Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
How do people end up loving what they do?
To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.
Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return – this is Supply and Demand 101.
The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow.
As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today’s economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?
Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.
With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners – in this case, the venture investors – is without precedent. It’s no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, “Everyone wants my job.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happen to be.
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.
You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.
In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do – whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.
In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours – but rarely more.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance – arguably the most valuable substance we possess – and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.
We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.
It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.