RULE #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion
Minimize the shallow in my life
Summary of Rule #2 Rule
Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your converging rays of attention to uncover the truth latent in each....
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
This ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s...
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 perceive...
Focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.
To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you g...
The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase.
Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable.
Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don’t run away.
Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow wo...
Process-centric e-mails might not seem natural at first. For one thing, they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them. In the moment, this might seem like...
Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before
Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths, Gallagher reports. [Among them is the notion that] ‘the idle mind is the devil’s workshop’… when you lose focus, your mind tends t...
Working right trumps finding the right work.
Be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior...