Cal Newport

We can see it.

And if you're bringing in dollars, they're like, you can do what you want.

And they could also see if we make you go to meetings, those dollars go down.

It's like, forget the meetings for you.

Everyone else where there's not a clear number where they can see how much value you're bringing, like, oh, you better be there in the meetings.

There's so much fat.

in the American knowledge work sector right now, right?

Because we're so wealthy, and there's so much money being slung around that we can have whole organizations where most people don't even know how they're directly connected to producing that value, and they could just be doing email all day or whatever, right?

It's so inefficient.

But there are, I mean, there are plenty of knowledge work areas where people don't put up with a bunch of this nonsense, and it's all areas where it's very easy to quantify your production.

I did this essay a couple years ago where I did a reflection where I said, God, almost every thought I've had in my books

all came out of my experience as a grad student at MIT.

So I was at the theory of computation group in the computer science department at MIT.

I don't call it a department, but the theory of computation group in the CS lab at MIT, which is like a group, the professors there, the students, we weren't like this, but the professors were super geniuses.

Like literally, Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, MacArthur, Turing Award, Dijkstra Prize, like,

smartest people in the world.

And it was incredibly clear if you were successful or not.

What major theorems did you prove in the last few years?

That's it.

That's all that mattered, right?