It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
Two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage beha...
Kirk’s path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forw...
Laura also connects efforts to be a conscientious consumer with issues relating to social justice, which also play a big role in the Mennonite Church.
Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the...
My Research Bible Routine At some point during my quest, I started what I came to call my research bible, which is, in reality, a document I keep on my computer. Here’s the routine: Once a week I requ...
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...
Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience memb...
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-...
Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefu...
Returning to my own example, it’s a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vo...
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...
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
So next time you start to question whether you’re missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas,...
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...
THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something...
Take book writing: If I published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipp...
The insights of Rule #2 fundamentally changed the way I approach my work. If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase productivity-centric. Getting things done wa...
The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic right job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately r...
The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need t...
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