Sidestep busyness and produce work that matters. The ability to focus has become valuable just as it’s become scarce. Become one of the few who can work deeply, and you’ll feel like you’ve been granted a superpower.
Spend more time on things you really care about. Outside the office, screens beckon: grabbing your attention and numbing you with distraction and emotional manipulation. Fill your time with meaningful activity that will strengthen your spirit rather than diminish it.
Yes, you too can be focused. You have the ability. You have the discipline. What you’re missing is a set of proven instructions for how to invest your energy to cultivate a true life of focus.
Do you wake up already exhausted?
You’ve hit the snooze three times already. You gulp down coffee and rush to work. Meetings, messages and interruptions dominate your time. The day is exhausting and frenetic, but somehow, for all this busyness, you feel like you barely got anything important done.
At home, you fleetingly remember your aspirations to exercise more, and read hard books, and dust off your quilting needles or the workshop in your garage, but there’s dinner to be made, laundry to be folded, groceries to buy, and new “urgent” work emails that arrived while you were commuting.
You flail at some of these tasks before eventually giving into the escapism of a screen: Instagram, Netflix, notifications and pings. Some are funny, others outraging, most just numbing. There’s an inner voice, still quiet for now, but asking with insistence: “Am I really happy with this?”
The default setting for modern life is distracted busyness.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The forces that keep you distracted are powerful:
- Colleagues clutter your inbox because shooting off yet another message is the easiest way to collaborate in the moment.
- Apps are carefully designed to capture your attention.
- Weakened by a steady diet of the superficial, you’ve lost your ability to enjoy deeper alternatives.
You didn’t choose to live this way. Our current condition was an insidious side-effect of otherwise exciting technology: computers, email, social media and smartphones. But just because you didn’t choose this life, doesn’t mean that you can’t choose what comes next. Take back control of your attention and rebuild your capacity for depth.
Choose a life of focus.
Imagine, instead, a life of focus.
You wake up, eager to start the day. You know there will be challenges ahead, but you’re doing the best work of your life—and others have started to take notice.
As you work, you get absorbed into what you’re doing. Emails, meetings and chatter from colleagues leaves your mind as your attention zooms into the task at hand. You feel like an Olympic athlete, performing perfected skills to their peak.
You leave the office satisfied with another day well done. As you get home you’re greeted by the people who matter to you. You share real conversations over dinner—laughter, stories and deep discussions. As the evening goes on, you feel a calm stillness come over you as you turn the page on a new book.
You go to sleep with the pleasant tiredness of a day well done. You know there’s a lot of noise out there in the world, but it isn’t rattling around in your head. You fall asleep easily, knowing whatever challenges tomorrow brings, you’re ready to face them.
A life of focus sounds almost mythical in our modern age. However, with deliberate effort more of your days can be like this one, and less of the frenzied chaos that we mindlessly accept as the status-quo.
Anything you want to achieve
is built on a foundation of focus.
Anything worth achieving requires focus. This is true now more than ever.
Research by MIT economist David Autor found that our economy is undergoing skill polarization. Middle class jobs our culture came to rely on are being hollowed out. What’s left are low-skill, low-paying jobs and high-skill, high-paying knowledge work.
Success in knowledge work is not like success on the factory floor. You need creativity. You need to solve problems. You need to quickly master new skills. You need to collaborate with others in a way that makes the most of your collective abilities. You need focus.
Unfortunately, most organizations make focus exceedingly difficult. Instead of making the most of your mind, most companies instead hook everyone up to email or Slack and say: “rock n’ roll!” Work happens in a chaotic flow of messages, meetings and calls. Convenient for the moment, but devastating for the important efforts requiring unbroken concentration. This not only makes us worse at our jobs, but miserable too.
You can be different. You can fight back against the onslaught of interruption, preserve time for depth, and train your mind to make the most of it. You’ll begin to move the needle on things that matter while your peers remain mired in the shallows, and you’ll enjoy your work day more because of it.
Sharpen your mind.
Don’t dull it with distractions.
All the great minds of history had one thing in common: they knew how to focus.
