Category: Jobs&Skills

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Linchpin shows you why the time of simply following instructions at your job is over and how to make yourself indispensable, which is a must for success today.

As he says, he doesn’t want to teach you tactics. He wants to teach you how to see. In that case my eyes still feel like I’m opening them for the first time, but I’m getting there.

Linchpin is all about becoming indispensable at work. Following instructions isn’t what we need any longer, as we’re already outsourcing most of this, and robots will take over the rest before too long.

Here are 3 lessons about what makes you a linchpin and how to become one:

• Linchpins pour their heart, soul and energy into their work.
• You have to make a conscious choice to overcome your fearsto become a linchpin.
• Give genuine gifts, without expecting anything in return.

Determined to become indispensable? Let’s linchpin the heck out of your work!

Lesson 1: Give your work all you’ve got.

Maybe you’ve heard of the scenario: A restaurant has to close after the chef leaves, or a car dealership struggles, because their top sales star goes to the competition. In these instances, the people leaving are so-called linchpins.

They’re indispensable for the business, because they are 100x more valuable than the average employee. They are the people who make a business great, by giving it their everything.

An extra-friendly barista at Starbucks, who smiles and brightens everyone’s day, brings in more customers than three others combined. If you give your work all you’ve got, are present in every moment, put emotion into each task and pour your heart and soul into it, you’ll build a reputation.

Linchpins don’t need instructions, and never just do what is asked of them. They approach their work creatively, solve problems when they see them and always over-deliver.

That’s why they’ll always find work, be treated fairly and businesses are really scared of losing them.

Lesson 2: Make a conscious choice to act in spite of your fears.

Why then, are there so few linchpins, when it would be easy to stand out by investing a little more than your co-workers. Well, most of us are afraid. From a young age on we’re conditioned to follow the rules, merge with the masses, and hide behind them to stay safe and comfortable.

Just think about school: Everyone is taught to use the same pencil, read the same book, learn the same stuff, sit quietly and listen. Even art has rules – try to paint outside the lines and you’ll probably get a D at best. Refuse to do what you’re told and be rewarded with detention.

We’re all conditioned by fear to play it safe. Linchpins are no different. They’re afraid too. But they choose to act in spite of it.

For example, whenever I took an exam in college, I was anxious about what grade I got, which led me to constantly check my grade report online. Eventually, I realized I cannot change anything after I hand in that piece of paper, so I just stopped checking and waited until someone said the grades were actually online.

Don’t let fear steal your determination to do something productive. Accept that it’s there and consciously decide that you’ll act anyway.

Lesson 3: Give, give, give, and don’t expect anything for it.

Economy used to work like this: “You give me $20, and I’ll give you this DVD of your favorite movie.” Everyone expected something in return for, well, everything.

If you’ve ever tried giving someone a gift when it wasn’t Christmas or their birthday, you’ll know that being generous often even makes people suspicious. It took me several tries last year to give a homeless person a piece of fruit, because they thought I was up to something.

Nevertheless, genuine gifts, given with good intention and zero expectations, are becoming a winning tactic. I don’t mean shitty free ebooks, 3 day email “courses” or gifts which are really just disguised advertisements. What Seth means by genuine gifts is giving away your best work – for free.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example of this. He always gives his best advice away for free and talks about it publicly. Instead of “not getting paid” this makes many people see and appreciate his unique skills so much, that he gets plenty of paid work, and companies pay whatever he wants, just to keep him around.

So if you want to stand out, start giving like a true artist, as Seth calls them, and don’t expect anything in return. Give it some time, and the universe will pay you back ten times over.

My personal take-aways

Seth’s ideas stick. Not only because of the great stories he tells and good examples he gives, but also because he always comes up with a catchy name. A linchpin. It sounds so cool I know I want to be one, before I even know what a linchpin is. Don’t you? Seriously, Seth’s stuff is gold. All of it. It’s a good summary, but you should stock up your Seth Godin collection with this book on your shelf as well

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Do The Work is Steven Pressfield’s follow-up to The War Of Art, where he gives you actionable tactics and strategies to overcome resistance, the force behind procrastination.

The main theme throughout Steven Pressfields books is Resistance, the inner force that lets you procrastinate on work, even though it’s most important to you.

While the first book describes resistance in all its facets, Do The Work takes you through actually overcoming it.

Here are the 3 things I learned:

• If your work truly matters to you, the fear around it will never subside.
• Never take action and reflect on your work at the same time.
• Let your work itself be the biggest reward for working.

Let’s take a deep dive!

Lesson 1: If your work is important to you, the fear of doing it will never go away.

We always think that if we practice enough, we’ll get so good we’ll never have any problems with our work, ever again.

But that’s not true.

Henry Fonda was so obsessed with acting that he had to throw up before coming on stage, every single time – even when he was 75 years old and a world famous actor already.

If you truly care about your work, you’ll always be worried about your performance, and that’s a good thing, because it means you’re still trying to get better.

So don’t stop when you’re afraid and instead, move on in spite of fear. After all, this is the definition of courage.

Lesson 2: Don’t take action and reflect at the same time.

Guess what the worst time is to edit a blog post? Right after you wrote it.

It’ll be impossible to objectively reflect on your work, because you just finished it, and are naturally proud of what you did – and you should be.

But that’s why it’s important to give yourself some temporal and physical distance, before judging your work.

I’ll even take it a step further and suggest this:

When in doubt, don’t reflect at all.

For example, I found it’s much easier to just write another blog post, instead of perfectly editing the last one. That’s why I usually just write, press publish and instantly write more.

Lesson 3: Your work should be the biggest reward for your work.

Resistance is a nasty thing. The perfect example happened to me today. It’s January 1st, which means I stayed up late for New Year’s Eve yesterday. However, I had already had a sleep deficit from getting up at 5 am for the past 2 weeks, to write these summaries every day.

Staying up until 2 am broke the camel’s back and I slept in, completely blowing my routine. Naturally, I had to overcome tons of resistance to write this today.

But I love writing these, and I have created a summary every day for the past 15 days – so I can’t just give up now. Looking back at how far I’ve come already made me want to continue.

So when you’re down and about to give up, look at what you’ve accomplished already, and let it drive you to doing even more. Then, ask yourself two questions:

How badly do I really want this?

Why do I want this?

You better be totally committed to it and feel like you have no other choice but to do it – because that’s the kind of work worth pursuing.

Note: I remind myself of these two things by listening to Eminem – Lose Yourself every single morning.

My personal take-aways

This book summary was very very short, only 4 blinks total, and while it was very inspirational, I felt the lessons lacked a bit of the actionable tips that the book supposedly holds.

Do The Work by Steven Pressfield

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Do The Work Summary

The Book in Three Sentences

Resistance is what prevents us from doing our best work.

The more important a call or action is to, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

The worst thing we can do is to stop once we’ve started.

The Five Big Ideas

“The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is the belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.

“When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”

“We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.”

“Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.”

Do The Work Summary

The following is a list, in no particular order, of those activities that most commonly elicit Resistance:

The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional.

The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.

Any diet or health regimen.

Any program of spiritual advancement.

Any activity whose aim is the acquisition of chiseled abdominals.

Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction.

Education of every kind.

Any act of political, moral, or ethical courage, including the decision to change for the better some unworthy pattern of thought or conduct in ourselves.

The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others.

Any act that entails commitment of the heart—the decision to get married, to have a child, to weather a rocky patch in a relationship.

The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity.

“In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.”

“Resistance is a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”

“Resistance will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man.”

“Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

“Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.”

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”

“The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

“Resistance aims to kill.”

“We want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.”

“The last thing we want is to remain as we are.”

“Prepare yourself to make new friends. They will appear, trust me.”

“Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.”

“A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.”

“Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.”

“Be stubborn. Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.”

“We’re in till the finish. We will sink our junkyard-dog teeth into Resistance’s ass and not let go, no matter how hard he kicks.”

“Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.”

“You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.”

“When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”

“Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.”

“The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.”

“Start before you’re ready.”

“You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more.”

“Let the unconscious do its work.”

“Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.”

“Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.”

“Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?”

“Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.”

“Figure out where you want to go; then work backward from there.”

“End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.”

“We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.”

“Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time.”

“Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.”

“Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.”

“One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP.”

“This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz.”

“Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect.”

“You are not allowed to judge yourself.”

“Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart.”

“Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.”

“Nothing is more fun than turning on the recorder and hearing your own voice telling you a fantastic idea that you had completely forgotten you had.”

“Forget rational thought. Play. Play like a child.”

“Our job is not to control our idea; our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be)—and then bring it into being.”

“Keep working. Keep working. Keep working.”

“Ask yourself what’s missing. Then fill that void.”

