Are You Lazy?
Summary:
LZ: What about people who don’t want to or cannot do deep work, ultra learning, et cetera? Do these people exist? And if so, what is the message to them? LZ: I am going to reject your premise that you are lazy. This is not an intrinsic trait of someone, like their hair color or their height. Laziness just simply describes the current configuration of your activity. The question is, where do you want to be? So let’s try it on for size. We want to build a life that is serving each of those bucket areas.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But it’s not necessarily the right path. So i just see alarm bells everywhere. I worry that you are five years out from being a completely miserable, overworked lawyer who’s really good at what he does and has no outlet for using that skill to make their life better beyond what they can just spend money on. I don’t know if that’s the case. Maybe moving from the private to the public sector will prevent that from happening. But just make sure that you have this story line worked out all the way to the conclusion before you start living out this tale in your actual life. I think we have time for one more question here. Let’s do one from brandon. Brandon asks, what about people who don’t want to or cannot do deep work, ultra learning, et cetera? Do these people exist? And if so, what is the message to them? I follow your work and own all your books. I am a big believer, and i am trying, but i am also lazy, and sometimes wonder what i am doing, or even if i can do any of these things or not. Well, brandon, i am going to reject your premise that you are lazy. This is not an intrinsic trait of someone, like their hair color or their height. Laziness just simply describes the current configuration of your activity. So what you are saying right now is that i have a configuration of my activities that, in my mind, seems below where i want to be. So subjectively, i’d label it as lazy. Great. We’ll change that configuration. We’ll get it somewhere where you want to be. The question is, where do you want to be? And here i want to be very careful about terminology. Because the way you reference deep work, the way you reference scott young’s concept of ultra learning, and by the way, read scott’s book if you haven’t yet. I gave him the turn ultra learning, so you now it’s going to be good, the way you’re referencing those terms, brandon, means to me that you’re probably thinking about something that is very specific, a subset of the vision of the deep life that i preach here on this pod castit in my writing. I think you’re thinking about a particular trajectory in life in which you are doing really intense, intellectual, creative work if i had to guess, i think you’re looking at examples like me and thinking, ok, that’s what deep work, ultura learning, that’s what it means, that you’re solving math proofs and writing for the new yorker and going five hours at a time staring at a white board. And i don’t know, that doesn’t appeal to me. Or you look at scott doing the m i t curriculum on his own, one course per week, you know, learning advance computer science so quickly, and like man, i just, i don’t really want to do that. That doesn’t really appeal to me. Those are very specific instantiations of the deep life. They are not the only instantiations of the deep life. It’s how i happen to construct my deep life. My deep life is constructed around intellectual activity, ecause to me, ideas are everything. That’s just my particular thing. Generation of ideas that have some impact is what i love to do. My whole life built around it. It doesn’t mean that your deep life, brandon, has to be built around ideas, that your deep life has to be built around academic achievement. Your deep life has to be built around high quality leisure or craft et cetera, right? At’s just what i happen to do. My parlor trick is that my brain is good at piecing things together and finding connections to resinate. That might not be your parlor trick. So let’s just be much broader in our definition of the deep life. It is a life lived intentionally. You’ve identified the buckets or area. Is a concentration. I’m sort of moving, i try to move away from the bucket terminology. Maybe it’s too late now, but i just brought that up randomly a year ago, and now ye’re stuck tocked about buckets, and i’m trying to move it to better terminology. So let’s try on for size. Concentrations. Maybe this is not the right word, but you have th concentrations or areas, let’s say, areas in your life that you know are important to you. Craft at’s important. Connection, int communities, important your constitutions. Important contemplations. Important celebration of things you just enjoy in the world. And awe and gratitude. That’s important. Great. Write em down. We want to build a life that is serving each of those. And how do we serve each of those? Do less do those things better. Know why you’re doing them. Cut out the craft that’s not, that’s not (Time 0:42:49)