- The legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan would get so absorbed in equations he needed to be fed by hand or else he’d forget to eat.
- Scottish polymath Mary Sommerville became one of the first women to join the Royal Astronomical Society despite the demands of raising five children. How? “I learnt by habit to leave a subject and resume it again at once, like leaving a mark into a book I might be reading.”
- Isaac Newton, as a young man, fled Cambridge University in 1666 to escape the bubonic plague. He brought with him a prized possession: a notebook left to him by his father in a time when paper was still a valuable commodity. Newton used this time to think deeply. As a result, he invented calculus and used it to finally tame our understanding of gravity.
What breakthroughs are beneath the surface of your mind, if only you could dive deep enough to reach them?
In the 21st century, focus has become a forgotten art. We’ve gotten so used to the quick and shallow, we’ve lost the ability to appreciate the patient and deep.
Great thinking requires space. It cannot survive in a fractured mental landscape. A life of focus allows your best ideas and deepest experiences to flourish.
How do you want to be remembered?
...that you spent a lot of time glued to your phone?
How much of what you’re spending your time on right now will matter ten years from now? How much of it will you even remember?
We’re hardwired to find meaning in making, mastery and real relationships. This requires intention and focus. Staring at a screen doesn’t fulfill this need. A deep life is deliberate, it won’t arrive by accident.
Time is warped by attention. The moments you’ll remember will be those engaged in meaningful things. Ultimately, it’s not the years of your life, but the life in your years that counts.
Focus is fragile.
Our minds weren’t built for modernity.
Your mind didn’t evolve to sustain focus on abstract ideas. Our ancestors relied on maintaining complex social interactions within a tribe, manipulating tools, and planning future behavior. Compared to other animals, this was miraculous, but resisting distractions was decidedly not in our caveman cognitive tool kit.
Then came the Neolithic Revolution. Gathering into permanent settlements, labor specialized, and the value of concentrated thought became more pronounced. Writing required that we repurpose cognitive tools originally evolved for other ends. This is grueling work – as any parent who has tutored their kids to read understands – but it unlocked a vast new potential for thought. From the cognitive calisthenics required to produce the written word came philosophy, mathematics and science–the foundation for our modern society.
This history underscores the fragility of focus. Without training, focus is easily lost. Ancestral instincts will quickly pull us back to a state of distraction and obsession over social status.
This is why the social media giants became some of the most valued companies in the history of the world: exploiting our ancient instincts. It’s why email upended the very nature of work: it too fed on our bias toward distraction and social obligation. It’s why focus is hard--but also why it matters so much.
Without an aggressive plan to reclaim the cognitive abilities that fueled our species’s ascent, you’ll lose them. A life of focus is hard work. But you’re not the first of our kind to put in this effort.
I’ve tried to focus before, but it never seems to stick.
You may have already tried to increase your focus. Cut down on screen time. Push back against unnecessary meetings or messages. Clear your calendar to put in deep work. But, you always find yourself sliding back to your old habits.
Here are three likely explanations for these past struggles:
- You failed to appreciate the forces working against you. Attention economy giants like Facebook and Google spend millions of dollars to figure out how best to snare your attention. Casual declarations to “spend less time on my phone” are doomed to fail.
- You didn’t practice long enough to acquire the skill of focus. Focus is a skill that requires training. If you put aside time for deep efforts without having first done the work to strengthen your cognitive muscles, the experience can be frustrating and ineffective.
- You created a vacuum. A life of focus isn’t just about eliminating distraction. You must then fill this space with high quality and meaningful alternatives. Simply trying to white-knuckle your way to less diversions can be a recipe for boredom at best and existential despair at worse.
A life of focus is a choice. But in order to be decisive, you need more than just willpower—you need a system.
Who are Cal Newport and Scott Young?
Cal and Scott are long-time friends and collaborators (it was Scott who introduced Cal to blogging back in 2006). Their mutual work on topics such as focus and productivity stretch back fifteen years, and their previous online course, Top Performer, based on Cal’s 2012 book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, has served over 5000 students and counting. This is their first course to build on their best-known titles: Deep Work, Ultralearning, and Digital Minimalism.
