In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: I went to the woods...
In 2013, for example, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees us...
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 your specialty is new—as mine is—and they can’t therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you’re going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there’s no one out there to...
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 you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is m...
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… i...
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 love what I do for a living. I’m also confident that as I continue my commitment to the ideas discovered in my quest, this love will only deepen. Thomas feels the same way about his work. So do most...
I like the term stretch for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When I’m learning a new mathematical technique—a classic case of delibera...
I keep a tally of the total number of hours I’ve spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.
I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material,
I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to s...
How do people end up loving what they do?
He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World, he...
Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted
Grant also batches his attention on a smaller time scale. Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods where he...
Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?…...
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of the...
Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures