Discovery 

The other day I came across Cal Newport’s podcast. I’ve never read any of his books, but I’m aware of their existence and I probably have watched a Youtube summary at some point, so I thought let’s give it a go.

The episode I clicked on was how to change your life in 4 months. In it, he talks about the idea of the deep life stack, and then there is a Q&A (which I didn’t watch).

I then had a snoot around and found another episode completely on the deep life stack, which I then didn’t watch but Googled to get a gist of it in its wider sense (rather than just being applied to 4 months).

Deep Life Stack

These seem to be the main tenets:

1. Discipline – keystone habits, route (how are you tracking). Pick 3 keystone habits: professional, home, wholesomeness
2. Values – code, rituals, routines
3. Calm/control – Plan quarterly, let that feed through to weekly, let that feed through to daily
4. Vision – making things remarkable. 1 small goal to achieve this quarter, 1 larger 2 year project

You then phase them, working on the discipline first, then values, then control, then vision, phased in c. 6 week periods.

I liked the sound of this idea a lot. A nice framework. Things make sense. It claims to be literally step-by-step. Listening to this stuff is like crack.

My attempt

That night, I set aside 20 minutes to try and apply it to my own life.

I sat down to write some keystone habits down. My pen hovered over the page for about a minute, but then I realised that I didn’t want to just set some keystone habits without first understanding what areas of my life there are. I’ve got some pretty good habits already. What further habits do I even want? 

I then had the epiphany that my life is like a project that needs to be project managed, and there’s different work streams within it, so I wrote down all the streams I could think of (around 14 came up) and then I tried setting quarterly A-grade goals in each area as well as B-grade goals and C-grade goals, although by the sixth stream I was 45 minutes in and out of energy for it. At that point I I looked at my notes, decided I was done and let myself bask in a sense of empowerment. Now I will change my life for the better. Now it will happen.

However, by the time I woke up the next morning, I felt annoyed because I hadn’t followed what the framework had said really, I’d set out some goals for the quarter that I wasn’t going to meet (make $1m???) and I didn’t really know how to proceed.

Initial reflections on my attempt

The annoying thing is, this stuff SOUNDS good. I bet if I actually followed it at least 80%, my life would probably look better. But who actually does the work and how do they actually figure out how it works? Put simply, why don’t I do the work and why don’t I actually figure out how it works? 

I’m someone who’s the type of person to watch this in the first place. If I can’t do the work, what about the people who also don’t watch the video? We’re all not doing it. In fact, there’s probably only a handful of people who actually do it. Cal must be doing it unless he’s not following his own advice. That’s one person at least.

What are the barriers? When I say barriers, I mean there’s a whole lot of friction (to take from Atomic Habits). So what is my friction? 

I’ll let you enter my thought-stream: I guess it has to do with finding the extended time alone and energy to critically self-reflect and knowing where to start and having self-doubt about it and there’s other stuff that I want to do right now and not knowing whether there’s any point anyway because what’s the ‘right’ answer and what about when I set my goal, is that really the goal I want and I’m probably going to fall off the tracks anyway at some point so it’s probably not worth the effort of all this other stuff. 

How does a mere mortal do this? 

How do I actually become this awesome version of myself? 

Instead of abstract concept I vaguely am familiar with, how do I actualise? 

How do I make it stick?

Where’s my incentive to overcome this friction? I’ve been cracking on with my life just fine without doing this, and will probably crack on just fine after not doing this. 

Final thoughts

I need to figure out what to do with the work I’ve already done (re writing out the life streams) because there is something of value there. However, one must recognise that this stuff is not easy.

Has anyone else actually done something akin to this framework to the point that their life is remarkably different to how it was before? Let me know.