see it as a horizon. But sometimes I go, wow, that was quite left of where I thought it was going to land. But it's in the vicinity. It's not behind me. It's always somewhere in the front. So I like to identify that idea of I'm going to be a storyteller.

But that I'm going to be a storyteller also allows, because it's on the horizon, to be maybe I'll teach storytelling someday. Maybe I'll be a consultant about storytelling. Maybe an advertising company will allow me to inject storytelling into their car commercials, which is what I have done, right? All of those things are sort of on the storytelling horizon, but it affords me the opportunity to be flexible in terms of what ultimately is going to happen.

Okay, so let's say I have, which I sort of do, a horizon goal of I'd like to be a musical performer of some kind. This was actually back in 2008 when I discovered YouTube. The channels I was mostly following were the YouTube music cover artists.

And I'd watch them play the piano or the guitar and sing along to some cover of a popular song and think, damn, that's sick. I really want to do something like that. And I had a few false starts. I dabbled with a few videos here and there over the years. And it was only like 10 years later that I was like, you know what, let me sit down and teach what I know about how to get into med school that I actually became a YouTuber. So it ended up going in a completely different direction. But I have always had in the back of my mind that

At some point, someday, I would like to explore that interest a little bit more. I love the idea of learning how to play instruments myself and learning music theory and learning how to compose and arrange and then singing either myself or with friends two popular songs. So that's like a vague horizon goal, I guess. I like that one. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah. So what do we do next in terms of breaking it down? Yeah, what's the process?

Well, it sounds to me like you're not quite sure what path that you're going to take to the horizon. And I like that too. I think the mistake people would make would be, I am going to get a record contract. I am going to be a lead singer in a rock band with a record contract. That is a bad idea, I think. What you've said is, I want to do something in music

And I kind of want to be a person maybe making music and making people happy with that music. Right. But if that horizon means, you know what, I discovered I'm actually a really good DJ. I don't need to learn how to play music because I can actually scratch and that actually fills that need for me. Or it could be turns out I can't play instruments. But what I can do is I can find people who play them really well and I can help them make better music and become a music producer.

Right. That's that's in that general area. And I think it's when people say, no, I will not be happy unless I have a record contract and I'm in a rock band and I'm performing in arenas. That's the only thing that's going to make me happy.

I think that's a terrible sort of approach to life. So I like your approach, which is I kind of want to do something in music. I think I want to play music, but, you know, open to other things. And then I would just do what you're doing, which is begin the exploration. Start walking down the path. You know, all right, let me try a guitar for a while. Right. My wife wanted to play the guitar. And then she quickly realized, you know what? The ukulele is better than the guitar. It's easier to play. It's smaller. And I can use it in my kindergarten classroom.

So she became a ukulele player. She's pretty good. And then one day I said, are you ever going to sing with the ukulele? And she said, I don't know. I'm not that good of a singer. But it turns out with the ukulele, it doesn't demand you to be a good singer because the instrument is so sort of

small and light and amusing that you don't have to sort of sing really beautifully. You can just sing well. So she has become a ukulele player who plays music to her kindergarten students and changes the way they learn because of it. Not her original goal, which is I want to play the guitar someday, but it's become this thing. And all she did was she started on the path. She took positive steps forward. Most people spend an enormous amount of time

thinking about what they should do to get to the horizon rather than saying, well, this is one possible step I could take. I'm going to take the one possible step. And if it's not the right one, I will take another possible step. But I cannot tell you how many people I meet who say, well, I'm still trying to plot out my thing. And I always say all the thinking you're doing

about reaching your goal is meaningless and useless and it doesn't count for anything. If you're just thinking about getting there, you're doing nothing. Take a step forward, even if that means

going online and buying a ukulele. That's the first step. Great. You made a positive step today. A ukulele is coming to your home. Think about what the next thing you can do is. You know, the idea of incrementalism is so important. People don't believe in it. The idea that tiny changes accumulated over time produce enormous results. Most people want a big gulp, a magic pill. They want to instantly have a million subscribers. They want to have a perfect YouTube video. They want to

to have a book contract before they actually write the book or even before they even write the proposal. Everyone sort of wants this enormous leap. And if you examine the success stories, which I always believe you should do, is just examine the success stories of people in the world so that you can get a sense of what those success stories are. All of them involve

Tiny incremental changes piling up over time that eventually produce enormous results. But people don't believe in it because they can't see it immediately. You know, I just recently started. I learned that people who have better balance live longer because if you get older and you don't have good balance, you fall and those falls put you in the hospital and old people in the hospital die. You know that probably better than I do.

