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What’s the secret to landing in these lucrative sectors of the widening digital divide? I argue that the following two core abilities are crucial.

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.
2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed

Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

Excerpted from page number 29 of “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.