“I was always getting on the Internet and checking my e-mail; I couldn’t stop myself; it was a compulsion,” Benn said, describing himself during the period leading up to his quitting his finance job. To emphasize his difficulty with depth, Benn told me about a project that a supervisor at the finance firm once brought to him. “They wanted me to write a business plan,” he explained. Benn didn’t know how to write a business plan, so he decided he would find and read five different existing plans—comparing and contrasting them to understand what was needed. This was a good idea, but Benn had a problem: “I couldn’t stay focused.” There were days during this period, he now admits, when he spent almost every minute (“98 percent of my time”) surfing the Web. The business plan project—a chance to distinguish himself early in his career—fell to the wayside.
By the time he quit, Benn was well aware of his difficulties with deep work, so when he dedicated himself to learning how to code, he knew he had to simultaneously teach his mind how to go deep. His method was drastic but effective. “I locked myself in a room with no computer: just textbooks, notecards, and a highlighter.” He would highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to notecards, and then practice them out loud. These periods free from electronic distraction were hard at first, but Benn gave himself no other option: He had to learn this material, and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on learning this hard new skill. “I probably read something like eighteen books on the topic by the time I was done,” he recalls.
After two months locked away studying, Benn attended the notoriously difficult Dev Bootcamp: a hundred-hour-a-week crash course in Web application programming. (While researching the program, Benn found a student with a PhD from Princeton who had described Dev as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”) Given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work, Benn excelled. “Some people show up not prepared,” he said. “They can’t focus. They can’t learn quickly.” Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class.
The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees. When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley market, along with his skill level.
When I last spoke with Benn, he was thriving in his new position. A newfound devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office, allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction. “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types], just programming.” For someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98 percent of his day in his old job surfing the Web, Jason Benn’s transformation is nothing short of astonishing.
Jason Benn’s story highlights a crucial lesson: Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today.
There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. Some of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn’t exist ten years ago and will likely be outdated ten years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they’d need to master digital analytics. To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.
The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy, there was a small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without distraction. They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality.
Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, “the superpower of the 21st century.”
We have now seen two strands of thought—one about the increasing scarcity of deep work and the other about its increasing value—which we can combine into the idea that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book:
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. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
This book has two goals, pursued in two parts. The first, tackled in Part 1, is to convince you that the deep work hypothesis is true. The second, tackled in Part 2, is to teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life. Before diving into these details, however, I’ll take a moment to explain how I became such a devotee of depth.
I’ve spent the past decade cultivating my own ability to concentrate on hard things. To understand the origins of this interest, it helps to know that I’m a theoretical computer scientist who performed my doctoral training in MIT’s famed Theory of Computation group—a professional setting where the ability to focus is considered a crucial occupational skill.