Cal Newport Quotes

These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. This observation may come as a surprise for those of us who have long basked in the glow of the passion hypothesis. It wouldn’t, however, surprise the many scientists who have studied questions of workplace satisfaction using rigorous peer-reviewed research. They’ve been discovering similar conclusions for decades, but to date, not many people in the career-advice field have paid them serious attention.

Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here’s the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time I was pondering Johnson’s theory of innovation: A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough — it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge — the only place where these missions become visible.

Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out.

The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.

suggests that you transform the way you think about the different flavors of one-click approval indicators that populate the social media universe. Instead of seeing these easy clicks as a fun way to nudge a friend, start treating them as poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life. Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click “Like.” Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No “so cute!” or “so cool!” Remain silent.

The Digital Declutter Process Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate — as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class — is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers.

As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

We've become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy.