Quotes About Performance

here's the core argument of Rule #2: You shouldn't just envy the craftsman mindset, you should emulate it. In other words, I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer. This

Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, 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. Therefore, if you're in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone's q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best.

A better strategy for shifting other's expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you're working.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving 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. Let's

In Ericsson's seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual's capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents," Ericsson notes.

we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you'll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

To summarize, big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).

An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.

Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain.