If it’s rare and valuable, it’s not easy to get. This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice—a method for building skills by r...
The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital. To understand why, first recall that bargaining theory, a key component in standard economic...
The Great Restructuring, unlike the postwar period, is a particularly good time to have access to capital.
The Minimalist Technology Screen To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough...
He would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office.
Just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn’t mean that you can easily make it happen.
The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined profes...
The goal of the machine, David explained, is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities....
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...
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...
Returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practice–style strain, but due to its intensity it felt like...
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...
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,...
Monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
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...
To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time … it needs a lot of concentration … if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented anot...
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.
We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.
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