Work

Focus is like a super power in most knowledge work jobs. Train this ability. Protect deep work on your calendar. Support these sessions through special rituals and spaces.

Most guys will live and die without ever doing anything truly remarkable. They'll work jobs they tolerate, take vacations to places everyone's been, and fill their free time with Netflix and social media.

Look at the lives of men who defined what it means to be truly interesting:

Roosevelt hunted big game in Africa, survived being shot during a speec

If you double your skill, for example, the number of people producing at your level probably falls by much more than a factor of two. This helps explain Karlsson’s results. As he spent more time optimizing his essays, the pool of competition diminished rapidly, greatly increasing the value to his potential readers. The best strategy for growing his

Bottom Line: Treat your time as a graduate student like a professional musician treats his or her performance repertoire. If you’re not constantly straining yourself to learn more and perform better, you’re in danger of being left behind.

The pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic: they’ve invested more time than you’d expect.

This breed of company will never spring from the mind of a committee; it would never have been permitted to endure in its current form, with thousands of employees organizing themselves around problems at hand, if we had submitted to the conventional managerial model in American corporate life.

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas