Study Hacks Blog

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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As longtime readers know, I’m a big advocate of time blocking as a productivity method. Running your day from a to-do list (or, God forbid, an email inbox) leads to sub-optimal returns on the energy invested. The superior method is to give every minute of your workday a job by actually blocking off your time and assigning specific work to the blocks. In my experience, a serious commitment to time blocking can roughly double your results. (For more details, see this article or Rule #4 of Deep Work.)

Anyway, this is all to say that I was excited when several readers pointed me toward a nice variation of time blocking implemented by Jeff Huang, a computer science professor at Brown University.

As detailed in a post he wrote about his method, Huang uses a plain text file to make his time block plan for the day. (Though I use a paper notebook for my time blocks, I too appreciate the versatility of plain text files.)

Here’s an example schedule provided by Huang:

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Today is March 14th, which to us math nerds is also known as Pi Day, in reference to the first three significant digits of the mathematical constant pi (3.14).

Part of what makes pi interesting is that it’s one of the most famous irrational numbers, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the fraction of two whole values (though 22/7 comes pretty close). In honor of Pi Day, I thought I would learn more about the history of irrational numbers, so I turned to one of my bookshelf favorites, The World of Mathematics: a four-volume history of math, edited by James R. Newman, and published in a handsome faux-leather box set in 1956. (I picked up my copy at a used book sale five years ago.)

The first volume contains an extended essay (originally a short book) titled “The Great Mathematicians,” written by Herbert Western Turnbull, the late Scottish algebraist. Turnbull dedicates much of the essay to great innovations from ancient Greek mathematics. It was Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC), he notes, who is most often credited for discovering that irrational numbers exist.

We know something of the proof that Pythagoras used due to a later account by Aristotle. The proof is elementary by modern standards (indeed, it’s a common example in undergraduate-level discrete mathematics courses). It goes something like this…

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