Quotes About Progress

Over a hundred years earlier, Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

this thirty-day experiment

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

players sounds similar to Jordan Tice's approach to music: They're both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

The Innovators, Isaacson later

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

method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable.

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

Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

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.

You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life.

Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier.

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved.

We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life.

These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life.

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

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia.

We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant.

Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability