Deep Work, ep1.

Today In Summary

• Reflection Point

• Quote for the week

• In Conclusion

🪔 Reflection Point

I want to believe I do pretty decent in executing my assigned task at my day job. So, while I believe in being really valuable to an organization, I also think everyone should constantly engage in something else that's beyond the day-to-day routine. The mind is too precious and probably has more to offer than we have ever cared to probe.

Have you heard of the phrase "Do what you love"? Maya Angelou says it this way: "Pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people cannot take their eyes off of you". SNAP-OUT, this is reality: not everyone would have the opportunity to "Love" what they do (if you do, consider yourself lucky). Many are only going to keep doing what they are trained to do to keep the basic needs of life met and be useful to their loved ones. 

Nothing extraordinary can come out of this trajectory, but I believe strongly that innate in every human is the ability to craft something extraordinary at different points in our lifetimes. So, even if you are part of an organization, you should not lose touch with that work that is cognitively demanding, but you can keep doing it forever. That is where the 'extraordinaries' are born.

This extraordinary thing is what I call a Masterpiece.

A masterpiece is not necessarily a body of work that immediately gains national recognition and awards, instead, it is a body of work that leaves an awestruck moment on its recipient. Examples include:

 - Sewing a bespoke piece of cloth for a client. She puts them on before you, looking at herself in the mirror, pausing for some seconds in awe, unable to step away from the mirror and finally turning to you with a smile; that is a masterpiece.

 - The iPhone is widely known today to be a carefully crafted piece of technology, but that wasn't Steve Jobs's first masterpiece, his first masterpiece was building the first digital blue-box with Wozniak (his partner) that was used to make free phone calls. e.t.c.

What we call civilization is simply a masterpiece built by another. It is so extraordinary that it's able to defy the odds of what was previously considered "impossible or inconceivable".

Here is my observation: When an individual masters the act of making masterpieces at a small scale, at some point, they eventually create one or more masterpieces capable of setting a legacy that lives forever.

From Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa which is approximately worth 860 million dollars today, to JK Rowling's writing of the Harry Potter Novel grossing over one billion dollars and a lot more. I discovered that there is a common act that is practised often among these sets of individuals that makes them craft things at an insanely quality level: Deep Work.

Deep work is simply the act of focusing intensely, without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is any activity performed in a state of absolute concentration that pushes your cognitive capability to its limits. These efforts create new value and improve your skill and are hard to replicate. 

The ubiquity of deep work among these influential individuals known for their groundbreaking body of work is important to emphasise because it stands and remains in very sharp contrast to the behaviour of most modern knowledge or mental workers. We simply just want to do the work and get done with it already, with a myriad of distractions queuing up to take turns on our attention, from messaging services like emails, WhatsApp, and SMS, to social network media like Instagram, Twitter and the newly onboarded Tiktok, combined with the ubiquitous access to them via mobile devices, work network access e.t.c. 

These tools and our inability to contain or resist their dopamine hits have fragmented our attention needed to achieve deep work into tiny chunks thereby producing a mediocre body of work eventually. The term for this type of work is called Shallow Work. It's the counterpart to deep work. It is a non-cognitively demanding type of work often done while distracted, and the result of any work done side by side with any form of distraction. This type of work tends not to create much value, it can be easily replaced and certainly cannot produce a Masterpiece. 

This is the missing piece, the solution is not to have more time or to do more work, the solution is to do Deep Work within the time allotted for your craft & make sure it results in a Masterpiece, that's the idea!

📜 Quote for the week

“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”

In conclusion,

• This week’s issue is based on Cal Newport's work,

• Leave some love, comments and share if you've found this helpful in any way,

• Special thanks to Tolani,

• Looking forward to your sets of Masterpieces, Happy new week.

• Dami ✌