Three months of guided practice.
Three actionable lessons per week.
Achieve focus in your work, life and mind.
Cultivating focus is challenging. It requires overcoming the default settings of modern life to develop something deeper.
We designed Life of Focus to help you achieve this goal. The program has a simple design:
- Each month you’ll train one dimension of focus. The training focuses each month on a clear and effective challenge; the completion of which will cement a new commitment to concentration into your routine. By the end of each month, you’ll enjoy immediate and concrete improvements.
- Every week we’ll send three new lessons. These lessons will support your practice, allow you to understand how to make the right efforts and help you navigate around obstacles. Concise and straightforward, they can easily fit into an evening or morning routine, shifting your focus back onto what matters.
All lessons are available as video, audio and text transcripts. This will allow you to adapt the course to your preferences and routine. Watch them over your morning coffee, listen during your evening commute or read them as you plan your day. Once released, you can also go back to them again any time you need a refresher.
Joining, you're not just getting access to ideas--but an entire community of support. We've created a resource page with tons of FAQs, updated regularly. Each lesson allows you to discuss with other students and course instructors. Know that, no matter what challenges you face, you'll face them alongside hundreds of other students all committed to building a life of focus together.
Month One:
Focused Work
Deep work is simple to explain, but difficult to consistently achieve. We’ve all had bursts where we’ve gotten days of work done in mere hours. But these flickers of focus are continuously being snuffed out.
Throughout this month, you’ll identify your ideal deep-to-shallow work ratio. We’ll show you how to integrate it into your actual working environment, and show the subtle tricks needed to hit your target consistently.
This month will allow you to make significant progress on the work that matters, replace busyness with accomplishment and create the satisfaction that comes from doing your best.
Lessons from this month include:
- Unraveling the science of attention
- Why workflows, not habits, are the key to deep productivity
- How to negotiate the space for deep work with your boss, coworkers and family
- Mental hacks to increase your capacity for pushing through frustrations
- How to find energy for deep work
- and more…
In addition to the three weekly lessons, we’ve also included an interactive worksheet. This exercise, guided with video instruction, will show you exactly what to do to become a master of deep work.
Chris
"Since I'm working from home, the course is a great help in structuring my work and making me more productive than I have dreamed of. It makes me do in 3 hours what would otherwise take a whole workday. No phone, email or interruptions just my tally and time block in front of me."
Michael
"I run a small 6-person startup and consider myself quite a focused person. I don't have any social media and have been using time-blocking for years. Even at this level, the course helped me greatly. The short weekly lessons were like a 'focus coach' to keep me accountable and a motivation to tweak and improve my working habits."
Debbie
"This has been an amazing three months and my life does look different at the end of it. Walking to and from my new studio space five times a week, spending time there in deep work and taking my projects to the next level has me feeling like I'm a performing artist. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked and having the most fun!"
Pierre
"I find that I'm much happier now that I don't spend so much time on social media or news sites. I've made some good progress on deep work that's allowed me to become more productive and less reactive. I brewed a new batch of beer and I feel that the course has resulted in a more focused approach to that hobby. And I am much more present with my wife and two small kids."
Month Two:
Focused Life
In this month you’ll perform a digital declutter, temporarily stepping away from the distractions clawing at your attention in your life outside of work. During this period, we’ll guide you through a process of rediscovering what matters to you. When the month concludes, you’ll rebuild your digital life with intention, based on these values.
A life of focus isn't just getting more work done--it's a fundamental realignment of your attention back onto what matters. Real connection with people you care about. Deep experiences that you'll remember for a lifetime.
Reclaiming your attention from the world of digital distractions is a not a casual undertaking. As the month progresses, we’ll walk you through hard-won strategies and ideas for succeeding with this ambitious endeavor:
Lessons from this month include:
- The Phone Foyer method and other hacks for reclaiming attention
- How to increase the quality of your time off
- Why real human connection requires effort
- A strategy to shift your time from consumption to creativity
- Why the pull to relax often leaves you feeling more tired than before
- and more...
We have also created an interactive worksheet to guide you through making these important changes. These in-depth exercises, with detailed video instruction, can help you make subtle changes that will allow you to live a more focused life.
