The Last Action Heroes

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The Last Action Heroes by Nick the Selmy A. is a book about the heyday of the 1980s action movie stars, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Seagal, Jean Claude Van Damme. The reason why that ended it was we're very used to spectacle right now in a post Jurassic Park world that are delivered via special effects. So these super muscled guys were in some sense a spectacle. It was just, it's larger than life. Nowadays we get the spectacle by having really cool special effects done by computers. But when you kind of do that, how do you make a movie larger than life? You put larger than life people into it and blew things up.

One of the most popular (and widely forgotten) slogans of the ancient world was Festina Lente, or, “Make Haste Slowly.” In this episode, Cal looks deeper at what this phrase meant, and in doing so uncovers an ancient version of slow productivity.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo

Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia

Today’s Deep Question: What can Octavian Caesar Augustus teach us about productivity? [5:37]

- How can I help my team move fast to slow productivity? [26:12]

- How do I figure out how long to spend on a task? [33:08]

- What’s up with Cal’s podcast album art? [38:14]

- Why is my partner so slow? [40:49]

- How does Cal’s Remarkable tablet change his working memory.txt habit? [46:23]

CASE STUDY: Not allowing work to dominate your life [53:28]

The 5 Book Cal Read in July 2023 [1:03:21]

Links:

bigthink.com/the-learning-curve/festina-lente/