Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

Myelin around neuron is good.

we have advanced from this elevated metaphor to a decidedly less poetic explanation expressed in terms of oligodendrocyte cells. But this sequence of thinking about thinking points to an inescapable conclusion: To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

Oligodendracyte are responsible for mylin

To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

The meaning and usage of deep work

When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

Work for long and uninterrupted session to reach peak of your potentional.

Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things. All of these trends are enabled by the difficulty of directly measuring the value of depth or the cost of ignoring it.

Why we need deep work and the disadvantages in lack of it.

I’ll make three arguments to support this claim. These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical. I’ll show that regardless of the angle from which you attack the issue of depth and knowledge work, it’s clear that by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive craftsmen like Ric Furrer. The thesis of this final chapter in Part 1, therefore, is that a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.

The author comes to his arguments and evidences to proof the moto behind deep work.

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

what is the way or motivation to do deep work.

She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

the difference between perception of young people and that of older people.

From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression.

Descarta's impact

The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.”

how to imbibe meaning into life.

Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.

Why only good intention to deep work not enough.

This chain method

A chain methid to creat habits to do deep work.

This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed.

How can deep work habits be imbibed.