Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in 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...
Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur Genius Gran...
Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that most peopl...
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.
Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: the cloud of external distractions.
It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this d...
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.
If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short).
Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion, they say, therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice. This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working do...
Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method...
Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. This point is crucia...
The end of each of these brainstorming sessions I require myself to formally record the results, by hand, on a dated page.
Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.
Focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and edit...
You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.
With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners—in this case, the venture investors—is without precedent. It’s no wonder that a venture capitalist...
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the...
We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.