Cal Newport Quotes

At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business

Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.

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.

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.

Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?” Cooper asks. “They are programming people,

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

Finally, it's worth noting that refusing to use social media icons & comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbit - in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Here's my tough love reassurance: let them go.

The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in — and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought … why am I doing this? This is … boring? This isn’t bringing me any kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to notice that these technologies aren’t actually adding anything to my life.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line — forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

… a better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists’ main work obligations. If taken seriously this metric might mean a given support unit needs to make its own work less efficient to better serve the organization.

Seeing life as something that’s both hard and interesting. You want to build resilience to the former and make the most of the latter.