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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Passage of the Week:

Professor Richard Feynman on leaving some room for doubt:

Two Quotes:

Book of the Week with 2 Important Lessons:

The book of the week is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

An extremely well-written book which gives you practical advice on how to pursue deep work in current distracted world. One of the best books on productivity and among my favorite books of all time.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. This book will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. It will help you thrive, to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world. And to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

1) How to Become a Winner in the New Economy:

In this new economy, three groups will have particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. If you can join any of these groups, you’ll do well. If you cannot, you might still do well, but your position is more precarious.

The critical question we all face is: How do we join these winning groups? While Cal acknowledges there’s no shortcut to amassing capital but he shares the other two winning groups that are poised to thrive and are accessible: those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field.

He argues that the following two core abilities are crucial for thriving in the new economy:

• The ability to quickly master hard things.

• The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

The ability to learn hard things quickly, of course, isn’t just necessary for working well with intelligent machines; it also plays a key role in the attempt to become a superstar in just about any field, even those that have little to do with technology. To become a world-class yoga instructor, for example, requires that you master an increasingly complex set of physical skills. If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. You must then transform that latent potential into tangible results that people value.

 2) Put More Thoughts into Your Leisure Time:

When it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day.” Addictive websites or social media apps thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen.

It's crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time.

A set program of reading, where you spend regular time, each night making progress on a series of deliberately chosen books, is always a great option, as is, of course, exercise or the enjoyment of good in-person company.

Books – I am currently reading:

The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives by Kit Yates. A brilliant and entertaining mathematician illuminates seven mathematical principles that shape our lives. Through fascinating stories and examples, he shows how math is the beating heart of so much of modern life.

Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put by Annie B. Jones. The popular From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don't have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we've always dreamed.