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Comment by muldoc | Hacker News Reader

Ah, Cal Newport. Another BS self-help sales person.

Curious about that opinion. I find your comment rather negative and, slightly, toxic, but I'll bite. Care to share why you have that opinion about him?

I've read three of his books, and although not all are "great", there's always some interesting thoughts about what he shares. I also like that he really gets people to develop a sense to actually think and work deeply, and move away from shallow and unsatisfactory busyness.

His newsletter and now his podcast are excellent ways for people to ask questions and get suggestions and help for free.

He has a bit of a big ego, but I wouldn't use that to call him "another BS self-help sales person".

Cal Newport is probably one of the "best" salesmen in the space because he has an actual non-meme job and seems to have more good faith than most others. But at the end of the day, his actionable material can be easily compressed into maybe three blog posts. Even if he had good intentions at the start, he still got caught up in the nonfiction sales logic.

Teaching productivity is not like teaching mathematics or philosophy. There is a limited range of things to learn and apply, and the core ideas are concise but difficult to put in practice. A good teacher in that space would essentially be able to impart their wisdom in maybe two hours, at which point the success of the teaching would lie in the student actually following what they were told. An ongoing productivity podcast or book series flies in the face of this. The mere act of commercializing productivity dooms the entire edifice. If the student is still on episode #23, the sales has succeeded but the teaching has failed.

I'm pretty sure he would be able to impart all his "wisdom" in 2 hrs. But, like you said, it can be difficult to put in practice. That's why a question and answer format is helpful for many people. Sometimes its really hard to pick up a seemingly easy idea and apply it to your own life. Having help from someone who has seen it applied in many different ways, and dealt with the usual problems, is really helpful. That's what he does with his podcast. Not really selling anything there, besides occasionally mentioning his books where some concepts are expanded. I honestly don't get the hate.

It makes more sense to see it as frustration about the space that is then applied to individual authors. Hating on Newport is rather pointless; it will not affect his life or yield useful ideas. What's happening is that people are growing tired of the whole hustle/newsletter/productivity fetish/repackaged stoicism atmosphere that permeates the internet, and are directing their frustration poorly. There is something deeply sterile about the throbbing mass of podcasts and blog posts that revolve around these topics, but there rarely is a precise target to focus on or even a useful way to voice the accompanying frustration.

I will never forgive Cal Newport nor HN for the hype around Deep Work. What an ironically vacuous book stuffed with filler anecdotes about modern day blacksmiths and card deck memorization, completely in contradiction to the very ethos of focused deep work. It should’ve been a nice long blog article but he wanted to write a NYT bestseller so I wasted time and money reading it.

Same. Bought his book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck" and threw it away in disgust a few pages in. Good thing is, now immediately anybody is referencing him I know they are full of sht.

Different author for that book: Mark Manson

That book is not by Cal Newport

I'm not sure he gives a ....

To Cal's credit, he has somewhat done this. He has a playlist on YouTube [1] which covers 90% of the lessons and it's pretty short. There is a lot more material sure but it's mainly focused on smoothing out that last 10% and can easily be skipped.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xK8kBHHUX43VVxO3b7s...

How could it be possible to encapsulate the perfect optimization of all possible processes in "a few blog posts" or "a couple hours" ?

It's not that complicated. Have you ever read something from this guy or similar (eg James Clear, Ryan Holiday, Peterson etc). If you do, it will become obvious quickly, that all these people do is blow up every little bit of information into it's own little chapter, and 10 more chapters to sell it to you under a different name. Most of the stuff they tell you are platitudes or rehashing of what has been said before. Next thing, if they are really good salesman, you will find them on Ted or Tom Bilyeu, because they are so good at it, everybody wants to have a piece of the pie.

It’s like self-help: in principle it’s supposed to help people and in practice if it does, that’s great. But in practice, the content is inevitably over-stuffed with padding, which sorts of contradicts the very principle of getting stuff done and not wasting time.

The productivity genre also never seems to provide empirical data to back up their recommendations. Like it would be great if these gurus actually conducted experiments into the best notes-taking systems. Evaluate them against each other with real results.

Oh, you say that every person’s best system is going to be different? Then maybe an innovation in this genre should be helping readers figure out which system should be best for the self, rather trying to prescribe one-size fits all systems and merchandising it with bullet journals and paid tools and the like.

He's one of the few self-help promoters who actually still has a real job and yet stays productive.

Everybody else has turned hocking productivity advice into lucrative careers.

never trust anyone who writes notes on taking notes

I agree that without use in practice outside of "notes on notes" you are almost certainly improving the wrong things.

However without reflection that may include notes on notes, you are doomed to the suboptimal or even counter-productive.

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