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oracular
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Cal Newport |
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I'll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My
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Cal Newport |
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Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before
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Cal Newport |
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If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless--which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to o..
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Cal Newport |
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Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of correspondents hoping to glean some helpful advice. As a Forbes.com article on sender filters reports, "At some point, the number of people reaching out exceeded [Herbert's] capacity, so he created filters that put the onus on the person asking for help." Though he started from a similar motivati..
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Cal Newport |
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Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience members seated nearby look on curiously. "A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous," Derek says. Soon, however, a second young man joins the first and starts dancing. "Now comes the first follower with a crucial role ... the first..
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Cal Newport |
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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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These services aren't necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They're just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they're a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threat..
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Cal Newport |
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dialectical
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Cal Newport |
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High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
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Cal Newport |
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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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Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance
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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."
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Cal Newport |
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Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
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Cal Newport |
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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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If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier--at least, in the moment. If you couldn't count on this quick response time, you'd instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requeste..
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Cal Newport |
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If you're a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you're much more likely to hear "go change the water cooler" than you are "go change the world."
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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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psychology
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Cal Newport |
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In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative--constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.
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Cal Newport |
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As Ericsson explains, "Most individuals who start as active professionals... change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work... is a poor predictor of attained performance." Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond whi..
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Cal Newport |
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Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. We can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford Nass, the late Stanfo..
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Cal Newport |
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consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They're easier.
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Cal Newport |
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In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.
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Cal Newport |
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If you don't produce, you won't thrive--no matter how skilled or talented you are. Having
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Cal Newport |
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Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naive. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. As Thomas discovered, the..
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Cal Newport |
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In such a culture, 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.
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Cal Newport |
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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." To"
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Cal Newport |
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An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, "Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my 'Ooh! Shiny!..
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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. We"
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Cal Newport |
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Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant--even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: "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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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 instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.
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Cal Newport |
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Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths," Gallagher reports. "[Among them is the notion that] 'the idle mind is the devil's workshop'... when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what's right."
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Cal Newport |
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Mike's goal with his spreadsheet is to become more "intentional" about how his workday unfolds. "The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day," he explained. "But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time."
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Cal Newport |
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In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2
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Cal Newport |
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In Morozov's critique, we've made "the Internet" synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. To make your company more like "the Internet" is to be with the times, and to ignore these trends is to be the proverbial buggy-whip maker in an automotive age. We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often ..
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Cal Newport |
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capital.
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Cal Newport |
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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. To
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Cal Newport |
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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 this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. This
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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.' " In"
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Cal Newport |
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If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind.
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Cal Newport |
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It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion."
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Cal Newport |
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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 same when it comes to the Internet--the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn't change this reality.
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Cal Newport |
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The Innovators, Isaacson later
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Cal Newport |
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A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.
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Cal Newport |