I'm Cal Newport and this is DeepQuestions, episode 172.

Here in my DeepWork HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse, and we've got ourselves a good old fashion listener calls episode, which I am looking forward to.

Now, this is the first recording session that we have done in the month of February.

We're doing this. I don't know what today is February 4th, maybe, February 5th, something like that.

So, you know what that means? If it's the first session in a new month, we should take some time to talk about the books I read in the preceding month.

We're trying to make that a habit here on the show. So, I thought we would start things off today talking about the five books I read in January 2022.

Quick background on that. I usually aim to read around five books a month and the two things I do to accomplish this goal is one, I make reading more of a default activity.

So, instead of looking at a phone or a tablet for random online distraction, I make looking at a book, my default activity.

And two, I read a wide variety of books of different styles, different genres, different levels of difficulty so that it doesn't become tedious or doesn't become too much of a chore.

I don't care what format, audio, Kindle, hardcover, whatever. Just keep reading. I also believe in not overthinking what you read.

Just reading a lot of interesting stuff is better than having some sort of carefully curated list with which you're trying to impress people.

Alright, so let's get into it the books I read in January 2022.

So, those who have followed this segment in previous months, no, I've been on a kick recently of reading books that have to do with the entertainment industry.

I'm not sure why I just like that genre. I did some cinema books. I've done some biographies of directors.

My entry in this in the sequence of books for January was Will Smith's new biography, which is titled Will, which I actually quite enjoyed.

Now, Will is co-authored. Will Smith co-authored it with Mark Manson, who you might know as the author of the subtle art of not giving an F word that book,

which sold, and I'm using the official terms here, Jesse, all the copies. That's what I have here. I have here on my official notes.

That book sold an absurd number of copies. I'm talking like 18 million copies. It's a crazily successful book.

So, he co-authored. Will Smith, I think, liked the subtle art and asked Mark to co-author will with him.

The way I learned about this is Mark told me. It's a pretty small world. Just you could probably imagine this to be the case.

There's only so many of us that are sort of in our 30s or now late 30s now, who write pragmatic nonfiction books for major publishers.

There's a group of us, and we all kind of know each other, right, because we're all like the same age. We all sort of write the same thing.

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