INTENSITY
“To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task, free from distraction.”
—Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Deep Work.
According to Newport, the type of work that optimizes your performance is “deep work.”He defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit, [which then] create new value, improve your skill and are hard to duplicate.”
Newport says, “If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally.”
In an article written for Inc., Jessica Stillman discusses Newport’s findings and profiles the intense work ethic of Bill Gates. In early 1975, Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore, typed line after line of code that would become the software behind Microsoft. Gates, his business partner Paul Allen and a Harvard math student named Monte Davidoff spent two weeks in the school’s Aiken lab. Gates was relentless.
In a piece in Business Insider, author Walter Isaacson is quoted as writing the following in a 2013 issue of the Harvard Gazette,“In the wee hours of the morning, Gates would sometimes fall asleep at the terminal. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard.” Paul Allen said, “After dozing an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.”
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”
—Michael Jordan, six-time NBA Champion and five-time MVP.
Professional athletes, musicians and entertainers exhibit the same kind of intensity.Michael Jordan was known to have practiced for hours after completing his team’s already grueling practice schedule.Venus and Serena Williams were up hitting tennis balls at 6 a.m. from the time they were sevenand eightyearsold.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer routinely pulled all-nighters and worked 130-hour weeks while at Google. Ryan Seacrest hosts American Idol, appears seven days a week on E!, hosts a daily radio show from 5 to 10 a.m., appears on the Today show, runs a television production company and in 2012, his company received a three hundred million dollar commitment in private equity funding to acquire even more businesses.
Apple CEO Tim Cook begins emailing employees at 4:30 a.m. He’s the first in the office and thelast to leave.When starting his first company, Mark Cuban routinely stayed up until 2 a.m., reading about new software andwent seven years without a vacation.While launching Amazon, Jeff Bezos worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week and stayed up until 3 a.m. to get books shipped.
In virtually every example of extreme success, one common denominator emerges—intensity.
It is a relentless and uncompromising drive to succeed, a willingness to do whatever it takes and a level of commitment that goes above and beyond the norms of expected performance.