Michael
"The digital declutter gave me back a lot of time and headspace. I'm really impressed. The first few days were difficult, but once I got used to not checking those websites, it was easier."
Richard
"I did the digital declutter and I was such a happier person. I found time for new activities, including picking back up a hobby I hadn't done in a long time: chess. I felt like I was able to spend more quality time with my wife after the kids went to sleep. I realized that I was saving so much time every night, and was living a more thoughtful day."
Jordan
"My girlfriend and I both undertook the digital declutter challenge and saw our phone usage drop from an average of 6-8 hours of screen time per day to 3 or less. We've successfully abandoned the compulsion to constantly be checking our phones, and it has done wonders for our work and our relationship."
Daniela
"The fact is that I really love learning, so focusing on new skills in the evening is fun and satisfying, and since I’ve learned to keep my phone and computer closed in the evenings I actually have time for new projects. Better management of my work time and my screen time also means that I’m much more available for family, which makes my life so much richer and more rewarding."
Month Three:
Focused Mind
The first two months make focus a regular part of your work and personal life. This last month will teach you how to get more out of these concentrated hours than you ever might have thought was possible.
Keep your mind sharp and you can cut through any obstacle. Cultivating focus is hard work, but it's easier if you take the right approach.
Like any serious training, getting your mind into shape isn’t an obvious endeavor. We’ll provide you exactly the ideas you need to succeed.
- How to build a cognitive “gym routine” for your mind
- Advice for cultivating motivation
- Cognitive scaffolding, and how you can use it to extend your focus
- How to use boredom to your advantage
- The biggest mistake people make when trying to learn something new
- and more...
In the interactive worksheet for this month, we’ll guide you through how to take your reclaimed time and apply it towards a meaningful project. These exercises, guided with video instruction, will help you avoid making common mistakes that prevent you from achieving your goals.
Claudine
"The course helped me focus on my reading intentions. It has really been satisfying to feel that focus on the task at hand, and enjoy gradually getting through some great books."
Mario
"I've gotten a ton of benefits from taking the course. I've increased my deep work hours by removing distractions and talking to my boss about deploying deep work sessions. I now spend a lot less time on my phone, and more time with my family, reading and playing piano. I've also made significant progress on my learning project: speaking Mandarin Chinese."
Risto
"For me digital declutter was very useful, I haven't given up social media fully, but I check it 1-2 times a week (and I don't miss it). Since then, I've read over 10 books and reintroduced flashcards for regularly refreshing my memory on things that I consider important. I feel like I've regained control of my mind."
Marina
"For at least 2 years I promised myself to start learning a new language. I did "some kind of training" for a year yet I couldn’t keep up a simple conversation. Thanks to Life of Focus and Ultralearning book, I’m completing A2 level in Dutch next Monday. I mean, it was just 2.5 months of hard work!"
Lifetime Access to Improve Your Focus
After you finish the three months that structure our curriculum, you’ll retain lifetime access to everything in the program. Additionally, you’ll also have the opportunity to join future sessions, and proceed through the months again with new cohorts of fellow students.
If you’d ever like to refresh your focus, or simply take the program again and stretch to the next level, you’ll have that option.
Any new lessons added to the core program will be accessible to all previous students. You’ll always have access to the latest research and methods that we add as the program evolves.
60-Day Money Back Guarantee
We understand that taking on a course can be a little uncertain. What if it’s not a good fit for your situation? What if you don’t find the lessons as helpful as you thought? What if something unexpected makes it impossible to continue?
Don’t worry. We’ve poured years into designing this course. We strongly believe it can help you regain focus in your life.
However, we don’t want the risk to fall on you. If you’d like to withdraw, for any reason, within the first sixty days after your purchase we will provide a full refund.
Life of Focus:
Expert Edition
Weekly Fireside Chat - Once a week, listen to a recorded conversation with Cal and Scott, where they share how they built their own lives of focus. Scott offers stories from applying focus to learn hard things. Cal shares experiences from his days at MIT, authoring best-selling books and how he’s cultivated a focused family life.
