Deep Work

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy
1. The ability to quickly master hard things.

2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There’s no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn’t change this reality.

Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things

But there are some general questions that any effective ritual must address:
• Where you’ll work and for how long

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same.

All it takes is an ideology seductive enough to convince you to discard common sense.

it’s even more important that the individual learn how to seek out opportunities for flow

feeling of going deep is in itself very rewarding

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow,