Cal Newport:
"If she didn’t cost the label much money, Jewel reasoned, they would be less likely to drop her if she wasn’t an immediate hit. This in turn would provide her the freedom needed to sharpen her craft and pursue something new and exceptional with her music."
"When Jewel’s first album, Pieces of You, was finally released in 1995, it fell flat. “Radio hated me, they hated me, vehemently hated me,” Jewel explained. “I mean, imagine Nirvana and Soundgarden, and then you hear a song like ‘You Were Meant for Me,’ and you go, ‘No.’ ” But because she didn’t cost the record label much money to support, they didn’t drop her. This allowed Jewel to focus her energy on building a fan base through touring, which she began to do at a relentless clip, taking on what she described as “a tremendous workload.”"
"Standing offstage, waiting for a show to begin, Young noticed Jewel’s anxiety. He asked her what was wrong. She opened up about all the pressures and stress she was feeling. He gave her a critical piece of advice in response: “Do not ever write for radio. Ever.”"
"Jewel listened to Young and returned to her plan of taking it slow and focusing on quality."
"After she released a sultry video for “You Were Meant for Me,” they exploded. The album went from selling a few thousand copies over its first year to close to a million copies each month. “It was staggering,” "
"Jewel’s strategy of prioritizing art over fame provides a nice case study of the third and final principle of slow productivity: obsess over quality. As captured in the definition below, when you concentrate your attention on producing your best possible work, a more humane slowness becomes inevitable:
"Standing offstage, waiting for a show to begin, Young noticed Jewel’s anxiety. He asked her what was wrong. She opened up about all the pressures and stress she was feeling. He gave her a critical piece of advice in response: “Do not ever write for radio. Ever.”"
"Jewel listened to Young and returned to her plan of taking it slow and focusing on quality."
"After she released a sultry video for “You Were Meant for Me,” they exploded. The album went from selling a few thousand copies over its first year to close to a million copies each month. “It was staggering,” "
"Jewel’s strategy of prioritizing art over fame provides a nice case study of the third and final principle of slow productivity: obsess over quality. As captured in the definition below, when you concentrate your attention on producing your best possible work, a more humane slowness becomes inevitable:
Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term."
"Quality demands that you slow down."
"a pair of propositions that offer pragmatic advice for introducing an obsession with quality into your own life."
"Why Knowledge Workers Should Obsess Over Quality ..."
"Even in knowledge work, however, if we look closer, we can often find hidden among our busy to-do lists one or two core activities that really matter most."
"When professors go up for promotion, for example, most of what occupies our days falls away from consideration. The decision comes down to exhaustive confidential letters, solicited from prominent scholars, that discuss and debate the importance and impact of our research on our field. In the end, great research papers are what matter for us. If we haven’t notably advanced our academic specialty, no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us."
"The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life."
"obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness."
"“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained."
"while also demanding that his team observe a three-hour deep-work period each afternoon with no meetings, messages, or calls allowed."
"A research director named Abby told me a similar story. She had been “fractured across a million projects,” which she found exhausting, so when she moved to a new position, she decided to adopt a different strategy: she would focus her energy on exactly two major goals. This clarity allowed her to step away from a more frenetic, overloaded busyness."
"The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable."
"The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities. What makes Jarvis’s story so heartening is its demonstration that these benefits of “obsessing” over quality don’t necessarily require that you dedicate your entire life to the blinkered pursuit of superstardom. Jarvis didn’t sell fifteen million records; he instead became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the particular field in which he worked. "
"Taste, in this process, acts as the compass that guides you toward the peaks and away from the valleys in the fitness landscape of possible creations."
"It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard."
"Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result. Glass argues that it’s in our desire to squelch this uneasy self-appraisal—to diminish the distance between our taste and our ability—that improvement happens."
"But as his conversation with Lewis continues, it becomes clear that Glass didn’t necessarily realize the inadequacy of the piece at the time when he recorded it. “I remember when I finished it, I was like, I remember feeling like, okay, I’ve finally got it, I finally know what I’m doing,” he recalls."
"His success came not only from a drive to meet his own high standards, but also from his efforts to improve those standards over time."
"Between my work as a professor and writer, my role as a father, and a tendency to fill any remaining free time with reading, I didn’t really have anything I could identify as a serious hobby, so I thought, given my preexisting interest, I would give cinema a try."
