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In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these "winner-take-all" markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent--labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas--as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commo..
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Cal Newport |
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As Derek explained to me, he started by pursuing music at night and on the weekend. "I didn't quit my day job until I was making more money with my music."
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Cal Newport |
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Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
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Cal Newport |
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In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency.
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Cal Newport |
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Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures
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Cal Newport |
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Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
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Cal Newport |
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Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.
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Cal Newport |
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People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain."
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Cal Newport |
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Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant."
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Cal Newport |
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Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.
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Cal Newport |
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After running my tough experiment [with cancer]... I have a plan for living the rest of my life," Gallagher concludes in her book. "I'll choose my targets with care... then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." We'd be wise to follow her lead."
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Cal Newport |
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There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration--that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.
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Cal Newport |
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Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
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Cal Newport |
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Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not the answer they wanted to hear," Martin said. "What they want to hear is 'Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script,'... but I always say, 'Be so good they can't ignore you."
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Cal Newport |
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A job, in Wrzesniewski's formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
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Cal Newport |
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It's worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It's helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict.
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Cal Newport |
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c7c56c6
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Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting--creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the "tyranny of the open-plan office." And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly...
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Cal Newport |
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The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone sc..
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Cal Newport |
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Stop focusing on these little details," it told me. "Focus instead on becoming better."
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Cal Newport |
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fighting desires--over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions--unless, that is, you're smart about your habits.
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Cal Newport |
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general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don't produce, you won't thrive--no matter how skilled or talented you are.
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Cal Newport |
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when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice.
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Cal Newport |
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974c5e5
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the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.
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Cal Newport |
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The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase,
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Cal Newport |
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The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced--though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren't all that far apart--and more to do with what we did with those hours.
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Cal Newport |
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In Wrzesniewski's research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.
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Cal Newport |
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Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery
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Cal Newport |
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Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.
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Cal Newport |
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Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs--factors described as the "nutriments" required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, ..
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Cal Newport |
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a506aab
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Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the paper's main proof argument, I faced immediate internal resistance. It was as if my mind realized the effort I was about to ask it to expend, and in response it unleashed a wave of neuronal protest, distant at first, but then as I persisted increasingly tremendous, crashing over my concentration with mounting intensity. To combat this..
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Cal Newport |
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You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
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Cal Newport |
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Here's the routine: Once a week I require myself to summarize in my "bible" a paper I think might be relevant to my research. This summary must include a description of the result, how it compares to previous work, and the main strategies used to obtain it. These summaries are less involved than the step-by-step deconstruction I did on my original test-case paper--which is what allows me to do them on a weekly basis--but they still induce t..
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Cal Newport |
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working right trumps finding the right work.
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Cal Newport |
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It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.
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Cal Newport |
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The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there's a magic "right" job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they'll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt."
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Cal Newport |
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the end of each of these brainstorming sessions I require myself to formally record the results, by hand, on a dated page.
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Cal Newport |
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The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.
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Cal Newport |
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craft-centric." Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound."
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Cal Newport |
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taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone;
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Cal Newport |
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dedication to stretching his ability, guided by feedback.
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Cal Newport |
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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.
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Cal Newport |
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little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It's a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn't exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.
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Cal Newport |
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without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.
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Cal Newport |
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Overall, Pardis's most important commitment was to patience. She didn't try to force a direction for her working life, but instead built up her career capital and kept her eyes open for the interesting directions she knew this process would uncover.
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Cal Newport |