You’re either remarkable or invisible, says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.
You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your
Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on. In
When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and...
We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that i...
We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.
We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point...
We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life.
To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate. (For
To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stre...
This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effective...
This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a s...
These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. This observation may come as a...
The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then yo...
The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.
The average Facebook user, by contrast, spends around 350 minutes per week on this company’s services
The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your curr...
The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s c...