"Tarantino’s essay collection, Cinema Speculation, also proved an important source of insight into what makes a good movie good and, equally important, what makes a fun movie fun."
"Most of my recent nonfiction books, for example, tend to deploy a style that I informally call “smart self-help,” which combines conventions from standard advice writing—a genre I was immersed in as a teenager and young adult, and for which I feel extreme affection—with more sophisticated forms from general nonfiction writing. Most books in these categories tend to fall into one bin or the other: you’re either Stephen Covey or Malcolm Gladwell. I like to mix them. I hadn’t thought much about this decision other than it’s what felt natural to me."
"When I read great nonfiction writers, I often find myself white-knuckling the book, trying to figure out what they’re doing that I’m not. This is useful, but also exhausting. When I’m studying a great film, by contrast, I can just enjoy it without reservation, and in doing so find a refreshing jolt of inspiration. Consider this on your own journey toward developing an obsession with quality. Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what’s great about other domains. It’s here that you can find a more flexible source of inspiration, a reminder of what makes the act of creation so exciting in the first place."
"Forming a group of like-minded professionals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, provides a shortcut to improving your taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality that you’re pursuing."
"Though I don’t remember exactly how much I paid in 2010 for that notebook, I remember it was a lot for me at the time—probably somewhere around fifty dollars. This cost, however, was part of what attracted me to it. Knowing how much I had spent, I figured, would make me more careful about what I wrote on its archival-quality pages, which would force me to be more structured and careful in my thinking. This might sound like an odd gambit, but progress in theoretical computer science research often reduces to a game of cognitive chicken in which whoever is able to hold out longer through the mental discomfort of working through a proof element in their mind will end up with the sharper result. My biggest self-criticism as a researcher at the time was that I was bailing out too early when trying to think hard about a theorem or new algorithm. I hoped that a fancy notebook would keep me in the game a little longer.
I ended up using this notebook for a little more than two years, recording my final page of notes in December 2012—a period that spans my entire postdoc and my first year as an assistant professor. I know these precise dates because I recently found the notebook among a stack of old planners on a shelf toward the back of my bedroom closet. As I leafed through its pages, I was struck by how neatly I had inscribed my equations and diagrams. (In the cheaper notebooks I buy by the bushel, my scrawl is often barely legible.) Over that entire two-year period, I used only ninety-seven of the notebook’s pages, filling each to its margins. Another thing that struck me was the familiarity of so many of the proof sketches and equations that made their way into the notebook. As I reviewed those ninety-seven pages, I found core results from what would become seven different peer-review publications, as well as the foundational thinking for what became my first major National Science Foundation grant as a young professor. This was one of many different notebooks I used during this short period of my academic career, but there’s no doubt that this unusually expensive option played a disproportionate role in my productivity.
The general idea that quality tools can increase the quality of your work is not unique to my early academic career. Novelists find a burst of energy when they switch from a generic word processor to professional writing software like Scrivener, just as screenwriters feel more capable when they buy Final Draft to compose their movies. It’s true that these more expensive tools include more features than their cheaper counterparts, but the “I’m a professional now” vibe they induce is arguably just as valuable. We see a similar effect in podcasters who buy the $300 Shure microphone famously used by Joe Rogan. In most cases, their audience wouldn’t care about the minor quality difference between that professional mic and a cheaper USB option, but to the aspiring podcaster, it’s a signal to themselves that they’re taking the pursuit seriously. We also see these dynamics at play when computer programmers set up elaborate digital workstations featuring two or three monitors. These programmers will swear that the ability to see multiple windows at once increases productivity. This is true to an extent, but earlier generations of computer programmers seemed to be plenty productive before the recent introduction of graphic drivers capable of supporting multiple displays. Part of the power of these setups is found in their complexity, which puts the user in a specialized mindset, ready to do the hard work of writing efficient programs.
The pursuit of quality is not a casual endeavor. If you want your mind on board with your plans to evolve your abilities, then investing in your tools is a good way to start."
"Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late."
"The band may have spent many more hours than they ever had before recording Sgt. Pepper, but their available time wasn’t unlimited. Once their sessions began making progress, the Beatles’ music publisher, EMI, released two singles, creating urgency to complete the project."
"Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection."
"This proposition argues that betting on yourself in this manner—with nontrivial stakes for failure but attractive rewards for success—is a good general strategy for pushing the quality of your work to a new level."