Principles of Resistance

Principle Number One: There Is An Enemy

Principle Number Two: This Enemy Is Implacable

Principle Number Three: This Enemy Is Inside You

Principle Number Four: The Enemy Is Inside You, But It Is Not You

Principle Number Five: The “Real You” Must Duel the “Resistance You”

Principle Number Six: Resistance Arises Second

Principle Number Seven: The Opposite of Resistance Is Assistance

“There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us.”

“Step one is to recognize [there is an enemy]. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. It saved my life, and it will save yours.”

“You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.”

“If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it.”

Resistance’s Two Tests

According to Pressfield, Resistance puts two questions to each and all of us. Each question has only one correct answer:

Test Number One “How bad do you want it?

Test Number Two “Why do you want it?”

“If your answer is not [totally committed], put this book down and throw it away.”

“If you checked [For fun or beauty Because I have no choice], you get to stay on the island.”

“The Big Crash is so predictable, across all fields of enterprise, that we can practically set our watches by it.”

“Crashes are hell, but in the end, they’re good for us.”

“A crash means we have failed. We gave it everything we had and we came up short. A crash does not mean we are losers. A crash means we have to grow.”

“A crash means we’re at the threshold of learning something, which means we’re getting better, we’re acquiring the wisdom of our craft. A crash compels us to figure out what works and what doesn’t work—and to understand the difference.”

“Whatever the cause, the Big Crash compels us to go back now and solve the problem that we either created directly or set into motion unwittingly at the outset.”

“Our greatest fear is fear of success.”

“When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.”

“No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash.”

“It takes balls of steel to ship.”

“When we ship, we’re exposed.”

“When we ship, we open ourselves to judgment in the real world. Nothing is more empowering because it plants us solidly on Planet Earth and gets us out of our self-devouring, navel-centered fantasies and self-delusions.”

Other Books by Steven Pressfield

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work

Recommended Reading

If you like Do The Work, you may also enjoy the following books:

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) Seth Godin

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2Ih0VeQ

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 Do Over shines a light on the four core skills you need to build an amazing career: relationships, skills, character and hustle, and shows you how to develop each one of them and use them in different stages of your career.

Today’s a big day. It’s the day Jon Acuff’s book trilogy is completed on Four Minute Books! After Quitter and Start, Do Over now completes this set in the four minute hall of fame.

Quitter was about quitting your job. Start was about starting your own. Do Over is what happens before, after, and sometimes in-between those two. It shows you how to intentionally build your career by focusing on developing four skills, each of which is particularly helpful in a certain stage of your career.

Here are 2 of them, plus another valuable lesson from Jon’s book:

• Look at what’s in your Career Savings Account™.
• Break through any career ceiling with new skills.
• Take a career jump by investing in your own character.

Ready to call do over? Let’s do it over then!

Lesson 1: Take stock of your Career Savings Account™.

Jon says just like a filled bank account helps you through a financial slump, a filled Career Savings Account™ helps you through a career slump.

And it happens quite often. According to the 2014 Gallup poll around 70% of Americans are either not engaged (=enthusiastic) in their jobs or downright hate them. But changing your career and rebuilding it requires courage.

The way you build that courage is by making sure you have the abilities to handle whatever comes next. Jon suggests the following formula to calculate what’s in your CSA so far:

Relationships + Skills + Character x Hustle = Career Savings Account™

Knowing you have a good network, solid technical skills, and a strong character, plus being prepared to do what it takes are the foundation of a strong CSA. Jon even created a quiz to help you take stock.

Lesson 2: Learn new skills to break through career ceilings.

Sometimes everything seems to be going fine, even though it feels like it doesn’t. When you can’t really put your finger on what’s wrong, because technically, everything is well at your job, that’s often a sign you’ve hit a career ceiling.

You’re paid well, you routinely handle all your tasks and are in good standing with all your colleagues. However, even though you’re doing great, you just can’t get to the next level. No promotion, no head hunters contacting you, and no promising side projects on the horizon.

In that case, your Do Over requires an objective assessment of your skills. What are you good at? What are you missing? Which skills do you need to take your career to the next step?

Dig deep, Jon says a lot of our skills are often invisible, hiding beneath the surface. For example, if you’re the one organizing the annual company Christmas party every year, that’s probably a good sign you’re very organized in general. But once you see that, you’ll probably also notice that another skill you don’t have would go quite well with it.

For example, if you’re good at organizing, how about actively creating and marketing events too, so you have something to organize and an event to pull off? By going out and acquiring exactly those skills that complement the ones you already have you round out your skill set, which is just what you need to smash through that career ceiling and rise up!

Lesson 3: Invest in your own character to get ready to take a career jump.

But maybe you don’t want to break through a career ceiling. Maybe you want to leave that building altogether, take a career jump, and start your own thing.

In that case, the most crucial aspect you need to develop first is your character. Once you take the leap a lot of responsibility will rest on your shoulders and you’ll have to be a leader, first leading yourself and eventual co-workers later on. The strongest business is built on the strongest you.

The three most important character traits Jon’s observed in his 16-year stint through corporate America are generosity, empathy and presence.

Generosity is simple: give more than you receive. I remember the very first day at my internship my advisor won tickets to see Pompeii in the cinema, and he invited me and another intern to join him. I’ll never forget that. For him it was probably a small gesture, but for me it was huge to be treated like a friend when it was just my first day as an intern there.

Empathy can be trained by asking yourself one simple question, over and over again, when you talk to others: “How would I feel if I was in his/her shoes?”. That’s all you need. Just mentally stepping into someone else’s perspective will help you understand them so much better and judge them a lot less.

Presence is about being in the moment and paying attention. So the next time a friend tells you a story, put down your phone, look at her and really listen to her problems.

Invest in your character whenever you get a chance. All it takes is time, and you can never know when the next career jump opportunity presents itself, at which you’ll be glad you did.

My personal take-aways

Simple, funny, straightforward advice. Jon is really cool. He tries to bring out the best in others, without sounding preachy or like he knows it all. The phrases and formulas he coins make his work more memorable, and it’s easy to recall the concepts later on.

If you’re just not feeling it at whatever work you’re doing right now, this is a great book to pick up and learn from!

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Deep Work proposes the idea that we have lost our ability to focus deeply and immerse ourselves in a complex task, but not without showing you that it’s a skill more than worth cultivating again and giving you four rules to help you focus more than ever before.

I’m still digesting all the valuable lessons from So Good They Can’t Ignore You, but I couldn’t help taking a peek at what Cal’s up to now. He’s been talking about the idea of deep work for quite some time on his blog (a way for him to test potential book topics), and now the accompanying book is out.

Given that we now suffer from an 8-second, less-than-goldfish attention span, Cal’s call to focus is more than appropriate. Digging deeper into deliberate practice, a concept he described in his last book, Deep Work suggests that being able to completely immerse yourself in a complex task is a rare, valuable and meaningful skill. The second part of the book then outlines four rules you can use to cultivate a deep work ethic.

Here are 3 lessons from Deep Work to help you go from busy to brilliant:

• There are four strategies for deep work, all of which require intention.
• Productive meditation can help you work deeper, even while you’re taking a break.
• Stop working at the same time each day.

I hope you brought your scuba diving gear, ’cause we’re about to go deep!

Lesson 1: Use one of these four deep work strategies, but be intentional about it.

I’m glad that Cal isn’t one of those “one-size-fits-all-advice” kind of people. He knows that different things will work for different people, so when making his case for deep work he suggests four different strategies:

The monastic approach. Monastic comes from monastery – the place where monks live. It means shutting yourself off completely, for example by moving to a cabin in the woods to write a novel, and not come back until it’s finished.

The bimodal approach. This prioritizes deep work above everything else. You could set a 4-6 hour block each day for deep work, for example, where you lock yourself in your office, similar to the monastic approach. However, once that block is over, you’re free to do everything else that might be on your plate.

The rhythmic approach. This chunks down your work into time blocks, similar to the Pomodoro technique, and uses a calendar to track your progress. For example you’d plan your week ahead of time and put 10 blocks of 90 minutes on your calendar, and make working with timed blocks a habit.

The journalistic approach. If you have a busy daily routine, this works well. What you do is to simply dedicate any, unexpected free time to deep work.

I’m currently alternating between 2 and 4, depending on the kind of day that’s ahead of me, but would love to move completely to 2 over time. Being intentional about your deep work approach requires monitoring how you spend your time, so one of your first steps in making this decision should be to track your habits. You’ll quickly be able to separate productive from unproductive time and spot patterns.

Speaking of which…

Lesson 2: Make the most of unproductive time with productive meditation.

This is an idea I really like and have recently been using more and more, without knowing I’d find it in this book. Cal calls it productive meditation, and it comes down to using your “unproductive” time to do deep thinking.

For example, if you’re taking the subway to work each morning, and know you have 30 minutes to and from work, in which you can’t do much else, use this time to try solving a complex problem in your mind. Commuting, showering, household chores, buying groceries and taking a walk (with or without your dog) are all great opportunities to think.

Ever since getting an activity tracker, I try to walk 10,000 steps per day, which is why I often end up taking a long 1-2 hour walk in the evening. I often spend this time thinking about how I can make Four Minute Books more remarkable, what I could create that is so new and unfamiliar that it takes things to a whole new level, and so on.

The next time you have some “down time”, in which you do menial tasks, latch on to a big problem, try to see sub-problems of it, break it down and solve it.

Lesson 3: Quit work at the same time each day, and stick to it.

Cal has a habit of ending his work day at 5:30 PM, every day. No emails, no internet, no to-do lists, no computer after that. He describes his practice in this 7-year old blog post, and while his systems evolve, planning both work and free time have remained a constant factor.

Your brain needs some space each night to wind down, and it won’t get that if you have an as-much-as-possible work ethic. Limit yourself by quitting work and not checking email, or, even better, shutting down your computer, at the same time each day. This way, you’ll have a fixed slot of free time every day to recuperate.

Your mind will keep working below the surface, but you won’t burn yourself out by working around the clock.

For example, I let Inbox Pause move my email to my inbox at 11 AM and 6 PM. After I check it for the second time at 6 PM, I wrap up work and shut down my laptop (most days, it’s a work in progress), so I can then exercise and have a proper dinner, and I feel much better for it.

My personal take-aways

I’ve only checked out some previews, read excerpts, interviews with Cal, articles on his blog, and the summary on Blinkist for this one so far, but I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I’ve been moving towards a deep work mindset already, and I’m feeling more productive than ever. I highly recommend you explore the concept of Deep Work.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

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Deep Work Summary

The Book in Three Sentences

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style work, often performed while distracted.

Deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy.

The Five Big Ideas

In order to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of, you need to commit to deep work.

The ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed, are two core abilities for thriving in today’s economy.

“To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.”

“Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”

Free Download: Download a free PDF version of this book summary. (Includes exercises not included in the post.)

Deep Work Summary

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.

Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Newport argues if you spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness, you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

“Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today.”

In order to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of, you need to commit to deep work.

Newport calls deep work, “the superpower of the 21st century.”

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

In Newport’s own words,

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

The ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed, are two core abilities for thriving in today’s economy.

“The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

The core components of deliberate practice are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

“This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.”

“By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill.”

“To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.”

“When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.”

According to Sophie Leroy, “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.”

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

“Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and non-technological.”

“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”

“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”

“Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”

“You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.”

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”

“You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.”

“You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.”

“[Donald] Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.”

“[Carl] Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else.”

“[The rhythmic philosophy] argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.”

John Paul Newport on Walter Isaacson, “It was always amazing … he could retreat up to the bedroom for a while, when the rest of us were chilling on the patio or whatever, to work on his book … he’d go up for twenty minutes or an hour, we’d hear the typewriter pounding, then he’d come down as relaxed as the rest of us … the work never seemed to faze him, he just happily went up to work when he had the spare time.”

The journalist philosophy: you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.

“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.”

“Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts.”

“Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.”

“Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured.”

“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task.”

“[Peter Shankman] booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand.”

The Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX)

These deep work rules include the ability to:

Focus on the Wildly Important

Act on the Lead Measures

Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

Create a Cadence of Accountability

“For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.”

David Brooks: “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”

“In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.”

“Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.”

“Lead measures, on the other hand, ‘measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.’”

“Lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.”

“At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.”

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

Deep work training must involve two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.

“Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.”

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.

“The first step [to the Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection] is to identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.”

“The key is to keep the list limited to what’s most important and to keep the descriptions suitably high-level.”

“When you’re done you should have a small number of goals for both the personal and professional areas of your life.”

“Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they’re not tied to a onetime outcome.”

“The next step in this strategy is to consider the network tools you currently use. For each such tool, go through the key activities you identified and ask whether the use of the tool has a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact, or little impact on your regular and successful participation in the activity. Now comes the important decision: Keep using this tool only if you concluded that it has substantial positive impacts and that these outweigh the negative impacts.”

“After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit: Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?”

“If your answer is ‘no’ to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear ‘yes,’ then return to using the service.”

“The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.”

How long can deep work be sustained by an individual in a given day?

“[Anders Erickson] note[s] that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.”

“We spend much of our day on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time.”

Free Download: Download a free PDF version of this book summary. (Includes exercises not included in the post.)

Recommended Reading

If you like Deep Work, you may also like the following books:

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday

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