– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

Hustle culture is back. Louder, prouder,

and somehow even more extreme. Early

morning routines, bold claims, and

whatever the [ __ ] this is. But a counter

movement is also gaining ground. Call it

anti-hustle, essentialism, or slow

productivity. A generation of knowledge

workers are starting to rethink what it

actually means to find success. And I'm

one of them. After years of grinding 50

plus hours a week, I cut my schedule

down to about 25. It's the slowest and

most intentional pace I've worked at in

over a decade. And the really surprising

part about this entire experience is

that I haven't lost momentum at all. And

in fact, if anything, I think I'm

starting to make some of my best work

yet. This video is sponsored by

Squarespace. I'll share more about why I

use them for all my websites later.

There's no shortage of books, podcasts,

and YouTube videos promising the secret

to productivity. Each one sharing a new

tip, routine, or morning ritual.

Productivity is how much money you get

out for the time you put in.

There is actually a hidden secret to

productivity and fulfillment. You know

exactly what you need to do right now.

I've always secretly wanted to be a

machine.

Instead of spending time getting in the

mood to work, just stop working.

When people ask me like, "Hey Dan, what

did you do to be successful? To drive

those cars or fly around on your plane?"

Uh, it's what I don't do. You ain't been

getting done. The advice is a mixed bag.

On one side, you've got the hustle bros

telling you to wake up at 4:00 a.m. down

a protein shake and grind until your

eyes bleed. On the other end, you've got

the quiet quitting movement. People

telling you to do the bare minimum and

coast towards your bimonthly paycheck.

Somewhere in the middle, you'll find Cal

Newport. His bestselling books like Deep

Work and Digital Minimalism push back

against traditional wisdom. Cal recently

laid out a more sustainable approach to

work in his book, Slow Productivity.

There's been a lot of talk about

productivity in recent years. What did

you feel was missing from the

conversation that led you to introduce

this idea of slow productivity?

Well, in knowledge work in particular,

we use the word productivity all the

time and we have no idea what we mean by

it. So, if you look back at industrial

manufacturing or you look at farming,

productivity is really clearly defined,

right? It's a ratio. How much output did

you produce for each unit input? How

many bushels of wheat were produced per

acre of farmland? How many model T's

came out of the factory for paid worker

hour that is on your payroll. And if

that number got better, then whatever

you were doing was more productive. But

when we moved to knowledge work, where

we were largely using our brains to

produce value, we lost the ability to

make those simple measurements because

there was no one thing that we were

doing. There was no one collection of

widgets we could point to and say,

"Here's what I actually produce today."

Maybe I'm working on four or five

different things and what those things

are might vary over time and they're

different than what the person next to

me is working on as well. So without the

ability to measure inputs and outputs,

all of our existing definitions of

productivity began to falter. And I

think this has been one of the defining

problems especially of the late 20th and

early 21st century in work.

I've always had difficulty finding

balance with my work from my early days

as a freelancer and especially after

starting my YouTube channel back in

2017. I've been pretty open about those

struggles. Over the past 2 weeks, I've

had pretty severe anxiety, pretty

crippling anxiety. I have thought about

quitting YouTube. I'm not saying that

I'm having a full-blown mental

breakdown. I'm just saying that it's

getting close. For years, I found myself

stuck in a cycle of churn and burn. I

called it ambition. But really, I didn't

know how to stop. But after becoming a

parent, my priorities have changed. The

nights and weekends I used to spend

catching up on work are now time that

I'd rather spend with my family. I

needed a completely different framework.

And that's where slow productivity came

in. A philosophy for approaching

knowledge work in a sustainable and

meaningful way built around three core

principles. If you really want to create

a sustainable career, produce stuff that

matters. Do in a way that is satisfying

so you don't burn out. There's three

things that matter. You need to be

careful about how many things you're

working on at the same time. And in

fact, do fewer things at once. Two, you

have to work at more of a natural pace.

So the amount of time you assume things

are going to take, make that realistic.

Finally, you have to obsess over

quality. So the quality of what you

produce really matters and you should

care a lot about it. Those three

principles stand uh in opposition to

pseudo productivity which says all we

care about is visible busyness. I'm

going to break down the rest of this

video into three sections diving into

each and explain how they help me

finally find work life balance.