"One of the more famous examples of a self-bet in recent history comes from the world of business: Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft. Today, we’re used to the idea of precocious tech types leaving college to start software companies, but this wasn’t a thing back then. When Gates left Harvard, there was no software industry (he created it), and the personal computers that he saw as the future were still available only as a hobby kit that interfaced with its user through switches and blinking lights. The stakes for failure were high for Gates as he left Harvard, but this helped push him to do something spectacular.
Betting on yourself need not be as dramatic as losing a record deal or walking away from an Ivy League school. Simply by placing yourself in a situation where there exists pressure to succeed, even if moderate, can provide an important accelerant in your quest for quality. "
"From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some."
"These authors demonstrate one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts. or a young Stephenie Meyer, for example, it likely wasn’t fun to squeeze so much writing in between kid activities or into tired stretches late at night. Given the sacrifices this goal demanded, she was motivated to not waste time on a half-hearted effort. Determined to see her project through to the end, Meyer wrote every day, even if she completed only a few pages. (By contrast, I’ve seen more than a few academics or journalists, given a luxurious sabbatical to do nothing but write, struggle to make meaningful progress amid all their newfound freedom.)"
"The problem, of course, is that for every Grisham there are a dozen other aspiring writers—or entrepreneurs, or artists—who end up slinking back to their old jobs, chastened and deeper in debt than when they started."
"Dedicating time or sacrificing money for a project are two obvious bets to push you toward higher-quality work."
"This same lesson applies to other endeavors. When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust."
-----
grok:
"Quality demands that you slow down."
"a pair of propositions that offer pragmatic advice for introducing an obsession with quality into your own life."
"Why Knowledge Workers Should Obsess Over Quality ..."
"Even in knowledge work, however, if we look closer, we can often find hidden among our busy to-do lists one or two core activities that really matter most."
"When professors go up for promotion, for example, most of what occupies our days falls away from consideration. The decision comes down to exhaustive confidential letters, solicited from prominent scholars, that discuss and debate the importance and impact of our research on our field. In the end, great research papers are what matter for us. If we haven’t notably advanced our academic specialty, no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us."
"The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life."
"obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness."
"“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained."
"while also demanding that his team observe a three-hour deep-work period each afternoon with no meetings, messages, or calls allowed."
"A research director named Abby told me a similar story. She had been “fractured across a million projects,” which she found exhausting, so when she moved to a new position, she decided to adopt a different strategy: she would focus her energy on exactly two major goals. This clarity allowed her to step away from a more frenetic, overloaded busyness."
"The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable."
"The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities. What makes Jarvis’s story so heartening is its demonstration that these benefits of “obsessing” over quality don’t necessarily require that you dedicate your entire life to the blinkered pursuit of superstardom. Jarvis didn’t sell fifteen million records; he instead became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the particular field in which he worked. "
"Taste, in this process, acts as the compass that guides you toward the peaks and away from the valleys in the fitness landscape of possible creations."
"It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard."
"Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result. Glass argues that it’s in our desire to squelch this uneasy self-appraisal—to diminish the distance between our taste and our ability—that improvement happens."
"But as his conversation with Lewis continues, it becomes clear that Glass didn’t necessarily realize the inadequacy of the piece at the time when he recorded it. “I remember when I finished it, I was like, I remember feeling like, okay, I’ve finally got it, I finally know what I’m doing,” he recalls."
"His success came not only from a drive to meet his own high standards, but also from his efforts to improve those standards over time."
"Between my work as a professor and writer, my role as a father, and a tendency to fill any remaining free time with reading, I didn’t really have anything I could identify as a serious hobby, so I thought, given my preexisting interest, I would give cinema a try."
"Tarantino’s essay collection, Cinema Speculation, also proved an important source of insight into what makes a good movie good and, equally important, what makes a fun movie fun."
"Most of my recent nonfiction books, for example, tend to deploy a style that I informally call “smart self-help,” which combines conventions from standard advice writing—a genre I was immersed in as a teenager and young adult, and for which I feel extreme affection—with more sophisticated forms from general nonfiction writing. Most books in these categories tend to fall into one bin or the other: you’re either Stephen Covey or Malcolm Gladwell. I like to mix them. I hadn’t thought much about this decision other than it’s what felt natural to me."
