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 validate your stature.
Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.
Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This.
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 products you might miss out.
The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Notice.
Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.
Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.
If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram – you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.
To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.
A job... is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.
The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase.
No one owes you a great career, it argues; you.
You have to get good before you can expect good work. As.
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers.
Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.