Ep. 344: You Are Not a Cog

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Modern knowledge work jobs should be cushy gigs. Fixed hours, air conditioning, no hard manual labor, flexibility. So why are we so often burnt out and what can we do about this reality? In this episode, Cal draws a lesson from an unexpected corner of computer science, computer security research, about how we can fix some of the big problems of work in a digital age. He then answers listener questions and returns once again to the topic of AI in a final tech corner segment.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.
0:23.5	So I'm here my my Deep Work HQ.
0:26.0	I'm joined, as always, by my producer, Jesse.
0:29.2	Jesse, I'm going to give an update on the book I'm writing.
0:32.3	Yeah.
0:33.1	So here's the timeline of where I've been and where I'm going, where I am right now.
0:38.4	I cracked the outline for this book a year ago.
0:43.4	So I remember it was during like a spring break trip.
0:47.2	I started writing it over the summer.
0:49.9	I wrote a draft of most of the first half over the summer and into the fall.
0:55.4	Took a break when I was having my surgery and also when I took over Calaisaka's column for a month for the New Yorker.
1:02.0	So I was like, okay, I'm working on that.
1:03.2	Came back to the book and decided that none of what I wrote worked.
1:07.3	Get out.
1:08.1	Yeah, the voice wasn't there.
1:09.8	The whole thing?
1:11.0	Yeah. Has that happened before? Yeah. It wasn't Get out. Yeah, the voice wasn't there. So the whole thing? Yeah.
1:11.5	Has that happened before?
1:12.6	Yeah.
1:13.0	It wasn't that much.
1:13.8	It was half a book.
1:15.7	Yeah.
	...

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