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.

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.

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

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.

3. owners

You know, Lincoln was funny. I don't think F.D.R. was very funny. But Lincoln was funny. Lincoln was really funny. But I think you should get elected first, and then show that you're funny.

I love the idea of being part of a campaign that captures the spirit of New York and the stories of women here, passionate about their dreams.

Fancy the happiness of Pinocchio on finding himself free! Without saying yes or no, he fled from the city and set out on the road that was to take him back to the house of the lovely Fairy.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

I don't like shopping, so I'll look online. I like going to the flea market at the Rose Bowl every once in a while. I like the same stores, Opening Ceremony and APC.

All life is a manifestation of the spirit, the manifestation of love.

Actually I like working kind of fast, because if you got it, why bother doing it over and over?

On 'B&B,' we shoot so fast and eight episodes a week, so we have to always be on our A-game. There's really no time to make certain adjustments. We usually shoot a scene in one take, maybe two or three only if needed.

I never was a great Thatcher fan, and it wasn't a sad day in my life when she resigned.

He whose wisdom cannot help him, gets no good from being wise.

I want to be an inspirational model. I want people to look at me and say, 'Wow, she looks healthy.'

I enjoy doing action a lot more because my films have a sense of violence. That's because I have a broad structure, and if I hit someone, it looks believable. Maybe my contemporaries are meeker-looking in comparison.

It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.

The kids really enjoy what they do. I check with them constantly to make sure that they're really happy to be there.