My notes from Deep Work

by Cal Newport

Deep Work

by Cal Newport

Deep Work - professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

Two reasons why deep work is a skill that has great value today

• learning - complex systems change rapidly, you must master the skill of quickly learning complicated things, and this requires deep work
• impacts of digital network revolution - cuts both ways: create something useful and the reachable audience is limitless, this magnifies the reward

To succeed you have to produce absolute best stuff you're capable of producing, a task that requires depth.

High-skilled workers

Those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?

The Superstars

Talent is not a commodity you can buy in a bulk and combine to reach the needed levels.

The Owners

Those with capital to invest in the new technologies that are driving the Great Restructuring.

To become a winner in the new economy the following core abilities are crucial:

• ability to quickly master hard things
• ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

Intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.

Because technologies change rapidly, the process of mastering hard things never ends: you must be able to do it quickly again and again.