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...
What struck me about Pardis’s story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to st...
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
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.
This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. Th...
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...
There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s...
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 best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
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...
Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World, he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. It does not make them illegal. It does not make th...
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...
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’re wired for distraction, you crave it.
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 point, however, further im...
It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.