Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit. These efforts crate new value, Improve Your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep Work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.
Jung - Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world.
Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel prize.
Neal Stephenson - “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can. Write novels. If I instead get interrupted a lot, what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time...there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.”
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style takes, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not crate much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr.
Our work culture’s shift towards the shallow (whether you think it’s philosophically good or bad) is exposing s massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth.
Two reasons why deep work is valuable:
To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task require deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.
The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.
To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of procuring - a task that requires depth.
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Ruthlessly cull the shallow and painstakingly cultivate the intensity of the depth.
To cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past.
A deep life is a good life.
There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
The ability to quickly master hard things
The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
Because technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.
If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive - no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Deep Work helps you quickly learn hard things
“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converting rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
-Antonin-Dalmatia Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and Professor of moral philosophy. Author of “The Intellectual Life”
“Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.” - Sertillanges
Deliberate practice - K. Anders Ericsson.
The core components of deliberate practice are usually identified as follows:
Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration.
“Diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice.” - Ericsson.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.
If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy. If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn’t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.
Deep work helps you produce at an elite level
Adam Grant (professor at Wharton school if business) thinks a lot about the mechanics of producing at an elite level.
Batch hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
Law of productivity:
High-quality work produced = (time spent) x (intensity of focus)
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.
Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.
The Principle Of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment.
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
Even a small slip in concentration can ruin hours of effort
This connection between deep work a good life is familiar and widely accepted when considering the world of craftsmen. “The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely inthe world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford.
A deep life if is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.
Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioural economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skilful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
Sine qua non = an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.
Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.
Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives.
When you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right.
A workday driven by the shallows, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” - Csikszentmihalyi - author of ‘Flow’
The more flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed in something challenging.
Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state.
Decades of research stemming from Csikszentmihalyi’s original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life workwhile.
To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
The craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual.
Deep work is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at the same time that it also is becoming increasingly rare (for somewhat arbitrary reasons). This represents a classic market mismatch: If you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive professionally.
Whether you approach the activity of going deep from the perspective of neuroscience, psychology, or lofty philosophy, these paths all seem to lead back to a connection between depth and meaning. It’s as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis.
A deep life is a good life - always worth repeating!
The Eudaimonia machine is a building.
Takes its name from the Ancient Greek concept of Eudaimonia (a state in which you’re achieving your full human potential).
“The goal of the machine,” architect David Dewaine explained, “is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing - creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities.” It is, in other words, a space designed for the sole purpose of enabling the deepest possible deep work.
...a work environment (and culture) designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains.
You’re a disciple of depth in a shallow world.
One of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.
People fight desires all day long.
Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. - Baumeister
Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
Some of these strategies will deploy simple heuristics to hijack your brain’s motivation center while others are designed to recharge your willpower reserves at the fastest possible rate.
Decide On Your Depth Philosophy
The famed computer scientist Donald Knute cares about deep work. As he explains on his website: “What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
A doctoral candidate named Brian Chappel, who is a father with a full-time job, also values dep work, as it’s the only way he can make progress on his dissertation given his limited time. Chappell told me that his first encounter with the idea of deep work was an “emotional moment.:
The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy attempts to maximise deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimising shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. It’s this clarity that helps them eliminate the thicket of shallow concerns that tend to trip up those whose value proposition in the working world is more varied.
“I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.” - Donald Knuth
*apply above to my courses
What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. - Donald Knuth, computer scientist
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. - Neal Stephenson
*apply to cartoons - DON’T INTERRUPT TIME-CHUNKS
The Bimodal Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling
This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically - seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritised.
The minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.
These efforts were aimed at increasing the intensity of Jung’s deep work to a level that would allow him to succeed in intellectual combat with Freud and his many supporters.
Jung would lock himself every morning into a minimally appointed room to write without interruption. He would then meditate and walk in the woods to clearly his thinking in preparation for the next day’s writing.
The Rhythmic Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling
The rhythmic philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep.
Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use everyday for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier.
