The Talent of Tenacity
"If you can't learn, you can't thrive," Cal Newport states confidently in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. In a world where we're practically raised to believe that all we need to accomplish our career goals is a Bachelor's degree, Newport challenges these ideals by suggesting that we need to continue to learn, adapt, and evolve our skill sets beyond the average level of a college graduate to further our momentum towards professional growth.
This statement deeply resonates with me because I feel as if my personal and professional work have become stagnant. I've wasted much time wanting and aiming to learn new skills to develop more articulate work but the familiarity of my current skillsets was more comforting than the uncertainty of learning new skills. For example, I've wanted to learn coding for quite some time and rather recently took a beginner's course in JavaScript. However, it is extremely frustrating to face that new, unfamiliar challenge to master new skills that would allow me to thrive than to maintain the status quo. Yet, I acknowledge that there were two key factors that inhibited me from developing new abilities: my fear of failure in such endeavors and the constant pressure from external judgment. Those inhibitors aside, I must concentrate on my ability to perform deep work, allowing me to focus deliberately on the development of the skills at hand (whatever they might be). Newport coined the term "deep work" to describe the action of isolating a given task with intense concentration.
According to the law of productivity, maximizing the intensity of focus directly maximizes the quality of results produced per unit of time spent. As an alumna of the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics (an elite public boarding school), I would like to express that my daily schedule was often centered around significant periods of concentration per subject followed by distinct "free" periods for socializing and relaxation. As I entered college, this structured schedule fell to the wayside as I grew fond of the idea that extended periods of focus on a single subject hindered my ability to perform in other subjects. Thus, I adopted a system of switching between tasks at delegated equivalent time segments with the intention of creating equal focus on each task, regardless of whether these tasks were finished. Was I ever fully satisfied with the work produced during these cycles? Absolutely not. Did I believe it made me more productive? Yes, but it created a façade of productivity by offering a higher quantity of results rather than quality. At the time, I was completely unaware of the culminating "attention residue" unintentionally created while performing this endless cycle of task-shifting. As a result, I struggled academically and made attempts to return my old habits of concentrating on a central subject matter before moving to the next task. However, in the tradition of collegiate studies, distractions were boundless and I often found myself struggling to maintain significant blocks of focus.
During my studies in a Developmental Disabilities course, I came across an article researching the distractibility of children with attention and sensory processing disorders compared against children without. Whilst searching for this article to compare with Newport's notes, I stumbled across a similarly captivating article: Attentional Inertia Reduces Distractibility during Young Children's TV Viewing. Co-authored by Daniel R. Anderson, Hyewon Park Choi, and Elizabeth Pugzles Lorch, the journal article examines the reaction time of distracting children who were watching television. These studies discovered that diverting the child's attention from television became increasingly more difficult after prolonged exposure to the television. Thus, a child who had recently tuned into a show reacted more quickly to an external stimulus than a child who had longer exposure to the television. Similarly, Newport argues that adults are more intensely productive after prolonged and isolated engagement with a skill or topic.
"Diffused attention is almost antithetical to the focused attention required by deliberate practice.”
Cal Newport
Another captivating theory from Newport: deliberate practice. The phrase itself emanates both concentration and adaptation, suggesting that the skill can only be learned with fervent motivation. As someone who, prior to COVID-19 regulations, juggled work in the theatrical realm, this concept of fixating solely on a particular skill or idea seems so foreign compared to the numerous production meetings attended throughout the course of a single week. Yet, I know from experience in a highly-structural institution that this focus is indeed possible. Perhaps I can develop some predeterminate structure for deliberate practice in such an incessantly distracted field.