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Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks. "They are programming people,"
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Cal Newport |
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These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction
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Cal Newport |
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A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement--it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.
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Cal Newport |
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In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
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Cal Newport |
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The average Facebook user, by contrast, spends around 350 minutes per week on this company's services
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Cal Newport |
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It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.
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Cal Newport |
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Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.
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Cal Newport |
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tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.
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Cal Newport |
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Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you're in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone's q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small ..
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Cal Newport |
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the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.
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Cal Newport |
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The constant exposure to their friends' carefully curated portrayals of their lives generates feelings of inadequacy--especially during periods when they're already feeling low--and for teenagers, it provides a cruelly effective way to be publicly excluded.
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Cal Newport |
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Kethledge, it turned out, relies on long periods alone with his thoughts to write his famously sharp legal opinions, often working at a simple pine desk in a barely renovated barn with no internet connection.
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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 famously wrote in the late seventeenth century." --
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Cal Newport |
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three crucial benefits provided by solitude: "new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others."
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Cal Newport |
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for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.
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Cal Newport |
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Inspired by these meetings, Franklin created a scheme in which the Junto members would contribute funds toward buying books that all members could use. This model soon grew beyond Franklin's Friday evening gatherings, leading him in 1731 to write the charter for the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of the first subscription libraries in America.
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Cal Newport |