Wizards Born in a Hotel

📜 Sunday Strategy Breakdown

🪙 The Vault

Magic.

Somehow I’m going to tell you that Albert Einstein, J.K. Rowling, and Steve Jobs are all similar without relating them to wizards.

Well except for J.K. Rowling.

Let me explain….

After writing 6 books of Harry Potter, readers wanted a closer. And no matter if you like her books or not, you know of that TV series that leaves you on a cliffhanger.

That’s exactly where she left her readers.

The only problem with a cliffhanger on the 6th book of a series is it’s not easy to make everyone happy and close up a 4,000+ page story.

It’s like trying to make a different ending to Breaking Bad…

( No matter what you do, you’ll probably make someone angry )

And most big stories like Breaking Bad have a whole team of people working at every angle, but for J.K. Rowling:

She was a Mother with kids, who would ask for help with their homework and dinner on the table.

But the readers wanted a 7th book.

So to make this happen, it was going to require her to spend a tremendous effort to tie all the winding storylines together.

This required focus.

She had enough and decided to do something extreme to shift her mindset where it needed to be.

$1000 Charged to her credit card.

She checked into a suite in the 5-star Balmoral Hotel in Scotland, which she used to start writing this highly anticipated piece of work.

A couple pages down.

She returned the next day because of how successful she recalled the first day of writing at the hotel.

Swipe.

Again and again, she ran her credit card to purchase what she couldn’t buy anywhere else:

A Deep State of Focus.

This led her to finish the last of the Harry Potter books here and is what drove the series to such success.

It was that slot of time each day with no distractions, and the flow of work running its course.

The major productivity of this daily exercise isn’t just a coincidence.

Mr. Jobs

Yeah, the creator of the most popular phone across the globe stemmed from deep work.

The creativity that undistracted flow state work prepares is unmatched.

Geniuses like Albert Einstein used deep work too.

Before creating E=MC2 the guy spent focused hours of energy on very few tasks.

In this way, he was able to enter a flow state for each project and devote the most attention.

But what is the magic??

Picture this:

You're at work, and you have to take care of some small mundane tasks.

Maybe taking out the trash, emailing employees, or even creating the work schedule.

This type of work uses very little brain power and is considered “Shallow Work”.

Some guy’s name that is too complicated to read ran studies on when a person experienced their “best moments”. ( This is his name if you’re curious: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi )

Why listen to him?

He was a Hungarian psychologist, who won a bunch of science awards and that pretty much just means he knows his stuff. ( Research him if you don’t believe me )

His conclusion:

This is what deep work achieves when we cut distraction out, and enter the “flow”.

Ok, enough of the sciency stuff. Back to wizards.

J.K. Rowling is a Billionaire.

Yeah with a B.

And she started off as a single mother struggling to survive, which shows that anybody can do it with some magic.

So just like her friends Mr. Jobs and Albert Einstein, the incredible things they accomplished weren’t from pure luck:

It was the daily effort of dedicating time to their craft and abusing that mental flow state to use their brain to its max as often as possible.

Next time you think about Harry and his wand…..

Just know that his story’s success was born from a writer in a flow state, in a hotel room.

And if you have a craft you're dedicated to, you’re only X amount of deep work sessions away from changing your life completely.

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