And so one of the tricks I learned was when you're brushing your teeth, stand on one foot during the first minute of brushing your teeth and see if you can maintain that one foot and then switch to the other one. And so I've started doing that. And I've asked people or I've told people this is a really good idea, you know, to help you improve your balance. And someone came back to me and said after a month, well, I don't really see my balance improving. And I said, well, first of all, you didn't really...

gauge your balance. You didn't assess your balance on day one to day 30. So it's impossible for you to even say that. But I said, this is incremental change. You're not even supposed to see it. You're not even supposed to expect to see it. You just have to believe that every single day that you spend a minute on each foot twice a day, if you're brushing your teeth twice a day, which you should be over time, the piling up of small things will produce enormous results, but you can't expect to see the results immediately. And if you do,

that's when people fail to sort of make changes in their life that are meaningful. Okay, changing gears slightly. So we've got 70 people in the team so far at the moment. Let's say as a bit of a thought experiment, you were allowed to clone like three of them. A million times over and you're like, if you think of the people that are like, I would clone you in a heartbeat. Add to my business. What are the characteristics of those like clonable top performers? Oh, um...

And I guess I'm asking, so someone listening to this is like, if they're in a job and they want to kind of

stand out or joining a new job or anything like that. Like what are the things that someone like you would be looking for as a business owner? Tenacity. Tenacity is that the word where you push through. I think there's not enough people in businesses that just keep pushing. Like even if you get a pushback, no, you can't do that. Or, you know, it's going to take time. You go, no, we'll figure out another way. And I think those are the people in my business that I go, yes, I'm so glad I've got you. Because I think people who don't take no for an answer or don't take pushbacks for an answer are the ones that succeed 100%. So I think tenacity. Tenacity.

The second thing that I would do is clone anybody that is super curious. So one of the things I do, I test people in job interviews and I go, have you got any questions? And if they go, no, I don't think I have, they don't get the job. Anybody that wants to be successful or is going to be good at their job are curious. They're going to have a million questions and I want a million questions. I want them to ask me,

Carrie, what do you do day to day? Or how much money do you make? Or what are the problems in the business? Or what's the first thing you would like me to do? Or whatever it is. People who ask questions, they're the ones that succeed the most. And they're the ones that do well in things like pitches. If they're asking their clients questions all the time, tell me about this, tell me about that. How do I know about this? How do I learn as much as possible about you and your company? They're the ones that succeed. So I think those are the two things that I mainly focus on is tenacity and curiosity.

And then lastly, I think it's just enthusiasm. I think people that are just everyday positive about their job. I think obviously we're not all positive. You know, I go through days of negativity and feeling, I don't want to really go to work today, whatever it is. But I think if you have a positive outlook mostly on life, I think you can change the perception of most things basically. Yeah.

Can you think of many people that have those characteristics, but you would still say are underperforming? Like, is there a... Because we've talked about kind of like personality traits, tenacity, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Is there like a kind of tangible performance element as well that's decorrelated from those things? Or do you find that it kind of tends to go together? Tends to go together. I think there's a couple of things that I notice repeatedly in those people that they need to improve on. Usually those people aren't very good at...

work. They're protective over, "I can do this, I can do that." They force through things. And I guess they're not very good at delegating work down and working as a team and things like that. But overall, they're usually the high performers. I call them the A players. Everyone has it. Businesses have A players and B players. And I'll not list who they are today or anything like that. I have many A players. And one of the things that I always say is,

A good business is based off how many A players they have in the business. So if you have 30 people in your company and 15 of them are A players, you've got a very good company. I think people usually have, what, two, three A players? And it's really hard to get them, by the way. But yeah, I try to aim as many as possible.

And can you tell in an interview that someone's going to be an A player or is it like within a couple of months of seeing them? Like when do you find out? Usually I can tell in an interview and it's usually those three traits I just mentioned. I usually ask them, when was the last time you pushed through something, showed tenacity, like you didn't take no, you didn't give up.