These conversations act as a great supplement to the course material, reinforcing your commitment and reminding you of the essential themes of the course during your three-month journey.
Conversations topics include:
- Cal Newport’s “CEO model” for selecting big life goals.
- Daily routines for achievement with a balanced family life.
- Why digital minimalism is essential for well-being.
- Behind-the-scenes of pivotal decisions Cal made in his early career.
- How to maintain peace of mind in the face of adversity.
- Strategies for Cal and Scott use for generating your best work.
Focused Work from Home (Mini-Course) — Join Scott for a six-part mini-course devoted exclusively to productively working from home. Building on the main curriculum, this module will be extra helpful if you need to stay focused with your work and projects at home. Lessons include:
- The Power and Peril of Working from Home
- Context Matching: Why You Procrastinate More at Home
- People Problems: Juggling Family and Work
- Preventing Slack: Staying on Top of Your Most Important Goals
- Flipping on Focus: Getting Stuff Done Despite Interruptions
- Separation, Not Balance: Keeping Work From Overtaking Your Life
Michael:
"Thank you Scott and Cal for a great series of Fireside chats! I'm glad I went the extra mile and included these with the main course. Your conversations added another dimension to the course, and as always you finish with some excellent advice to reflect on."
Life of Focus:
Multi-Course Access
In addition to Life of Focus, we have three other courses taught by either Cal or Scott. Normally, as with Life of Focus, we only offer sessions for these courses a couple times per year. In this session, we’re providing an all-access pass that will let you take not only Life of Focus but any of our other courses, whenever you’re ready.
This includes:
- Top Performer - Our 8-week course showing you how to deeply understand and master your career. This course shows you how you can apply deliberate practice to your professional life so you can become so good they can’t ignore you.
- Rapid Learner - Scott’s 6-week course in effective learning, combining research from cognitive science and Scott’s personal experience taking on challenging learning projects, such as tackling MIT’s undergraduate curriculum in twelve months or learning four languages in a year. You'll get access to the Total Mastery Edition which also includes full access to Scott's previous programs Learning on Steroids and Learn More, Study Less.
- Make it Happen! - Gain a deep understanding of the strategies to effect change in your life–master your psychology, create systems to ensure progress and avoid the traps that hold you back. You'll get the upgraded Gold Edition of this course which includes additional audio recordings and ebooks.
Getting access to all four courses allows you to skip the line and access them whenever you’re ready to start. The pass also offers a discount, letting you get the courses for 30% less than joining each individually.
Save 30% over enrolling in each course individually!
Sign up now to create a Life of Focus
STANDARD EDITION
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
12 weekly fireside chat recordingsFocused Work From Home
(Mini-Course)Full access to Top PerformerFull access to Rapid LearnerFull access to Make it Happen!
Get Started Now:
Installment payments$49 x 12 months
OR
One-time payment$497 (save 15%)
Expert Edition
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
- 12 weekly fireside chat recordings
- Focused Work From Home
(Mini-Course) Full access to Top PerformerFull access to Rapid LearnerFull access to Make it Happen!
Get Started Now:
Installment payments$69 x 12 months
OR
One-time payment$697 (save 15%)
Multi-Course Access
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
- 12 weekly fireside chat recordings
- Focused Work From Home
(Mini-Course) - Full access to Top Performer ?
- Full access to Rapid Learner ?
- Full access to Make it Happen! ?
Get Started Now:
Installment payments$147 x 12 months (save 30%)
OR
One-time payment$1497 (save 40%)
60 days money back guarantee
Need help? Contact our support team: support@scotthyoung.zendesk.com
What our students say:
Michael
"The digital declutter gave me back a lot of time and headspace. I'm really impressed. The first few days were difficult, but once I got used to not checking those websites, it was easier."
Chris
"Since I'm working from home, the course is a great help in structuring my work and making me more productive than I have dreamed of. It makes me do in 3 hours what would otherwise take a whole workday. No phone, email or interruptions just my tally and time block in front of me."
Michael
"I run a small 6-person startup and consider myself quite a focused person. I don't have any social media and have been using time-blocking for years. Even at this level, the course helped me greatly. The short weekly lessons were like a 'focus coach' to keep me accountable and a motivation to tweak and improve my working habits."
