80,000 Hours interview General advice: be interesting, be impressive. Focus on quality not quantity. Do a small number of things really well. Most students are bad at been students. Gotta think of almost like a job, take it seriously. Very very few do that. Schedule properly, have bursts of high intense focus, no context switching. You'll get way more done. So good they can't ignore you Two strategies: become best at one skill, or became very good at a rare combination of several. Develop expertise, get to the cutting edge somewhere, where you can see the adjacent possible. Then you will find it much easier to identify worthy lifelong missions, pushing forwards on something important and new. Context switching is very costly. has a really deep, negative impact, mainly the way it interacts with our brain’s attention centers. The human brain can’t very quickly shift context back and forth like a computer processor. It’s a messy process, because we have to inhibit certain neural networks and we have to amplify other neural networks. It can take a while. So, I finish a conversation with you, and I want to now change my attention over to writing an article. It’s going to take 10 or 15 minutes until I’ve really calmed down all of the semantically related neural networks of our conversation, and really amplified the semantic networks relative to my article, and only at that point will I really be rocking and rolling and making some real progress. Cal Newport: And before all the networks that got fired up by looking at that inbox can finally finish being inhibited, we look back at the inbox again, and now we’re firing up and it’s probably slightly different networks, because now there’s a new email in there from a client, and now the networks related to that client are firing up and then we go back to the work and then we go back there. It’s a cognitive catastrophe. On the stakes: I think it’s massive. So, one number that I think is provocative is, if you look at the industrial sector as an analog, right, and a number I like to cite is a number that Peter Drucker cited towards the end of his life in 1999. He said, look, if you look at the industrial sector in the 20th century, there was 50x growth. Our productivity grew 50x in the 20th century. Why? Because, the early 20th century is when we got really serious about process engineering. Like hey, wait a second. If we use an assembly line, we can build cars better. We really started to get serious about building things as a process we could get better and better at. And as he underscored, he’s like, 50x growth is almost inconceivably large. Essentially all of the wealth on which the modern developed world was built on in the 20th century came from that 50x growth in the industrial sector. Writing in 1999, when he was reflecting back on this, he said in knowledge work, and in particular knowledge work productivity, right now, we are where the industrial sector was in 1900. Cal Newport: We haven’t even begun that explosive growth that’s possible once we get really serious about well, what’s the best way to actually do this work? And so I point to that number because it’s astronomically large. It means we’re talking not just billions, but perhaps trillions of dollars of global GDP is sitting on the table because this nascent digital era knowledge economy sector, which is very new in commercial historical context, we haven’t even got serious yet about what’s the best way to work. We’re still doing the easiest, most natural things. And so, I think it is a world-changing amount of growth and wealth on the table waiting to be extracted, once we start to get serious about these issues. Fixing the hive mind is going to be a billion dollar industry.