Hi, this is Ray.

Last newsletter I made the case for team learning… how football teams demonstrate the power of collective cognition, why solo learners hit walls, and why finding your learning community matters. Everything in that piece was true and worth keeping.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I left it there, because the World Cup is also showing us something else. Watch any player on the pitch closely and you'll notice something the cameras don't usually emphasize: most of what they're doing in any given moment is happening between their ears, alone. Reading the game. Processing options. Deciding. Adjusting. The team coordinates, sure, but each player is also a single person making thousands of solo cognitive decisions per match. And every one of those decisions is built on hours and hours of individual training that no team can do for them.

Watch the elite players warm up before a match. They're together, but they're working alone. Drilling movements. Visualizing scenarios. Stretching. Going through their pre-match rituals. The team is in the same room, but the work each player is doing is profoundly individual. It has to be. Nobody else can build their movement patterns for them. Nobody else can run their nervous system. Nobody else can do the cognitive preparation that puts THEIR brain in the right state for what's about to happen.

Today's newsletter is the counterpoint to the team learning piece. The case for solo learning, what it specifically builds, why it's irreplaceable, and how to do it well in a culture that has been making focused solo work harder than it has been in human history. The two newsletters are companion pieces. Together they describe how learning actually works. Let's get into it.

Many engineers feel stalled because the role itself has not evolved. The work looks the same, but the market has moved.

Senior engineering in 2026 demands ownership, faster judgment, and comfort with ambiguity. If your role is not pushing you there, it may be holding you back.

Last cohort, 15 hiring partners sent 31 representatives to evaluate challengers through 246 live interviews. Gauntlet offers a reset. Apply now.

Cohort 6 starts July 6

_{Must be a US citizen to qualify.}

Let me start with what's specifically at stake. Solo learning isn't just "what you do when you can't find a group." It builds something distinct that group learning genuinely cannot produce. The two modes aren't substitutes for each other. They're complementary.

The most important thing solo work builds is sustained attention. The capacity to stay with one thing, in your own head, without external scaffolding, for an extended period. According to research summarized in deep work literature, when you concentrate deeply, your brain cements learning pathways and strengthens connections between neurons, enabling them to fire faster… and research suggests that this rewiring can occur only when you focus on a single task at a time, avoiding distractions. The neurological work that makes durable learning possible happens during focused attention, not during fragmented attention. And focused attention is, by its nature, mostly a solo affair. Other people, however well-meaning, are distractions while it's happening.

This is the case Cal Newport has been making for the past decade, and the science has only gotten stronger since he started making it. According to one breakdown of his framework, deep work is defined as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive ability to their limit… these efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate. The "hard to replicate" part is important. The people who can do extended focused solo work have a capability that's become genuinely rare. The capability that's rare is also the capability that produces the most valuable learning outcomes.

The football comparison helps here. The team practice and the matches are what we see. But the player who shows up to those team activities has spent thousands of solo hours building the individual technical foundation that makes their team contribution possible. The ball control they have wasn't developed in team drills (it was developed alone, doing repetitions, when nobody was watching. The fitness they have wasn't built in match-pace training) it was built in solo gym sessions and runs. The cognitive preparation they bring wasn't generated in tactical meetings… it was built through individual study and reflection.

You need both modes. Team work without solo work produces players who can socialize on the pitch but lack the individual quality to actually play. Solo work without team work produces players who have skills but no game intelligence. The combination is what makes elite performers possible. Same logic applies to learning.

Let me get concrete about what builds specifically in solo work that doesn't build elsewhere.

The capacity for sustained focused attention itself. This is the foundational one. Every hour of focused solo work strengthens the underlying brain systems that produce focused attention. Every hour of fragmented work does the opposite. As one analysis put it, if you spend enough time in a state of obsessive shallowness, you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. The brain you train is the brain you get. Train fragmented attention and you become someone who can't focus. Train sustained attention and you become someone who can. Solo work is where most of the sustained-attention training happens, because group work involves constant attention switches by its nature.

