Cal Newport's Blog, page 39

Neal Stephenson’s Latest Novel Tackles Social Media (Hint: Future Humans are Not Impressed)

Stellar Social Media

In the first line of Neal Stephenson’s epic sci fi tome, Seveneves, the moon shatters into seven pieces. Two years later, all life on earth is destroyed by the resulting rain of moon rocks from above.

Fortunately, before this cataclysm begins, humanity manages to send a small representative group of the species into space to live in a floating swarm of space station modules. These modules, naturally enough, are connected by social media applications running over a mesh network.

Given the projected importance of this network for maintaining a community, a social media celebrity named Tavistock Prowse is selected as one of the lucky survivors to join the new space colony. I’m not giving away anything not already stated on the book’s back cover when I note that things do not go well. (Especially for Tavistock Prowse.)

Enough people survive, however, for humanity to continue. As the book jumps 5000 years ahead, we learn that future humans have studied the life of Tavistock, and more specifically his interaction with social media.

They’re not impressed…

Tav’s Mistake

Here’s some exposition starting on page 641:

Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before [life on earth ended] understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, [a large segment of the future human population] called it Tav’s Mistake. They didn’t want to make it again.

This aversion is expressed in the future humans’ technology. Though they live in massive floating space stations, their personal electronics, as Stephenson explains, are less capable than the average smartphones from the time of earth’s destruction.

This is no accident:

Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinct pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine.

Have I mentioned recently how much I like Neal Stephenson?

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On an unrelated book note, my friend Ryan Holiday just published his new book: Ego is the Enemy. I read it and it’s good. In the world of practical non-fiction, Holiday has carved out a effective niche that crosses erudition with the drive for better self-performance. His last book became a surprise hit among professional athletes. I predict this one will have similar resonance among the high achieving class.

The Principles of Immersive Single Tasking

Immersive Single Tasking

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an intriguing application of virtual reality: helping knowledge workers achieve hyper productive states.

To be clear, when I say “productive,” I’m not referring to the efficient processing of the types of shallow tasks that computers will one day soon automate (think: emails and administrative drudgery).

I’m instead talking about wringing the most possible value out of your brain as you work deeply on important objectives. In other words, the type of effort that’s becoming increasingly valuable in our 21st century economy.

I called this application of virtual reality immersive single tasking. In this post, I want to provide some more details about the key principles that I think will allow virtual reality to unlock this vision of hyper productivity.

Principle #1: Disruption of Distraction Patterns.

As psychology professor Art Markman recently wrote in Inc., our brains are “time prediction machines.” They build patterns around how often we should check email and social media when in the context of our office and then automatically follow those patterns.

If your mind has learned to check email every 20 minutes when at your desk, Markman explained, then every 20 minutes it will automatically interrupt your current train of thought and redirect your attention to your lurking inbox.

Here’s Markman:

“As a result [of this effect], deciding you want to pay attention to other work for longer stretches of time requires more than just making a resolution to be more diligent about reading for longer periods of time or engaging more sustained effort to work on a key report.  You have to disrupt the timing the brain has learned.”

Immersive single tasking offers a powerful tool to create this disruption. If you use virtual reality to bring yourself to an environment used only for deep work, your brain is not given the opportunity to ingrain new distraction patterns in this setting.

Artists, of course, have leveraged this effect for centuries by retreating to remote locations for creative work (c.f., here and here), but most knowledge workers cannot escape to a rustic cabin every time they need to think deeply.

Principle #2: Leveraging Visual Cognition.

One of the best known scenes from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report is Tom Cruise using an augmented reality system to rapidly manipulate floating virtual images and videos with his hands. As Kevin Kelly reveals in his insightful new book The Inevitable, this scene was not pure fantasy. Spielberg assembled a team of scientists and futurists to help him understand what types of tools to expect in the future.

Virtual reality (and its close twins augmented and mixed reality) has brought us to this future. It will unlock many such forms of interactive visual cognition in which you can embody the concepts relevant to your deep work in informative visual objects.

When I recently demoed Tilt Brush on an HTC Vive, for example, I was struck by how useful such visualizations might be to my work in distributed algorithm theory. I imagined, for example, what it would be like if I could examine in three dimensions the behavior of a symmetry breaking strategy on a relevant set of graphs floating around me.

Similarly, imagine the metrics relevant to your business’s performance arranged around you into a literal data landscape, where interesting trends stand out as visually arresting features.

Principle #3: Enhancing Creativity with Awe.

The sense of awe generated by encountering a sublime scene can lead to a state of expansive thinking well-suited to creative insight. (It also makes people happier and less stressed, among other benefits.)

Virtual reality, of course, is heralded as a source of digital awe, and is therefore well-suited to boost creativity.

This effect is perhaps best captured in images.  Imagine, for example, that you’re trying to craft a compelling chapter to open your new novel. While you grapple for inspiration, would you rather be looking at this:

Or this (a screenshot taken from an Oculus Rift demo):

Bottom Line

The concept of immersive single tasking is still new and my thoughts at this point are still preliminary. Accordingly, the above list of principles might change if this idea ever actually evolves.

But the underlying notion is one I continue to think is worth investigation. Technology is not always the foe of the type of important, impactful, meaningful, deep work I so often laud. If applied right, it can make such efforts far more common and effective.

At the same time, I should also note that I’m realistic enough to realize that immersive single tasking is probably not currently at the top of the list of VR priorities. But one can hope.

(Desk image by Jonathan Koren)

Jim Clark on Productivity: Don’t Spend Your Day on Social Media, Instead Spend Your Day Building the Next Big Thing

A Pioneer Pontificates

Jim Clark knows how to create valuable things. He’s one of the few people in the recent history of American business to start three different billion dollar companies.

Clark also knows about technology: all three of his billion dollar companies were Silicon Valley startups.

We should, in other words, take his thoughts seriously when he discusses productivity in the digital age, which he did, a few years ago, in an interview with Stanford president John Hennessy (see above).

Around 41 minutes into the event, Clark delivers the following heterodox judgment on social media:

“I just don’t appreciate social networking, which has blown up in recent years. In part, because [I recently attended a panel on social media where a panelist was] just raving about people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook…so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: the guy whose spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you every think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done? That’s the fundamental problem…people waste too much time on that.”

Clark then provided a glimpse into his own highly productive work habits:

“In my life, it’s been a lot about hard work and focus and study and very concentrated study, not about – you know – lots of interruptions, I’m guilty as anyone — but I turn my phone off or turn the buzzer off and make it unavailable for a good six hours a day. And I work — I still work. I like programming, I like doing things that are productive.”

In other words, no one every made a fortune being good at using Facebook. But there are many people like Clark who made a fortune putting in the deep work necessary to create the type of complicated systems that run services like Facebook.

Which group would you rather belong to?

(Hat tip: Gabriel)

The Deliberate Creative

The Deliberate Creative

Last month, Scott Barry Kaufman posted an article titled “Creativity is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice.”

Kaufman was responding to Peak: Anders Ericsson’s recent book on expert performance.

At the core of Kaufman’s critique is the idea that deliberate practice does not work well for “almost any creative domain” [emphasis his].

As he summarizes:

Deliberate practice is really important for fields such as chess and instrumental performance because they rely on consistently replicable behaviors that must be repeated over and over again. But not all domains of human achievement rely on consistently replicable behaviors. For most creative domains, the goals and ways of achieving success are constantly changing, and consistently replicable behaviors are in fact detrimental to success.

This discussion caught my attention because my day job is the quintessential creative endeavor. As a theoretical computer scientist, I solve math proofs for a living. To conjure something that makes it past the brutally competitive peer review process in my field usually requires an original approach that makes progress where other really smart people have been stuck.

This reality is why I’m able to draw with some confidence from a well of personal experience when I note that I strongly disagree with Kaufman.

99% Perspiration

Where Kaufman and I diverge is in our understanding of how deliberate practice fits into the creative process. Early in his article, Kaufman reveals the spindly straw man he plans to joust:

“…scientists can’t keep publishing the same paper over and over again, and writers can’t keep writing the same critically acclaimed novel over and over again and expect the same acclaim…How many times would Lady Gaga have to consistently wear her meat dress without people getting bored?”

Kaufman seems to propose that what it means for a creative to practice deliberately is to keep repeating the same project again and again without change.

This is a bizarre interpretation.

Kaufman, for example, cites chess players and musicians as examples where deliberate practice is useful. And yet, chess players don’t rehash the exact same strategy over and over again — they instead innovate in creative ways to counter the play of a given opponent.

