Nassim Taleb on Deep Work Quotes

"Avoid people who give you 'productivity' advice. They are usually the least productive people."

"Trust those who are greedy for money a thousand times more than those who are greedy for credentials."

"Knowledge is not what you learn in school; it's what you discover when you're alone and bored."

"Deep work is an act of rebellion against a world that wants you to be shallow."

"The quality of your work is inversely proportional to the number of emails you answer."

"The logic of the black swan makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know."

"One should only work when the inspiration is high, otherwise, you are just producing clutter."

"You can only be a polymath if you have the courage to be bored and the stamina to read old books."

"The most productive tool ever invented is the 'Do Not Disturb' button."

"The best way to learn is to follow your own curiosity without any institutional pressure."

"To understand the world, you must spend a lot of time doing nothing but observing."

"A flâneur is someone who is allowed to be curious for its own sake."

"I need long hours of idleness to produce anything of value. If I am busy, I am not thinking."

"A mathematician is a person who can find the solution to a problem that doesn't exist."

"The difference between a worker and an intellectual is that the worker wants to be busy, the intellectual wants to be idle."

"Modern life is the lack of the transition between the intellectual and the physical. We need both."

"The most important thing to do every day is to protect your time for deep thinking."

"Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing."

"Read what you enjoy, not what you 'should'. The passion for the subject creates the depth."

"True mastery requires a barbell strategy: extreme safety in your basics and extreme risk in your ideas."

"The best way to learn is to read everything you can on a subject until you are bored with it."

"Ergodicity in work means that you cannot achieve greatness if you are constantly interrupted by small risks."

"If you find yourself checking the clock, you are not doing deep work."

"Bureaucracy is the death of deep work because it rewards the appearance of activity over results."

"Focus is about what you say no to, especially the news, which is just noise designed to distract you."

"The greatest enemy of deep work is the 'meeting'—a place where minutes are kept and hours are lost."

"If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past."

"If you want to be a philosopher, don't have a job. Jobs are the enemy of deep thought."

"I never use a watch. My body knows when it is time to work and when it is time to sleep."

"You don't want to win an argument. You want to win."

"The person who reads the most is not the person who learns the most; the person who thinks the most wins."

"My motto is 'checkmate' to the person who thinks that they can predict the future."

"Knowledge is reached by any process that subtracts what is wrong."