Your own thinking, distinct from other people's thinking. When you're always learning in groups, your thoughts become increasingly entangled with the thoughts of the people around you. You hear their framing before you've formed your own. You absorb their conclusions before you've worked out your own position. Solo work creates the space where YOUR thinking can develop. The thoughts that surface when you're alone with the material, without other voices in the room, are uniquely yours. They're often the most original and most useful thoughts you'll generate.

The discipline of staying with difficulty. Group settings provide social scaffolding that makes hard work easier. Other people's effort pulls you along. The shared engagement keeps you in the room. Solo work has none of that scaffolding. When the material gets hard, only you are there to choose to stay with it. The decision to stay… and the muscle that decision builds… is something solo work develops that group work, by its nature, can't.

The specific subskills that have to be drilled alone. Many skills have components that can only be developed through solitary repetition. The musician practicing scales. The writer drafting paragraphs nobody will read. The athlete doing footwork drills. The language learner repeating pronunciation. These activities aren't enhanced by an audience. They're slowed by an audience. The work has to happen alone for the reps to accumulate efficiently.

Self-knowledge as a learner. When you study alone, you find out who you actually are as a learner. What you can focus on. What loses you. How long you can sustain attention. What time of day you work best. What environments support you. Group settings obscure all of this because the group is doing the regulating for you. Alone, you have to face yourself honestly. The self-knowledge that produces is the foundation for managing your learning over decades.

Now the honest part. Solo learning has always been important, but it's gotten dramatically harder in the past two decades for reasons that have nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the environment we're all trying to learn in.

According to a 2026 study cited in deep work literature, analysis of over 500,000 hours of remote work found that only 51% of work time is spent in deep work tools, while 34% is spent in communication tools and 15% in meetings. Half. Half of professional work time is now spent in shallow contexts that actively impede sustained focus. The infrastructure of modern work (Slack, email, video calls, notifications) has been quietly converting what used to be focused solo time into fragmented communication time. The fragmentation produces less learning, less skill development, less actual output. But it FEELS productive because the screen is busy and the messages are flowing.

The same pattern shows up in education. According to research on student focus, many students confuse activity with productivity… they spend hours switching between apps, messages, videos, and study materials while believing they are working hard, but fragmented attention creates shallow learning. The students aren't lazy. They've absorbed a model of work that confuses motion with progress. Their teachers, their parents, and the technology they use have all been training them in the direction of constant connectivity. The solo focused work that produces actual learning has become genuinely countercultural.

This matters because the gap between people who can do focused solo work and people who can't has been widening. The people who can are pulling further ahead in their fields, their crafts, their lives. The people who can't are working harder than ever and producing less. It's not a small effect. It's becoming one of the defining capability gaps of this era.

Here's where the previous newsletter and this one come together. The relationship between solo and group work isn't either/or. It's a cycle, and each mode makes the other better.

The research bears this out. According to a recent controlled experiment I cited last time, participants who prepared individually before engaging in collaborative learning scored significantly higher than those who engaged solely in collaborative or individual learning. The full pattern matters: solo prep → group engagement → solo consolidation → repeat. Skip the solo prep and the group time is shallower. Skip the group time and the solo work lacks correction. The combination outperforms either alone.

Football players know this implicitly. They do individual training. They come to team training where they apply what they've built individually. They leave team training with new things to work on alone. They come back next time better prepared for collective work. The cycle never stops. The solo and the group reinforce each other indefinitely.

Most adult learners are bad at this cycle in one of two directions. The over-collaborators spend all their time in groups, classes, communities, and chats, with too little solo time to develop their own thinking and skills. The over-isolators spend all their time alone, with too little group time to surface gaps and absorb other perspectives. The optimal pattern is moving between modes deliberately, with each mode supporting the other.

Okay, the practical part. If you've recognized that you've been neglecting the solo side of your learning… or if you want to make your solo time more productive… here's what works.

Schedule solo deep work like a meeting. Time that's left "free" gets eaten by everything else. Solo deep work has to be defended on your calendar like any other important commitment. Block the time. Don't take meetings during it. Don't accept "I just need a minute" interruptions. The hour you've scheduled for focused study is not negotiable, just like a doctor's appointment isn't negotiable.

