Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World(8)

This ability to learn hard things quickly, of course, isn’t just necessary for working well with intelligent machines; it also plays a key role in the attempt to become a superstar in just about any field—even those that have little to do with technology. To become a world-class yoga instructor, for example, requires that you master an increasingly complex set of physical skills. To excel in a particular area of medicine, to give another example, requires that you be able to quickly master the latest research on relevant procedures. To summarize these observations more succinctly: If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

Now consider the second core ability from the list shown earlier: producing at an elite level. If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value. Many developers, for example, can program computers well, but David Hansson, our example superstar from earlier, leveraged this ability to produce Ruby on Rails, the project that made his reputation. Ruby on Rails required Hansson to push his current skills to their limit and produce unambiguously valuable and concrete results.

This ability to produce also applies to those looking to master intelligent machines. It wasn’t enough for Nate Silver to learn how to manipulate large data sets and run statistical analyses; he needed to then show that he could use this skill to tease information from these machines that a large audience cared about. Silver worked with many stats geeks during his days at Baseball Prospectus, but it was Silver alone who put in the effort to adapt these skills to the new and more lucrative territory of election forecasting. This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Having established two abilities that are fundamental to getting ahead in our new, technology-disrupted world, we can now ask the obvious follow-up question: How does one cultivate these core abilities? It’s here that we arrive at a central thesis of this book: The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.

The dependence of these abilities on deep work isn’t immediately obvious; it requires a closer look at the science of learning, concentration, and productivity. The sections ahead provide this closer look, and by doing so will help this connection between deep work and economic success shift for you from unexpected to unimpeachable.





Deep Work Helps You Quickly Learn Hard Things


“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”

This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges wrote the book as a guide to “the development and deepening of the mind” for those called to make a living in the world of ideas. Throughout The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges recognizes the necessity of mastering complicated material and helps prepare the reader for this challenge. For this reason, his book proves useful in our quest to better understand how people quickly master hard (cognitive) skills.

To understand Sertillanges’s advice, let’s return to the quote from earlier. In these words, which are echoed in many forms in The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration. This idea turns out to be ahead of its time. In reflecting on the life of the mind in the 1920s, Sertillanges uncovered a fact about mastering cognitively demanding tasks that would take academia another seven decades to formalize.

This task of formalization began in earnest in the 1970s, when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice.

Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

American culture, in particular, loves the storyline of the prodigy (“Do you know how easy this is for me!?” Matt Damon’s character famously cries in the movie Good Will Hunting as he makes quick work of proofs that stymie the world’s top mathematicians). The line of research promoted by Ericsson, and now widely accepted (with caveats*), de-stabilizes these myths. To master a cognitively demanding task requires this specific form of practice—there are few exceptions made for natural talent. (On this point too, Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, “Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.” Ericsson couldn’t have said it better.)