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How to focus on the present moment
How to cultivate empathy and understanding towards others
How to set personal and professional goals
Introduction: Deep Work Defined
1. Deep Work
- Performing activities in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit.
- These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
- Psychologists used to refer to deep work as “being in the flow."
- Requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.
2. Shallow Work
- Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted
- Tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Deep work is the type of effort that is needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field.
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The Idea: Minimize The Shallow
□ Minimize the shallow.
• Shallow work includes a low level of focus and consists of tasks that can be performed while distracted. These tasks don’t create new value.
• It is much more satisfying to create something extraordinary that only you can create.
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The Idea: Master Hard Things
□ Master hard things quickly.
- Focus intensely without distraction.
- Tackle relevant topics sysyematically.
- Deliberate practice.
• Focus on developing your high-level skills, and you will be more valuable.
• Be a superstar. Climb to the top by becoming the best in your field.
• Work your way up to being an owner. Owners are the most valuable people out there.
• Immerse yourself in your work to master hard things quickly.
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The Idea: Produce At An Elite Level
□ Produce at an elite level.
- Enforce strict isolation until task is completed.
- Consolidate work into intense, uninterrupted pulses (batching).
- Maximize performance on 1 task.
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The Idea: Deliberate Practice
□ Deliberate practice.
- Attention focused on a specific skill or idea that you are trying to improve or master
- Receive feedback so you can correct your approach
• Uninterrupted concentration, no distractions.
• To be great at something is to be well-myelinated
• Isolate relevant neural circuit enough to trigger myelination.
• Isolated, repetitive firing of neurons
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Quickbites 1
3 groups that will thrive/ are at an advantage:
- The high-skilled worker - those that can work with intelligent machines.
- The superstars - those who are best at what they do.
- The owner - those with access to capital. Venture capitalists.
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Quickbites 2
2 Core abilities:
1. Master hard things quickly.
- Intelligent machines are complicated, hard to master and change rapidly.
- Therefore the process of mastering hard things never ends, you must be able to do it quickly, again and again.
- If you can't learn, you can't thrive.
2. Produce at an elite level.
- Transform latent potential to tangible results
- If you don't produce, you won't thrive
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The Idea: Produce At An Elite Level 2
•High quality work produced = time spent x intensity of focus
• More intensity of focus, less time spent
• Attention residue - 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.
• Work on a single hard task for a long time without switching to minimize the negative impact of attention residue.
• the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance
• Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
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CURATED BY
Curious about different takes? Check out our Deep Work Summary book page to explore multiple unique summaries written by Deepstash users.
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