A World Without Email? | Cal Newport

Cal Newport (0:00)

All of this stuff is trainable.

The crazy thing is that almost no one trains it. Like in athletics, it would be crazy if you're like, oh, I know it's important to have good lungs, right? I'm playing basketball or something, but I don't train cardio, you know? Like I don't try to do anything to make it better. And if you're a knowledge worker or you're a creative worker, I mean, concentrating on one thing is like your equivalent of having good cardiovascular health. It's like crucial to what you do. But we just think of it as like, for some reason we think of focus as this like intrinsic trait that some people are just good at and other people aren't. And you're like, oh, I guess I'm not a focus person. That's like, if I went out and ran a mile, if I've never done any running, it would be wrong for me to conclude, oh, I'm not a running person. It would be, no, I'm not trained to run.

I gotta lace up the shoes. Thank you.

Michael Gervais (0:55)

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts towards mastery.

And we wanna understand the psychological components that have helped them become. How do they make sense of themselves? How do they make sense of the world around them? And how do they use their mind to build their skills required to perform and live well in modern life? And if you wanna learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick reminder to check out the online course that I created with head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Pete Carroll at findingmastery.net forward slash course. And we took all the greatest gems from science, made it applied, all the stuff that we use in the real world to help world-class athletes, artists, musicians, whatever they might be, executives kick ass in life and of course in business.

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