Deep work is great, people. It really, well, works. Today I received an email from a client asking to respond within the hour how long it would take me to translate 10 1-page .pdfs. So I went ahead and simply translated them within that hour I was supposed to spend thinking about the speed of my translation.

To be fair, the 10 files had a lot of repetitive parts. But to be doubly fair, there was a lot of fussing with the format. They all had complicated headers and some handwriting. One would need this part underlined, those two bold-typed and other three italicized, while another required the first two be left alone, the other two put in a larger font, and the last 3 italicized and bold-typed.

For deep work, you have to train yourself to go into stretches of profound, trance-like concentration. It doesn’t happen at once. It’s like running a marathon. You train, and train, and train, and then you are ready.

I’m starting a deep work challenge here on the blog. I’ll share daily activities that will prepare us to work deeper and accomplish more in less time. You know that unpleasant, sticky feeling where you’ve worked all day but can’t really say what it is you’ve actually done? Deep work is a cure for that.

The author of the book where I found the idea of deep work is Cal Newport. It’s a great book and I highly recommend. But the activities are all mine. Except one that I did find in Newport’s book but I’ll credit him once I get to it.

Prepare! The challenge begins tomorrow. We’ll get ourselves more focused and ultimately much freer.

Well, if this is true, it’s very sad. If it’s not true, then it’s also very sad. Between delusion and whiny, groveling subservience, I’m not sure which is better.

My mother doesn’t know how to change the voicemail recording on her home phone, so I sometimes call when I know she’s not there just to hear my father’s voice on the voicemail.

A person who is fixated on a past injustice done to him is permanently crippled. He bleeds energy. His main identity becomes that of a victim, a loser, and he does everything to service that identity. It is unimportant whether the injustice is real or imaginary. The result is always that he says his own energy by pouring it into the past instead of into the future.

This is why Trump will not be a good candidate in 2024. He’s fixated on the injustice of his 2020 loss. He has dissipated his persona of “I’m a winner and everybody associated with me gets sprinkled with the golden dust of winning” to nurse a past grievance. And he’s never going to be as good at nursing grievances as his opponents. So he loses even at being a loser.

First, one side was wailing about the assault on democracy over something extraordinarily trivial. Now the other side is wailing about same over something trivial. Ted Cruz yesterday suggested that there should be… get this… hearings about yesterday’s assault on democracy. Probably we should call them the August 6 hearings even though it wasn’t the 6th. But who cares? As long as we have our own “something 6th hearings”, it’s all good.

And the funniest thing of all is that these funny monkeys aren’t noticing how identical they are.