Quotes About Dedication

This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

How you'll support your work.

Where you'll work and for how long.

I'll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My

How you'll work once you start to work.

When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. "It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections," he explained. "Studio musicians have this adage: 'The tape doesn't lie.' Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before

there's something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is "just right," and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won't be easy.

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.

regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career.

craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. "The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

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.

adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.

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

those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

Not only did Jordan's early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback. The teacher was always there, Jordan explained, "to jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.

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

Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

Let's assume you're a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you'll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can't ignore you.

Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur "Genius Grant" for her work evaluating anti-poverty programs, didn't make the cut for the book, but still weigh heavily on my thinking about how to best shape my own career. It

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