Have you got any questions? Curiosity. And then enthusiasm. I just ask them, tell me something that you've done recently and just see how enthusiastic they tell. And you go, you just know that they are going to be your A players. And you find that that prediction holds true when you see them in real life. Yes, it does. The only thing is A players don't usually stick around because they become entrepreneurs. They usually go and start their own businesses.

And that's what happened with me. I had a lot of people leave and go start businesses, which I'm very proud of. I'm like, wow. Like I hired a hundred and overall I've hired 140 people in the last three years.

And so many of them have gone to start their own businesses. And I'm proud of that because I remember thinking like, I want my people to work here and go and work for Netflix or Disney or, you know, amazing brands or go start their own businesses. And I'll be very, very proud. And that's my success metric if I can go and create that. So yeah, the fact people have gone and started their own businesses is a good thing. But it did mean that I had to constantly replace people because they come, they learn, and then they move on and go start their own thing. So yeah, Apley is a very, very valuable, but they're very hard to keep.

What's the balance between, I guess, being yourself versus choosing yourself? In the sense of, for me, my default self, you know, we've talked about how the self is, you know, a result of accidents of stuff. My default behavior is often to prioritize work at the expense of everything else. I am the happiest person in the world if I've spent five hours in the evening on my laptop from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.,

But that's not really the person I want to be. I want to be a person who has more balance, who takes care of their health and their relationships, and who views time spent with loved ones not as a, you know, I'd rather be on my laptop, but more like I'm genuinely happy to be here in the present moment. So that's kind of who I want to be, but it's not who I am, if that makes sense. So how do we...

How do I know which one is more quote authentic? Because I find that my mom often says sometimes that, oh, you know, Ali, you're trying to change for other people and stuff. This was when at university, I made the active decision that I wanted to become more confident and charismatic and be more outgoing. Whereas in school, I was a massive nerd and played World of Warcraft all evening. And so to my mom, that was the real me. And she would say that, yeah,

you're fine as you are you don't need to change i'd be like no but i want to change like i want to i want to level up it's just better i think to be more confident i'm going uh yeah what do you reckon there is the conditioned self and there is true self there is the mind and identity and there is spirit

What we've come to identify as who we are is actually the construction of the mind. The mind has created an identity. We enter this world and then the mind is trying to understand who am I? What does that mean? Who are you? What is this world? How does it all fit together? And it creates an identity and it builds one. And it builds certain understandings of the world and what people do and intentions and

and it's mapping out this internal world. And that is down to the accidents of birth. That is down to, like you're saying, your family, your cultural experiences, the place and time in this universe that we have this opportunity. The mind will always do that. Then there is true self, which is just consciousness. And the nature of consciousness is love, is truth.

The mind says, "I need to get everything in place and then I'll feel at peace." The soul says, "Be at peace and everything else falls into place." We've been living from our minds for the majority of our lives though. We've been living from that place and we've built up armory and we've built up coping mechanisms to navigate. The path is beginning to take off some of that armory.

to see that actually when I connect to truth and love, I will then see what it looks like. You don't need to figure that out. If you can just go down into that place of truth and love, you will see what it will look like. Because one thing we do know is that the mind is a terrible predictor of what will make us happy. It's got all these ideas. My life has to look like this or should look like this and then I'll be happy. We've got no idea.

We've got no idea. We don't even know what's going to happen in one minute's time. So to take away all the configurations of the mind trying to even choose or a map or build or be a lot of self-improvement is talking about improving who you are or optimizing who you are, which is based on the premise that you are not enough. You're not good enough. You're not whole enough. You're not

You're not enough. So you've got to do more change to be better. We'll get caught in the same trap, move away from mind down into consciousness, into that field of consciousness, tap into that place of love and intuition and move from that place of truth. And then we'll see what it looks like.

So what does that look like in my confidence? I want to be confident because I feel like I'm not yet confident and I would like to be more that way. Yes. Yeah. This idea that you're not confident is an idea. Take away the illusion and then we'll find truth. So it's the more that we begin to...

drop out of the mind, the more that we create separation from the mind, we'll just begin to notice, "Oh gosh, my mind is just saying that I'm not confident. Gosh, my mind has created an identity of who I am. It's got its idea of who Ali is." And we can be curious about that and see it from a distance as if you're observing another person. So what is the identity that my mind has created about Ali?

Who does my mind say that Ali is? What does my mind say Ali can do and can't do? Gosh, what does my mind judge that would be inappropriate for Ali to do? We just begin to see it. We begin to see how the mind's created all these preconceived ideas and notions. Oh gosh, it says that he's not confident. The more that we create separation from it and we see it and distance from it, we will then just be moving from truth. And the truth is...

You are neither confident nor not confident. You just are. You are neither brilliant nor not brilliant. You just are. The mystics would just say, I am. That's all we can say, I am. And there is no label that we can attach to something which can capture reality. There's no label which can accurately capture reality.

ultimate power and love. There's no name for it. It's just pure power. You are pure power. You're pure. Even that's just a name or an idea, but you're just pure power and energy. And we'll see where that energy can go. But when we move from that place, even the idea of confident and confident doesn't make sense anymore. It's like what, you know, color is the number seven.

That doesn't make sense. That's not who I am. That's not what I am. It's just then more ramblings of the mind. You move from that place of power and all that will happen is there will be unfoldings and you'll just begin to change. So if we turn the confidence then into something more concrete, like ability to play fingerstyle on the guitar. Ability to play? Fingerstyle on the guitar. You know, that kind of music. Yeah.

So that's an ability. Yeah. So you can accurately assess what is my level of ability in terms of playing the guitar. Yep. And I can choose to actively improve that ability or increase that ability if I want to. Yes. Similarly, if I like confident is a bit dodge. But if I were to think instead of being confident, which is like a almost like a character trait that is unnerving.

has a value judgment on it because more confident is generally better uh as society judges but instead of it thinking of thinking of specific skill of public speaking while doing presentations specific ability to go up to a pretty girl and talk to her specific ability to whatever completely those are then areas in which i can decide okay i actually want to work on my presentation skills therefore i'm going to watch some youtube videos and do some practice yes but i'm not

using that as a way of thinking, therefore I am currently unconfident. Because in a way that also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Completely. So we can build up individual skills. I'd say the key part though is just seeing when the mind is making judgments and being able to see that as just the nature of a mind, which is a tool. Because whenever you live from a place of no mind or just live from a place of presence,

You're not even thinking about confidence or not confident. So if I think about me right now, how am I coming across as confident or not confident? I'd have to make a judgment assessment. I don't know.

like potentially some people might say yes or no. It doesn't matter. I just need to be me. This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted and I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos. But then I discovered WeWork and I

I was a member, me and Angus, my team members, we were members of the WeWork in Cambridge and they have like hundreds of other locations worldwide as well. And it was incredible because we had this fantastic, beautifully designed office space to go to, to work. And we found ourselves like every day, just at nine o'clock in the morning, just going to WeWork because it was a way nicer experience working from the coworking space than it was just sitting at home working. These days, what me and everyone on my team has is the all access pass, which means you're not tied to a specific WeWork location, but it means you can use any of their several hundred coworking spaces around London, around the UK, and also around the world.

And one of the things I really love about the coworking setup is that it's fantastic as a bit of a change of scenery. So these days I work from home, I've got the studio at home, but if I need to get some focused writing work done and I'm feeling a bit drained just sitting at my desk all day, I'll just pop over to the local WeWork, which is about a 10 minute walk from where I am. I'll take my laptop with me, I'll get some free coffee from there, I'll get a few snacks. And it's just such a great vibe and you get to meet cool people. I made a few friends through meeting them at WeWork and it's just really nice being in an environment almost like a library, but kind of nicer because there's like

a little bit of soft music in the background and there's other kind of startup bros and creators and stuff in there as well. And it's just my absolute favorite coworking space of all time. It's super easy to book a desk or book a conference room using the app. And it's a great place to meet up with team members if you're going to collaborate and you'll live in different places. They've got unlimited tea and coffee and herbal teas and drinks on tap. And they've got soundproof booths in which to take Zoom calls and meetings. Anyway, if you're looking for a coworking space for you or your team, then I'd 100% recommend WeWork. Like I said, I've been a paying customer for theirs for the last two years.

which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali. And you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. There's a blog post you wrote. I can't remember the time. Probably like 2010 or something. And you said something like the advice that you give to students when they're trying to figure out what to do with their careers is to begin with the lifestyle in mind.

and reverse engineer the career from that rather than, hey, I did an economics degree, therefore private equity, hedge funds or investment banking are my three options. And you end up going down one of these routes. And that post really vibed with me because I think it made me think, hmm, if I were to begin with a lifestyle in mind, does that in fact actually look like the big media company?

