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Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, "so good that they can't ignore you."
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Cal Newport |
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635896f
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Jim Clark was interviewed at an event held at Stanford University. At some point in the interview, the topic turned to social media. Clark's reaction was unexpected given his high-tech background: "I just don't appreciate social networking." As he then clarifies, this distaste is captured by a particular experience he had sitting on a panel with a social media executive: [The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hou..
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Cal Newport |
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ff78ca9
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Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. . . . Being a friend means being "on call"--tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online." --
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Cal Newport |
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16594a0
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This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you're not necessarily abandoning these services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your lif..
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Cal Newport |
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Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it.
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Cal Newport |
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a52a564
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In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it's not commonplace; it's instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard--the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives..
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Cal Newport |
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e896370
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Se tan bueno que no puedan ignorarte.
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Cal Newport |
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115d1d8
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Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.
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Cal Newport |
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7ebfc76
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You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your
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Cal Newport |
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Think Small, Act Big." It's in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of "small" thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action."
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Cal Newport |
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continuous and harsh feedback he received accelerated the growth of his ability.
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Cal Newport |
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Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep
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Cal Newport |
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37334e8
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Another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations. The most crucial line in my description is the following: "I'll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests." This seems minor, but it makes a substantial difference in how my correspondents think about their messages to me. The default social convention surrounding e-mail is that unless you're famous, if someone sends you something, y..
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Cal Newport |
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8400e7b
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she was witness to a "grand unified theory" of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that 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."
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Cal Newport |
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58c9348
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the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.
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Cal Newport |
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e9501a4
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We have now seen two strands of thought--one about the increasing scarcity of deep work and the other about its increasing value--which we can combine into the idea that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book: The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate t..
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Cal Newport |
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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 ment..
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Cal Newport |
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c40be7e
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You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires.
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Cal Newport |
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6c513ec
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There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacit..
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Cal Newport |
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63fe934
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The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This
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Cal Newport |
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b923b3b
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Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about. You can be the one person in th..
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Cal Newport |
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b3813d9
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soon realize that network tools are not exceptional; they're tools, no different from a blacksmith's hammer or an artist's brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better (and occasionally to enhance their leisure). Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There's no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the sa..
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Cal Newport |
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7e2f7f5
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The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.
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Cal Newport |
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d837996
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The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth.
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Cal Newport |
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0f235c1
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Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It's not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't.
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Cal Newport |
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d1d5812
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You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires--over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to ..
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Cal Newport |
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e73beb7
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Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.
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Cal Newport |
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e5bfdf8
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The key here isn't to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
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Cal Newport |
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03bfe8a
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we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad
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Cal Newport |
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ed7590e
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recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.
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Cal Newport |
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609b439
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Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on." In"
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Cal Newport |
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095b776
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My author website doesn't provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn't own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum--"you have to have a phone that works before our son is born")."
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Cal Newport |
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ce81d6e
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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.
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Cal Newport |
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f12f362
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The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Notice
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Cal Newport |
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04a273e
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And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically--his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here's how he once explained the omission: "If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can wr..
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Cal Newport |
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f93f0bb
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Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century."
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Cal Newport |
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e1f93f1
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What's the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a "day within a day," explaining, "during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income." Accordingly, the typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement--a task that, ..
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Cal Newport |
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f4f21df
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When we step back from these individual observations, we see a clear argument form: 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 you're not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it'll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quan..
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Cal Newport |
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38abb39
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Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, "oh, that's well written code." It's much like as if you were writing a poem." --
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Cal Newport |
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92f5184
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You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
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Cal Newport |
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baef82c
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In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
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Cal Newport |
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9f19257
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Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.
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Cal Newport |
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83378de
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Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that 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. This
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Cal Newport |
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702a532
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monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.
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Cal Newport |