108 - Musk, Chalamet, and Real vs. Fake Greatness (with Cal Newport)

excellence, actually

A couple of recent events—Elon Musk parading onstage with a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference and bragging about DOGE's 120-hour work weeks, and Timothée Chalamet saying he wanted to be one of "the greats" in an acceptance speech at the SAG Awards—ignited a conversation on the Growth Equation text thread about what role work should play in our lives. In a society that sometimes overly valorizes busyness or performative productivity, and also sometimes overly critiques the type of obsessive work that excellence demands (lauding "balance" instead), what does the actual hard work of greatness look like? For help, Brad and Clay tapped in Cal Newport, friend of FAREWELL and host of the podcast Deep Questions with Cal Newport, who writes and thinks (deeply, as you might've guessed) about productivity, work, and how they intersect with a meaningful life.

"Elon Musk Is the World's Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor?" (The New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/opinion/elon-musk-billionaire.html

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