Quotes About Performance

serious study, defining it formally as an "activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance.

the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

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).

easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.

a confidence that comes out," Martin explained. "I think it's something the audience smells.

In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2

One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which 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.

recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.

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

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work.

Attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens your performance.

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

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. When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work).

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

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.

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. Let's

if it's rare and valuable, it's not easy to get. This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice—a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable.

If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You

In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

The pseudo-worker looks and feels like someone who is working hard—he or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to push on late into the night—but, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesn't actually accomplish much.

you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.