Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

This is a book about how to live disguised as a productivity book. If the only thing you're interested in is how to squeeze more work into every day, there are better resources such as David Allen's classic Getting Things Done. If you want more than that, don't miss Deep Work.

The message that stood out most to me was the connection between doing deep work and generally finding meaning in work. This idea seems to be a carry over from Newport's earlier book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, but since I haven't read that book, this was my first exposure to it.

Passion is often trotted out as the show horse we're all to chase if we're to find happiness and success in our careers. In Deep Work, Newport convincingly argues that it's actually skill and mastery that lead to passion and not the other way around. When we work at something long enough to get good at it, we find inherent satisfaction in doing it. This is partly due to Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi's very influential concept of “flow.” Flow the state we attain when we work at something that is right at the fine edge between too hard and too easy. We block out all other stimuli and go into a state of meditative work in which time passes quickly and in a deeply satisfying way. If we practice something enough to easily enter this flow state, we begin to associate these positive experiences with the work and develop a passion for the work.

Additionally, when we create work we're passionate about, it can lead to an overall happier life. This is part of the idea behind another book, Rapt, which again, I haven't read, but is summarized briefly in Deep Work. The core idea is that we are what we think. When we spend time focusing on pleasant or positive aspects of our experiences, we start to frame everything that happens in our lives in a way that is congruous with the positive things we're focusing on. It seems like a pretty obvious conclusion, but when placed alongside the idea of creating passionate work, it's easy to see how important it is to do work we're good at. It is a direct contributor to our overall happiness.

Happiness is great, but there are a couple other things we want from work, both of which circle back to make happiness itself easier to find. Obviously, the first is money. Once the money is flowing, we seek meaning. Newport makes arguments for how deep work can lead to both of these.

Money is the easy one. Robots are taking over the world. If your job can be done by someone with less than a college education, it's very likely that at some point in the not too distant future, it'll be automated by a robot. If you can become someone who builds or works with these robots in a way that increases automation, you will probably make a lot of money. If you don't do that, you can still make money by being one of the best in your field, whatever you field may be. In order to do either of those though, you're going to have to be able focus deeply and produce a lot of good work quick. This comes at a time when people who can do deep work are fewer and fewer. As Nicholas Carr shows in The Shallows, the increasingly distracted world we live in means that many people's brains are permanently altered so as to render them incapable of extended periods of focus and concentration.

It should be said that while deep work is one way to greatly increase your probability of making money, there ways to do it without deep work. For example, having capital to begin with and investing it or there are some forms of management where deep work isn't as much of a requirement. In most other fields though, the ability to work deeply is increasingly rare and increasingly necessary.

We also crave meaning. For a long time, meaning was found principally in the domain of religion, usually state run, or in the government of the state you happened to have been born into. This is argued in the book All Things Shining by Harvard philosophy chair Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. This is another book that I've added to my queue, so I won't take on the argument directly, but rather quote from Deep Work to make the point. Here's how Newport describes the loss of religious or state imbued meaning:

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. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”

Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. To illustrate this claim, they use as an organizing example an account of a master wheelwright—the now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels. “Because each piece of wood is distinct, it has its own personality,” they write after a passage describing the details of the wheelwright's craft. “The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for.” In this appreciation for the “subtle virtues” of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. The wheelwright doesn't decide arbitrarily which virtues of the wood he works are valuable and which are not; this value is inherent in the wood and the task it's meant to perform.

As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. 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.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy.

All Things Shining

Deep Work

Deep Work