If you check your email, Facebook, Twitter more than 3 times a day (yes, three times a day), chances are you are ruining your efficiency by playing into the current social narrative of prioritising what is urgent / recent over what is important / deeply valuable. The author gives an extremely convincing argument why we should do more of deep work – prolonged periods of time where we focus our attention on one meaningful task. If you ever locked yourself in a conference room to get some stuff done instead of sitting in your open space, then you know that he is right.

Advice to “follow your passion” is handed out more and more often, esp. to people starting their career. Author debunks it as dangerous (“do what Steve Jobs did, not what he said”), instead asking to build career capital and strategically use it to build work context in which you thrive. As someone whose motto is “chipping away works”, I found myself nodding along a lot to author’s findings…

“Less, but better”. The author explores hypothesis that you will be more successful in life by figuring out what is it that you want to do, and then doing that in a thoughtful manner, picking the most important and powerful ways to achieve it, rather than going at it from a thousand different angles. The convincingly argues that the achievements come from saying “no” – after all, while “you can do anything, but not everything”