> With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if

> With that said generalisations like the one quoted are not substantiated. I don't think real commitment/passion to anything was that popular to begin with if we take the general population. Even historically if we take education levels back then. If take this a slightly different way: I think it is common, very common, but that it's normally for some specific thing that isn't fashionable or going to produce a measure of fame. A helluva lot of people are experts at one thing (edit: that they care deeply about and devote huge amounts of time to), it's just "growing unfeasibly large marrows" or "fixing bikes" or "building model railway layouts" or "training dogs" or "cage fighting" or whatever don't have the mystique or social cachet of the underachieving creative who drops everything and isolates themselves to produce award winning novels. I quite like Deep Work as well, but with this post he seems very taken by romantic ideals of creativity and stereotypes of modern life