Deep Work

In an interview on the AI Podcast, Andrew Ng predicts that AI would be an essential part of our lives and it is going to transform the world, the way electricity did. A consequence of that is not that Skynet would activate, but many of the existing jobs would disappear. To survive, lifelong learning would become essential. Previously, we could learn something in college and ply trade based on that knowledge for decades. Now we will have to replenish that knowledge constantly. ...

In June 2017, Alex Honnold did something which no man had done before. He climbed El Capitan in Yosemite without any ropes. This free solo ascent of the 3000 ft rock formation without any fallback mechanism ranks as one of the greatest athletic feats ever. Equally interesting is the way Alex Honnold trained. He did 60 practice climbs on El Capitan. First, he rehearsed these climbs using rope. He memorized complex portions of the climb. He specifically trained on the tricky portions of the segments by going up there and with gear and practicing over and over. In the final weeks before the climb, he practiced on a smooth stretch of rock, climbing with only his feet and not using his hands. Thus what looked like a miracle was the result of a well-planned training. ...

Doing deep work requires focus. You have to be free of distractions and have to be wise enough not to drown yourself in mindless web surfing. You should not end up as a slave to an attention grabbing algorithm run by a social media company. In the Ezra Klein podcast,Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, talks about his technique for overcoming distraction I try to set my own agenda and not to allow technology to set the agenda for me. I tend to read books, long books, rather than short passages or tweets. I think another thing that has happened over the last century is that we have moved from an information scarcity to a deluge of information. Previously the main problem with information for people was that they didn’t have enough of it, and there was censorship, and information was very rare and hard to obtain. Now it’s just the opposite. We are inundated by immense amounts of information. ...