Deep work - summary 🢅8

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 are hard to replicate

• Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
• Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to promote deep work in his professional life - a task that required time, energy, and money. It also took him away from more immediate pursuits.
• To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
• Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance. In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.
• If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.
• Law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
• 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.
• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
• By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.
• For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight — be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually — can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.
• By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities — like finding old friends on Facebook — and reinvesting in high-impact activities — like taking a good friend out to lunch — you end up more successful in your goal.
• Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.
• Put more thought into your leisure time.
• How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
• Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
• I had applied and been rejected for a well-respected grant that many of my colleagues were receiving.
• The single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.