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Let's pull together the threads spun so far: Current economic thinking, as I've surveyed, argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. 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.
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Cal Newport |
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what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.
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Cal Newport |
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You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.
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Cal Newport |
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You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.
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Cal Newport |
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Knuth deploys what I call 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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Stephenson wrote an essay titled "Why I Am a Bad Correspondent." At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those ch..
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Cal Newport |
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The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue." --
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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 work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies..
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Cal Newport |
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We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity.
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Cal Newport |
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Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it.
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Cal Newport |
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the whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight--be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually--can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.
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Cal Newport |
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the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instea..
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Cal Newport |
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We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.
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Cal Newport |
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When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don't lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.
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Cal Newport |
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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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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 concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstance..
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Cal Newport |
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We can now step back and use Gallagher's grand theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life. This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work--whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer..
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Cal Newport |
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Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi's work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back again..
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Cal Newport |
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The task of a craftsman, they conclude, "is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there." This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning."
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Cal Newport |
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The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker's creed in its preface: "We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals." The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way: Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for indi..
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Cal Newport |
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The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.
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Cal Newport |
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minimize the shallow in my life
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Cal Newport |
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By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities--like finding old friends on Facebook--and reinvesting in high-impact activities--like taking a good friend out to lunch--you end up more successful in your goal.
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Cal Newport |
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If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram--you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits
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Cal Newport |
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in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.
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Cal Newport |
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two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you'll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
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Cal Newport |
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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.
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Cal Newport |
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To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
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Cal Newport |
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Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
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Cal Newport |
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We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness." #"
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Cal Newport |
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when walking through nature, you're freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid
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Cal Newport |
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Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences--wherever you happen to
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Cal Newport |
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And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth."
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Cal Newport |
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Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
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Cal Newport |
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All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal"
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Cal Newport |
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what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
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Cal Newport |
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This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren't that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartmen..
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Cal Newport |
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I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,
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Cal Newport |
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running is cheaper than therapy.
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Cal Newport |
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I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material,
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Cal Newport |
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Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted
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Cal Newport |
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Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences--wherever you happen to be.
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Cal Newport |
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Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
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Cal Newport |
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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.
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Cal Newport |