Ep. 373: The Internet’s Best Advice for Reinventing Your Life

A few years ago, I published a podcast episode with a simple idea. The right time to make major changes in your life is not the New Year, but instead the fall. This is when your energy is returning after the summer slowdown and when you're really ready to lock in on bigger goals. That episode became really popular, and in the year since then, this fall reset concept has caught on within the Internet community. Some of the biggest names in podcasting and YouTube have since put out their own reset videos, which I think is great for two reasons. One, as an empathetic human, I like the idea in general to see people improving their lives. But two, as someone who writes and talks specifically about technology and how it impacts us and how we should respond to it, I've come to believe that taking control of your life is a critical first step before you can take control of your devices. The more interesting you find your life outside of screens, the less interesting the screens themselves will become. So here's what I thought would be cool. Today, we're gonna go through five of the most popular life reset videos on the Internet at the moment. I'm then gonna extract the best piece of advice from each, which will leave us with sort of five of the best pieces of reset advice out there. We can think of this as like an all star reset plan. Alright? So that's what we're gonna do. So if you feel like you've been in a rut or like your life could be better, you're worrying that you're retreating to your devices because you're unhappy with what's happening beyond them, or or maybe you just need a little bit of inspiration this fall, this episode will be perfect for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, the Internet's best advice or resetting your life. Okay. So here's the plan for how we're gonna do this, Jesse. I have five videos I watched. What I'm gonna do is for each of these videos, I'm gonna play a clip of what, in my opinion, was the best idea I heard in that video. And then I will translate that idea into a very concrete piece of advice that you can consider putting into practice. So we'll give a sort of Cal Newport spin to each of these ideas. And then when we're done, we'll have sort of five concrete suggestions for resetting your life if you feel like it's time to inject a little bit of energy into it. Alright. So that's the plan. Let's get into it. We're gonna start with a video from the incomparable Mel Robbins. Now, if you haven't heard my recent appearance on her show from a couple months ago, you should check it out. It was a lot of fun. I went up to Boston. We we had a good time …