I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers

about work, technology, and the deep life.

I want to talk briefly here about something I have been dealing with recently. Friction.

Now, to step back a little bit when we're talking about creative efforts

why sometimes call long-form creative efforts where you're applying skilled

cognition to produce something valuable,

it's easy to oversimplify this.

So, well, you're either doing hard creative work or you're not.

Your efforts are either deep or they're shallow, but there's actually a

really interesting substructure to these long-form creative efforts and it's worth

trying to highlight this substructure because it helps people get through the different stages and

obstacles involved in producing really original valuable things using their

brain. Now I tend to think about long- form creative work as having three stages. Friction, which is the one I really want to talk about today, flow, and finalization. Long-time readers and listeners know that I never miss a chance for

superfluous alliteration. So when you're working on something hard with your mind, that first phase is friction, and to me that's the phase in which you have an idea of what you're trying to do, but you can't yet make the pieces work.

And so you're throwing brain cycles at it.

What about this way? What about that way?

What if I come out from this angle?

Doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work.

It's a lot of cognitive dead ends, a lot of cognitive rejections that you do again and again and again until you get to stage 2 which is flow.

Now I run the risk of danger here because I am overloading the term flow I do not mean this

necessarily to be exactly the psychological state that me highly checks at

me high identified it can be but I mean flow here a little bit more generally. This is where the

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