Somewhere early on in the process of writing Getting Art Done, a book called Deep Work was released.
In fact, I came across Deep Work just as I was finishing my book proposal for an earlier version of GAD. This earlier version was about focusing amidst technological distraction—which is much of what Deep Work is about. I was shocked to find that Deep Work told many of the same stories I had planned for my book, and cited many of the same sources.
In other words, Cal Newport had been years ahead of me. In fact, he had first written about deep work on his blog three years prior.
As I said in The Heart to Start (Chapter 5, “The Voice”) people are always coming to the same conclusions independent of one another. It’s just the nature of the world.
There’s plenty of room in the market for books that cover similar topics, but each new book is an opportunity to hone the concept of your book. It’s an opportunity to make your positioning tighter, and to refine your target reader.
But it did force me to think about what was unique about GAD. How is GAD different from Deep Work?
I started with the realization that Cal and I are two very different people. He’s a computer science professor. He’s worked his way up the academic ranks to gain tenure.
I prefer to work outside of established structures. I’ve had no formal education after getting my bachelor’s degree, but I’ve easily learned more since then than I did while I was in college.
I have never met Cal, but he seems to look up to the titans of industry. At least, that’s who you’ll see him using as examples in Deep Work. It’s actually a common complaint in the book’s otherwise-excellent Amazon reviews—that the examples he uses appeal to exemplars’ money or fame to establish authority.
It’s of course possible that his traditional publisher forced his hand on this. This is the main reason I’ve decided traditionally-publishing again, isn’t for me at this point.
Why Cal writes this way doesn’t matter—I now had two very good potential points of difference: that I’m different in that I don’t tend to climb pre-established ladders, and that I don’t tend to use titans of industry as examples. Sure, I look up to Steve Jobs and Steve Case, mostly for the impacts they’ve had on my life, but I’m more likely to use a digital-nomad blogger or a latin dancer as an example.
Which led me to a realization: GAD is about art. Deep Work is about “knowledge work.”
I personally can’t get excited about how many papers a professor publishes. I’m not necessarily impressed that an entrepreneur took a company public.
What I’m interested in is art. What I mean is that I’m interested in people who have found that thing that is uniquely theirs. They have taken their personality traits and experiences and passions, and combined them to make something totally unique. Something that only they could create.
It’s fitting that I would come to this realization in this thought exercise. After all, this exercise was all about finding out what about GAD is unique. In finding out what about GAD is unique, I have to think about what is unique about me.
Why is GAD (or whatever it comes to be called) the book that I and only I could write? Everyone writing books should ask themselves this question. If you’re constantly searching for that, you find that you have no real competitors. I feel that’s true of my first book, Design for Hackers. Yes, there are other [web-design books] (https://designforhackers.com/blog/best-web-design-books/), and there are more “successful” web-design books, but none are like D4H.
I love art. I’m a writer, I’m a designer. I was a rabid painter and drawer when I was younger. I dance, I love great films, and I’ve written plenty of songs on my guitar. I look up to artists, in many forms, including entrepreneurship. The external definitions of success such as money or fame are an afterthought. What I love is someone doing what they and only they can do.
So that’s the thing that makes GAD different from Deep Work. GAD is about art. It’s about being creatively productive.
Being creatively productive is not as simple as doing “deep” versus “shallow” work. “Deep” work could be crunching numbers on a spreadsheet, writing a first draft, or doing research — all very different things.
When you’re trying to make your creative work happen, “deep” versus “shallow” isn’t enough. There are a variety of mental states that make up creative work. Creative work goes through a somewhat-predictable progression. You need to reconcile these mental states and this progression with the ebbs and flows of your creative energy.
Additionally, it takes no time to have a great creative idea. The value of a creative idea can be many times that of an uncreative idea. Therefore creative work is not merely “deep.” It’s infinite.
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