Original source: http://www.cnblogs.com/buptzym/p/8059121.html
Impetuousness has become a common social phenomenon. It is very easy to judge whether a person is impetuous, just look at the number of times he actively picks up his mobile phone in a day. According to the TED speaker, this value is generally 50 times, and in addition to 8 hours of sleep, basically every 20 minutes to turn over the phone.
What are you going to do with your phone? Look at WeChat, ticket circle, Weibo, Zhihu, Taobao, or just swipe the homepage back and forth. We are not celebrities and no one cares about your actions on social networks. However, in just a few minutes, the situation that the brain has worked hard to build is destroyed. After putting down the phone, it is likely to forget what you were doing before, and then it is difficult to enter the state for a long time. Fragmented reading is prevalent, but when you put down your phone, what can you remember?
We also found that students who graduated almost at the same time will have a huge gap after working for a few years. Some people have been able to manage a large team of hundreds of people, while some people can't even manage themselves. initiative. Everyone seems to be working, so why is there a huge difference in career development, professionalism and influence a few years later?
Deep learning is a very important concept in artificial intelligence (AI), which means that a model with a deep enough structure and a large enough capacity can complete complex tasks. Drawing on this concept, for people, deep work is high-quality work and thinking with depth and breadth. While we have such powerful brains, not everyone is good at deep work. 
(The depth of machine models has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years)
impetuous and anxious
Impetuous people often cannot persist in reading long and difficult texts, fidgeting in a lonely environment, constantly flipping through their mobile phones, and often pursuing short-term value rather than long-term gains. The brain has to switch situations repeatedly, getting more and more impetuous, and then a vicious circle, and it is easy to get tired: for example, if you try to chat with 10 people at the same time, you will be exhausted in half an hour.
Many students do not have a good habit of debugging code, and so does Mr. Desert. To give a chestnut: writing code is likely to be wrong at one time, modify it after an error, run it again, and modify it again. Each run takes a minute or two, so it's habitual to pick up the phone and then look down to see what went wrong again. After a lot of tossing, I brushed a lot of Zhihu in the morning, but didn't do much serious things. How does God write code? They will run the simulation in their brains attentively, correct the errors found in advance, and be very focused when debugging. But the difference in efficiency between the two is staggering.
We found that lazy people cannot survive. But not lazy but impetuous is not necessarily better. I used to make a list of things to do and clear the list to complete the task. Afterwards, I found that I became more and more addicted to the feeling of completing the list, and the goals set became more and more trivial, and I did not delve into the details and heights of the tasks. Although impetuous is not lazy, it seems to be busy, but in fact the quality is low. Tactical busyness cannot change strategic laziness. Without thinking about the problem, I hurried on the road and worked blindly.
Quality is far more important than quantity. Success never depends on enough things. Change depends on a few key elements. "A person's destiny, of course, depends on self-struggle, but the process of history must also be taken into account." The elders have completed three small things that are enough to be famous for eternity. For most people, it is enough to complete one important thing.
The state of deep work
In deep work, the brain is very focused and efficient, capable of dealing with complex problems. Imagine a state: under uninterrupted long-term thinking, the brain will create a sophisticated three-dimensional information network, various ideas and creativity will continue to emerge, and the efficiency of absorbing information after finding a problem will be very high.
A seemingly simple question actually has rich connotations behind it. Can you think of enough depth? Take a mathematical example: for Bayesian formula, its concept is simple, and it is well known by many science and engineering students. What problem is it originally used to solve, what conditions are there, what background knowledge is required, and further, its nature, what inferences and extensions are there, and in what fields has it been successfully applied. Being able to explain these issues clearly is enough to apply for top algorithm engineers.
Focus is a habit, and when you can stay focused on boring or inexplicable problems (like reading this article), the brain naturally picks up this skill and adapts. Focusing on work is very efficient. Although there is a huge difference in wealth, everyone has equal time. If you save working time, you will have more free time to waste.
In addition to high-quality work, deep thinking can also extend into your usual free time, certainly not encouraging to be a workaholic. Many good ideas do not come from sitting upright at the desk, but from inadvertent thinking sparks in life. When you are very interested in a problem, you unconsciously think about it subconsciously. The unintentional state can instead cause them to come to real consciousness.
Thinking on a walk is very effective, and of course it has to be safe. During the long commute, let yourself try not to play with your mobile phone, think about what problems have not been solved, and the originally frantic and boring waiting has become calm. Imagine a person sitting quietly on a bench by the West Lake on Saturday evening, with no one around and only a few kittens playing around. Looking at the calm lake, I fell into contemplation: There are several options for the task to be completed recently, what are the pros and cons, whether the resources are available, the problems and solutions that will be encountered, which girl is better (and messed up again), and further, Develop key milestones, mission outputs and impacts. In half an hour, without the help of pen and paper, let the brain do a complete simulation of the problem-solving path. Maybe you can figure out a problem that has been bothering you for a long time.
