After a deep dive on the author of “Deep Work” (and many other books), professor Cal Newport, I decided to summarize some of his best works – as usual, with some of my comments, that you can find within parenthesis. And, to help recapitulate the ideas, I also realized a quick table that you’ll find at the end – I strongly suggest to look at only after reading this post. The following, is my work after reading “My 7 best ideas”, that you can find here (don’t worry if it’s not his original website, it’s a funnel to make you provide your email address, it’s the same link you’ll find below his videos on Youtube – and the one that I used to start reading the PDF and the 7 Cal’s posts pointed by the links in it).
1. The deep reset
Odysseus myth setting foundation for many western stories (you may like Dante’s version with the famous: “Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza” in Inferno, XXVI).
Hardship unlocking a deeper, more authentic, more satisfying life (see also “The unexamined life is not worth living” and Marco Aurelio: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?“).
Carl Jung argued that this story-line is an archetype, engraved in the collective human unconscious, as unavoidably fundamental.
When we found ourselves marooned in series binge-watching (or anything else), instead of crying in despair since we lose our fight against immediate relief in distraction, we can allow the disruption, accept the temporary pain, spark the resolve needed to find our way out of the underworld, fight to get our affairs back in order, and then, when the time comes, with a mix of humility and purpose: transform our lives into something deeper.
2. On the structured pursuit of depth
Create and follow a 30 days plan, with specific details, e.g.:
| Craft | Community | Contemplation | Constitution | |
| Amplify | Learn Python, create application for inventory system | Volunteer for local meal to homeless | Practice 15min mindfulness meditation each day | Eat clean, 10.000 steps a day |
| Reduce | Track your time to control ratio deep/shallow work | Take social networks app off of the smartphone; prune down accounts that don’t inspire you | Eliminate negative comments on social networks | Alcohol only on weekends |
(For that, you can also find some guidance in Eisenhower’s Matrix and take inspiration by “Getting Things Done” or “Atomic Habits” – that I summarized here).
System/process can’t make alone achieve you the Deep Life, but it’s a good tool to help you to take focused action toward this objective (same is true for other tools and frameworks).
3. On pace and productivity
John Gribbin wrote a book about great scientists, where it seems that most of them had an incredibly slow daily pace (in latin, they said “Festina Lente” – in general, we overestimate what we can do in short term, but underestimate what we can achieve in the long term with small steps in perseverance). It took years to develop and refine theories and inventions (against the mainstream ideas about genius that discovered something all of a sudden, like the fake falling apple story about Newton or all the mainstream movies where scientists suddenly see something they didn’t even thought about before, with only emphasis on those moments and not on all the hard work before that lead to the intuition and creation; see also “Range” book by Epstein and concepts like the diffuse mode thinking).
When it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the famed scientists in Gribbin’s book seem spectacularly unproductive. Years would pass during which little progress was made on epic theories. Even during periods of active work, it might take months for important letters to induce a reply, or for news of experiments to make it across a fractured Europe.
Galileo famously ground the lens for his first telescope in only twenty-four hours, but this was after an entire summer of him trying to track down an elusive visitor to Italy who was rumored to know something about this then new technology (same for Edison, with famous anecdote if him saying “I discovered another way the light bulb won’t work”). No one remembers Newton’s lazy lockdowns, but his Principia achieved immortality.
4. On slow productivity and the anti-busyness revolution
(Remember always: usual busy != productive. Also: even in consumption, refer to The slow media manifesto).
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang was a typical overworked, multitasking, slave to the hyperactive hive mind, Silicon Valley consultant. Feeling the symptoms of burnout intensify, he arranged a three-month sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He wrote:
“I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life. I didn’t feel the constant pressure to look busy or the stress that I had when I was consulting. And it made me think that maybe we had this idea about the relationship between working hours and productivity backward. And [we should] make more time in our lives for leisure in the classic Greek sense.”. He then wrote “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less”, then pointed out the finger to the overwhelmed and over-scheduled manner in which we currently operate isn’t working.
