EP. 94 – Deep Work

[Intro]

“Deep work, therefore, is key to extracting meaning for your profession in the manner described by Dreyfus and Kelly. It follows that to embrace deep work in your own career, and to direct it toward cultivating your skill, is an effort that can transform a knowledge work job from a distracted, draining obligation into something satisfying - a portal to a world full of shining, wondrous things.”

Deep Work is a book written by the famous author and professor Cal Newport.

His other best selling books include: So Good They Can't Ignore You / How to Be a High School Superstar / How to Become a
Straight A Student / How to Win at College

Deep work has had great impact on the way I do my work every day, and it has already reaped me benefits such as writing and publishing a book by myself and making many sales and receiving massive feedback in only 3 days.

For these reasons, I really encourage you to read the book that I am about to summarize here:

Deep Work - Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

We shall begin!

Today's society is focused on multitasking. Companies prefer workers that can multitask on open floor spaces, and are interrupted every minute or so with e-mails, notifications and tweets. This is what we were taught to understand as "productive". And workers that can handle that are rewarded.

For that reason, the attention residue - the attention that remains focused on the former task as your focus shifts to the next one - does not allow people to achieve deep work.

Deep work, as stated in this book, is a type of work that is valuable, rare, and meaningful. They are professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration, and they create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. (pg.3). In short, it is the ability to focus on ONE task with no distractions whatsoever, allowing your mind to achieve the flow state - a state in which you stretch your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity.

Let's briefly summarize the three main arguments for deep work: that it is valuable, rare, and meaningful.

It is valuable because it is the type of work that allows people to change society and cause great impact. Carl Jung, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates: those three have had in common the ability to focus on ONE task. Those three have also changed life as we know it. Jung was in a state of deep work when he wrote his masterpieces that are studied in Psychology up until today. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both have been able to create massive opportunity and growth for our era through h the developing of new technologies.

In the book, the author argues that we are going through the Great Restructuring of our economy, where machines are often times more valuable than employees. However, this is not driving down jobs. Instead, it is dividing them. That is, many people will lose in this new economy, but there are winners.

They are:

The high skilled workers - people who are able to work with complex systems and machines; the superstars - that is, the master of their crafts; and the owners - those with enough capital to invest and reap the returns in this new era.

Having acknowledged the winners of this economy, one must understand how to become one. To be the third type requires massive capital. However, to be the first and second, all you need is deep work - because deep work will allow you to learn and master new skills quickly, and it will also allow you to produce at an elite level with speed and quality. When you can master these two, you are set for success in this new era.


It is also important notice that mastering these two things (learning faster and producing at an elite level) allows you to produce an unprecedented amount of value in today's society without moving as much capital (or even human capital) as it would be required years ago. The author mentions Instagram, a company that hit the 9-figures mark (billion dollars) without moving nearly as much human capital needed to hit the same mark in the industrial era.

Deep works is rare because few people in our era understand its value and replicate it. People think being busy is checking e-mails and responding to them, rather than being actually productive for their field or career. Facebook uses open floor spaces and keeps their employees open to request at ALL times. This happens because it's hard to measure the impact on the bottom line of a company of people's fractured attention.

And when we are not sure of those impacts, we tend to remain on auto pilot and do things "as they have always been done", because it's easier that way. The start up era showed that collaboration and open floor spaces are "good". This is what the author calls "the metric black hole" together with the "principle of least resistance".

To sum up: it is hard to measure the effects of deep work on the bottom line of a company. For this reason, the principle of least resistance comes into play, so nearly nobody adopts deep work in their workday.

The principle of least resistance is, as the author states: "in a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviours that are easiest in the moment." (pg. 58).

In short words, the culture of connectivity persists because it's easier than applying deep work into our busy lives.

The author also suggests that deep work is rare because people trick themselves with a mind game. Most employers will think that being busy is the same as being productive - when it isn't. Because it is hard to find clears indicators of what it means to be productive in various work settings, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. (pg. 64)

Lastly, deep work is meaningful.

The author provides three strong arguments for such claim. First, the author turns back to science to argue that deep work allows you to focus your attention on the right things. It cites the science writer Winifred Gallagher, who found a remarkable connection between attention and happiness. In short, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore plays in defining the quality of our life. In Gallagher's own words: the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

After, the author turns to Psychology. Cal Newman, with the help of a writer just as famous as the difficulty to spell his last name, Csikszentmihalyi, argues that depth in work actually brings happiness and makes the work more enjoyable. Contrary to popular belief, "jobs are easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed" (pg. 84)

The experiments in Psychology have proven that the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject's life satisfaction (pg. 84). The underlying conclusion is: to build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. (pg. 86)

Lastly - and to be honest, my favourite - comes the Philosophical Argument for Depth. In this discussion, the author brings up two authors: Hurbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, both well recognized professors at Berkley and Harvard. These two scholars together published a book called All Things Shining, which explores how sacredness and meaning have changed, and how it may be coming to an end in our era, what leads to not only a boring, but almost unbearable life.(pg. 87).

Both authors suggest that the post-Enlightenment era, as a result of Descartes, have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, and that creates a living that is unbearable. Both authors come to the craftsman crafting a sword as an example of someone finding meaning in their work - in their craft. With that, the craftsman is able to find meaning in something other than himself, what leads to a better and more fulfilling life.