In a world in which our lives are increasingly distracted and diluted by forces like digital distraction and artificial intelligence, how do we push back?

How do we create meaningful lives, focus on things that actually matter to us?

Today, I want to give you some powerful advice for accomplishing exactly this goal.

Advice that comes from a perhaps unexpected source, famous writers.

Now, as a professional writer myself, I love hunting down advice about my craft from authors I really admire.

But something I've come to realize is that some of my biggest ideas about living a deep life can be understood as generalizations of ideas that authors have had about the art of writing.

So here's what I want to do. I pulled five of my favorite quotes from five well-known authors talking about the craft

of writing, offering advice about how to do it better.

And for each of these quotes, I'll explain what the author means.

But then I'm going to generalize a bigger idea out of that quote that could apply to your

life in general.

And then I'm going to translate that idea into concrete advice about how you can act on it to make your life deeper in a distracted world.

So let's put on our writing nerd hats and go searching for some wise words.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

Today's episode, life-changing lessons from legendary writers.

I'm going to start with a quote from the short-storiest novelist essayist George Saunders.

This is a quote that came from his book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,

which is actually like a really cool book that comes out of his creative writing pedagogy, a longtime creative writing teacher. And it's a, it's a book that has short stories from Masters and then his commentary. So it's a book about the art of writing. It's a really cool book. I'm going to pull a quote out here. For those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'll put this up on the screen as well. All right, so here's Saunders. What makes you as a writer is what you do to any old text by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft.

Who cares if the first draft is good?

It doesn't need to be good.

It just needs to be so you can revise it.

All right.

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