I've been a content creator for the past

15 years and I've seen all the advice

about how to build a successful

business. Most of it boils down to one

clear message. Do more. Make more

videos. Write a newsletter. Post shorts

on Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube.

Launch a podcast, engage with every

comment and DM, and publish a Patreon

page. Create a digital course, a free

giveaway to promote it, and an email

salesunnel to run on autopilot. Oh, and

don't forget to stay on top of trends,

repurpose your content, track analytics,

experiment with new formats, and somehow

manage the never-ending admin of running

a business. There's always another skill

to pick up, always another project to

tackle, another plate to keep spinning.

But if you want to start reclaiming your

time, the first key is to do fewer

things.

Well, when I tell people they should do

fewer things, they get worried that what

I'm suggesting is that they accomplish

fewer things. But actually, it's a very

pragmatic recommendation because what

happens when you have too many things on

your plate? Well, each of these things

that you've agreed to do brings with it

administrative overhead. I mean, I have

to send emails to people. I have to have

meetings with people. I have to think

about it. There's just overhead to tasks

that you take on from small to large. I

call that overhead tax. As you say yes

to more and more things, the amount of

total overhead tax you're paying begins

to add up. And because your time each

day is finite, there's only so many

hours you can actually work. After a

while, if your plate is sufficiently

full, most of your day now becomes

wrangling overhead packs. The real work

might take a certain number of hours.

Say writing an article in 10 hours. But

the hidden costs pile on. email threads

with editors, revisions, chasing

permissions, invoicing, your 10-hour

project turns into 20 pretty quickly. A

few months ago, I started to think about

how I could reduce my own workload. And

the first idea I came up with seemed a

little bit crazy, if not completely

reckless. I asked myself, what if I only

made long- form YouTube videos and that

was it? Could that be enough? Would I

still find it fulfilling? Would it help

me grow creatively and professionally?

Or would it be a financial disaster? I

decided it was worth it to experiment.

And that meant making some really hard

cuts. No more weekly newsletters, no

more endless social content, no more

behind-the-scenes videos of my bonus

channel, no more podcast episodes, no

more interviews, practically no

meetings, and very little phone calls. I

stopped doing about 90% of the work I

thought was essential, even if I enjoyed

it, even if it was fun to make way for

my core mission, my most important work.

So, of course, there are still some

things that I do outside of YouTube

videos, like managing my YouTube course

and doing business administration stuff,

but I was noticeably less busy with my

overall workload. The first month of

adjusting to this new pace, I felt so

much lighter. I was less frustrated that

I was constantly falling behind and I

was more proud of the work that I was

making. But there was still one thing

that I had to contend with. My inner

hustle, bro. That voice in my head that

kept whispering,

"Shouldn't you be doing more?"

In many corners of the internet, hustle

is romanticized to the extreme. Endless

work days are glorified. Rest is

dismissed as weakness. And some people

literally don't even know what a weekend

is.

I'm going to Spain Friday till Monday

morning. I call that's like a mini

retirement.

That's a weekend.

It's a weekend. It's a mini retirement.

There's this cultural reverence for hard

work. As if the more hours you put in,

the more virtuous you are.

They are so soft. They have no work

ethic.

I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill.

I'm 22 miles in, [ __ ]

Ripple down. 4x 5x down your hustle.

Most people are weak. Most people don't

want to go to that extra mile.

No one will outwork me. No one. Just

takes work. Shitloads and shitloads of

work.

You're allowed to be selfish. You're

happy to give up leisure, sleep, family

time. I will not be outworked. Period.

To suggest that hard work isn't the

foundation for success would be a slap

in the face to most Americans. So, there

are plenty of examples of high achievers

and organizations that thrive on hustle.

From tech startups to obsessive

athletes, there are TV shows with

extremely demanding production

schedules. What would you say to someone

that points at these examples as proof

that hard work and hustle creates better

outcomes? So there are some fields in

which it is inevitable that you have to

work really long hours because

structurally it's been set up that way.

But most definitions that people have

for avoiding mediocrity and having a

professional life that is this

interesting or successful that they're

proud of isn't actually well served by

that approach. You study the lives of

people who get really good at thing

master chefs. You look at master

comedians or writers. Uh it's not about

a hustle in a given day. It's about I

stuck with this craft for 10 years. I

didn't get distracted by other things.

