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...
The skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
Focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and edit...
If you’re not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an acceptable level, where you then remain stuck.
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,...
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...
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...
More detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion,...
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...
The whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party wai...
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...
There’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is just right, and instead put your head down and plug away at getti...
The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with...
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