Don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that seem different than what you believe in. You're not going to get tricked out of your conviction... You actually strengthen your understanding of the world and, therefore, strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas that are well formed.

I think the cultural norms are going to change around this. I think we're going to think about unrestricted Internet usage not as something that we just sort of bequeath on youth as they become 10-years-old but something we're actually much more careful about—probably something just going to be post-pubescent is going to make a lot more sense once you've had more brain development.

For me, a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day, to me, is one of the more glorious sights.

[Steve Marin] says 'My advice, instead, is be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come.'

The deep life is a term for one of these things—we all know it when we see it; we just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that it resonates; it feels authentic and interesting and resilient—that they're not the type of person who's going to look back at the end of their life and say, what did I do?

In order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, like you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections.

I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the Internet; it's not our phones; it is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense to pull you back to them.

The data I like to cite which was looking at email and Slack checks in knowledge workers... The median average interval between checks was 5 minutes... and the mode was 1 minute in this data set. So it was like we are we are checking all the time.

I'm a big believer in what I call rooted productivity. There has to be somewhere—I call it the root document—that says these are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life, and therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this root document.

I also walk a lot ... When I'm trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this, almost always I'm going to do that on foot.

If you put 2 or 3 people at the same whiteboard to try to alchemize these insights into actual mathematically precise proves, you get a 20-3% boost in your concentration level...

My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years.

When you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of.

The phone is very good at inducing a network switch. And that's an expensive, time-consuming, energy-consuming neuronal operation.

If you're going to live a deep life, the ultimate original commitment is 'I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter, even if I don't feel like it.' That is the biggest binary zero-to-one flip that happens in crafting a life.

We need to slow the hell down, figure out what we really want to do, do these things at a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff, and make the good stuff better.

We're good, as humans, to committing to things that are positive; that's very motivating for us. We're bad at trying to avoid things that are negative.

I'm a big believer in, pretty quickly, you want to capture ideas in the tool you use to do that work.

I think everyone who runs their own business who's entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility, I think you should integrate seasonality into what you do.