Claudine
"The course helped me focus on my reading intentions. It has really been satisfying to feel that focus on the task at hand, and enjoy gradually getting through some great books."
Mario
"I've gotten a ton of benefits from taking the course. I've increased my deep work hours by removing distractions and talking to my boss about deploying deep work sessions. I now spend a lot less time on my phone, and more time with my family, reading and playing piano. I've also made significant progress on my learning project: speaking Mandarin Chinese."
Risto
"For me digital declutter was very useful, I haven't given up social media fully, but I check it 1-2 times a week (and I don't miss it). Since then, I've read over 10 books and reintroduced flashcards for regularly refreshing my memory on things that I consider important. I feel like I've regained control of my mind."
Richard
"I did the digital declutter and I was such a happier person. I found time for new activities, including picking back up a hobby I hadn't done in a long time: chess. I felt like I was able to spend more quality time with my wife after the kids went to sleep. I realized that I was saving so much time every night, and was living a more thoughtful day."
Jordan
"My girlfriend and I both undertook the digital declutter challenge and saw our phone usage drop from an average of 6-8 hours of screen time per day to 3 or less. We've successfully abandoned the compulsion to constantly be checking our phones, and it has done wonders for our work and our relationship."
Pierre
"I find that I'm much happier now that I don't spend so much time on social media or news sites. I've made some good progress on deep work that's allowed me to become more productive and less reactive. I brewed a new batch of beer and I feel that the course has resulted in a more focused approach to that hobby. And I am much more present with my wife and two small kids."
Debbie
"This has been an amazing three months and my life does look different at the end of it. Walking to and from my new studio space five times a week, spending time there in deep work and taking my projects to the next level has me feeling like I'm a performing artist. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked and having the most fun!"
Daniela
"The fact is that I really love learning, so focusing on new skills in the evening is fun and satisfying, and since I’ve learned to keep my phone and computer closed in the evenings I actually have time for new projects. Better management of my work time and my screen time also means that I’m much more available for family, which makes my life so much richer and more rewarding."
Marina
"For at least 2 years I promised myself to start learning a new language. I did "some kind of training" for a year yet I couldn’t keep up a simple conversation. Thanks to Life of Focus and Ultralearning book, I’m completing A2 level in Dutch next Monday. I mean, it was just 2.5 months of hard work!"
Michael:
"Thank you Scott and Cal for a great series of Fireside chats! I'm glad I went the extra mile and included these with the main course. Your conversations added another dimension to the course, and as always you finish with some excellent advice to reflect on."
Frequently Asked Questions
A: Life of Focus is a course delivered over twelve weeks consisting of:
- Three guided, monthly challenges for your work, life and mind.
- Three brief lessons per week. Each week you’ll get one IDEA lesson to help you understand how to focus better, one ACTION lesson to put it into practice and one CHALLENGE lesson updating you for the monthly goal.
- Three interactive worksheets. While the challenges are simple, getting it right can be tricky. Thus we’ve prepared a guided worksheet which will steer you around obstacles and reinforce your commitment.
Access to the course is lifelong, meaning you can always go back and watch previous lessons. Past students are also welcome to join in new sessions, whether you need a refresher or simply want to deepen your commitment.
Those who upgrade to the Expert Edition will also get twelve weekly fireside chat audio recordings with Cal and Scott.
A: To complete the lessons you only need ten minutes, three times per week. As such, Life of Focus is easy to integrate into a morning or evening ritual. You can even watch it with a partner or your family to commit to focusing better together.
Each worksheet (once per month) requires between one and three hours to complete.
Of course, the real effort is from taking a new stance to your work and life. This can be strenuous, even if it was work you needed to do regardless. We recommend you make a strong commitment to the course before joining, therefore, as a flimsy effort will likely not stick to the end.
A: The busiest among us are the most in need of focus! Life of Focus is good to apply when you’re in the middle of projects, as these challenges can help to reinforce good habits for working effectively and ignoring distractions.
