Quotes About Depth

A workday driven by the shallow, from a neurological perspective, is likely to be a draining and upsetting day, even if most of the shallow things that capture your attention seem harmless or fun.

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical. I'll show that regardless of the angle from which you attack the issue of depth and knowledge work, it's clear that by embracing depth over shallowness you can tap the same veins of meaning that drive craftsmen like Ric Furrer.

Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go deep more easily and stay in the state longer.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your

Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,

I earlier quoted Winifred Gallagher, the converted disciple of depth, saying, "I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.

We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.

Our work culture's shift toward the shallow (whether you think it's philosophically good or bad) is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth—

Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear.

To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.

The implication of these findings is clear. In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you'll associate with your working life.

Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

It's as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis.

Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.

Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.

The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

The thesis of this final chapter in part one therefore is that "a deep life is not just economically lucrative but also a life well lived

minimize the shallow in my life

A sound that was both less and more than it had ever been before.

For he rewove the very fabric of my heart.

I had read essays describing the horrors of genocide committed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I had lectured on Jewish literature detailing the atrocities carried out by Hitler. I had read the words in my head but never comprehended their depth in my heart—until I lived them. Only later would I realize that there are no words harsh enough, no paragraphs wide enough, no books deep enough to convey the weight of true human sorrow.