Ep. 366: How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months (Classic Episode from August, 2023)

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. Hey. It's Cal here. We're trying something different this week. Both Jess and I are on vacation at the same time, so we thought we would go back in our archives and find a classic episode that we both really enjoyed. So the episode we chose, which came out almost two years ago exactly to this day, it was August 2023. This episode has been one of our most popular. When we put this on YouTube, it generated something like 1,500,000 fun episode to revisit. I think you're gonna like it. What you're gonna hear in this episode is some of the early forms of the ideas I was formulating around the deep life. I had a fun time coming back to this recently because these ideas have evolved quite a bit in the the current book I'm writing on the deep life. So it's interesting to go back and hear again how these ideas started. But something about the these notions, the the the strategies described here seem to hit a chord. So I think you'll like it. We'll be back next week with another new episode, but this one is worth another listen. So enjoy this classic episode of the Deep Questions podcast. So today's deep question, how can I reinvent my life in four months? Now that four months number is not arbitrary. If it is the September now, where does four months put us? September, October, November, December. That means this overhaul process we're gonna talk about will finish right around New Year's. So right around the time all of your friends are buying copies of James Clear's book and getting gym memberships, you'll already be done with doing a reinvention for the year and you'll be well into this new life, not just starting. Now not surprisingly for long time listeners of my show and viewers of my videos, I'm gonna use the DeepLifeStac framework to structure our discussion of how to reinvent your life this fall, but I'm gonna be specific this time. And we're gonna have particular timelines, how long to spend at this layer, how long to spend at that layer because I want this whole process to fit exactly within four months. Alright. So with great trepidation, I'm actually gonna do a little bit of drawing while we talk here, so we can actually see the deep live stack that I am discussing. So what I'm gonna do here is bring up my drawing screen, and we are gonna draw ourselves a deep life stack, and we're gonna annotate it as we go. Alright. So at the bottom of the stack is the discipline layer. So I will actually write this on the screen with my, almost calligraphy quality handwriting. What do you say, Jesse? For those Looks pretty good. For those who are for those who are, watching instead of just …