If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage. - Cal Newport

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress.

To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation & connection in a way that makes sense to you.