Deep Work by Cal Newport

From the publisher:

Read the Wall Street Journal Bestseller for “cultivating intense focus” for fast, powerful performance results for achieving success and true meaning in one’s professional life (Adam Grant, author of Give and Take).

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

1. Work Deeply

2. Embrace Boredom

3. Quit Social Media

4. Drain the Shallows

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.

Praise for Deep Work:

“Entrepreneurial professionals must develop a competitive advantage by building valuable skills. This book offers advice based on research and reality–not meaningless platitudes– on how to invest in yourself in order to stand out from the crowd. An important guide to starting up a remarkable career.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder & chairman of LinkedIn and co-author of the bestselling The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

About the author:

Cal Newport, Ph.D.

lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a writer and an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He also runs the popular website Study Hacks: Decoding Patterns of Success. Deep Work is his fifth book.

 

(Credits: Book cover image and publisher’s description have been retrieved from BiblioShare.)

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