The way to be a better comic is to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes is to write everyday. - Jerry Seinfeld
Your only job next is not to break the chain.
Deep work needs to happen in ninety minute chunks.
“Who’s to say that I can’t be that prolific?” He concluded. “Why not me?”
The Journalistic Philosophy Of Deep Work Scheduling
You fit deep Work whenever you can into your schedule.
Journalists are trained to shift into writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.
Ritualise
An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.
The Pulitzer Prize-wining biographer Robert Caro: “every inch of Caro’s office is governed by rules. Where he places his books, how he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on his wall, even what he wears to the office. Everything is specified by a routine that has varied little over Caro’s long career. “I trained myself to be organized.
*I should this.
“Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.” - David Brooks
Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go dee, again and again - there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize of conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.
How you’ll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
How you’ll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.
“It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” - Nietzsche
To work deeply is a big deal and should not be undertaken lightly. Surrounding such efforts with a complicated (and perhaps to the outside world, quite strange) ritual accepts this reality - providing your mind with the structure and commitment it needs to slip into the state of focus where you can begin to create things that matter.
Make grand gestures. The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
It’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put your self in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps. Unlock the needs mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight - be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually - can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.
Distraction is a destroyer of depth
The four. disciplines of execution
Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
Execution should be aimed at a small number of wildly important goals.
Have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.
“If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” - David Brooks, The Art of Focus
Once you’ve identified a widely important goal, you need to measure your success.
There are two types of metrics: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores. The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior: When you receive them the performance that drove them is already in the past. Lead measures on the other had, measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures. In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples. This is a number you can directly inches by giving out more samples.
*This is similar to ‘go for no’
For an individual focused on deep work it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to=day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally.
To maximise the motivation generated by this scoreboard, whenever I reached an important milestone. In an academic paper (e.g. solving a key proof), I would circle the tally mark corresponding to the hour where I finished the result. This served two purposes. First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.
Discipline #4 Create A Cadence Of Accountability
Downtime aids insights
Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply
Spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate
To concentrate requires directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. Walking on a busy street requires you to use directed attention, as you must navigate complicated tasks like figuring out when to cross a street to not get run over, or when to manoeuvre around the slow group of tourists blocking the sidewalk. After just fifty minutes of this focused navigation, the subject’s store of directed attention was low.
Walking through nature exposes you to inherently fascinating stimuli. When w asking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate, and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep you r mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your recited attention resources time to replenish. After fifty minutes of such replenishment, the subjects enjoyed a boost in their concentration.
The work that evening downtime replaces is usually not that important.
Only the confidence that you’re done with work until. The next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow.
Deep work and deliberate practice overlap substantially.
Use a shutdown ritual.
*make my own shutdown ritual
Your mind is released from its duty to keep track of these obligations at every moment - your shutdown ritual has taken over that responsibility.
Rule # 2 - Embrace Boredom
Push your understanding close to your cognitive limit
You cannot consider yourself as fulfilling your daily obligation unless you have stretched to the reaches of your mental capacity.
“I’ve recently bee making more highly creative insights in my business life...I’m convinced it’s related to this daily mental practice. This consistent stain has built my mental muscle over years and years. This was not the goal when I started, but it is the effect.” - Adam Marlin
The creative insights that Adam Marlin now experiences in his professional life, in other words, have little to do with a onetime decision to think deeper, and much to do with a commitment to training this ability every morning.
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand...they’re pretty much mental wrecks. - Clifford Nass, Stanford Professor
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. If every moment of potential boredom in your life - say, having to wait fine minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives - is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been retired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s Terach, it’s not ready for deep work - even if your regularly schedule time to practice this concentration
Training for deep work must address two goals: improving your ability to concentrate and overcoming your desire for distraction.
Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.
If you spend just one day a week revisiting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving into it.
Schedule in advance when you’ll use the internet, then avoid it outside of these times. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely not network connectivity is allowed - no matter how tempting.
The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teacher your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the metal muscles responsible for organizing the May sources vying for your attention. By segregating internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimising the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.
