Britt Gage

Enter the MTA’s Extra Credit campaign, which is trying to sell students on the appeal of MetroCards (or later this year, free OMNY cards ). Last month, the agency began giving away a free virtual reality Meta Quest 2 headset each week to a random high school student who uses their student MetroCard and has perfect attendance that week.

If I were to add up all the “lost” years of my life when I studied, worked on, or invested in things that didn’t end up directly contributing to the handful of life-changing turning points, it wouldn’t just be a few lost years. It would be “lost” decades. But here’s the kicker: No one cares!

We all invest our time, efforts, and money into the... See more

The problem with the argument that it’s stupid to look for meaning in work—a form of false consciousness to find purpose in your job—and rare to love what you do is that it’s wrong. All sorts of people doing all kinds of work like the companionship they find in the workplace, the chance to get out of the house, the feeling of doing something, the... See more

In a distracted world, the ability to consistently do deep work is a competitive advantage.

It's impossible to create meaningful works of tech, writing, or art without the capacity to sit down and focus for extended periods.

You can start a company to make an impact and surround yourself with people on a similar journey, or you can seek to maximize the stock price and profits.

The larger the scale of work, the longer it takes. As a result, break work down into milestones to communicate at key moments and incrementally deliver otherwise.

Reaching the frontier of a field, you will stumble upon something that hasn’t been solved yet, which will make all the difference. Society will reward you for offering something it wants but hasn’t been able to obtain so far.

The way to that point is through trial and error, iterating, and uncovering different truths.

Stack rank all the candidates for a highly competitive school or job. Typically, offers would be made to the top-k candidates. Instead, make offers probabilistically, with probability proportional to

[approx # top tier candidates]

[candidate's stack rank]

. Benefits include: greater diversity of accepted candidates; less ridiculous resources spent

... See more