As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this n… - Cal Newport

In one such study, mentioned in Pink’s book, researchers at Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone — and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.