14/7/20

Deep Work by Cal Newport

And it’s definitely not about technology or hacks. It’s about developing a sustainable system to build
your life, career, and business.

. So I started reading about Stoicism, Pragmatism and Mindfulness; anything that helps you to control
your thoughts and improve your mental toughness

. I journal, read, set daily priorities, and don’t consume useless information.

When we procrastinate, we voluntarily delay an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay
may harm us in terms of the task performance

There are two biases that influence procrastination:

Focalism. Our tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts
and feelings in the future.

Presentism. Our tendency to put too much emphasis on the present in our prediction of the future.

Let go of the misconception that your motivational state must match the task at hand.

‘My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act.’”

“When you find yourself thinking things like: ‘I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,’ ‘I work better
under pressure,’ ‘There’s lots of time left,’ ‘I can do this in a few hours tonight’ … let that be a flag or
signal or stimulus to indicate that you are about to needlessly delay the task, and let it also be the
stimulus to just get started.”

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and
rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to
transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”

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

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.”
Jung’s approach is what I call the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide
your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to
everything else.”

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core
truths: “I choose to,” “Only a few things really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.”

The English translation of “weniger aber besser” is “less is better.”

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.

Essentialism is about pausing constantly to ask, “Am I investing in the right activities?”

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It
doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment
of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is
essential.”

“When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other
people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before
long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important.”

To become an Essentialist requires a heightened awareness of our ability to choose.”

“When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be
taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices—or even a function of our
own past choices.”

“Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is
a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped.”

‘What Is an Editor?’ there are ‘two basic questions the editor should be addressing to the author: Are
you saying what you want to say? and, Are you saying it as clearly and concisely as possible?’”
An Essentialist produces more—brings forth more—by removing more instead of doing more.”

“When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can’t figure out which to tackle first, stop.
Take a deep breath. Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is most important this very
second—not what’s most important tomorrow or even an hour from now. If you’re not sure, make a list
of everything vying for your attention and cross off anything that is not important right now.”

The three realities without which Essentialist thinking would be neither relevant nor possible.

Individual choice: We can choose how to spend our energy and time.

The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.

The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all.

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15/7/20

Now, what is this Mindful Living? The idea of attentiveness to the present moment. It can help clear the
clutter in your mind caused by the overstimulation of today’s supercharged world. Wow!

Osho says, ‘Mindfulness’ is Buddha’s word for meditation. By mindfulness he means: you should always
remain alert, watchful. You should always remain present. Not a single thing should be done in a sort of
sleepy state of mind. You should not move like a somnambulist, you should move with a sharp
consciousness. Buddha used to say: Not even your breath should be allowed to go out and in without
your consciousness.

“In order to focus on the present, we must give up, at least temporarily, our attachment to our desired
goal”
“Constantly reviewing new ideas creates, in a sense, a new habit of perceiving and processing our lives,
a habit that brings us the sense of clarity we long for every day”

“The first step toward patience is to become aware of when your internal dialogue is running wild and
dragging you with it”.

“The second step in creating patience is understanding and accepting that there is no such thing as
reaching a point of perfection in anything”.

“When you stay on purpose, focused in the present moment, the goal comes toward you with
frictionless ease”.

“Equanimity is defined as even-temperedness and calmness”.

“Our concepts of ideal and perfect are always changing”.

“With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable”.

“The three decisions that control your destiny are: 1. Your decisions about what to focus on. 2. Your
decisions about what things mean to you. 3. Your decisions about what to do to create the results you
desire”.

“Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure”.

“It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean”.

“We must change our belief system and develop a sense of certainty that we can and will meet the new
standards before we actually do”.

“Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards
and believe you can meet them”.

“We’re not driven by the reality, but by our perception of reality”.

It’s never the environment; it’s never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events—
how we interpret them—that shapes who we are today and who we’ll become tomorrow”.

“If you ever feel angry or upset with someone, remember, it’s your rules that are upsetting you, not
their behavior”.