The city is originally boring, it is the life, communication and competition between people that brings interest. You can be friends with the brain, and it will construct beautiful scenes for you, create memory palaces, and remember a surprising amount of information. The brain can also imitate a few friends to help you out, but don't fall into the trap of multiple personalities (this is so cool).
do one thing at a time
Many knowledge and skills are difficult to transfer in different fields, but focus and depth are essential qualities in any field. Cultivating this underlying ability can have a profound impact on all aspects of oneself. The question is, how can we stay focused?
Some people think that focus requires deliberate exercise. In fact, as long as you cultivate the habit of leaving your mobile phone and not easily distracted, you can take a valuable step: if you want to pick up the mobile phone, hold it back; if you can't figure out the problem, calm down, draw a picture and explain it to yourself again. This ensures at least half an hour of focused work. Most people's brains are not good at parallelism, so it is more productive to stay focused on doing things in series. To quote the Master Chief in the XBOX game "Halo" often said: "Just do one thing at a time".
Of course, if you want to create great results, you need days or even months of hard work, such as proving subtle mathematical propositions, which requires talent and interest, as well as hard training in concentration. Bill Gates threw everything away and designed the BASIC language in 8 weeks, laying the foundation of the Microsoft empire. He worked so hard in these two months that he slept an hour or two when he was extremely exhausted, and was hailed by Paul Allen as an "amazing act of concentration". For comparison, what can we do in two months?
You can actively create a sense of ritual and environment to force yourself into a state of concentration. If possible, close WeChat and Dingding; hire a fitness trainer, and train very hard because of the price of the flesh; often go to your favorite cafe to read and write, which is much better than hanging around at home. The office environment of a company also largely determines the working style of employees. The super-large booths of Internet companies greatly promote the exchange of information, and to a certain extent, it makes it difficult for employees to calm down and think about problems, such as our company. Cages full of small compartments, while good for personal research, can also reduce the efficiency of information flow. Microsoft's office area design is worth learning from. They have spacious public spaces for open discussions, and each person also has an independent office for in-depth work. Therefore, Microsoft's academic research output is quite large.
If you still can't get yourself to meditate and focus, then it may be the cause of the body. The author recently studied the "Huangdi Neijing" (have the opportunity to write a review after reading, do big data fortune-telling), in which the 16 words in the ancient innocence theory are thought-provoking: " Trace and nothingness, follow the true energy, guard the spirit, and stay safe from illness. " . There are too many desires and impetuousness in the city: many people do not conform to the atmosphere of heaven and earth, mobile phones and computers hang in front of their eyes all day, all kinds of radiation are flooded around, the air conditioner is extremely cold in summer and very hot in winter, and if you don’t exercise on weekdays, you eat greasy, which leads to false fire. Too prosperous, unable to meditate, let alone focus and depth. On the contrary, when you are in the idyllic farmhouse, listening to the voices you know in the middle of the night, it is easy to calm down, and then you are so sleepy that you want to sleep...
Maybe you don't believe in Chinese medicine, that's okay, but it is necessary to cultivate good living habits. I have to say that deep work consumes a lot of brain power, and one or two hours of thinking is enough to make the brain feel burning. After all, the body is the capital of the revolution.
Meaning of deep work
Deep work is not the study of success, nor is it a panacea for reaching the pinnacle of life. It is the attitude of taking life seriously and using time efficiently. It does not mean being cut off from the outside world. You can configure the rhythm of retreat and communication according to your own habits, and the efficiency of communication will be higher. The other person will be pleasantly surprised by your previous deep thinking, and no one likes to blurt out a pointless point.
Depth and focus make a huge difference: in general, hard work is enough to be the best. However, in the competitive environment of strong players, if you want to stand out, you need to have a thorough systematic understanding of business, products and algorithms, as well as in-depth work and active actions. Although large companies are full of talented people, it is easy to find that people are sometimes overworked, and the most fundamental details are overlooked everywhere. Answer the previous question again, because the strong can think clearly and plan the future, focus leads to initiative, and actively feed back focus. Therefore, people with the same starting point will have a huge gap after a few years.
What's more, due to the increasingly high labor cost, the rapid development of AI, the fast speed and low cost, and almost no mistakes, a large number of jobs that do not require high brain power will be replaced by AI in the future, especially entry-level accountants, programmers, Office white-collar workers such as artists have less impact on the service industry that requires complex interactions with the environment. In order to gain an advantage in the new competition form, it is necessary not only to compete with people, but also to have the deep thinking ability of fuzzy decision-making that AI does not have.
Of course, everyone understands the truth, and it is another matter whether you can practice it yourself. This is the watershed of competition. For example, after posting this article, I can take the initiative to pick up the phone 50 times an hour, hey.