Musicians, similarly, don’t play the same song their whole career — they instead continually write new songs, and the good ones keep pushing the boundaries of their genre.

Deliberate practice, in these examples, is necessary because it’s what generates the expertise on which their creativity rests. You cannot exhibit the thrilling creativity of a chess grandmaster until you’ve spent the 10,000 deliberate hours necessary to internalize the game’s intricacies.

The same holds for most creative domains.

To return to my world, the very best theoreticians are those who put in the painstaking, deliberate hours required to keep up with the cutting edge in our field. Most scientists give up in this effort long before the stars, just like most chess players practice a lot less than Magnus Carlsen.

Our breakthroughs don’t tend to arrive ex nihlo (e.g., the above image), but instead tend to follow combinatorially from the right parts of the current cutting edge. (As I discuss in detail in SO GOOD.)

Edison summarized this observation more plainly when he quipped that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. In today’s creative economy, the perspiration is likely the result of deliberate practice.

As I’ve written before, our culture loves the idea that we’re all beautiful creative flowers just one inspiring journaling exercise away from changing the word.

But on this issue, I’m siding with Ericsson. Impactful innovation is exciting — but it almost always requires a relentless, deliberate acquisition of cutting edge skills. The final insight is often the easy part.

Even for Lady Gaga.

Top Performer Closes Friday at Midnight

Last Call

A quick and final reminder: registration for the next session of Top Performer closes Friday at Midnight PT (so that we can get started on Monday).

If you’re still considering, the course home page should hold answers to all of your questions.

Immersive Single Tasking: Virtual Reality and the Coming Age of Hyper-Productive Work

Ready Thinker One

Earlier this month, I demoed the HTC Vive virtual reality system. I was impressed. The Vive uses wall-mounted sensors that track your movements as you walk around a virtual space and interact with it using handheld wands.

The effect can be quite immersive.

At one point in the demo, I found myself in a small science lab. I could walk around and explore whirring gadgets on shelves. On a whim, I crouched down and peered under a sink and examined the pipes underneath.

It’s a scene straight out of Cline…but with less Dungeons and Dragons references.

Yesterday, however, I had a revelation about this technology. After giving a speech about deep work, I participated in a discussion with local entrepreneurs. Someone asked me what role virtual reality might play in supporting deep work.

A light bulb went off in my head. The answer was clear: potentially a lot!

Immersive Single Tasking

The appeal of virtual reality is the sense of immersion it creates. It takes you out of your normal world and places you somewhere new.

In my book, I talk a lot about the power of using special locations reserved only for deep thinking. With the help of virtual reality, this idea could be pushed to an extreme.

Imagine, for example, that when it comes time to…

…work on a math equation you can transport yourself to Kings College Hall (see above) to work on a giant whiteboard anachronistically added to the scene.
…tackle a new chapter in your science fiction novel you can place yourself in a quiet room in a space station with a rotating view of the galaxy twinkling outside your window.
…reflect on a major professional decision you can sit quietly at a Himalayan monastery and watch the breeze flutter prayer flags.

In other words, if used to enable the type of immersive single tasking described above, virtual reality has the potential to unlock massive amounts of deep work-fueled productivity.

Put another way, perhaps the best way to combat the addictive appeal of inboxes and feeds is to make the act of thinking hard even more appealing.

Top Performer is Open

The Return of Top Performer

Last fall, Scott Young and I launched the first session of Top Performer — an online course we spent over three years developing. As you might recall, Top Performer provides a systematic curriculum for:

identifying the skills that matter most in your profession;
constructing a deliberate plan to improve them rapidly; and
finding the time in your already busy schedule to consistently make progress on this endeavor.

The first session was a great success, so we’re opening up a new session. Between now and midnight Friday the Top Performer course is open again for sign ups. 

If you’re interested in finding out more you can visit the course web site which contains: detailed descriptions of the motivation, curriculum, and FAQs. There is also a video walkthrough and numerous video case studies from first session students. You can also view the overview video above.

I’ll post another short note around 24 hours before the end of the sign up period.  But that’s the last I’ll talk about this for a while.

