From the Archive: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Cal Newport

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Alteger Show. Presenting the archive, classic episodes that remain timeless, the raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up. There's a multi-billion dollar attention account. economy behind making those things as distracting as possible.

There's very smart people working to make sure that as soon as you get anywhere near that smartphone, that you're not going to turn your attention away anytime soon, which to me, as someone who uses my brain for a living, is as scary as, you know, cigarette should be. Basically what I'm trying to model and promote is a relatively extreme lifestyle. We can call it the deep life, which is where You prioritize doing deep work, so focusing hard on hard things. And you also prioritize cultivating that and training that ability and trying to push your level of focus higher and higher.

And in order to prioritize these activities, be ruthless about eliminating and be more efficient with everything else. So you can't just say, I'm busy and say that's good hustling and I'm successful. You have to say what am I busy with. And if you're busy with shallow work, if you're in an email inbox for 100 hours a week, then you're like, oh, that's something's wrong going. out here.

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