Study Hacks Blog

In 1973, the BBC aired a 13-part documentary television series called The Ascent of Man. It was written and hosted by the polymath intellectual Jacob Bronowski, and following the lead of the BBC’s 1968 hit series, Civilization, it featured poetic commentary set against dramatic visuals.

Which is all to say, I was excited to recently come across a copy of the series’s companion book: a handsome large-format hardcover that largely replicates the commentary from the television show and is thick with full-color photos. (I’ve always loved sweeping science histories. I’m concurrently reading, off and on, a vintage copy of Richard Leakey’s 1978 book, People of the Lake, and Niall Ferguson’s latest, The Square and the Tower.)

I wanted to briefly share an interesting nugget I came across early in Bronowski’s book about the consequences of our ancestors’ shift toward an omnivorous diet:

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I open Deep Work with the story of a stone tower that Carl Jung built on the shores of the upper lake of Zurich, near the small town of Bollingen. Jung would retreat to an inner sanctum inside the tower, modeled after meditation rooms he had seen on a tour of British controlled India, to think deeply about his breakthrough work on psychiatry and the collective unconscious.

It always struck me that Jung’s Bollingen Tower, as he called it, seemed almost purposefully fantastical, as if Jung was using its form to induce states of deeper creativity. The other day, while reading Anthony Steven’s insightful guide, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, I learned my instinct was right. As Stevens explains:

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A reader recently asked me the following question:

“You talk about developing rare and valuable skills specially those which the market values, but at what point do find yourself doing something meaningful? Yes, society would value you and compensate you, but at what costs. I know many people that are highly skilled, but hate their job/life. Is there an equilibrium in which you can develop rare and value skills while still being happy/proud about what you do?”

This question is important. In fact, it’s so important that I dedicated the fourth and final rule of my book So Good They Can’t Ignore You to this topic. Since it’s been nearly eight years since that book came out, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief summary of the answer I provided back then.

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I recently stumbled across a 1993 John Seabrook profile of Bill Gates from The New Yorker. It initially caught my attention because of its opening, which provides a nice snapshot of the early days of email. On a whim, Seabrook, who has never met Gates, sends him an email (from a CompuServe account). Eighteen minutes later, Gates replies.

Simpler times.

But I ended up more struck by a passage found deeper in the piece. “Microsoft’s ambition is to supply the standard operating-system software for the information-highway machine,” Seabrook notes. Because this was before broadband consumer internet was even on the radar, Microsoft assumed this machine would depend on the existing cable TV infrastructure, and therefore be sold as box that plugged in like a VCR.

Seabrook traveled to Redmond to see prototype devices demonstrating this vision, and reported the following:

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In Deep Work, I tell the story of Ric Furrer, a general blacksmith who runs a forge in Door County, Wisconsin: a rural idyll near Lake Michigan’s Sturgeon Bay. He works in a converted barn whose doors he often keeps open to the surrounding farm fields to vent the heat, his hammer blows echoing for miles. He makes a living with architectural metal work, but he’s known for his rare mastery of ancient weapon forging techniques. I came across him in a 2012 Nova episode in which he recreates a viking sword using crucible steel (see above).

In Deep Work, I write the following:

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As someone who studies technology and culture, I’ve noticed that we’re perpetually caught off guard when an unusually useful new innovation spreads rapidly. We tend to quickly claim that this latest fast adoption is unprecedented.

Historically speaking, however, these quick expansions might be more common than you realize. I was recently re-reading one of my favorite history of technology titles, Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. In it, Standage summarizes the astonishing rapidity with which the American telegraph network grew.

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