Periods spent fully disconnected and uninterrupted are crucial because that’s when genuine insight and unique ideas form, allowing you to plan meaningful next steps. Effective execution depends entirely on thoughtful, high quality strategies. Nothing can replace deliberate and focused progress. If you allow distractions to interrupt this flow state, you'll find yourself lost and off track.
Rushing or compromising quality inevitably leads to unnecessary stress, friction, and anxiety. To truly move fast, prioritize meaningful, high quality execution. You need to be biased for action.
Thinking slowly and intentionally, using your mind’s most deliberate and thoughtful functions, is essential. Active recall, spaced repetition, visualizing, original thinking, creative thought experiments, letting your mind wander, and writing. All contribute significantly to producing exceptional outcomes. You must deliberately reduce shallow, reactive, and unclear thinking. Since mental capacity is limited, changing your perspective regularly helps keep your thinking fresh. Between intense sessions of mental work, your subconscious mind needs downtime such as light exercise or spending time outdoors, to process experiences effectively.
Avoiding conformity, over stimulation, and mediocrity is key. Approach problems from first principles and consider new, unique angles. Start small and do important things that may initially seem unscalable, then scale up only when you have real momentum. Eliminate anything that doesn’t contribute genuine value. Creating a lifestyle based on these principles significantly increases your likelihood of producing breakthroughs. Position yourself thoughtfully and intentionally. Good luck will naturally follow.
History is shaped by people who take real, purposeful action, consistently getting important tasks done. Continuously learn, update your knowledge quickly, and ruthlessly focus on what's both urgent and important. A life filled with sincere ambition and meaningful pursuit is one well lived. The deep life is the best life.
Fyi:
"Active recall is a learning method where you continuously test yourself by pulling information out of your memory instead of just passively reading notes. Studies have shown (Rawson & Dunlosky, 2011; Roediger & Butler, 2011; Roediger, Putnam, & Smith, 2011) it strengthens memory and helps move information into your long-term memory, making it one of the best methods for revision and studying. Flashcards are a great way to use active recall as you’re testing yourself with a prompt or question and strengthening the connections in your brain."
"Spaced repetition is the oldest technique in memory science that is the most powerful, reliable, and easy to use. Distributed learning or spaced repetition is one of the longest researched topics in cognitive psychology, starting from Hermann Ebbinghaus’s studies of his own recall as early as 1885. For too long, we have treated spacing as an optional strategy and an educational add-on. Conversely, spacing is fundamental to learning that is present in the tiniest neural connections of the simplest of animals. Experiments have shown that even fruit flies can be taught to fear certain odors and this memory is stickier if their training sessions are spaced out."
"As one of the most innovative thinkers of the early twentieth century, Einstein was no stranger to the power of thought experiments. As a child, he dreamed up a thought experiment about chasing a beam of light, which led him to uproot the existing physics paradigm. He outlined his general relativity theory through thought experiments that contained accelerating elevators, blind beetles exploring curved surfaces, and a person falling off a roof."
Recommended video about the flow state!