Yesterday, I put the finishing touches on a framework to help myself perform deeper work. Deep work is not just measured in time, but in mental strain and concentration. The motivation for doing deep work comes from a desire or a craving for acquiring career capital - that set of skills that is rare and valuable and that provides you a sense of accomplishment in exercising your craft. In today's post, I'm going to share the events that led me to create this process AND the very first feedback I received from my friend and colleague, Lillian Isabella. Let's get ... dareIsay ... deep! [caption id="attachment_642" align="aligncenter" width="810"]

Image Credit: TheDailyQuotes.com[/caption]

A series of unfortunate events ... that eventually turned into fortunate ones!

As you've heard from me over and over again, I have recently become a devotee of deep work after reading a book by the same name written by Cal Newport. The point of the book is to argue the rarity and importance of deep work in a knowledge economy and to put into context how knowledge workers, particularly, can improve the quality of their work. For the past two months, I've been training myself to concentrate despite a myriad of distractions at work and at home. I've begun to see results in the form of habits that support concentrated thought and more precise patterns of speech and reasoning. What I haven't seen is a growth in career capital-building activities. I can concentrate and execute on things I already know, but I didn't regularly push that extra level further into territory that I either couldn't immediately understand or immediately implement. I felt that my brain wasn't working hard enough to stretch my abilities and put me further toward building more rare and valuable career capital. That's why I decided to combine what I learned from Deep Work, The Lean Startup, The Power of Habit, and So Good They Can't Ignore You in a diagram to help myself exercise mental deliberate practice AND track my progress. This somewhat overwhelming chart is my first attempt at "showing my work". I've broken my process down into 5 stages: consistency, experimentation, comprehension, analysis, and creation and asked my friend and colleague, Lillian Isabella to give me her thoughts. Both she and I are very serious about what we do and regularly seek tools to improve our discipline and skill in our respective fields. I thought she would be the perfect person to provide feedback in an interview since it can also be helpful for her when she adapts it her work.

My very first feedback!

I printed out the chart, explained each level (as I will for you in upcoming blog posts!) and asked for Lillian's first impressions.

Lillian: I think it's interesting that you're trying to mechanize self-actualization in a way. Kat: Yes, I'm trying to find a way to make myself accountable for my own self-actualization so that I know that I am living my values of continuous learning. Lillian: I think you'd really enjoy the book, Choose Your Self by James Altucher. He not only talks continuous learning in a professional sense, but doing it through the whole body: the spiritual body, the physical body, the emotional body, and the mental body, so that you're always moving toward building a complete, well-balanced person. He had reached extreme wealth multiple times over and then lost everything because of his behavior. He would continuously crash and burn and then build himself up to wealth again. He realized that financial wealth is only a positive if all the rest of the areas mentioned before are also wealthy. I think you'd enjoy the book. Kat: That's great! I'm going to write that down. Lillian: What I really like about this framework is it doesn't allow room for anxiety or negative thought patterns that are self-destructive. What particularly excites me is the input and output columns. The first three columns are theory; the inputs and outputs are the action; and the metrics are analyzing that action. It's what makes this whole thing relevant. Kat: Exactly! I'm glad you're interested. Would you want a copy of it? Lillian: Absolutely! I want to analyze it and retool it for my specific interest areas for acting and writing. Kat: Sounds like a great idea! This process is designed to reclaim focus, build an action plan for growing your career capital, and eventually develop a craving for the that lead to career capital, allowing your skills and abilities to keep up with your ambition. In level 1, you exercise your mastery in your field, and then, in level 2, you identify the focus of your new career capital. In level 3, you acknowledge and understand the career capital of others, while, in level 4, you're building your personal and unique career capital. Level 5 is where you validate that what you've learned is indeed career capital through the test of it being both rare and valuable. Lillian: I always wanted to do this, but I didn't have a tidy step by step process. I'm excited to re-imagine the inputs and outputs to fit the career capital I would like to pursue. Kat: I would love to see your chart when you've finished. In fact, my chart-making process is documented on my blog where I will also go into intense detail on each level and how I understand it. I would love to have you guest post your chart and your journey through the levels. You might have more or fewer levels than I, so having recreate the process for your purposes might give me more clarity on guidelines for anyone to do deeper work. Lillian: It's a plan!

I merged concepts from several books to help myself move closer and closer to the adjacent possible in my field. I followed my own example and asked for feedback and some (really unexpectedly positive... even though she's my friend, her garbage-detector is fully functional!) feedback. I hope that you can take what I created and create a process for you to get deeper in your work.

Make sure you don't miss Lillian's deep work journey by signing up for my mailing list and signing up for hers! I'll be refining my model and sharing it on my mailing list as well, so, that's two reasons why you need to go ahead and sign up!