The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it...
The Innovators, Isaacson later
The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.
Stop focusing on these little details, it told me. Focus instead on becoming better.
So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter...
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. In an age of n...
Managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas’s old daydreams, but as he now recognized, nothing would. A fulfilling working life is a more subtle experience than hi...
Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.2 When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovat...
Let’s pull together the threads spun so far: Current economic thinking, as I’ve surveyed, argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our econ...
Knuth goes on to acknowledge that he doesn’t intend to cut himself off completely from the world. He notes that writing his books requires communication with thousands of people and that he wants to b...
Kethledge, it turned out, relies on long periods alone with his thoughts to write his famously sharp legal opinions, often working at a simple pine desk in a barely renovated barn with no internet con...
Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced.
It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration....
If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, follow you passion can be bad advice. It’s more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this gene...
If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities.
I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field’s most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To
How you'll work once you start to work. Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.
Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the paper’s main proof argument, I faced immediate internal resistance. It was as if my mind rea...
He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall...
First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.