Match session length to your current capacity. Trying to do four-hour deep work sessions when you're currently capable of forty minutes will fail. Start where you are. If you can do 25 minutes of focused work without breaking, start with 25-minute sessions. Build up over weeks. The capacity grows with use. Forcing it doesn't accelerate the growth… it just produces failed sessions.

Aggressive distraction elimination. Phone in another room, not face-down on the desk. Notifications off across all devices. Browser tabs closed except the one you need. Door shut. Headphones with focus music or silence. The distraction reduction sounds like overkill until you experience how much better solo work feels when it's properly protected. Each removed distraction is one less cognitive cost you're paying.

Embrace boredom in the breaks. As one deep work analysis noted, if you can't be bored, you can't do deep work… train your attention like a muscle. The breaks between solo sessions matter enormously. If you fill every break with phone scrolling, you're training your brain that boredom requires stimulation, which makes the next deep work session harder. Boring breaks (walk, stare out window, stretch, drink water) preserve the attention system. Phone breaks degrade it. Same length of break. Opposite cognitive effects.

Pick one thing per session. Solo work degrades fast when you try to do multiple things in one session. Pick one specific thing to work on. Stay with it until the session ends. Multitasking even within solo time defeats most of the benefit.

Build in transitions. The first ten minutes of any solo session are usually warm-up where you're settling into the work. The last ten are wind-down where you're consolidating what you've learned. The middle is where the deep work actually happens. Don't expect to be at peak concentration the moment you sit down. Give yourself a runway.

Track your sessions honestly. As I covered in the time-management newsletter, most people overestimate their solo work time substantially. Time your actual focused minutes. The data will surprise you. The data will also help you improve.

Don't substitute solo work for group work. If you've over-corrected toward solo work, you'll lose the benefits of group engagement that the previous newsletter covered. Solo isn't BETTER than group. Solo is necessary AND group is necessary. The mistake is choosing one and abandoning the other.

Some practical guidance on when to favor each mode.

Go solo when you need to: develop your own thinking before getting influenced by others, build raw skill through repetition, do focused reading or writing, work through difficult material that requires sustained attention, recover from social fatigue, integrate what you learned in a recent group session.

Go group when you need to: surface gaps in your understanding you can't see alone, get feedback on your work, hear alternative perspectives, build accountability and motivation, learn the social aspects of your domain, debate or test your ideas, find inspiration when you've lost motivation.

Some learners default heavily to one mode and need to deliberately push toward the other. If you're a natural extrovert who finds solo work uncomfortable, the discomfort is data… your solo capacity probably needs deliberate development. If you're a natural introvert who avoids groups, your group capacity probably needs work even if the group sessions feel draining at first.

Here's what I want you to take from this and the previous newsletter together. Learning isn't a single mode that you do well or badly. It's a cycle between two complementary modes (focused solo work and engaged collective work) each of which builds something the other can't. The football players you're watching this month are products of both. They do massive amounts of individual training AND massive amounts of team training. Neither would produce elite performance alone. The combination does.

Most adult learners are operating heavy on one side and light on the other. If you've been over-collaborating, you've probably underdeveloped the focused solo work that builds depth. If you've been over-isolating, you've probably missed the collective input that builds breadth and corrects your blind spots. Both errors are common. Both are correctable.

The skill is in knowing when each mode is right, and being capable of both. The solo work builds the depth that makes group work valuable. The group work builds the perspective that makes solo work targeted. The cycle compounds. The players we're watching this month have been running this cycle for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. The cumulative effects show in everything they do.

You can run the cycle too. Probably you already are, partially. The question is whether you can do both modes consciously, with intent, instead of accidentally over-favoring one. Whatever you've been doing too much of, deliberately practice the other for the next few weeks. Notice what changes. The complementarity is real. The combined power is more than the parts.

Even Bilbo wrote his book alone. He also spent years living with hobbits, talking with wizards, traveling with dwarves. The solo and the social. The deep and the wide. Both produced the journey. Both produced the writing of it. Yours works the same way.

Keep learning (and keep balancing the modes),

Ray