Cal Newport Quotes

To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make,” Furrer explains. “And it’s that challenge that drives me. I don’t need a sword. But I have to make them.

the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” American

By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative — constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.

If your specialty is new — as mine is — and they can’t therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you’re going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there’s no one out there to validate your stature.

the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities — a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs — factors described as the “nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore — plays in defining the quality of our life.

Our sociality is simply far too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages & emojis. Any digital minimalist must confront this reality & manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. [...] The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners — in this case, the venture investors — is without precedent. It’s no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, “Everyone wants my job.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.