How to Win Friends and Influence People

 Author: Dale Carnegie

Originally published: October 1936

Self note

Practical – Every day

1. Become genuinely interested in other people
2. Smile
3. Remember people names - made them feel important
4. Give honest and sincere appreciation
5. Be a good listener, encourage others to talk about themselves
6. Make the other people feel important, do it sincerely. ‘Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.’

Negotiation

1. Begin in friendly way, avoid argument. Don't condemn, criticize, complain
2. Talk in terms of the other person's interests  stop talking about what you want, but try to see other people's viewpoint, how can I make this person want to do it?
3. Get the other person saying ‘yes, yes’ immediately
4. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking
5. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers
6. When you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Say respect to other people's opinion, never say you are wrong, Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires
7. Appeal to the nobler motives, dramatise your ideas, throw down a challenge

Leadership

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation
2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
5. Let the other person save face
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.’
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

From Book

Part 1. Fundamental techniques in handling people

1. Don't condemn, criticize, complain

2. Give honest and sincere appreciation

3. Arouse in other people an eager want (stop talking about what you want, but try to see other people's viewpoint, how can I make this person want to do it?)

Part 2. Six ways to make people like you

1. Become genuinely interested in other people

2. Smile

3. Remember people names - made them feel important

4. Be a good listener, encourage others to talk about themselves

5. Talk in terms of the other person's interests

6. Make the other people feel important, do it sincerely

Part 3. How to win people to your way of thinking

1. Avoid arguments

2. Say respect to other people's opinion, never say you are wrong

3. When you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically

4. Begin in a friendly way

5. Get the other person saying ‘yes, yes’ immediately

6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking

7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers

8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view

9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires

10. Appeal to the nobler motives

11. Dramatise your ideas

12. Throw down a challenge

Part 4. BE A LEADER

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation

2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly

3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person

4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders

5. Let the other person save face

6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.’

7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Deep Work

 Author: Cal Newport

Originally published: January 5, 2016

Introduction

• Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
• Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
• More time spent in shallow work will permanently reduce our capacity to perform deep work.
• The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
• A deep life is a good life

PART 1 - THE IDEA

1. Deep Work is Valuable

• As intelligent machines improve, and the gap between machine and human abilities shrinks, employers are becoming increasingly likely to hire “new machines” instead of “new people.”
• Valuable:
• The High-Skilled Workers - good at working with intelligent machines
• The Superstars - now marketplace become accessible from all over the world. People will choose the best
• The Owners - capital + labor = return. Labor become more elite, so capital has more impact
• Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy - both requires deep works
• The ability to quickly master hard things.
• The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
• Deliberate Practice
• Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master
• You receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
• Why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.
• High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus). 

2. Deep Work is Rare

• The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
• Why culture of connectivity persist:
• In the environment where we can get answer or specific piece of information quickly, life become easier -  no need advance planning, organizing, preparing
• Easier to spend time in our inbox than planning the day with advanced task management
• Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide
• The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.
• Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

3. Deep Work is Meaningful

• On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another.
• These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.
• In work (and especially knowledge work), to increase the time you spend in a state of depth is to leverage the complex machinery of the human brain in a way that for several different neurological reasons maximizes the meaning and satisfaction you’ll associate with your working life.
• “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
• Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
• Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

PART 2 - THE RULES

1. Work Deeply

• The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
• Any time he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep work mode. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities— a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed.
• “[ Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
• Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important:  
• “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” 
• “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”
• Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
• Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.
• Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”  Lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.
• Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
• Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability - weekly review
• At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning— no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.

2. Embrace Boredom

• Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
• People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks.
• Improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.
• Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
• Identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline— for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t avoid seeing it as you work. At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity— no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
• The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally— walking, jogging, driving, showering— and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
• Suggestion #1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
• Suggestion #2: Structure Your Deep Thinking - This cycle of reviewing and storing variables, identifying and tackling the next-step question, then consolidating your gains is like an intense workout routine for your concentration ability.

3. Quit Social Media

• The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.
• The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
• The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.
• If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. 

4. Drain the Shallows

• Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.
• How to measure depth of certain task: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? - then focus on the most deep task
• Fixed schedule productivity: Finish your work by 17:30. A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. The limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.