No one owes you a great career, it argues; you
My author website doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—you have to have a phone that works before our...
Leah Pearlman, who was a product manager on the team that developed the Like button for Facebook (she was the author of the blog post announcing the feature in 2009), has become so wary of the havoc i...
Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.
It’s here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our co...
It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all ti...
In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term deliberate practice to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an a...
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in...
In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency.
In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
If you’re a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you’re much more likely to hear go change the water cooler than you are go change the world.
If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece ofinformation immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, inthe moment. If you c...
If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital. If you skip this step, you might end up like Sarah and Jane: with lots of enthusiasm but very little to show for it. Not
If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that...
I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he love...
I might finish writing at two or three A.M., then have to leave at eight the next morning to get back to my job at NBC on time, Alex recalls. It was a busy period. After
I keep a tally of the total number of hours I’ve spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.
I had reached the level of expertise you would expect from someone who had played an instrument seriously for the last six years. But this is what I find fascinating: Compared to Jordan Tice’s ability...
How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.
Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance. In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: Ther...