For example, if you’ve scheduled your next internet block thirty minutes form the current moment, and you’re beginning to feel bored and crave distraction, the next thirty minutes of resistance become a session of concentration callisthenics.
Give yourself plenty of opportunities in the vending to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
It simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.
Roosevelt Dashes
Identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline.
At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity. Attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
Roosevelt dashes leverage artificial deadlines to help you systematically increase the level you can regularly achieve - providing, in some sense, interval training for the attention centers of your brain. An additional benefit is that these dates are incompatible with distraction - there’s not way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadlines.
After a few months of copying this strategy, your understanding of what it means to focus will Kelly be transformed as you reach levels of intensity stronger than anything you’ve experienced before.
Meditate Productively
The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally - walking, jogging, driving, showering - and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to being your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls.
Suggestion #1: Be wary of distractions and looping
When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.
Aa
When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over gain on what you already know about it. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.
Suggestion #2 Structure your deep thinking
Start with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory. For example, if you’re working on the outline for a book chapter, the relevant variables might be the main points you want to make in the chapter.
Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables. In the book chapter examples, this next-step question might be. “How am I going to effectively open this chapter?”
With the relevant variables stored and the next=step question identified, you now have a specific target for your attention.
Assuming you’re able to solve your next-step question, the final step of this structured approach to deep thinking is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified. At this point, you can push yourself to the next level of depth by staring the process over.
This cycle of reviewing and storing variables, identifying and tackling the next-step question, then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability. It will help you get more out of your productive meditation sessions and accelerate the pace at which you improve your ability to go deep.
Memorize a deck of cards.
One of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.
The ability in question is called “attentional control” and it measures the subject’s’ ability to maintain their focus on essential information.
A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate.
Never attempt rote memorization.
We’re not wired to quickly internalize abstract information. We are, however, really good at remembering scenes
*apply this to cartoons - how do I make it memorable? Colours? Expressions? Forms? Etc
Your mind can quickly retina lots of detailed information - if it’s stored in the right way.
Proceeding through the steps described earlier (on how to memorise a deck of cards) requires that you focus your attention, again an again, on a clear target. Like a muscle responding to weights, this will strengthen your general ability to concentrate - allowing you to go deeper with more ease.
Your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.
Aa
Rule #3 quit social media
If you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.
The craftsman approach to tool selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
The law of the vital few (Pareto principle) In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
All activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities, It’s a Seno-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you sorry to the later, the lower your overall benefit.
Once the repacking was done, Nicodemus then spent the next week going though his normal routine. If he needed something that was packed, he would unpack it and put it back where it used to go. At the end of the week, he noticed that the vast majority of his stuff remained untouched in its boxes. So he got rid of it.
If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured web surfing.
Drain the shallows
“How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to ‘mess around’ with new ideas? Fried asked rhetorically. “How can we afford not to?”
Schedule every minute of your day
Quantify the depth of every activity
An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities.
Finish your work by five thirty
All Radhika Nagpul’s tactics shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the deep efforts - that is, original research - that ultimately determined her professional fate.
A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive.
Bill Gates worked with such intensity for such lengths during this two-month stretch that he would often collapse into sleep on his keyboard in the middle of writing a line of code. He would then sleep for an hour or two, wake up, and pick up right where he left off - an ability that a still-impressed Paul Allen describes as a “prodigious feat of concentration.”
The ability to concentration is a skill that gets valuable things done.
I bought a $50 high-end grid-lined lab notebook to work on mathematical proofs, believing that is expense would induce more care in my thinking.
This year I was relentless - most every day of most every week I was pushing my mind to grapple with results of consequence, regardless of whether or not a specific deadline was near. I solved proofs on subway rides an
d while shovelling snow. When my son napped on the weekend, I would pace the. Yard thinking, and when stuck in traffic I would methodically work though problems that were stymieing me.
As this year progressed, I became a deep work machine - and the result of this transformation caught me off guard.
Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand.
To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.
If you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity. to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.
I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.
