The best practical book I found that is way better than overly generic books on "deep work" is Jason Skycak's "Advice on Upskilling"

https://www.justinmath.com/books/ (scroll for the second one)

He is a math guy, who worked in Wall Street and then left and now works on math academy buidling models to improve learning.

It's great, well researched and practical book. However, it's not easy at all. Go check it out. It's free and he has published google docs version.

Thank you ever so much for this recommendation. I'm already through half of his upskilling document. It is as if he wrote the book exactly for me. I've been studying first thing in the morning off and on for a while now, and I'm happy to find that he advocates for that. Other than that, his focus on a) maths, b) coding and, c) domain expertise fit in line with where I want to head. I'm also happy to see that he has written much on his blog that I could dig into later.

I'd also STRONGLY recommend Polya's "How To Solve It"[0]

It really is about teaching you how to solve arbitrary problems. It teaches how to think. You can read pages xvi and xvii (in [0]) which will give you a good sense at what the book teaches. Half the first chapter is available too (this is an easy book to find online).

It's also technically a math book, but treating it as a standard math book is missing the point (honestly, missing the point of math altogether). It is really about how to solve problems, which that's what math is about. Math is really a collection of logics (plurality intended) that can be used to solve problems. Thing is, this is usually done in the abstract as mathematicians are usually interested in solving the general form of a problem. (The other part being that math is a high precision language, which is another thing it shares with programming languages). People might be scared off by the math notation in it, but I'd wager that anyone who can write anything more complicated than a hello world program is smart enough to make it through this book[1].

You do not need to be a mathematician to benefit from it, nor need to know much math at all. I'll make the strong claim that every single programmer, and anyone doing anything related to STE(A)M will benefit. If the "A" is surprising, I think you'll understand after reading a bit.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Mathematical-Princeton-Scie...

[1] Variables in math are no different than in programming. The main difference is math is terse because it's typically hand written. I'd add that programming also has types but most people are writing with languages that do duck typing.

I looked through the google docs version 0 on my phone, it’s pretty interesting. Is there an epub or PDFs versions?

0 https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/17qFY5w9uEWL4VVyJSTEm...

Have you ever checked out Richard Hamming’s book, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn?

He also has an amazing lecture series on YouTube from the naval institute up in Monterey based off this book