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The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy," explains Matthew Crawford."
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Cal Newport |
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Returning to my own example, it's a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one's productivity vocabulary: "yes." It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work. If you ask for my involvement in university business that's not absolutely necessary, I might respond with a defense I learned from the department ch..
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Cal Newport |
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A clean break is best. In
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Cal Newport |
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Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let's
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Cal Newport |
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You're either remarkable or invisible," says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow."
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Cal Newport |
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When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are no..
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Cal Newport |
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The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. 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 lifesty..
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Cal Newport |
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First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don't like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.
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Cal Newport |
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If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you've found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.
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Cal Newport |
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The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. When
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Cal Newport |
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Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.... Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in."
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Cal Newport |
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Summary of Rule #4 The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits. In the first chapter of this rule, I reinforced the idea that this trait, like all desirable career traits, really does require career capital--you can't skip straight..
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Cal Newport |
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Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. When
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Cal Newport |
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The 4 Disciplines of Execution,
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Cal Newport |
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the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn't come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities--a conviction that what you're doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of exist..
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Cal Newport |
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When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.
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Cal Newport |
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Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said
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Cal Newport |
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the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.
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Cal Newport |
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If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers.
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Cal Newport |
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if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This
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Cal Newport |
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Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you'll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.
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Cal Newport |
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I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared.
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Cal Newport |
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We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I'm arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. "The truth,..
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Cal Newport |
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If your specialty is new--as mine is--and they can't therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you're going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there's no one out there to validate your stature.
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Cal Newport |
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You've got to find what you love.... [T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle.
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Cal Newport |
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The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox--responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what y..
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Cal Newport |
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I want to spend time on what's important, instead of what's immediate,
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Cal Newport |
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To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions. As I concluded after meeting Jordan Tice, there's something libe..
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Cal Newport |
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The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.
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Cal Newport |
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion's glow."
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Cal Newport |
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simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.
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Cal Newport |
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As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today's economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?
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Cal Newport |
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Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration."
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Cal Newport |
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ca5b78f
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With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners--in this case, the venture investors--is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job."
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Cal Newport |
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Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: "Thoughts?" 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..
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Cal Newport |
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Any pursuit--be it physical or cognitive--that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
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Cal Newport |
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Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.
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Cal Newport |
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These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. This observation may come as a surprise for those of us who have long basked in the glow of the passion hypothesis. It wouldn't, however, surprise the many scientists who have studied questions of workplace satisfaction using rigorous peer-reviewed research. They've been dis..
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Cal Newport |
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now checks AllSides.com once a day--a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the
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Cal Newport |
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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.
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Cal Newport |
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e4ae999
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These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you're waiting in line, or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show, or waiting to finish eating a meal, they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind's general ability ..
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Cal Newport |
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First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.
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Cal Newport |
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No one owes you a great career, it argues; you
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Cal Newport |
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the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.
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Cal Newport |