The answer is probably not. But then another part of me was like, am I just feeling, am I just bullshitting myself and just like setting my ambitions lower because I am afraid of the work that it would take to

to build said media company and try and go big. And I'm just content to wallow in my own mediocrity of like, oh, I'll just write four hours a day and then I'm happy with life. I don't need to make that much money. Do you get what I'm getting at? Yeah. I don't think you're dilute. So first of all,

I love that post. So yeah, lifestyle centric career planning, I think it's such a critical idea, especially for young people trying to figure out like in college. I wrote that while at a graduation ceremony for my sister. So I was thinking about graduation, graduation advice. Yeah. And you, and it has to be the right answer.

For how you figure out your career, which is you get the image of the lifestyle you want at whatever point, you know, in the future and you make it super tangible. Like you can you can feel it. You can smell it. You can see it, but not getting specific at all about what your work is. Like, are you in the countryside? Are you in a city? Is it you know, you're you're at the bohemian mountain.

bar in the in the Lower East Side and and around all these artists are you in a field and you've been out in the sun and like you know whatever working on your trails like what is it is a very social you're in a small town are you what are you up in the mountains like get that really clear and then say great let me work backwards now to figure out how do I get there with my work

Right. And I think that's such a critical way of thinking about things because, A, it's not just, hey, follow your passion or something like this, because the right answer might be, I'm going to go to medical school so that I can be sort of get these nightingale shifts where I work three times a week, one week out of the month or something like that, or work for three months. And it's the highest hourly rate I can get. And then I can spend the whole summer in the Canary Islands. Like it can lead you to really interesting places. I think it's the way to do it. And the reason why I think you in particular are not

you're not diluting yourself into, you know, avoiding the difficulties of ambition is that a lot of people, when they do this exercise, it is a hundred percent clear. They want that,

They really crave that activity and work, right? So I think it's a really clear personality type thing that if you are the type of person whose ideal lifestyle does involve, I've got a team, I'm making moves. It's super really clear. If you talk to those people and I have, because this is my framework and I run that framework past, there's a lot of people who are like,

I love the idea of activity and I want to be doing something. I want people, you know, I want to be at the center of attention. I want people that are on my team. I want to be, I love that action, the sociality, the, the, some people love that. So if you don't feel it unambiguous, of course, that's what I want to do.

Then I think that's really meaningful. And I'll tell you, I think I'm like you, which is why the way I am logistically handling the business aspect of all this career is right now I have a half day rule, one half day a week. It has to fit in that. If it can't, if something can't fit in that, then I can't do it. And my goal down the line is make that one day a week. What is slow productivity?

Totally. So, yeah. So if we don't have, here's the issue with knowledge work in general,

The issue we've been grappling with in the last 20 minutes, like what does productivity even mean? Right. And so then it just becomes this weird catch all or boogeyman. So I have this thought of like, why don't we actually positively come out and come up with a definition that we like a definition that's human, a definition that, that melds well with our human instincts and the way our brain is actually wired, that's centered around producing meaningful and valuable things, but in a way that's very sustainable in a way that's very satisfying. So, so instead of just pushing back against the,

the boogeyman productivity, like what's,

put in place an alternative. And the alternative I've been working on is called slow productivity. And like the slow food movement or these other movements, I've gone back and pulled from these sort of existing cultures of knowledge workers that have been around for centuries, in some cases, millennia, that had the privilege and space to kind of figure out what's the best way to work with your mind? You know, what works, what doesn't? And figuring out, can we have a widely applicable definition of productivity comes out of it? And so slow productivity has three principles to it.

do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. Those three things, approaching knowledge work with those three principles realigns the efforts with our humanity, the way we're wired. I can give you a neuroscience argument for it. I can give you a psychological argument for it. I can give you a philosophical argument for those three things. On all three of those levels,

Orienting knowledge work around that is meaningful, satisfying. You can produce things of great value. It can be very productive for companies and it can be very satisfying for individuals. So I'm sort of putting together my pitch of what target of productivity should people who make a living using their brains, what should they be going for beyond just get after it, have your to-dos organized? I don't know. What's the philosophical argument?

