10 Lessons From the Book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport

1. Deep Work vs Shallow Work

Deep Work?= Work performed in a distraction-free environment that pushes cognitive capacities to the limit, creates new value, improves your skill, and is hard to replicate.

Shallow Work?= Work that doesn’t require much concentration or skill generally produces little value, and easy to replicate.

Shallow work is undemanding, repetitive, and doesn’t produce much value. Instead, you should be doing more deep work, which requires sustained concentration on a mentally challenging task.

2. The New Economy

Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

In the modern world, economic, social, and technological trends will lead a select few to succeed in big ways while the majority will see fewer benefits.

3. Attention is the New Currency

Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on a healthy living hood, you and your life become happy and positive - you will get hope & inspiration to be healthy, so you will take action & initiative to build & maintain a healthy lifestyle.

That's how just switching your attention from negative to positive things completely changes the direction in life.

Where your Attention goes, Energy flows.

4. Business does not equal productivity

In a business context, if we are not clear on the priorities that will lead to impact, we tend to do the easiest activities in order to prove that we are valuable and productive, instead of doing the actual revenue-producing task that requires a consistent level of focus.

Spending hours & hours on a task that doesn't produce any impactful results is not a productive use of time. That's what we see in modern corporate workspaces, people are putting in a lot of time but their impactful output is nothing compared to the hours they are investing.

5. Overcome Distractions

Distractions are the biggest enemy of Deep Work and convert our Deep Work into Shallow Work. That's why overcoming distraction is the first toward deep work.

In the modern era, smartphone is the biggest distraction & attention sucker; Email, Social Media Notifications, Chats, News updates, and an endless number of random things are designed to distract you from your work and grab your attention.

You will eliminate 90% of your distractions just by putting your phone in another room with Airplane mode. If your work requires you to be on your Smartphone or Social Media, block out all of the notifications and use a news feed Eradicator to block all news, stories & updates from your social media.

6. Schedule Your Day

This is the simplest habit that pushes you to start your day without procrastination. Once you have a clear vision of how your days are gonna look like you will be more likely to start doing the work without procrastination. Because you already dedicated tasks to exact time blocks. You can start working according to the time blocks, you don't have to decide which task to start & which one is the easiest one.

So plan your day in advance the previous night and after waking up in the morning start your day according to the schedule without any kind of distraction.

7. Become a Superstar in the 21st Century

There are Two Core Abilities to become a Superstar in the new economy:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

Those Two Core Abilities work together, once you learned to quickly master hard things you will be able to produce at an elite level that no one else can produce

8. Pursue difficult things

Pain breaks us to make the next-level version of us. Pursuing difficult things in life is painful but once we achieve the difficult thing we come out from another side stronger than ever.

The self-confidence & self believe you build inside yourself during pursuing & achieving difficult things separates you from 99% of the population who never pursued & achieved anything super difficult in life.

9. Let small bad things happen

“Tim Ferriss once said, Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things” -Author Cal Newport

When you start pursuing difficult things, unexpected obstacles will appear in every single step. Fighting with the small little obstacles to reach the destination separates you from the majority of the population who never left their comfort zone.

Accept small bad things happily, those are signs of your progress & prosperity.

10. Create Daily Rituals

Most of us think willpower is like a character trait, but researcher Roy Baumeister has discovered willpower is more like a muscle.

Each morning we wake up with a limited amount of willpower that gets depleted over the day as we exert effort, make decisions and resist impulses.

The best way to avoid using up our willpower too quickly, according to Cal Newport, is to set up daily work rituals/habits that make deep work almost automatic.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.