Cal Newport Quotes

the crucial step in programming is not the actual act of mechanically typing commands into a computer, but instead crafting the underlying solution that is then translated into code.

He disabled notifications for 112 different apps on his iPhone. “It’s relatively easy to retake control,” he optimistically concludes.

If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up “career capital” by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

"First things first: Always go to class! The importance of this rule cannot be overmphasized. It doesn't matter if your class meets at 6:00 A.M., at the top of the steepest hill on campus, on saturday mornings — wake up, get dressed, and go to the lecture on time. As Lydia, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, explains, if you skip class, "it'll take twice as long studying to make up for what you missed." This is why class attendance is so important. Not because learning is power, or it's what your parents would want you do, but because it saves you time. if you attend class regularly, you will significantly cut down on the amount of studying required to score high grades. Don't make this negotiable. Even if you're tired, hung over, or extremely busy, find a way to make it there."

In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours — but rarely more.

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.

We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?

As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.