Adam Grant's recent NY Times article about languishing -- the psychological middle state that exists somewhere in between depressed and flourishing -- has been making the rounds online. Perhaps it is because COVID sucks and many of us can relate.

Either way, three points in the article really stood out to me (at least one of which, in my mind, directly ties back to real estate).

Firstly, I found it helpful to hear him describe what flourishing is. In his words, "flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others." This resonates with me. I know that I am at my best when I'm accomplishing things and making progress.

Secondly, he puts forward a possible solution to languishing -- it's the concept of "flow." Flow is when we are absorbed in meaningful and challenging work and where, again in his words, "your sense of time, place and self melts away." This also resonates with me. I am a big fan of a flow (even if I didn't know what it was called).

Thirdly -- and this one is important as we all think about the future of work/office space -- focus is paramount to doing exceptional things! Here's an excerpt that I immediately paused on as I was reading the article:

Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.

For the rest of Grant's article, click here.

According to Walter Isaacson – the bestselling author of their biographies – it is this:

I started with Ben Franklin, and then Einstein, and then Steve Jobs—[they were all] innovative and creative. And I said, “Well, what pattern [leads to] that?” The pattern wasn’t that they were smart, because you’ve met lots of smart people, and they don’t usually amount to much. The pattern tends to be curiosity across disciplines.

This excerpt was taken from a conversation between Isaacson and Adam Grant, which you can read or watch here. 

Here is another excerpt that speaks to the way in which Jobs prided himself on working at the intersection of technology and the humanities:

I’ll give you a tiny example. The Mac that came out in 2000 had a handle on it, and they say, “This is a desktop machine. We don’t need the handle—people aren’t really supposed to move it around. It’ll cost us another sixty dollars [per computer].” And Steve said, “The handle is there because it makes the machine approachable. My mom is afraid of her computer, but if there’s a little thing [where] she can put her hand, where she can touch it and she knows it won’t break, that makes her connect emotionally to the computer better.” And he was right. But it cost money, and the Mac didn’t make as much.

Lately I’ve been finding that I need to divide my time between multitasking and blocks of uninterrupted time. The multitasking phase is doing calls, responding to emails in 3 seconds, going from meeting to meeting, and so on. It’s a mode that many of us probably exist in virtually all of the time.

But I can’t stay in this mode all of the time. I think of it as short attention span mode. There are times when I need blocks of uninterrupted time so that I can “go deep.” One example would be to review drawings. I really need to focus so that I can think of all of the externalities associated with the decisions being made.

This is related to my post about managers and makers, but it’s also the focus of a recent book by Cal Newport called, Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity. You can read more about the book here at Knowledge@Wharton, but I wanted to highlight two concepts. The first is this equation:

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).