"When I read great nonfiction writers, I often find myself white-knuckling the book, trying to figure out what they’re doing that I’m not. This is useful, but also exhausting. When I’m studying a great film, by contrast, I can just enjoy it without reservation, and in doing so find a refreshing jolt of inspiration. Consider this on your own journey toward developing an obsession with quality. Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what’s great about other domains. It’s here that you can find a more flexible source of inspiration, a reminder of what makes the act of creation so exciting in the first place."
"Forming a group of like-minded professionals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, provides a shortcut to improving your taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality that you’re pursuing."
"Though I don’t remember exactly how much I paid in 2010 for that notebook, I remember it was a lot for me at the time—probably somewhere around fifty dollars. This cost, however, was part of what attracted me to it. Knowing how much I had spent, I figured, would make me more careful about what I wrote on its archival-quality pages, which would force me to be more structured and careful in my thinking. This might sound like an odd gambit, but progress in theoretical computer science research often reduces to a game of cognitive chicken in which whoever is able to hold out longer through the mental discomfort of working through a proof element in their mind will end up with the sharper result. My biggest self-criticism as a researcher at the time was that I was bailing out too early when trying to think hard about a theorem or new algorithm. I hoped that a fancy notebook would keep me in the game a little longer.
I ended up using this notebook for a little more than two years, recording my final page of notes in December 2012—a period that spans my entire postdoc and my first year as an assistant professor. I know these precise dates because I recently found the notebook among a stack of old planners on a shelf toward the back of my bedroom closet. As I leafed through its pages, I was struck by how neatly I had inscribed my equations and diagrams. (In the cheaper notebooks I buy by the bushel, my scrawl is often barely legible.) Over that entire two-year period, I used only ninety-seven of the notebook’s pages, filling each to its margins. Another thing that struck me was the familiarity of so many of the proof sketches and equations that made their way into the notebook. As I reviewed those ninety-seven pages, I found core results from what would become seven different peer-review publications, as well as the foundational thinking for what became my first major National Science Foundation grant as a young professor. This was one of many different notebooks I used during this short period of my academic career, but there’s no doubt that this unusually expensive option played a disproportionate role in my productivity.
The general idea that quality tools can increase the quality of your work is not unique to my early academic career. Novelists find a burst of energy when they switch from a generic word processor to professional writing software like Scrivener, just as screenwriters feel more capable when they buy Final Draft to compose their movies. It’s true that these more expensive tools include more features than their cheaper counterparts, but the “I’m a professional now” vibe they induce is arguably just as valuable. We see a similar effect in podcasters who buy the $300 Shure microphone famously used by Joe Rogan. In most cases, their audience wouldn’t care about the minor quality difference between that professional mic and a cheaper USB option, but to the aspiring podcaster, it’s a signal to themselves that they’re taking the pursuit seriously. We also see these dynamics at play when computer programmers set up elaborate digital workstations featuring two or three monitors. These programmers will swear that the ability to see multiple windows at once increases productivity. This is true to an extent, but earlier generations of computer programmers seemed to be plenty productive before the recent introduction of graphic drivers capable of supporting multiple displays. Part of the power of these setups is found in their complexity, which puts the user in a specialized mindset, ready to do the hard work of writing efficient programs.
The pursuit of quality is not a casual endeavor. If you want your mind on board with your plans to evolve your abilities, then investing in your tools is a good way to start."
"Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late."
"The band may have spent many more hours than they ever had before recording Sgt. Pepper, but their available time wasn’t unlimited. Once their sessions began making progress, the Beatles’ music publisher, EMI, released two singles, creating urgency to complete the project."
"Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection."
"This proposition argues that betting on yourself in this manner—with nontrivial stakes for failure but attractive rewards for success—is a good general strategy for pushing the quality of your work to a new level."
"One of the more famous examples of a self-bet in recent history comes from the world of business: Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft. Today, we’re used to the idea of precocious tech types leaving college to start software companies, but this wasn’t a thing back then. When Gates left Harvard, there was no software industry (he created it), and the personal computers that he saw as the future were still available only as a hobby kit that interfaced with its user through switches and blinking lights. The stakes for failure were high for Gates as he left Harvard, but this helped push him to do something spectacular.
Betting on yourself need not be as dramatic as losing a record deal or walking away from an Ivy League school. Simply by placing yourself in a situation where there exists pressure to succeed, even if moderate, can provide an important accelerant in your quest for quality. "
"From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some."
