Idea #3: Deep Work Is Fulfilling
Shallow work is deceptively bad because it feels productive and meaningful. Answering emails feels like you’re doing something. Staying on top of the office conversation in Slack makes you feel updated on what’s going on. In contrast, Newport says, deep work actually moves you meaningfully toward happiness and fulfillment. Deep work is when you’re most capable of tackling your thorniest problems. Because these problems often yield the largest rewards, deep work is often far more rewarding than shallow work.
Newport mentions in an interview that he didn’t originally intend to include a chapter on the fulfilling aspect of deep work. However, as his research went on, he found so many accounts of people whose deep work practices led to a deeper sense of happiness and fulfillment in their work, he felt that he needed to include it.)
Newport explains that the fulfillment that comes from doing deep work aligns closely with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow, found that when people concentrate on a worthwhile task that pushes them to their cognitive limit, they experience a state of flow, or a sense of contentment and purpose.
( Because flow occurs when you’re working hard at something you believe is important, it naturally would be more likely to happen when you’re doing deep work in support of your goals than when you’re scrolling through Reddit comments.)