It's orthogonal to hustle. There's

rarely been a time in this 20-year

writing career where I'm up late writing

or something like this, but I've never

not been writing. It's not hard in the

sense of, "Oh god, I worked 15 hours and

I'm not sleeping." But I'm always

writing and it's focused and it's

relentless and I'm always trying to get

better and I'm always trying to hone

that craft. Doing the stuff that really

is making you better that other people

aren't willing to do and just uh

insisting on doing that day after day

after day. That's almost always the

recipe for things that are awesome. When

the only productivity tool you have is

to act like a human battering ram, the

consequences are inevitable. Burnout,

anxiety, depression, a life that serves

your work instead of the other way

around. And that's why one of the key

principles of slow productivity is to

work at a natural pace. The important

thing to focus on is time scale. The

real question isn't how much you can

produce in a single day, week, or month,

but how much you can accomplish over the

course of years. When you think this

way, it suddenly makes sense to have

leisurely days, to take an afternoon

siesta, or to even brace yourself, take

a weekend.

So, to have lots of mini retirements

during the year is what I've tried to do

in the last few years. I'm not sure I'm

doing it very successfully.

When I cut down my commitments and gave

myself a reasonable deadline of one

video every 2 weeks, I naturally began

working at a calmer, more sustainable

pace. Fewer projects meant less overhead

tax, which gave me hours back that I

hadn't had in years. I used that time to

invest in my health. I doubled my

strength training days from 2 to 4. I

kept up my weekly game of squash and I

found time to prepare more healthy meals

versus resorting to the processed meals

I would go to when I got super busy. All

in, I usually work 5 to 6 hours a day

now, which feels crazy compared to the

past. But here's the important thing.

Moving slower hasn't made me less

ambitious. It's made me more focused.

Because even though I'm working at a

slower pace, it doesn't mean that I

don't want to produce exceptional work.

I'm really into this whole slow

productivity thing. So much so that I'm

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For those that embrace slow

productivity, the whole point isn't just

to work less. While they might have

4-day work weeks or take multiple months

off per year, their goal is still to

create better work. The third principle

of slow productivity is obsess over

quality. At first glance, it seems like

it doesn't belong with the other two.

Why did you think this was an important

part of the puzzle? If you take that

piece out, the whole slow productivity

project is going to begin to falter.

Because without that piece, you're just

building up an antagonistic relationship

with work. If you obsess over quality,

you're going to get better at things

that people care about. When you get

better at things that people care about,

you have more leverage over the way that

your working life unfolds. If you're on

the ball, if you're organized, it's

like, "Yeah, I'm going to get this done

next Wednesday." And you give it to them

next Wednesday and it's good. Yeah,

sure. You got this queue or these quotas

or like whatever you want to do, right?

You want to quote a lot of Cal Newport,

like that's great. Uh because you

deliver.

Personally, I think about quality a lot

as a content creator. I see it as an

opportunity to stand out in an

increasingly noisy landscape. But that's

not exactly a popular opinion.

If you want to write down one word and

stick it in your mirror from this whole

talk, the word is volume. 30, 40, 50, 60

pieces of content a day.

There's a lot of talk online about

output. How often you post, how many

times a day you show up on every

platform. But for creators and artists

who aren't merely personalities, who

actually care about their work, and who

find purpose in the creative process,

turnurning out more content isn't the

answer. Instagram currently gets 22

million videos uploaded to its platform

every day. Do you really think making an

extra three videos this week are going

to help you stand out? If you want to

rise above the noise and make something

that people actually remember and that

leaves an impact, it makes more sense to

put your energy into fewer things. It's

not about sheer volume. It's about using

the time you have to create the best

work you're capable of. So, the videos

that I've been making lately, videos

like this one, have been a big shift for

me. I've cleared my plate. I've done

fewer things, and I've poured everything

into each one. And something really cool

happened. I started getting comments

saying, "These were some of my best

videos yet." And while that was

encouraging, if I'm being honest, it

wasn't the most important part. What

mattered most was that I was proud of

the work that I was making instead of

just rushing from one project to the

next. Thanks so much to Cal for joining

me for this one. I'll link his book in

the description below. I highly

recommend it. And if you want to catch

my full interview with Cal, you can

subscribe to me over on Patreon. Thanks

so much and I'll see you next time.