Deep Work

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a stage of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

The great news is decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience state that the mental strain accompanying deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities and knowledge.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistics-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

The bad news is the net seems to be "chipping away at the capacity for concentration and contemplation," said journalist Nicholas Carr in a 2008 Atlantic article.

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work has focused on the root of happiness and what leads people to enjoy what they do. As a Westerner, he started with the assumption that money/income would be heavily related to the feeling of happiness people experience. Luckily for Csikszentmihalyi, a great deal of research had already taken place in this field.

Generally speaking, there is not a high correlation between money and happiness. This statement is especially true for wealthy people.

Each dollar of income makes a big difference in reducing negative emotions for people in the 20th income percentile, but those returns fall off by the 80th income percentile and disappear at around $200,000, according to the study (data from the chart on the left). This is interesting because it demonstrates that people have fewer negative emotions with more money, up to $200,000.

Notice we are yet to say anything about positive emotions.

Csikszentmihalyi's work found that the happiness of people has not improved with the massive personal income growth from 1956-1996. During arguably the largest economic expansion in the history of the world, the percentage of very happy people statistically decreased.

Another study in 2010 found that three different measures of positive emotion (or lack of negative emotion) saw rapid improvement that slowed to nothing around $75,000. You read that right! After $75,000 in income people experience no added feeling of happiness.

This brings life to Ecclesiastes 5:10, "Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless."

Back to the research of Csikszentmihalyi now. Money does not bring people happiness. So what does?

This is where Csikszentmihalyi inserts his Flow Concept. Flow can be described as a state of ecstasy "in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to add that "the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Graphically, you could say flow looks like the following graph.

“Inducing flow is about the balance between the level of skill and the size of the challenge at hand.”

In summary, Csikszentmihalyi is saying appropriately challenging work, with the right skill set is ultimately a place where we can find great happiness in what we do.

This is critical to understand because it validates our need to do Deep Work. Deep Work is not about making more money it is about being a human being made in the image of the Creator God. The Creator God understands Deep Work and invites us to engage in the Deep Work of dominion (Genesis 1:28). This is fundamentally an act of being Human!

Deep Work is becoming the necessary skill for people to experience happiness through their work. It is also quickly becoming one of dwindling opportunities to guarantee yourself a high income. Who are the workers of the future?

1. High Skilled Workers - Those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines.
2. The Superstars - Globalization through technology has made access to elite performers in any part of the world easy. Companies no longer have to accept the local option.
3. The Owners - The people willing to start new ventures and their friends that can fund them.

If these are the people that will be successful, then how do we ensure our abilities can contribute to the new economy:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to product at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

To master the two critical skills of the emerging economy, you must accept the following definition:

"To learn requires intense concentration that engages both knowing and doing."

K Anders Ericsson, a professor of Florida State, has pulled this statement together in the concept of deliberate practice. Ericsson states "the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain." He goes on to say, "deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction."

This is true because neural science has shown intense focus on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger brain development.

Attention Residue

Adam Grant is a tenured professor at the Wharton School of Business. His research states the following formula:

High Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

By increasing the intensity of focus, Grant reduces the negative impact of attention residue. The attention residue left by unresolved switches dampens our overall performance because it ruins the intensity of focus.

Let me be blunt. Our work is filled with massive distractions that makes deep, meaningful work nearly impossible. We live lives full of constant contact through email, social media, and direct messages. This inundation of messages leaves us with an ever present negative attention residue.

The Principal of Least Resistance: Without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors, we tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

The problem is the moment never really changes to a long term perspective. We get stuck living in a culture of immediate connectivity.

1. We pursue the easy quick answers in life to move forward the fastest.
2. We accept our lives being centered around connectivity as opposed to diving into the deep.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in our jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

The problem is deep work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

This high view of busyness leads us to value anything that provides us with more information that can be consumed, even if it remains superficial. Evgeny Morozov, in his 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, states "It's this propensity to view 'the internet' as a source of wisdom and policy advice that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology."

If you have not picked up on it yet, shallow work is often not very meaningful for the skilled worker. I am not saying helping people in the mundane of life is not meaningful. I am saying that deep work in a skilled profession can provide more fulfillment than any other form of work.

Science Writer Winifred Gallagher, in her 2009 book Rapt, states, "Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggests that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience."

Gallagher goes on to say, "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on."

These two statements lead us to believe that human beings are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. This is thought easily fits within the shelf space of the Biblical creation story. God says to construct the world into meaningful ways in Genesis. We are to build the garden to the city.

There is an ancient quarry worker's creed that speaks to this value of work:

"We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals."

Dreyfus and Kelly, in All Things Shining, state"being immersed in a craft, is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there."

Questions

• Explain to me the connection between happiness and deep work.
• Are you capable of deep work?
• What does deep work require of people?
• What must you remove/change in your life to enable deep work?

Sources

• Deep Work by Cal Newport
• Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). The concept of flow. In Snyder, C. R., & Lopez, S. J. (Ed.). Oxford handbook of positive psychology. Oxford University Press, USA. 89-105. (attached PDF)
• Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience - By Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi (attached PDF)