"These authors demonstrate one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts. or a young Stephenie Meyer, for example, it likely wasn’t fun to squeeze so much writing in between kid activities or into tired stretches late at night. Given the sacrifices this goal demanded, she was motivated to not waste time on a half-hearted effort. Determined to see her project through to the end, Meyer wrote every day, even if she completed only a few pages. (By contrast, I’ve seen more than a few academics or journalists, given a luxurious sabbatical to do nothing but write, struggle to make meaningful progress amid all their newfound freedom.)"
"The problem, of course, is that for every Grisham there are a dozen other aspiring writers—or entrepreneurs, or artists—who end up slinking back to their old jobs, chastened and deeper in debt than when they started."
"Dedicating time or sacrificing money for a project are two obvious bets to push you toward higher-quality work."
"This same lesson applies to other endeavors. When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust."
-----
grok:
"The chapter centers on the third and final principle of slow productivity:
Principle #3: Obsess over quality Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.
Cal Newport argues that truly exceptional work cannot be rushed; quality inherently demands slowness because deep improvement is incompatible with chronic busyness and overload.
Opening Case Study: Jewel
The chapter opens with the singer-songwriter Jewel’s early career in the mid-1990s. She deliberately kept production costs low on her debut album Pieces of You (1995) so the label wouldn’t drop her if it failed initially. Radio hated the folk-pop sound amid the grunge era, and sales were dismal at first. But the low overhead bought her time. Neil Young gave her crucial advice: “Do not ever write for radio. Ever.” She doubled down on relentless touring and artistic integrity instead of chasing quick hits. A later video for “You Were Meant for Me” caught fire organically, and the album eventually sold 12 million copies. Jewel’s willingness to prioritize craft over immediate fame—and the breathing room it created—illustrates how obsessing over quality can transform apparent failure into sustained, explosive success.
Why Knowledge Workers Must Obsess Over Quality
In knowledge work, most daily tasks (meetings, email, administrative busywork) evaporate when real evaluation happens. What remains are one or two core activities that actually matter: great research papers for professors, breakthrough designs for engineers, compelling writing for authors, etc. Obsessing over the quality of these high-leverage activities turns “doing fewer things” (Principle #1) from a nice idea into an absolute necessity. Once you commit to excellence in what truly counts, busyness becomes intolerable—it actively sabotages the deep focus required to improve.
Producing rare and valuable work gives you leverage: better reputation, more autonomy, higher pay, the ability to say no. The marketplace doesn’t hand out slower schedules for free; you earn them by becoming so good that people can’t ignore you.
Two Core Propositions for Cultivating Obsession
The chapter offers two pragmatic propositions:
- Build your taste, then close the gap between taste and ability
- Taste (the ability to recognize truly excellent work) develops faster than the skill to produce it. Ira Glass famously described the “taste gap”: early in a creative career you know what’s good but can’t yet make it, which creates productive discomfort.
- Philip Glass, Quentin Tarantino, and Newport himself show how immersing yourself in the very best work—even outside your exact field—sharpens taste and provides fresh inspiration without the exhausting self-critique that comes from studying direct competitors.
- Joining or forming a small community of serious practitioners accelerates taste development dramatically.
- Invest in the tools, rituals, and environment that signal “this matters” and pull higher performance out of you
- Quality tools (an expensive notebook, Scrivener, a Shure microphone, multiple monitors) do more than add features; they shift your identity to “I’m a professional who takes this seriously.”
- Rituals and bets on yourself—high stakes with real consequences—combat perfectionism and force progress. Examples:
- The Beatles giving themselves ~700 hours (but not unlimited time) for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
- Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft when no software industry existed.
- John Grisham quitting his law job to write full-time; Stephenie Meyer writing Twilight every spare moment between raising kids.
- Dedicating a bounded but intense period (a summer, a sabbatical used wisely) or putting real money/skin in the game.
- The common thread: enough pressure to motivate obsession, but not so much that paralysis sets in. “Progress, not perfection.”
The Deeper Logic
Obsessing over quality is the engine that makes the entire philosophy of slow productivity sustainable. Doing fewer things (Principle #1) and working at a natural pace (Principle #2) feel virtuous in theory, but in a competitive world they only endure if you’re producing work so valuable that people grant you the freedom to keep operating that way. Quality is the currency you trade for a saner, slower, more human professional life.
In short: Get so good they can’t ignore you—and they’ll have to let you move at the pace excellence actually requires."
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