Cultivating Depth and Stillness in Research

So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things,  working at a natural pace, 9

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Meaning one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.

 but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the

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“What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage . ... When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage.

The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension

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If I wake up and touch my phone, I’ve already lost hours. Not because I’m browsing social media for hours, but because the mind has already been agitated, made unquiet, and the context switch back into thoughtfulness can take the whole morning. In other words, the addict part of my brain takes over and contaminates my ability to be contemplative. I... See more

It’s taken me a while to warm up to the idea that thinking is working, and that what is actually work can at first look lazy. I love Naval [Ravikant’s tweet], “Be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar.” More often than not, spending two hours thinking about a problem is a much better use of my time than taking two calls withou... See more