I know online courses (and the sales process surrounding them) is not everyone’s cup of tea. If this includes you, please ignore this — we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

Edwin Land’s Deep Research

The Deep Life of Edwin Land

Edwin Land is famous for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation, but he’s also known as one of the twentieth century’s most innovative inventors. In addition to his famed work on instant film development, his research on polarizing filters led to many breakthroughs.

“What was Land like?…He was a true visionary,” is how his friend Elkan Bout described him.

What interests me most about Land, however, was his work habits. Here he is in a 1975 interview with Forbes magazine talking about his approach to innovation:

“If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess … My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.”

Land’s wikipedia entry notes that he was known for his “marathon research sessions,” elaborating: “When Land conceived of an idea, he would experiment and brainstorm until the problem was solved with no breaks of any kind.”

Famously, while researching polarized films, Land once went eighteen days without changing his clothes.

I like these stories because they underscores an important point that has been increasingly overlooked in an age that lauds open offices and social media-enabled serendipity: creativity is 99% hard, deep work. 

(Hat tip to Steve for bringing this quote to my attention.)

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

The Economic Operating System

I recently read Douglas Rushkoff’s provocative new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.

Rushkoff is a media theorist, but this book falls comfortably into the area of big think economics. Its premise is that the underlying “operating system” of our economy — capital growth above all else — is not a fundamental law of markets, but was instead something selected four hundred years ago for some less than noble reasons.

(For a more grounded take on the same premise see Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, which, if you’ll excuse a bit of trivia, was also a titular inspiration for my most recent book.)

Its Implications on Distraction

I’m not as interested as Rushkoff in making a moral judgment on the nuances of our market economy — a discussion above my pay grade.

What caught my attention with respect to our conversation here was the conclusion, implicit in his argument, that many of the features that have built the Internet into a weapon of mass distraction are not intrinsic to the medium, but are instead a side-effect of its cooption as a tool for capital growth.

That’s a heavy sentence. Let me attempt to unload it…

Rushkoff notes that after the biotech crash of the 1980’s, investors needed a new sector that could continue to fuel capital growth.
The Internet filled this role. Among other things, it exposed net users’ attention and personal data as an under-exploited resource that could be extracted and sold, and therefore support growth much in the way colonizing a country and extracting minerals from the ground once did.
As in any extractive industry, the more resources you can mine, the better. This led the way to attention engineering and the general/inevitable push to make applications and sites as addictive as possible.
This capital-driven push toward maximum addictiveness led to the shiny tangle of apps and infotainment sites that have become the bane of potential deep workers worldwide.

This is an important distinction.

When I take a stand against social media, in other words, I’m not taking a stand against the contents of your feed, but am instead taking a stand against these large companies’ insistence that the intrinsic value of my attention should flow into their coffers instead of being directed by me toward deep work on things I find important.

Rushkoff’s observations, however, do more than fuel righteousness. They also provide hope.

The Internet can and should be a source of peer-to-peer connection, serendipity, interestingness, and even revenue generation. But we shouldn’t necessarily expect the venture-backed corporations sprinting to generate 100x returns to be the best source of these rewards.

What We Learned Teaching Over 1000 Professionals How to Practice Deliberately

Top Performer Returns

Last October, Scott Young and I launched an online course called Top Performer, which teaches knowledge workers how to apply the insights of deliberate practice to excel professionally. The first session of the course was a big success, so, by popular demand, we’re going to open up a new session later in May.

To help prepare for this new session, Scott and I wrote a series of articles that share the most interesting insights we’ve learned from the over 1000 individuals who have gone through our curriculum to date.

We’ll be posting these articles over the next two weeks only on our email newsletters (to keep our respective blogs tidy).

Therefore, if you’re intrigued by the idea of deliberate practice in the workplace, sign up for my newsletter using the form at the top of my right sidebar.

If you already receive my posts in your inbox from me (e.g., and not from Google) then you’re all set. Similarly, if you already receive Scott’s posts by email — and if you don’t, you should!  — you’re also all set.

What to Expect from the Launch Process

I know some of you don’t like when I sell things (e.g., this course, my books), so I want to let you know in advance exactly what to expect from this launch process…

The article series mentioned above will be published on our email lists over the next two weeks. After those two weeks, we will briefly open Top Performer for sign-ups, so there will probably be a flurry of 2 – 3 posts/reminders on the blog and email list surrounding that short window.

And that’s it.