Cal Newport Quotes

the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries.

The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when completed.

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.

In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

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.

Here’s what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

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.