talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

Deep work is exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early twentieth century.

A study has found that nearly 30 % of a worker's time is dedicated to reading and answering e-mail.

This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving email messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.

Spending time in a state of shallow work will permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

Why deep work is so important?

We have an information economy that is dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. To remain valuable in our economy, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This requires deep work. If you get used to doing shallow work, you will fall behind as technology advances.

If you created something great, its reachable audience is essentially unlimited. If you created something useful, your audience will continue to grow, if what you created is not good, it would be very easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.

Deep work is not an old-fashioned skill. It is a crucial ability for anyone looking forward to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that hew up and spit out those who are not earning their keep.

The real rewards are not reserved for those who are comfortable with using Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributes systems that run the service.

Deep work is the superpower of the 21st century.

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. ---The deep work hypothesis

During these years, I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a MacArthur “genius grant” winner—a professor who was hired at MIT before he was old enough to legally drink.

It wasn’t uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the common space, staring at markings on a whiteboard, with a group of visiting scholars arrayed around him, also sitting quietly and staring. This could go on for hours. I’d go to lunch; I’d come back—still staring.

This particular professor is hard to reach. He’s not on Twitter and if he doesn’t know you, he’s unlikely to respond to your e-mail. Last year he published sixteen papers.

My commitment to depth has rewarded me. In the ten-year period following my college graduation, I published four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a tenure-track professor at Georgetown University.

I maintained this voluminous production while rarely working past five or six p.m. during the workweek.

This compressed schedule is possible because I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up.

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world.

I’ll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers; to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world; and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.

An increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before.

Who will be valuable in the Intelligent Machine Age? 1. highly skilled workers 2. superstars 3. owners

1. highly skilled workers Robotics and voice recognition are automating many low skilled positions, but other technologies such as data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping are increasing the value of abstract and data-driven reasoning skills.

2. superstars Working remotely is more effective and productive due to the advance of e-mail and virtual meeting software. Employers would rather hire an overseas superstar of the field to finish the work, than hiring full time low-skilled employees, so that they can save money.

The talented remote workers will earn more because they can work for many companies. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance

3. owners

When I was a boy if a girl got pregnant the shame was placed on her and the boy could get away.

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.

Nothing in human life is inherently private.

The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence.

I feel completely fearless when I'm on stage. And also totally fearful. There's the fear that I'm not making a very smart career move sometimes, but there's the stronger belief that these things need to be said.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we're all the same.

Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one's conquests.

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from which you come, is not as disruptive to happiness and well-being as becoming part of a relatively fragmented culture.

If I hold up a red square for 30 seconds and take it away, you will see a perfect green square. It's how the eye works. So if you want to paint a really good red painting, you have to strategically place in some green, so the eye is brought back.

We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.

I always did think that when I turned 40, I'd start coming into my own.

Youngsters are the most discerning audience. They want entertainment, they want issues.