As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today’s econom...
As I’ll explain, mission is one of these desirable traits, and like any such desirable trait, it too requires that you first build career capital—a mission launched without this expertise is likely do...
As Ericsson explains, Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this poin...
As Derek explained to me, he started by pursuing music at night and on the weekend. I didn’t quit my day job until I was making more money with my music.
As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employe...
An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of hi...
Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: Thoughts? These e-mails take the sender only...
All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives—studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think thi...
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal
Alex Berger, he didn’t arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into va...
After running my tough experiment [with cancer]… I have a plan for living the rest of my life, Gallagher concludes in her book. I’ll choose my targets with care… then give them my rapt attention. In s...
Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detri...
A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of you...
A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
Fully embrace Rogowski's closing advice: Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work....Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products—especially in sc...
Without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.
The pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn’t evince too much envy. On the other hand, if yo...
The late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was s...
The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.