(We work too much because of exploitive capitalist imperatives, and then overload our personal lives because we’ve internalized these narratives; following the rat race as in the short “Happiness” by Steve Cutts, plus living with the toxic mindset to celebrate overworking, even only mere presence. We can searching for solutions in all the minimalism “work less, spend less”, for example reading books like “Early Retirement Extreme”).
“I believe we can do more right now”, I’ve become increasingly convinced that what this needs are alternative definitions of “productivity”; including profitable value generation in businesses and resilient satisfaction in our personal lives, while rendering the excesses of overload culture as unnecessary at best, and profoundly harmful at worse (not to mention all the deep reasons why workaholic hide themselves burying in the office).
5. Case Study: On Michael Crichton’s busy ambition
By his last year at Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, 26-years old, didn’t want to pursue a medical career: he planned to write a nonfiction book about patient care and wanted to know if he could use his final semester to hang around the hospital gathering research for his project. “Why should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?”.
The dean warned him that writing a book could have been much more difficult than graduating and being a doctor, but Michael actually already wrote 4 books under a pen-name, some of them prize-winners. He also became a “one-man operation”, writing also screenplay adaptations (also Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen and all the “one-man” writing/playing music, being director and actor, etc. – maybe it was a time where it was still possible to try to become “the universal man”).
Interesting to compare the “hyperactive” Crichton with John Grisham, a “rival” novelist: he typically started writing on January 1st, working three hours a day, five days a week, in an outbuilding on his farm, to finish the first draft of that year’s book by March and have the manuscript completely done by July. Instead of devoting time and energy in organizing tours or hiring people to do so, he preferred to spend time and energy in sports and other activities. His professional “staff”, consisting of just editor and agent, knew that, so rarely bothered him.
For the first case, Type 1, it craves activity and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. Medical school wasn’t sufficiently stimulating. The other model, type 2, it craves simplicity and autonomy, and sees success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations. Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham.
They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways when it respectively arrived. As best I can tell, different people are wired for different ambition types (compare craving for success and wealth ASAP as shown in TikTok and certain books, with the rational and “relaxing” way to develop your passions like a side-hustle to soften your primary work pressure and eventually go FIRE).
6. Case study: Brandon Sanderson built an underground lair in suburban Utah
After the last pandemic, lot of knowledge workers wondered about their work, their life partially spent in commuting and all the time spent in the office without a real reason. So they considered remote working, sometimes building something more complex than just an Ikea desk near their washing machine. Some musicians even built a sound-proof cabin inside their house, but a novelist wen further:
Brandon Sanderson took a lot in Utah and started digging works, so workers created him a big room made of course of concrete. Then, from his house, he can take the stairs to go down in his secret lair underground, a lair where he can disconnect from the rest and concentrate or enjoy his personal cinema. (People and connections are great, creating a lot of interesting valuable opportunities, but at the same time, we need to find space and time for ourselves, if we really want to built something important).
7. In defense of thinking
“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.” – Hemingway (it resembles the famous “If I have a day to cut a tree, I’ll spend most of the time to sharpen the axe”, with in this case the importance of getting bored and to give your mind the space and time to elaborate and create). Most of people, specially young ones that want to write something (essays, doctoral thesis, etc.) just focus on the importance of continuously writing. It seems we’re losing the concept of “thinking” as a concrete and isolatable activity; something that can be prioritized, and trained, and even cherished as a valuable pursuit in its own right (important to find the balance, otherwise it will be just thinking without writing down anything).
In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle identified rational contemplation as the highest and best of all human activities. In The Intellectual Life, Thomistic scholar Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges spends over 200 pages detailing how the serious thinker should organize their process of thinking. We see this in education systems built more around content than training the meta-activity of making sense of content. We see this in a techno-media landscape that emphasizes expression over cogitation, and tribal Sophism over Socratic grappling (also, deep lack of critical thinking, favoring emotional speech and rhetoric instead of thinking and understanding and, if it’s the case, to suspend judgment; we’re growing generations in which the only important thing is to express something, even without thinking).
And now, as I promised, my extreme recap of the points.
Hope you’ll find inspirations in these points. Good Deep Work to everyone!
