Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And be...
Ryan and Sarah have heaps of control in their working lives, and this is what makes the Red Fire lifestyle so appealing.
In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.
You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free fr...
To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.
To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the m...
Thurston struck up conversations with strangers. He enjoyed food without Instagramming the experience.
This study, it turns out, is one of many that validate attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.
These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the opportunity costs that required more attention. As he elaborated: If I make hay all summer, I can’t be...
The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Ludd...
The constant exposure to their friends’ carefully curated portrayals of their lives generates feelings of inadequacy—especially during periods when they’re already feeling low—and for teenagers, it pr...
The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it’s pointed out, but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters. I...
The 4 Disciplines of Execution,
Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure...
Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my comm...
Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation...
Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.