#727: In Case You Missed It: February 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

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Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_2 (2:57)

First up, Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the New York Times bestselling author of Deep Work. His new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

Tim Ferriss (3:17)

Could you give some examples, old and new, of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity?

Cal Newport (3:24)

I was motivated by slow food as an example, where they look back to traditional cuisines where cultures had evolved over generation and generation, like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy? The slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers. People who did things with their brain, but not the normal 1950s and onward, I'm in an office or working at a computer screen, so like artists and philosophers, scientists, the original knowledge workers, they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. I said, great, we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work, because they had freedom and flexibility, so we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the modern life. A lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers. One of the early examples is Isaac Newton.

I said, okay, we all know he wrote this great masterwork, the Principia. Calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity, that gives celestial order to the way the cosmos works.

He wrote that thing over decades, decades. He would go and do other things and come back. It wasn't this frantic push until it's done, but no one remembers how long he spent working on that. They're just like, yeah, that thing changed the way we understand the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play In the Heights the same way. I do his whole story. It's a seven-year odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play, which wasn't very good, to when it first goes onto a professional stage, his pre-Broadway debut. That's a seven-year period. And he's working on it, then he's not. Then he's working on it again, and he's not.