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January 2018

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A little more than a year ago, a friend took me for lunch in downtown Toronto, and we talked mostly about what we’d been reading. Immediately afterward she marched me to a nearby bookstore and insisted I buy Cal Newport’s Deep Work.

She was the second person that week to describe it to me as potentially life-changing, so I bought it with great enthusiasm. Later that day, I sat reading it in a tea shop for two hours, riveted by the possibilities of working in the uncompromising, undistracted way Newport described.

I’ve had that feeling many times while reading non-fiction books—the “hot lightbulb effect” of being aware you’re reading the right ideas at the right moment in your life. I’d stopped in Toronto on the way home from an inspiring chautauqua experience in Ecuador. The trip that had culminated in an unforgettably moving group discussion, during which each of us declared heartfelt resolutions about how we wanted to live the rest of our lives. I was determined to return to work with unprecedented focus and clarity, and now I’d found the perfect guide to doing exactly that.

The window to act on a timely idea is very small. The heat of inspiration only lasts a few days, or even hours, and if it runs out before you’ve formed and implemented a plan, you’re essentially back at the status quo.  Read More

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The response to last month’s “Depth Year” article caught me off guard. It went viral immediately and quickly became the most popular article of the year.

I’m still sorting through emails from readers sharing their intentions to go deeper instead of wider with their pursuits in 2018: reading unread books, tuning up the piano again, resuming Spanish lessons, calling up old friends. Someone even started a Facebook group to discuss Depth Year plans with others.

This level of enthusiasm made me feel a bit sheepish, because I intended it more as a thought experiment than a serious proposition. I wanted to point out the mirage of novelty—that emotion of newness and possibility we get when we start a new project, buy the supplies for a new hobby, or order a new book.

Novelty—essentially the feeling of “Oh how life will change now that I’ve added this to it!”—is a very gratifying emotion, and we experience it frequently in our consumption-focused society. But it usually contains a vital miscalculation: acquiring access to some new thing doesn’t guarantee we will ever enjoy its full value, or even a fraction of it.  Read More

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