Cal’s Books are Salad
Hi Zettlers,
What kind of (information) food are Cal Newport’s books?
This is the question that I try to answer for myself.
His term “ultra-processed content” is spot on for the
process that both food and content processing share: It is about
refining and combining key stimuli. Sugar, Fat, Salt, Protein — each
are specific stimuli that in isolation are not particularly
understandable (try eating pure sugar). However, cloaked in
engineered food and especially in combination, you can overload the
brain and generate the (hyper-)palatability.
This is exactly the process how ultra-processed content works.
However, nobody seems to think of what the actual ingredients (other
than the engineers at Facebook/TikTok/etc.) are that are combined. It
is actually highly important, to develop a model of the causal
mechanisms. In food, the combination of carbs and fats are
particularly damaging for very specific reasons (there is for example
a threshold) when your glycogen stores are full and your fat cells
also.
All this leads to the question mentioned in the subject: What kind of
information food are Cal’s books.
My answer is that they are salad. Healthy with essential
micronutrients.
How much salad do you eat as a high-performing athlete? Not that much
because of your limited ability to digest food. As a high-performance
athlete, you need much more dense food.
This is my personal situation: I am a professional knowledge worker,
which means that I digest and transform knowledge into other
(hopefully, higher forms) of knowledge. I am maxing out my capacity to
digest information deeply, which means that I cannot read Cal’s books.
I recommend them quite often, but the last book I read (deeply) was
Deep Work.
Live long and prosper,
Sascha
PS: I love Cal’s podcast. Strangely, I think he presents a more
refined version of his thoughts there than in his books. Perhaps
because he is focussing more on presenting his ideas than telling a
story?