All right, so we'll start with questions about deep work. Our first such question comes from Tyler. Tyler says, I'm a subscriber to Top Performer Executive Edition, as well as a few other professional optimizing services. All right, so just as an aside, Top Performer is one of two online courses that I offer with my longtime friend Scott Young.

So Top Performer is a course about applying deliberate practice to get better at your career. All right, back to Tyler's question. My understanding is that there is a lot of focus on building skills that move the needle in terms of hard skills. But I wanted to see if you could touch on developing projects around increasing your exposure and image alongside your deep work projects to build their impact and grow your CV.

Tyler, be very wary here. This is a trap. There is a clear trap here that I'm talking to you about from personal experience. The trap of focusing on exposure, marketing, presentation. How do I get the word out about this? How do I get the message just right? It is a trap because those efforts are seductive.

They're kind of hard, but not too hard. And it's something your mind would much rather do than the actual deep work to produce the stuff that you're producing, trying to promote in the first place. You look at things like what's my email funnel or my social media promotion plan.

And what you see is what I used to call checklist productivity. This is something you can get better at by learning the right checklist. I went and I learned how to do online marketing. And other people don't know this, that are just off the street. Now I have this insider knowledge and I follow this checklist and I have this funnel here and I have this social media strategy there and I'm spending some money on this graphic design here and it's all immensely fulfilling and it's not really challenging and it begins to take up all your time.

But in the end, what matters? Producing something so good it can't be ignored. So it is a trap. Now I said this is from personal experience. It's because this is where I was when I first began to develop my concept of deep work, I was relatively early in my graduate student experience at MIT.

I was doing research and was thinking too much about what's the topic of my research? Like can I find a sexier topic? And if I promote it just right and talk about it right, you know, I was thinking too much about this. Like an idea for the research that would catch attention and get coverage.

And it was then that I came across Steve Martin's professional autobiography, Born Standing Up, and it was then when I watched the Charlie Rose interview of Steve Martin where he said to Charlie, "My advice to people is be so good they can't ignore you." This was a huge turning point.

Because what I learned was, no, write papers to get cited. Do really good work. It's really, really hard and the rest will work itself out. That notion got ingrained in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. That notion got developed into my book, Deep Work, as well. Be so good they can't ignore you.

Don't worry so much about how you let people know. Now, it's not to say that other stuff is not important, but you should just get some reasonable evidence-based practices for how you present stuff or how the promotion works. Set that on autopilot so you're not making unforced errors. You're not handing out flyers at the mall.

Like, yeah, okay, figure out some reasonable stuff to do. Set it on autopilot and then get your attention back to producing stuff that's too good to be ignored. If you look at these two scenarios, I've produced something excellent and I have a reasonable autopilot promotion machinery in progress. Compare that to another scenario where I produce something pretty good but have a cutting-edge promotional apparatus.

I think all about it. That first scenario is going to dominate the latter. People find good things. You can help them a little bit, but don't think too much about that step of actually making an impact.