25 Deep Lessons from the book "Deep Work" by Cal Newport

Depth is where the magic is. DEEP WORK makes a compelling case for cultivating intense focus and offers immediately actionable steps for infusing more of it into our lives.

I, hereby, list down the 25 deep lessons that I learned from this awesome book. I know that I need to keep practicing this learning day in and day out. These learning are worded and appended in a way that makes it easier for most of us to understand and absorb...

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Thought-Provoking Life Lessons from the Book

1/ Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.

2/ For many types of work—especially when pursuing innovation—collaborative deep work can yield better results.

3/ Distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-and-spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals.

4/ Spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you’ll struggle to concentrate.

5/ When walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention.

6/ If you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, “I’m done with work until tomorrow,” you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left unresolved in your mind will keep battling for your attention throughout the evening (a battle that they’ll often win).

7/ Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.

8/ By supporting deep work with rock-solid routines that make sure a little bit gets done on a regular basis, the rhythmic scheduler will often log a larger total number of deep hours per year.

9/ The five most common desires that a deep worker fights against include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work … checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.

10/ You can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day, and if you’re like the German subjects from the Hofmann and Baumeister study, these competing desires will often win out.

11/ You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

12/ The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

13/ You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

14/ Deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

15/ Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

16/ This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

17/ The advantage of cultivating concentration so intense is that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.

18/ If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. In most cases, it is actually not.

19/ Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

20/ Big trends in business today actively decrease people’s ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

21/ High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).

22/ When you switch from Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true.

23/ Deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration.

24/ To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

25/ To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive.

Hope these deep lessons will help shape up your thought process to some extent and help you lead a better life.

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Regards

Manoj Arora

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