Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There’s no reason why knowledge work...
Thoreau establishes early in Walden: The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we posse...
This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen)...
This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supporte...
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 an act of small think...
These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you’re waiting in line, or waiting for the plot...
These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed...
There is, however, a lesser-known piece to this story. As Christensen recalls, Grove asked him during a break in this meeting, How do I do this? Christensen responded with a discussion of business str...
Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer. If they had instead waited for inspiration to strike before settlin...
The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion.
The task of a craftsman, they conclude, is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there. This frees the craftsman of the nihi...
The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy, explains Matthew Crawford.
The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed system...
The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to follow their passion is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with...
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...
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 journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systemati...
The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next...