If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.
You visit Knuth’s website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you’ll instead discover the following note: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer...
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rig...
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, the superpower of the 21st century.
The batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.
We can now step back and use Gallagher’s grand theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life. This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attenti...
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in 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. Let’s
Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, require...
RULE #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion
In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s...
As the author Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.
The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to re...
Summary of Rule #2 Rule
Stephenson wrote an essay titled Why I Am a Bad Correspondent. At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other...
Rule #4 is entitled Think Small, Act Big. It’s in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is a...
Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good.
Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people? Cooper asks. They are programming people,
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let’s