Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it...
Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
The journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven n...
There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for i...
Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we’ll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimal...
Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.
You have to get good before you can expect good work. As
When you study the type of careers that make others remark, That’s the type of job I want, this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way...
What struck me about Pardis’s story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to st...
Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of massive distraction, to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special...
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...
Three crucial benefits provided by solitude: new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.
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 calls this mental state...
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...
Two Core Abilities for Thrivingin 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.
Using money as a neutral indicator of value—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded th...
People have the need to put their hands on tools and to make things. We need this in order to feel whole. As Rogowski explains: Long ago we learned to think by using our hands, not the other way aroun...
People play differently when they’re keeping score, the 4DX authors explain.
Rowling’s decision to check into a luxurious hotel suite near Edinburgh Castle is an example of a curious but effective strategy in the world of deep work: the grand gesture. The concept is simple: By...
Argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-...
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