We’re thrilled to announce the latest episode of the Moonshots Master Series, in which hosts Mike and Mark dive deep into Cal Newport's transformative teachings. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the constant demands of modern life—emails, social media, endless tasks—this episode is your guide to reclaiming your focus and productivity.
Deep Work by Cal Newport 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. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy.
Yet most of us have lost the ability to go deep—spending our days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.
Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.
Charlie Munger is one of the greatest investors of all time. Plenty of people have called him a “learning machine.” The phrase ‘Latticework of Mental Models’ comes from Berkshire-Hathaway’s Charles Munger, who spent most of his life working out ways to, for lack of a better term, think better.
Munger has come to the conclusion that in order to make better decisions in business and in life, you must find and understand the core principles from all disciplines.
You have to learn all the big ideas in the key disciplines in a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. – Charlie Munger
This is what he calls Elementary Worldly Wisdom, and using his system of Mental Models can help you succeed in almost any endeavour.
Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien’s The Great Mental Models: Is designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful, and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. Mental models help you improve your decision-making, productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
The old saying goes, "To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." But anyone who has done any kind of project knows a hammer often isn't enough. The more tools you have at your disposal, the more likely you'll use the right tool for the job — and get it done right.
The same is true when it comes to your thinking. The quality of your outcomes depends on the mental models in your head. And most people are going through life with little more than a hammer. Until now.
A lot of people think that Albert Einstein’s greatest ability was his mathematical mind, but Einstein’s greatest skill was the ability to sift the essential from the inessential — to grasp simplicity when everyone else was lost in the clutter.
Problems are an integral part of everyday life. So is problem-solving. But where people differ is in their ability to solve problems. Problem-solving has a synonym today, especially in the corporate world — fire fighting. Up to 70% of employees’ time is spent ‘fire fighting’. They spend more than six hours a day grappling with problems that should not exist. Imagine what organizations can achieve if hundreds or thousands of employees get these hours daily to work on something constructive!
Some problems should be solved. Some problems should be left alone. Some problems should not exist at all.
In Episode 136 we do a Cal Newport deep dive. Similar to his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World which refers to studying for focused chunks of time without distractions such as email and social media.
Cal challenges the belief that participation in social media is important for career capital, suggesting instead that career capital is a function of creativity, impact and control, or autonomy. Cal's been an advocate for "digital minimalism" and refers to the role email and chat play in what he calls "the hyperactive hive mind".
Cal Newport knows that real straight-A students don’t study harder—they study smarter. In this episode we take a look at Cal Newport’s breakthrough approach to acing assignments, from quizzes and exams to essays and papers, How to Become a Straight-A Student reveals the proven study secrets used by real straight-A students across the country.
In this episode we dive into Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You discussing his long-held belief that "follow your passion" is not good advice. Not only is the cliche flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do.
Most of us know that addiction to digital tools is costing us both productivity and peace. But giving them up completely isn't realistic. We're addicted to texting, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter not because we're stupid or shallow, but because they provide real value in the form of connection, community, affirmation, and information. In this episode we dive into Cal Newport’s philosophy and plan for a mindful, intentional use of technology that maximises its benefits while minimising its drain on our attention, focus and time.
Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six self-improvement books. He also writes the Study Hacks blog focused on academic and career success. This series we will deep dive into his work starting with his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
Deep Work is a book about the science of productivity. Cal argues the best way to get more meaningful work done is by working deeply – working in a state of high concentration without distractions on a single task.
