Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.
Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four disciplines (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully...
By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.
Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away...
And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-m...
According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the liquid networks that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new ideas.
A job...is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.
A clean break is best. In
A Brief Mission Intermission Let’s take a moment to pull together what we’ve learned so far about mission. In the last chapter, I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital b...
A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a...
The cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.
1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.
When you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It’s at this point that you’re most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually b...
Unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.
The technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.
The months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to ea...
The deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriou...
The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.
The ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.