Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support...
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and...
Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book’s conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner.
Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery
But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their pro...
Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, oh, that’s well written code. It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.
Bad courses, with incompatible professors and unreasonable requirements, are the key to developing an ulcer.
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle...
As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting lik...
As the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya expands in his modern interpretation of the Ethics, if your life consists only of actions whose worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, wh...
An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike...
Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi’s work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade: The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is str...
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.
A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working lif...
The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.
Some general questions that any effective ritual must address: Where you'll work and for how long.
Just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn’t mean that you can easily make it happen.
Easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
Attempting to schedule deep work in an ad hoc fashion is not an effective way to manage your limited willpower.)