The Idea: Deliberate Practice

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.

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

•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.

□ Master hard things quickly.

1. Focus intensely without distraction.
2. Tackle relevant topics sysyematically.
3. 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.

□ 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.

□ Produce at an elite level.

1. Enforce strict isolation until task is completed.
2. Consolidate work into intense, uninterrupted pulses (batching).
3. Maximize performance on 1 task.

3 groups that will thrive/ are at an advantage:

1. The high-skilled worker - those that can work with intelligent machines.
2. The superstars - those who are best at what they do.
3. The owner - those with access to capital. Venture capitalists.