Ep. 281: Learning Hard Things

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2024

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the more important abilities to cultivate for the year ahead is comfort learning complicated (and therefore valuable) new things. In this episode, Cal tackles the myths surrounding mastery and presents a new mental model for internalizing non-trivial information. As he elaborates, there is both good news and bad news when it comes to this topic: you can learn almost anything, but you can’t learn everything.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo

Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia

Deep Dive: Learning Hard Things [2:50]

- When it comes to taking notes, what really matters? [29:49]
- Can I fit all of my hobbies into my week? [36:02]
- Can YouTube teach me to be a better student? [39:40]
- How do I figure out what to learn next? [46:09]
- How do I learn something fast when I already have a busy schedule? [48:23]
- CALL: How does “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” relate to “Slow Productivity”? [55:11]

CASE STUDY: Slow Productivity affinity group [1:03:46]

The 5 books Cal read in December 2023 [1:13:28]

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Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.
0:31.0	So if you're new to our quirky little world here, I'm a computer science professor and digital theorist at Georgetown University who writes about the way
0:34.7	technology impacts how we live, how we work and how we relate to each other. On this
0:40.8	show I give concrete advice for how to act on these big ideas that I write about
0:49.2	So I'm here in my deep work HQ
0:52.0	Joined as always by my producer Jesse.
0:55.8	Jesse, happy new year.
0:57.1	Happy new year.
0:58.1	I think this episode is coming out on New Year's Day,
1:01.4	is that right? So we had a Christmas Day episode last week and
1:05.3	a New Year's Day episode this week. I love it. I don't know how often that
1:08.9	alignment happens. I'm feeling good about 2024. I'm generally and I think this is from a rational
1:16.8	perspective well well justified. Skeptical a year's that are odd. I never really was on board with this 2023 nonsense.
1:25.1	2024 seems like it's going to be a good year.
1:27.5	2022 was an interesting year, right? Because it was the year where everything was
1:31.8	back to normal or going back to normal from the pandemic.
1:34.1	So that was exciting.
1:35.1	Twenty-24 is going to be a good year.
1:37.5	I have my books, slow productivity coming out in March.
1:40.9	We have cool things we're working on for this show a lot of things I'm excited
1:46.1	about 2023 holding pattern year so I think we're ready to get up to some cool things and with us in mind we have a cool episode put
1:56.0	together I mean so it's the New Year's now so everyone is thinking about how do I
	...

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