Cal Newport

you get better at it.

And it has a demonstrable difference.

You sit down to work and you're just producing better stuff or you're trying to pick up some complicated new thing.

Like, oh God, I can learn this faster.

That makes a huge difference.

And then the second one, which was more recent in my life was, oh, you really got to control the workload.

So much is downstream from how many things you've agreed to work on.

You have to leave the mindset of everything I say yes to brings with it value.

So saying yes to more things, it's just going to aggregate more value.

That's not the right mindset.

That's not the way.

It's a nonlinear reward function there.

There's a certain point as you add more things that not only does value stop growing, it begins to go down on the other side.

And that there's a real saying no to many more things is actually a way to optimize reward and output, which is not natural.

It doesn't make sense at first.

It doesn't feel like common sense.

So workload and focus training,

You can control those more than you think, and you're going to have huge results from those.

Yeah, it's almost perverse the way that works.

It's like when you have all the time in the world, all you want is opportunities.