Well, there's like, we can go back to Aristotle if we need to, right? There's this, what is the teleology of human existence? Well, what's the one thing we have that other creatures don't is we have these brains that can sit and think and create things. And there's an argument towards the,

the production of things of value and meaning and sort of giving things the time they require, craftsmanship, that there's a real philosophical foundation to the human value that's extracted from actually like doing things of value of impact with your mind. And a lot of that gets sapped away when you're just

answering emails all day or just hustling to get after it. You could go all the way back to neuro. I mean, this is the thing I'm working on now is I've gone back heavily to do a deep into the mainly social anthropological research to do a deep history of work for 300,000 years. What was work for humans? Because that's a long enough time span that our brain doesn't

evolved, right? To match this definition of work. And, you know, surprise, surprise, when you go back and look through this deep literature, you see not doing too many things. Sees a variation in pace and intensity. A lot of your time being the application of hard-won skills. Like that's exactly what comes up. That's what we did for 300,000 years. So there's also this almost like psychology, anthropological, even neuroscientific argument for

not being overloaded, varying your intensity in various ways, and spending more of your time applying hard-won skills, like what we expect work to be. Have you stumbled across any kind of Dunbar number for number of active projects that one should have at a given time? When you say fewer things, how few are we talking?

Well, yeah. I mean, I, so there, there's two different timescales. I mean, at the scale of like what you're working on right now, it's one, right? So like in the, what, what we cannot do, what our brain cannot do is concurrently during like the afternoon, go back and forth between three different things.

Just the way our planning motivation loop works, like we have one thing in our working memory, we build this internal model that pulls episodic memories out of the hippocampus. We use that to try to predict what we should do next. That system cannot handle more than one thing. So we cannot be thinking about making decisions on or making progress on more than one thing at a time. And I don't mean like literally at the time, like over a...

A couple hours, even like work on one thing till you're done, move on to the other thing. Our brain cannot go back and forth. It's why email, like going back and forth between your email just crushes us psychologically. You know, a recent podcast episode, I talked about task freeze where you see like 15 things you need to do and you just stop.

It's because you literally, the planning motivational center of your brain can't make plans for 15 things at the same time. It neurologically can't do that. So your motivation system just freezes up, right? So at a time, one thing, in terms of like ongoing projects, I'm a big believer in like pull-based methodology, where there's like two or three things you're working on. When something finishes, you can pull something else in.

And I actually think this is how companies should organize work. Software developers already do this, but I think we should do this more broadly in knowledge work where, yeah, there's a lot of work the company needs to do. Don't just distribute that to everyone's plate and everyone has 20 things that they have to kind of figure out what to do with.

They should just be working on a couple things and they can pull in new things once it's ready. And the problem, why I think this is important and why I think it's killer to have a lot of things on your plate, even if you're not working on them at the exact same time, is there's something called an overhead tax that every project that you have committed to generates. It's an overhead of administrative work that you have to do, even if you're not actively working on the project. It's emails you have to send.

meetings, planning meetings, standing meetings you have to have, and just cognitive load of knowing it's there. So that builds up.

So if you have 15 projects on your plate, you're paying overhead tax on 15 projects and that tax takes up your time. And before you know it, most of your time and mental energy is going to the maintenance of the ongoing projects and almost nothing gets done. And then you fall farther behind and then more projects build up and the tax gets worse. I call it the overhead spiral. It's a terrible state to be in. So there's a real cost to having too many things on your plate, even if you're very careful about

This morning, I'm just working on this. And then in the afternoon, I'm just working on that. And on Tuesdays, I work on this. Once you get past a certain level, it's a problem. And I think, again, it's something companies get wrong. They just say, let's distribute the task informally to everyone. We'll have everything live on people's individual plates and they can just figure out what to work on and whatnot. And the overhead tax kills them. A much better system is this all sits in a holding tank.

And when I'm ready for the next thing, I pull it in. But until it leaves that holding tank, I'm paying no overhead tax on it. It's not actually in my view. So I honestly think like three active projects at a time is best. And obviously, when you're working on something, you're only working on that one thing. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other

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