Deep Work - A Shallow Read

The author claims that every successful person and every successful team rely on deep work a lot. Knowledge workers absolutely need deep work. He also says that some folks who perform sales and executive functions need not do deep work. I’m puzzled over the author’s conclusion without any deep proof or any reference to a controlled study.

Busyness is not the same thing as being productive. Doing a lot of stuff in a visible manner doesn’t give you depth in anything you do. Knowledge working is not an assembly line. Deep work struggles to catch on in the world that’s dominated by tweets and various kinds of feeds.

I agree with everything he has said about what deep work is, why we need deep work and how to schedule deep work in our day to day life. We get introduced to 4 rules in the second half of the book. The rules are:

1. Work Deeply
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Network
4. Drain the Shallows

Each rule runs for 60 - 90 minutes in the audiobook. Let’s take a simple rule - “Quit Social Network”, do we need a detailed explanation of what is it or how to do it? These chapters could have been concise. At this point in time, I’ve read enough online about the negative impact and psychological consequences of using social media. So nothing new here. There are references and quick summary of other popular books such as ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ by ‘Joshua Foer’, and ‘Flow’, ‘Getting Things Done’ etc.,

The author says something like mental faculties needs no rest like muscles and needs only changes, except during sleep. I’m nitpicking here, but there are few annoying claims like this sprinkled throughout this book. Hmm, did I hear about Edison’s 1000 failed attempts to invent the light bulb in this book too? There is 20% of useful material here if you’ve read a ton of self-help books and articles (from Medium!). On the other hand, the book would be extremely useful if you are a novice reader on self-help books. Now, hold on, how did I come up with the 20% in the previous sentence?

I didn’t get a right return on my time investment from this book. I’ve got a feeling that I’ll write a self-help book sooner or later if I just keep on reading these self-help books. It can be about any topic that the readers might want to improve on. Let’s come up with a recipe here. Pick a topic. Use the words ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘How’ to ask questions and answer them yourself for the first few chapters. Come up with your own set of rules/theories/hypothesis with supporting anecdotes and correlate them appropriately with any successful/failed events that have happened already.

Let’s do this exercise and pick a topic called ‘Perseverance’ and name the book ‘Perseverance - Secrets to Never Give Up’. The chapters of my imaginative book would be:

1. What is Perseverance?
2. Why you need Perseverance?
3. How to practice Perseverance?

And I can use my imagination to fill in the rest of the book with anecdotes and clever hypothesis and what not? I could say something like “Edison failed 1000 times but persevered and was successful in his 1001st time”. I could extend the book with additional chapters such as ‘When not to be Persistent’, ‘Perseverance at workplace’, ‘Perseverance in sports’, ‘Perseverance in Business’, ‘Perseverance is what makes Homo Sapiens great’, ‘Perseverance is a journey’, ‘Knowledge workers and Perseverance’, ‘Difference between perseverance and persistence’ etc.,

Allow me to do the above exercise once more and let me name the book ‘Optimistic Mindset - A Mindset to Succeed’. Again the chapters could be ‘What is Optimistic Mindset?’, ‘Why you need an optimistic mindset in this pessimistic world’, ‘How to gain an optimistic mindset?’, ‘Optimistic Mindset vs your normal mindset’, ‘Optimistic Mindset at workplace’, ‘Optimistic Mindset for relationships’, ‘Optimistic Mindset for business’. Again let me try to fit the light bulb anecdote in this book too. The popular inventor, Edison had a supreme optimistic mindset, even after he faced failure for 1000 times and if it was not for his optimistic mindset, this world would have remained dark forever at nights.

I believe one of the best ways to grasp key points from self-help books is through an app called Blinkist.