That being said, even if you can take the course when you’re busy, we don’t recommend starting if you don’t intend to follow through with the course challenges. The main value of the course is participating in the monthly challenges, the lessons are only to assist in that effort.
Think of it like a gym--you wouldn’t expect to get fitness results just by watching the training videos without actually doing the exercises. Similarly, the monthly challenges are the exercise and the lessons are to ensure you have proper form, so you can complete them successfully.
A: After developing Top Performer, Cal and Scott observed that the problem many have isn’t in knowing what to do, but with doing it. The work to have a fulfilling and meaningful career is hard, so the ability to focus is central to success.
As Cal worked on Digital Minimalism, he noticed that this lesson extends outside the office as well. Our personal lives are distracted and shallow, leading to feelings of apathy and anxiety rather than mastery and meaning. In parallel, Scott wrote Ultralearning about the process of deepening skills through aggressive learning projects.
Together, we have both found focus to be central to our lives and what we teach. We wanted to go beyond a book and lead a group of committed students to put these ideas into practice. We wanted to help other people cultivate lives of focus.
A: Unfortunately we cannot guarantee one-on-one access or personalized coaching.
However, the course comes with the ability to participate in discussions with other course members and ourselves. As comments and questions come up, we’ll also add them to a central FAQ page on the course to provide you with more instruction.
A: The broad themes of our writing continue through the course. In that sense, if you didn’t like our writing before, don’t get the course!
However, if you did find our writing either in our blogs or bestselling books helpful, this course is a chance to go deeper. There are many things we can facilitate in a course that are difficult (if not impossible) to do in any other format. This includes things like interactive worksheets, large-scale group challenges and the opportunity to engage with a topic over longer periods of time.
If you’ve read Deep Work, Digital Minimalism or Ultralearning (or even if you haven’t yet) this is a chance to master the concepts that underpin a focused life.
A: Everyone needs *some* deep work, even if it will dominate some professions and not others.
What makes something deep work is that it is skilled and cognitively demanding--not that it must be done in isolation. Therefore, a sales person diving deep into a client’s problems, a therapist who has to determine the best solution for her patient or a teacher trying to deliver his best lecture are all practicing a kind of deep work.
Every profession and job is different. Thus our approach to tackling deep work is not a one-size-fits-all method that applies to just programmers, writers or academics. Instead, we want everyone to use this opportunity to explore how focus impacts their lives, and how subtle changes can make you more effective at work and life.
A: Since this is a three month course, it’s totally fine to start even if there may be occasional interruptions. Real life has interruptions, so we want to train ourselves to be able to focus in real life, not just in a meditation retreat.
We do encourage people to start with the challenges as they come up, even if they must do them scaled down or diminished because of temporary obstacles. You’ll be surprised how much you can do, even in imperfect circumstances, if you commit to doing a little.
A: Don’t hesitate to send an email to our support team at support@scotthyoung.zendesk.com. There one of our team members can help with any questions (or forward your questions to Cal or Scott as needed) to see if it’s a good fit.
We know starting a course like this can be a little daunting, so please contact us if you have questions!
Sign up now to create a Life of Focus
STANDARD EDITION
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
12 weekly fireside chat recordingsFocused Work From Home
(Mini-Course)Full access to Top PerformerFull access to Rapid LearnerFull access to Make it Happen!
Get Started Now:
Installment payments$49 x 12 months
OR
One-time payment$497 (save 15%)
Expert Edition
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
- 12 weekly fireside chat recordings
- Focused Work From Home
(Mini-Course) Full access to Top PerformerFull access to Rapid LearnerFull access to Make it Happen!
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Installment payments$69 x 12 months
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One-time payment$697 (save 15%)
Multi-Course Access
- Full, 12-week curriculum
- 35+ video lessons
- All 3 guided worksheets
- Private community
- Lifetime access
- 12 weekly fireside chat recordings
- Focused Work From Home
(Mini-Course) - Full access to Top Performer ?
- Full access to Rapid Learner ?
- Full access to Make it Happen! ?
Get Started Now:
Installment payments$147 x 12 months (save 30%)
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One-time payment$1497 (save 40%)
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